New flying cars with AI: China's low-altitude economy takes off

Aviation New Flying Cars With AI: China's Low-Altitude Economy Takes Off

2025-11-27 From Henrik Bork | Translated by AI 3 min Reading Time

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Xpeng unveiled a new flying car in early November. The "Aridge A868" is the first to begin flight tests since the company's aviation division was renamed Aridge. Previously, the flying car division of the Chinese electric car startup was called "Xpeng AeroHT."

The Xpeng Aridge A868 is a pure flying car with a cabin for six passengers. It features a hybrid drive, achieving a top speed of 360 km/h and a range of approximately 500 kilometers.(Image: Xpeng) — The Xpeng Aridge A868 is a pure flying car with a cabin for six passengers. It features a hybrid drive, achieving a top speed of 360 km/h and a range of approximately 500 kilometers.
(Image: Xpeng)

It is the second model from Xpeng in the field of new mobility after the "Land Aircraft Carrier," which consists of an electric car with a passenger drone on the roof and is set to go into production in 2026. The new A868 is a pure flying car with a cabin for six passengers. It features a hybrid drive, achieving a top speed of 360 km/h (approx. 234 mph) and a range of around 500 kilometers (approx. 310 miles), Xpeng announced.

Thanks to its rotors, it can take off vertically, making it an Electrical Vertical Take-Off and Landing (eVTOL) vehicle. In the air, the rotors can then be tilted forward into a vertical position so that they act like propellers, allowing the A686 to fly like a conventional "fixed-wing" aircraft. For landing, the rotors are again moved into the horizontal position familiar from helicopters. This is known as a tilt-rotor architecture.

New AI model

In a video released by Xpeng, a pilot can be seen controlling the eVTOL from the cockpit using a kind of joystick. The A686 is therefore not an autonomously flying passenger drone. It will likely take some time before autonomous passenger drones can receive licenses in China. However, the pilot of the A868 will have access to an autopilot featuring AI and VLA technology, just like with the Land Aircraft Carrier.

At its "Xpeng AI Day" this year on November 5, the company unveiled its new product XPENG VLA 2.0. According to the company, it is a new type of AI model, a "Physical World Large Model," which extends the capabilities of an LLM in the text and image domain to include interaction with hardware. When translating visual signals into action instructions, the intermediate step via language is eliminated thanks to an innovative "Vision Implicit Token Action," the company stated.

Utilizing embodied AI across industries

This form of "embodied AI," which can be used across domains, including for humanoid robots and robotaxis, is not only set to be implemented in the new flying car A686 but also in future products of other types, said company founder He Xiaopeng at the event. He stated that he had repositioned his company as a "mobility pioneer in the world of physical AI and as a global company for embodied intelligence." Previously, he had already consciously focused on AI as the first Chinese electric car startup.

Now, it signals its global ambitions not as a manufacturer of electric vehicles with artificial intelligence, but as a producer of various mobility solutions with AI. The rebranding of the aviation division from "Xpeng Aeroht" to "Xpeng Aridge" is also to be understood in this context.

Local transport market in focus

With the newly introduced flying car Aridge A686, Xpeng is targeting the short-distance travel market for flights under one hour, such as within the megacity clusters "Greater Bay Area" around Shenzhen and Hong Kong, as well as the cluster around the Yangtze River Delta between Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Nanjing. It is also set to be marketed for tourism purposes, specifically for so-called self-flying tours. "Between 2027 and 2030, the aircraft is likely to become a complementary means of transportation for interurban commuting," writes the daily newspaper Nanfang Ribao. This is a fairly realistic forecast, as China's Communist Party leadership has declared the "Low Altitude Economy"—referring to everything operating up to about 1,000 meters above ground level—a priority in national development within the new Five-Year Plan.

The new flying car from Xpeng is another example of how this low-altitude economy in China is rapidly moving from the design and concept phase towards market readiness and mass production. One could also say it is "taking off." (se)

The unmanned, autonomously flying drone CarryAll V2000CG from AutoFlight completed its first commercial mission on September 18, 2025. (Image:AutoFlight)

How can eVTOLs be used effectively? Which technologies make them sustainable? How can infrastructure challenges be resolved? Mouser addresses these and other questions as part of its "Empowering Innovation Together" program. (Image:Mouser Electronics)

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