Tesla unveiled its new Mannequin Y with a refreshed design in China and plenty of identified that it appears remarkably just like Xpeng’s P7, which is humorous as a result of Xpeng itself was a Tesla copycat at its inception.
It goes full circle.
Henry Xia, who based Xpeng in 2014, admitted overtly that he was influenced by Tesla and by the automaker’s announcement that they had been open-sourcing their patents.
It was reportedly the primary firm to truly take up Tesla on utilizing their patents without spending a dime.
However issues took a flip for the more serious from there.
Xpeng went past simply taking inspiration from Tesla and its considerably open patents. It copied Tesla’s Autopilot and cluster person interface:
Tesla later additionally initiated a lawsuit towards Guangzhi Cao, a former Autopilot engineer who stop to hitch Xpeng’s autonomous driving workforce. The automaker accused the engineer of stealing Tesla’s Autopilot supply code for Xpeng.
The lawsuit was settled in 2021. Xpeng was not the occasion to the lawsuit and acknowledged that its personal driver-assist options relied on in-house growth.
However Xpeng didn’t cease copying Tesla there. The Chinese language firm blatantly copied Tesla’s web site for a short second in 2020:
Now, a couple of years later, you would argue that it’s going the opposite manner round.
Yesterday, Tesla unveiled its Mannequin Y design refresh in China with the most important change being a front-end redesign that’s remarkably just like Xpeng’s P7+ and different autos within the Chinese language EV automaker’s lineup.
It options the identical 3-section lightbar and really related headlights popping out of the aspect air intakes:
Xpeng senior designer Rafik Ferrag additionally seen the resemblance, and in a brand new put up on Instagram at present, he mentioned that he believes Tesla is “paying tribute” to Xpeng’s design with the brand new Mannequin Y refresh:
In 2019, Xiaopeng P7 introduced a pattern of entrance cross-over lamp to all the trade. In actual fact, this set of options was designed by us in 2018 and has been used as Xiaopeng’s DNA and identification since then. It’s nonetheless being paid tribute to by varied producers comparable to Tesla and LX.
Proper earlier than Tesla’s unveiling of the brand new Mannequin Y, Xpeng shared the primary official photographs of its new G7 SUV, which encompasses a related front-end:
Xpeng has seen its car deliveries surge 34% in 2024 in comparison with Tesla’s deliveries being down 1%. The G7 can also be positioned to be certainly one of Tesla’s high Mannequin Y competitor in China, which is its most vital market.
Electrek’s Take
It at all times goes full circle. There’s little doubt in thoughts that Xpeng copied Tesla prior to now and whereas I can’t affirm that Tesla copied Xpeng right here, it appears extraordinarily prone to me.
Xpeng has been doing very properly with its lineup in China this 12 months and now the G7 is critical competitors to Tesla’s predominant cash maker: promoting Mannequin Y autos in China.
Is Tesla getting nervous?
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