XPeng's MONA Product Manager Apologises for the Word 'Lao Deng'

A week after the MONA L05's pre-sale launch, the product manager who fronted it has apologised for a word she used on stage. 恩塔 Etta, the MONA product manager, posted a three-and-a-half-minute video on 22 October in which she says she "said the wrong thing" at the 15 October event, explains what she meant, and apologises for the discomfort.

The word is 老登 — "lao deng", internet slang for an old man, dismissive rather than neutral. At the launch she used it repeatedly, including about her own bosses, and urged the audience to reject 登味审美 — "lao-deng taste" in design — with the joke that the kind of styling executives like should simply be handed to young people instead.

The clip travelled well beyond the launch stream, and the backlash came in two forms. One was that a product manager was, in the words of one widely shared comment, "trying to achieve her goal by putting down a group of people". The other was sharper, because it turned the campaign's own label around: a launch built on rejecting "lao deng" was judged by some viewers to be, of all the EV brands, the most 老登 of them.

▶ Play the 3:26 apology — English subtitles: download the SRT (our translation of her Chinese captions).

What she says in the video

She opens by naming the criticism she received, in ascending order of unpleasantness: people uncomfortable with the word, people questioning her professionalism, and people attacking her appearance and her age. She does not dwell on the last one, and neither will we.

Her explanation has two parts. The first is that "lao deng" is an in-joke:

The word "lao deng" is something we use as a joke among ourselves all the time. We tease Guang-ge and the old hands with it. Nobody thought anything of it — we just took it as a joke. But I never realised that in public it makes people uncomfortable. To me it was a joke; to people who don't know us, it sounds like something else entirely.

The second is what the joke was aimed at, which she says was never age:

What we meant to criticise is the same thinking and the same stock language for every car. That fixed mindset was the target. Of course, everyone's choice is their own; I still should not have used that word to say it.

The reviewer 托马斯电火车, who covered the launch, adds that she asked the project team for permission to apologise to the users her words affected. She concedes the setting specifically — "it was also my first time on a stage that big... so some of our in-jokes went up there with me; that was me not thinking it through" — and closes by asking that the row not colour how people see the car: "please do not let the discussion about my remarks change how you feel about the L05."

Why it happened is not a mystery

The launch was designed around a generational contrast, and that is the part worth examining rather than the word itself.

XPeng has said the MONA product team is 54% post-95 and 39% post-2000, and He Xiaopeng has said nearly half of its product managers were born after 2000. At the 15 October event he joined by video link from Paris and then handed the stage to that team, who presented the L05's product thinking themselves. The car's own positioning throughout has been generational — "young people's first large five-seat SUV" — and the pre-sale material leans on the same frame with a 169,800 to 191,800 RMB ladder aimed at buyers who would otherwise be shopping a decade-old segment.

A campaign that sets itself up against a generational other will eventually produce a phrase that does the same thing out loud. The in-joke was not a slip in an otherwise neutral presentation; it was the presentation's thesis, compressed.

The awkward part for the company

The apology is personal. When this section was written we had found no company-level statement on the episode, and the video is posted from her own account, filmed in an office, addressed to "everyone" — not a corporate correction of a campaign. That changed on the afternoon of 24 October; the company's version is below.

That is the uncomfortable structural detail. The phrase came out of a launch format the company built, in a segment the company wrote, on a stage the company handed over; the person who said it is the one carrying it. Whether XPeng treats this as an individual's misjudgement or as a marketing decision that needs revisiting is not something the video answers.

There is also an irony the commenters spotted immediately and which the company cannot argue with: a launch that told the audience it was rejecting "lao deng" aesthetics has now attached the word to XPeng's own most youth-targeted product line.

The responsibility question

Her apology did not settle the argument, and the sharpest response to it came from the side defending her. The EV and robotics commentator 杨骏驱, who quote-posted the video that evening, made the case that the blame had been assigned to the wrong link in the chain:

Picking a convenient reference to build your case is an effortless way to argue, just not a very elevated one: applying Yu Chengdong's authority-and-responsibility logic to a frontline product manager, and recasting her stepping forward to reflect on herself as being summoned out to carry the blame. After seeing enough of this, one cannot help noting: some people, the moment the topic lands on XPeng, always have something ready to hand.

The comments he was quoting put it more bluntly. 杰瑞老实: "the launch script is a draft reviewed word by word by several parties and read aloud — she is not Yu Chengdong, she cannot decide for herself; you tell her to read it, and then after she reads it you call her out to apologise... baffling." 柳笛_6D: "I do not understand why a junior colleague has to apologise like this... was the tone and the wording of the launch something she improvised?"

The Yu Chengdong comparison is doing real work rather than name-dropping. He is the Huawei executive whose public remarks are treated as his own, and the point is that authority and accountability should sit on the same desk: an executive who makes his own statements can be held to them, while a product manager reading an approved script cannot. If the wording went through a reviewed draft — which these commenters assert and we cannot independently verify — then the sentence that caused the row had approvals behind it before she said it aloud, and the person on stage was the least powerful link in that chain.

That is the part XPeng has still not addressed. An apology from the presenter converts a decision made by a campaign into a judgement call made by an individual, and it leaves the process that produced the sentence unexamined. Whether the company considers the phrasing a personal misjudgement or a marketing problem is the open question; so far, only the individual has answered it.

