Xpeng Clears Robotaxi Hurdle in Guangzhou, Opens Invite-Only Yoyo Rides

Xpeng’s autonomous ride arm has cleared a practical milestone: Yoyo now holds approval to run Level 4 robotaxi trials anywhere in Guangzhou, the company’s home market. The company said it was granted the city’s intelligent connected vehicle demonstration operating qualification, which pushes the business past closed-door testing and toward real passengers.

Don’t expect to hail one at random just yet. Access will open gradually through invitation codes in the early phase, with the team widening coverage as it goes, according to Candice Yuan, who runs Xpeng’s robotaxi business.

From test track to paying-street economics

The clearance isn’t really about the technology anymore. As Yuan frames it, the company can now stop proving that the cars work in theory and start learning how the service behaves in everyday conditions — booking flows, dispatching, customer handling and the cost side of running a fleet.

That operational know-how is the asset Xpeng wants to hand to partners down the road, rather than keeping everything in-house. The stated goal is a robotaxi package that can be repeated in other cities and other markets.

Under the skin: a chassis based on the flagship GX SUV · vision-only sensing (no LiDAR, no HD maps) · four in-house Turing AI chips worth 3,000 TOPS of effective compute · second-generation Vision-Language-Action model steering the decisions

The groundwork this year has been steady. Xpeng picked up a smart connected vehicle road-test permit in Guangzhou in January, stood up a dedicated robotaxi division in March, and saw its first series-production robotaxi leave the line in May. By July it had run its first internal ride, with chairman and CEO He Xiaopeng sitting in the passenger seat from the online booking through to the journey itself.

The 2027 target, and who pays

On the August 24 earnings call, He put the internal trial figure at over 2,000 rides in Guangzhou and said the full passenger-service process had been validated end to end. He also confirmed a cloud-based remote takeover platform was finished.

The headliner remains the 2027 promise: passenger services running with nobody in the driver’s seat. That’s the piece of the puzzle regulators will have to sign off on separately.

On the money side, Xpeng’s plan leans on partnerships rather than going it alone. It intends to team up with major ride-hailing platforms at home and abroad in 2027 to push into key cities, with revenue arriving from three directions:

• Vehicle sales to fleet and platform partners
• Technology services tied to the autonomous stack
• Revenue sharing on ride operations

The Yoyo brand name itself only went public on October 8, which tells you how quickly the commercial framing has come together after the engineering work. For Guangzhou riders, the invitation codes are the first small crack in the door. For Xpeng, the more important question is whether a driverless service in its own backyard can be made to work at a price partners will pay.