Beyond the Road: He Xiaopeng's Dream of Flying Cars and Robotaxis
Key Takeaways
- Truly ambitious founders often think in terms of decades, investing in 'moonshot' projects that may not see short-term returns.
- Building a brand around a futuristic vision can generate excitement and attract talent, even if the products are still in development.
- The core technology developed for one product (like autonomous driving for cars) can often become the foundation for entirely new business lines.
Prologue: The Science Fiction CEO
He Xiaopeng is a self-professed science fiction aficionado. He grew up reading books and watching movies that depicted a future of flying vehicles and intelligent robots. Unlike most people, he never saw these as mere fantasies. He saw them as an engineering roadmap.
In 2021, at an XPeng company event, he stood on stage and didn't just talk about the next model of electric car. He talked about the future of three-dimensional transportation. He showed concept videos of a sleek, futuristic vehicle that could drive on the road and then, with the press of a button, deploy rotors to take off vertically and fly through the air.
To many in the audience, it seemed like a marketing gimmick, a far-fetched concept to generate headlines. But for He Xiaopeng, it was a serious declaration of intent. He believed that the ultimate goal of a smart mobility company was not just to replace the gasoline car, but to fundamentally change the way humans move. And for him, that meant going beyond the road.
Act I: The Flying Car Bet
XPeng's flying car ambitions are channeled through an affiliate company called HT Aero, in which He Xiaopeng and XPeng are major investors. Since 2013, this team has been quietly working on developing electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) vehicles.
For years, it was a skunkworks project, operating in the background. But as XPeng's core car business stabilized, He Xiaopeng began to invest more heavily and speak more publicly about his vision. He argued that flying cars were a natural evolution of the automobile, a solution to urban traffic congestion.
He made a bold prediction: by 2024, the company would take pre-orders for a mass-market flying car that cost under 1 million RMB (about $150,000). The vehicle would be designed for low-altitude city flying, capable of driving on the street and flying over obstacles.
It was an incredibly ambitious timeline that was met with widespread skepticism. The technical and regulatory hurdles for certifying a flying car are immense. But He Xiaopeng was undeterred. He believed that just as XPeng had proven the skeptics wrong about its ability to build a smart car, it would do the same with the flying car.
Act II: The Robotaxi Endgame
While flying cars represented a long-term dream, He Xiaopeng was also making a major bet on a more near-term application of XPeng's core technology: robotaxis.
He saw the development of a fully autonomous ride-hailing network as the logical endgame for his massive investment in in-house autonomous driving. The business model was simple but powerful: once the technology was mature enough to remove the human driver, the cost of transportation could be radically reduced, opening up a multi-trillion dollar market.
In 2022, XPeng launched a pilot robotaxi program in its home city of Guangzhou. A fleet of modified XPeng G9 SUVs, equipped with the latest version of XPILOT, began offering rides to the public. It was a crucial step in collecting the real-world data needed to train and validate the autonomous system.
Unlike some competitors who were developing purpose-built robotaxis, XPeng's strategy was to use its existing mass-produced vehicles. He Xiaopeng believed this approach was more capital-efficient and would allow them to scale up a robotaxi service much more quickly once the software was ready.
Epilogue: Building the Ecosystem
He Xiaopeng's ventures into flying cars and robotaxis are not separate, speculative side-bets. They are integral parts of a single, unified vision for a future mobility ecosystem.
He believes that the core of this ecosystem is the "brain" of the vehicle: the full-stack, in-house autonomous driving software. This single technology, once perfected, can be deployed in a private car, a flying vehicle, or a robotaxi. The hardware is just a different "body" for the same intelligent soul.
This long-term, ecosystem-level thinking is what sets He Xiaopeng apart. He is not just trying to sell more cars next quarter. He is trying to build the foundational technology that will power how people and goods move in the cities of the future. It's a vision that requires immense capital, extraordinary patience, and a touch of a sci-fi dreamer's imagination. It's a high-risk, high-reward bet, but it's the game He Xiaopeng came to play.