The company answers, through its vice president

On the afternoon of 24 October the company response arrived — not from a press office but from 托马斯电火车, the XPeng Group vice president whose Weibo account carries that title, in a post he framed as "reconstructing the whole process". Its substance:

• The word was internal. "From first to last, 'lao deng' was the product team's teasing of a few core people in charge internally. It was never aimed at any external user."
• The launch was genuinely delegated. He and He Xiaopeng were abroad for the Paris show, and planning, staging and the livestream were handed to three product managers — 小鬼当家, "kids running the house". "I reviewed their PPT; the rest was theirs to handle. No script, no corporate boilerplate."
• The targets were named: 杨光, 姜文, 凤头 and 何小鹏 — the product-planning leads. ("The ones being teased," he writes, "were exactly these few.")
• Nobody internally was upset. Watching the stream back from Paris, he says, not one of the "lao dengs" was displeased; they praised it in internal discussion as real co-creation rather than a recitation of specifications.
• The apology was her own idea. "The later apology video was Etta's own proposal" — she decided her wording had been loose after seeing people who had not watched the whole stream misunderstand it.
• The rebuttal is financial. To the accusation that this was engineered marketing: "With MONA as hot as it is now, do we need that? If anyone can prove we asked media to hype this up, I will pay them 1,000,000 RMB."
• She is not being moved off the stage. Etta will appear at the 29 October launch, he says, alongside Ouyang Nana and "lao deng representative He Xiaopeng".

That last sentence is the most consequential in the post, and it is the one Chinese commentators quoted back most: after a week in which the company was accused of hanging a junior colleague out to dry, its answer is to put her on the launch stage again, on the record, in her own words.

What the statement settles, and what it does not

It settles the question this article raised about where the words came from. The people defending Etta argued that a launch script is a document reviewed word by word by several departments, and that a product manager reading it cannot be held responsible for it. The company's account is the opposite: the PPT was reviewed, the words were not scripted. If that is accurate, the sentence was hers in a way the defenders did not claim — and the company's decision to hand three product managers an unscripted stage is the decision that produced it.

It does not settle the marketing question. A vice president's account of his own company's conduct is a company account, and the 1,000,000 RMB offer is not verifiable by us: it names no process, no arbiter and no deadline, and as far as we can find nobody has claimed it. It also does not touch the substance of the original criticism, which was never about who wrote the line but about how it landed on customers who were not in the room.

The counter-voice was immediate. 烟隐烟隐, the account that broke the L05 price slide, quote-posted the statement with a mockery that doubles as a summary of the sceptical position: "Very MONA — answering with an Etta meme; the 'lao dengs' can work it out for themselves. And people with a young mindset, like us, certainly won't feel any malice." Under the vice president's own post, the visible comments run strongly the other way: "He Xiaopeng wasn't offended — so who is?", and one self-described 41-year-old: "I'm a lao deng too and I don't feel insulted."

What it does not change

• The car. The L05 goes on sale on 29 October at the pre-sale ladder announced on 15 October: five trims, 169,800 to 191,800 RMB, BEV and EREV, the Ultra SE at 1,500 TOPS and the Max at 750. We set that out here.
• The engineering story, which has been running separately and is unaffected: the 587 km zero-takeover run and the proving-ground comparison against a GLC.
• The engagement. If anything the row increased reach: the apology post carries 376 likes, 147 comments and 83 reposts, against 44 likes on XPeng's official robot post the same day. What is visible under the video is largely supportive — "it was a joke, there was no need to apologise", "support Etta" — which suggests the criticism was concentrated in the quote-posts and other platforms rather than under her own post.

Caveats

• We did not watch the full launch stream. The on-stage wording is as described by Chinese outlets and by the clips that circulated; her apology video does not replay what she said.
• "Lao deng" is contested slang. It ranges from affectionate ribbing between friends to a genuine put-down depending on who says it and to whom; that range is exactly what the episode is about, and it is why her "it was an in-joke" defence is credible to some readers and irrelevant to others.
• The accounts of intent are the participants'. Both she and the company say it was an in-joke aimed at internal leads; neither can be verified from outside, and intent is not the same as effect.
• The company statement is the company's account. It was published by a group vice president on his personal Weibo account, not as a formal corporate release, and it describes events he did not personally witness on stage.
• The 1,000,000 RMB offer is unverifiable. No process, arbiter or deadline is specified, and we have found no one claiming it.
• Named individuals. The vice president names 杨光, 姜文, 凤头 and 何小鹏 as the people teased; we repeat the names because they are part of the company's own account, not because we can confirm their reactions independently.
• Engagement figures are as of writing and will move.
• The script-review claim was the commenters' — and the company now denies it. XPeng's vice president says the PPT was reviewed but there was no script; we have no way to check either account.
• She is an individual, not a spokesperson. We have not repeated the personal attacks she mentions, and the article is about the campaign and the wording, not about her.
• The team-composition figures are XPeng's own and refer to the MONA product team, not the whole company.

The bottom line

A product manager used a diminutive for "old man" as a punchline about design conservatism, on a stage her company had built to look young, and it landed as contempt for a group of customers. Her apology is unusually direct about the mechanism — in-joke, public context, fixed mindset as the real target — and it concedes the thing that matters, that the audience could not be expected to know any of that.

The harder question — the joke was the campaign's, and the apology was hers — has now been answered by the company, and answered in its own favour: three product managers were given an unscripted stage, and the sentence was theirs. That is either the most candid thing XPeng has said all month or the most convenient, and the difference depends on whether you believe a vice president describing his own company.

Source: the apology video and post by 恩塔 Etta (Weibo, 22 October 2026), the company statement by 托马斯电火车, the commentary by 杨骏驱 quoting 杰瑞老实 and 柳笛_6D, the quote-post by 烟隐烟隐, and the launch context reported by IT之家, 快科技 and 驱动中国 — translated and adapted for XPENGTech.

Updated 22 October: added the responsibility argument made by 杨骏驱 and the commenters he quoted, who contend the launch wording was a reviewed script rather than the presenter's own.

Updated 24 October: added the company's own reconstruction of the episode, published by group vice president 托马斯电火车, and the reaction to it. The earlier note that no company-level statement existed was correct when written.