XPeng P7's First Hill Climb: 1:02.694 at Beijing's Jinzhan Festival

XPeng has taken the P7 hill climbing for the first time, at Beijing's Jinzhan Speed Festival — the event Chinese coverage has taken to calling the country's Goodwood — and come away with 1:02.694 in the all-electric all-wheel-drive street-car class.

According to the Weibo post and the same-day Chinese coverage, that was fourth in class and seventh overall across the groups, with 谢建超 (Cam Xie) driving a car described as the P7 Ultra.

▶ Play the 70-second clip

Why a hill climb is a different kind of evidence

A hill climb is not a lap record. The Jinzhan course runs about 1.89 km with elevation change and linked corners, which rewards traction, braking stability and chassis behaviour far more than top speed or a single big power figure. For a five-metre electric sedan to place inside the top ten overall against a field of purpose-built performance machinery is a claim about the whole car, not about its motor.

That is exactly the argument XPeng's camp is making: from circuit lapping to hill climbing, "different tracks, different formats" — the point being that the car does not need a bespoke set-up to be quick somewhere new.

The comparisons, treated as claims

The post goes further, saying the time beat million-yuan-class electric performance cars and is comparable to thousand-horsepower coupes. Those are promotional comparisons, and they should be read as such:

• We have not seen a published full timing sheet or entry list from the event in the sources available, so the composition of the class — and what each rival was — cannot be checked independently.
• The framing comes from XPeng-aligned accounts, and the same figures circulate across outlets largely as mirrors of that material rather than as separate reporting.
• The P7 Ultra variant, its tyres and any competition preparation are not confirmed in the material we found.

None of that makes the time wrong. It means the number is verifiable and the comparisons are the part to hold loosely.

What it signals

Two things are worth taking from it regardless of the marketing.

First, Chinese performance EV marketing has moved from drag strips and straight-line claims to circuit and hill-climb results, where a time is a time and cannot be argued with — an arms race that rewards chassis work, which is harder to fake than a 0–100 figure.

Second, the P7 line is being positioned as the handling car in XPeng's range rather than the flagship. Hill climbs are a sensible venue for that: short, technical, and much cheaper to enter than a race series.

Caveats

• A single result in a single class, reported by the manufacturer's own ecosystem of accounts.
• No independent timing sheet has been published in what we found; the course length and configuration come from Chinese coverage of the event.
• "China's Goodwood" is a nickname, not an equivalence — the Goodwood Festival of Speed is a different scale of event.
• Driver affiliation, car specification and any modifications are unstated in the material we reviewed.

The bottom line

1:02.694, fourth in class, seventh overall on a first attempt at a hill climb is a respectable result by any reading, and it is the kind of thing a performance brand should be doing. The interesting part is not the trophy — it is that a Chinese sedan maker now treats a European-style hill climb as a normal place to go and prove a point.

Source: 烟隐烟隐 (Weibo) for the clip, with the result carried by Chinese auto coverage on 30 September 2026 — translated & adapted for XPENGTech.