Hands Off the Wheel for 19 Minutes: XPeng's New VLA vs a Zero-Takeover Challenge

Auto blogger 劝退频道 (Quantui Channel) set himself a simple-sounding challenge: take an XPeng G9L on the new second-generation VLA build, load a route with seven waypoints and roughly an hour of driving, and complete it without touching the steering wheel and without taking over once.

He failed by the strictest reading of his own rules — and then argued that the failure does not count.

The set-up was harder than it sounds

Two parts of the route were the real test. The first: the road winds, and it is not a straightforward urban grid. The second: the car has to get through two barrier gates. The first gate stops the car, but the driver still has to press the horn himself; the second is recognised and passed by the system. According to the host, only XPeng and Huawei's Qiankun ADS 4 currently manage both gates — and his car was on a temporary plate, which usually adds another layer of difficulty.

Not big-road driving — the fine-grained stuff

The interesting claim is about where the upgrade sits. The new VLA's progress is not about "how well it handles this kind of road", which was already fine, but about the small operations — and those, he says, have improved by a different order of magnitude:

• X-Foresight — the system now reasons about what will happen up to 6 seconds ahead.
• Infini-VLA — instead of reading frame by frame, the car keeps the last 30 seconds as a video memory, and uses that memory together with X-Foresight to anticipate the next six seconds.
• Catching green lights — it reads how many seconds are left on the signal and speeds up to make the light rather than coasting towards a stop. The host calls this the most surprising behaviour in the whole drive.
• Comfort on bad surfaces — on an old, potholed road the car adjusted its behaviour to the road surface to manage ride comfort.

The cases worth watching

• Truck plus oncoming traffic. It slows first, then the wheel goes left immediately and it changes lane across the solid line to get around — and the host notes he felt none of it longitudinally. No drag, no jerk, including when passing pedestrians or overtaking.
• A short-light left turn into traffic. It yields first ("but yielding isn't great here, Xiao P"), then takes the moment and completes the turn. He is not certain it would work with more cars behind, but the important detail is what happened earlier: when the car ahead showed an intention to turn right, this car's steering wheel had already started moving.
• A car that changed its mind. Another driver wanted to turn left, the VLA set up to slip past — then the other car just stopped. The host says the system looked briefly confused, sat in the road while it re-planned, and then changed lane to go around the obstacle.
• Unprotected U-turns, made harder because the oncoming lane was invisible. It also passes an e-bike without slowing, because — the host reasons — its 6-second prediction says the paths will not conflict.
• A 5.2 m car with a 5.4 m turning radius. Thanks to rear-wheel steering, the G9L's turning circle is as short as a MINI's, which he says is the single biggest reason these unprotected turns and roundabouts look easy.
• A 2 m-wide lane with a 1999 mm-wide car. Both sides almost touching the walls, the car crawls through using its side cameras — it is a fusion-vision system, with no lidar — and speeds back up only once clear.
• A university-town jam. An elderly rider on a scooter, e-bikes parked along the kerb, a taxi with hazard lights flashing, pedestrians crossing: it hard-brakes once for a pedestrian, then steers back out; at the school gate it slows and stops to leave room for a large vehicle, then continues. Speeds hover around 15–20 km/h and, over the whole section, there is no panic braking and no stopping dead. Its habit of accelerating when the car ahead signals a left turn — to avoid being cut in on — reads, he says, like an experienced local driver.

The one takeover, and why he says it doesn't count

Partway through, the host edited the waypoint list while the car was driving. The new build supports temporary pull-over stops, so the car decided by itself to route into a car park it had just been told about. He took over — then ruled the intervention invalid, because the car was doing what the edited route asked, not failing at driving.

The fuzzy-voice finale

The last demonstration is not driving at all. He asks the voice assistant to navigate to "the hotel nearby with three deity statues". The system searches, finds the Fushou Road hotel, and offers it; he accepts, then cancels. His point: the request was deliberately vague, and the car still resolved it.

The verdict

Challenged on the overall result, his summary is that this generation of VLA "can really fight": two barrier gates, active avoidance around pedestrians, proactive overtaking, and green-light catching all point to more than a small efficiency bump. On hardware he notes the G9L packs dual-chamber air suspension, standard rear-wheel steering and free ADAS, and calls it the most important large five-seat SUV of the second half of the year, with few rivals. He also jokes about the build's nickname — "Liu Xianming's raw version", the un-tamed internal software.

Source: 劝退频道 (Quantui Channel), Weibo — translated & adapted for XPENGTech.