XPENG names its robotaxi “Yoyo” and opens its booking app to testers after more than 2,000 internal rides in Guangzhou
XPENG's robotaxi, built on the GX SUV, is officially called XPENG YOYO. The company is targeting passenger rides without a safety driver in 2027 and expansion outside China through partnerships.
XPENG has picked a name for its robotaxi: XPENG YOYO, or 小鹏悠游 ("Xiaopeng Youyou") in Chinese. The company announced it today on Weibo. It says the Chinese name suggests relaxed, carefree travel, while the English one is easy to pronounce anywhere in the world and marks a "first step" toward going global.
Along with the name, XPENG launched a robotaxi page on its website and a booking mini-app, "XPENG YOYO Autonomous Driving." For now, access is by invitation code, to grow the number of people testing the service. In the app, riders can preset the cabin temperature, fragrance and music style. XPENG hasn't announced a date for opening to the public or how big the fleet will be.
The car
The robotaxi is built on the XPENG GX, the brand's flagship electric SUV, and is engineered for Level 4 autonomous driving. It uses cameras only, with no lidar and no high-definition maps. It carries four XPENG-designed Turing chips with 3,000 TOPS of computing power and runs the VLA 2.0 model. Rear passengers get privacy glass, "zero gravity" reclining seats and a large entertainment screen.
The timeline
- January 2026: XPENG receives a permit for public-road testing in Guangzhou.
- May: the first production robotaxi rolls off the line.
- July: internal rides begin, with CEO He Xiaopeng as the first passenger.
- August: the company reports more than 2,000 internal test rides.
- 2027: the target for rides without a safety driver and for partnerships with ride-hailing platforms in China and abroad. Amap is already the first global partner for the robotaxi's software development kit (SDK).
VLA 2.0 can also be tried at the Paris Motor Show, where XPENG and Tesla are the only brands giving real-traffic rides. There, though, it runs as supervised driver assistance on the L03 coupé SUV.
