XPeng's He Xiaopeng Declares LiDAR Non-Essential: China's Smart Driving Path Splits

In May 2026, XPeng CEO He Xiaopeng publicly stated that LiDAR is no longer essential for smart driving systems, claiming pure vision combined with end-to-end large models is sufficient for advanced autonomous driving. This marks the formal split of China's smart driving tech routes into two camps: the pure vision + end-to-end route represented by Tesla FSD and XPeng XNGP, and the multi-sensor fusion route represented by Huawei ADS and NIO NAD. In Q1 2026, smart driving feature activation rates f