After Amsterdam, a German Tesla Owner on Software, AI and Europe

André Scheidler — the German EV content creator Xinhua invited to Amsterdam to ride both systems — has published his own account of the day, and it is more interesting for what it says about the industry than for who he thinks won.

He is explicit that winning is not the point. In his words, this was "explicitly not about XPENG vs. Tesla", and he was not there "to force a winner". What he found worth reporting was how close the two systems now are: in Amsterdam, he writes, they were "sometimes much closer to each other than many would probably expect."

Who he is, and why the framing matters

Scheidler has driven Tesla's FSD for years, and had already tested XPeng's VLA 2.0 in Munich earlier in 2026, so he arrived with a baseline. Xinhua invited him to give a European assessment of XPENG NGP with VLA 2.0 against Tesla FSD (Supervised) on the same Amsterdam route — the test our earlier article covers in detail. His summary line from the day was that the two are "very comparable"; this post is the longer version of that thought.

The part that is actually new

His conclusion is not about the two cars. It is about what the next round of competition will be fought over:

the next big competition in the automotive industry will, in my opinion, not be decided solely by range, charging power, or horsepower. Software, AI, and intelligent driving are becoming increasingly important.

And then the line that gives the post its edge, addressed to his own continent: Europeans should watch how fast this technology is developing, "especially with regard to our German manufacturers."

That is a notable thing to read from a German who has spent years living with FSD. The argument that cars are becoming software platforms with an AI stack at the centre is the argument XPeng has been making about its own business — VLA, in-house Turing chips, physical AI — and it is the same argument that has German and Japanese manufacturers on the defensive about software timelines. It lands differently coming from a Tesla owner than it does from an XPeng press release.

What he did not say

• He did not declare a winner. "Comparable" and "closer than expected" are not endorsements of one system over the other, and he says as much.
• He has not published the full video yet. His post is a first account, with the video to follow — so this is his impression rather than a frame-by-frame analysis.
• He was Xinhua's guest. The trip was arranged by the news agency that ran the test. That does not make his account dishonest — he is clearly at pains to avoid a versus framing — but it is an invited-guest account rather than independent testing, and it should be read that way.
• The quote reaches us through two translations. His post is German, screenshotted in English and Chinese by a Chinese Weibo account. We quote the English rendering of his words, and the usual drift applies.

Why we are running it

Our coverage of the Amsterdam test was about what the two systems did. This is about what a German Tesla owner concluded from watching them: that the competition has moved to software and AI, and that Europe — Germany included — should be paying attention to the pace rather than the scoreline. For a blog that mostly documents XPeng's software releases, that is the more useful takeaway from the whole exercise.

Source: 托马斯电火车 (Weibo), quoting André Scheidler (@EFIEBER_ANDRE) — translated & adapted for XPENGTech.