Chinese EV Maker XPeng Addresses P7 Power-off Problem
AI Finance & Economics reported on Wednesday that an owner of XPeng vehicle and a former employee of the company posted an article on his social media account saying that the XPeng P7 he drove had repeatedly experienced power outages and offline problems.
In the article, the owner called himself a loyal fan of XPeng Motors and cited that he was once an employee of the company. He bought the first XPeng P7 670N in October 2020 and the second P7 670E in July 2021.
In March 2022, the owner claimed that when driving the E version P7 with Navigation Guided Pilot (NGP), there was a complete loss of power at high speed while the battery and motor lit up with a fault light. After that, NGP exited its functionality and the speed dropped rapidly from 120km to 0km within a few seconds. One minute after the vehicle was powered off, the after-sales service staff of XPeng called him regarding what had just transpired.
One month later, the same problem had reoccurred with the same vehicle. The owner said that when P7 was charging at an XPeng supercharging station, the whole car suddenly lost power and went offline. After the power outage, neither the doors nor the trunk could be closed and the vehicle couldn’t be driven.
XPeng Motors offered two solutions to the owner. One was to return to a factory service center while issuing vehicle service points as compensation. The other was that if the owner disagreed to the repairs, the company could recycle the vehicle at issue at the price of a second-hand car. Afterwards the owner himself would be able to re-purchase XPeng products at the price of a new car. The owner said that the normal used car is worth 220,000 yuan ($33,583), but this car can only be exchanged for 180,000 yuan due to quality problems. Since prices have recently increased to 320,000 yuan, the difference of 140,000 yuan will be borne by the owner, which is the only way to exchange the vehicle.
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XPeng Motors addressed the issue on Wednesday stating that the company had repeatedly advised the car owner to return to the store for repairs and was willing to negotiate a deal. The company has put forward an offer to replace for free the vehicle with a new P7 Wing, or, alternatively, the same, but newer, vehicle and a considerable cash compensation. During the negotiation process, they also communicated the valuation of vehicle recycling, rather than forcing the customer to replace and pay the difference of 140,000 yuan.