The New Generation Sales Champion Is Back: A Battle XPeng Cannot Afford to Lose

On the evening of April 2, the 2026 XPeng MONA M03 was officially launched.

The new car was released in six versions, with guiding prices maintained between 119,800 and 151,800 yuan. The strategy for the update is clear: the starting price remains unchanged, while configurations have been comprehensively upgraded.

Wallstreetcn has learned that within 37 minutes of the launch, confirmed orders exceeded 10,000 units, with the Max version accounting for over 85% of those orders.

As a key model that once pulled XPeng out of a sales slump, this facelift of the MONA M03 not only carries the heavy responsibility of boosting sales but also relates to XPeng's strategic direction after its rebranding to "XPeng Group."

01 Over 10,000 Orders in 37 Minutes

The 2026 MONA M03 features significant upgrades.

Two new exterior colors, Roland Purple and Avocado Green, have been added. The clear coat thickness has been increased by 20% compared to the industry average, with an 8% improvement in glossiness. Soft-touch materials cover over 70% of the interior. The front row has been upgraded with 14-point massage seats and a 20-speaker HIFI-grade audio system, paired with double-layered acoustic glass and RNC active noise reduction technology—configurations that were previously more common in higher-priced models.

However, the real highlight is the downward migration of the intelligent driving system.

The new car offers Max and Ultra SE dual-compute versions. The Max version is equipped with a single Turing AI chip, delivering 750 TOPS of effective computing power. The Ultra SE version features dual Turing AI chips with computing power as high as 1,500 TOPS. He Xiaopeng stated that this is the first time globally that this level of computing power has been brought to the $20,000 price range. He stated bluntly at the press conference: "This time, we have truly put 500,000-yuan-level intelligent driving and 200,000-yuan-level comfort into a 110,000-yuan car."

In terms of pricing, the 2026 MONA M03 has six configurations ranging from 119,800 to 151,800 yuan. The starting price is consistent with the previous model. Four of the variants offer more features without a price increase, while two new high-end variants have raised the price range by 12,000 yuan.

He Xiaopeng revealed that the gross margin of the new MONA M03 is even higher than that of the old model. This responds to external skepticism regarding whether the "more features for the same price" strategy would impact profitability.

He Xiaopeng further clarified: "I believe there is no value in making cheap, low-profit cars. We won't touch cars under 100,000 yuan. Although there is scale, I feel the value is too small."

In other words, XPeng does not intend to rely on low prices to gain volume; rather, it hopes to create differentiation through intelligent driving and premium configurations within the 110,000 to 150,000 yuan price range.

The market has also provided positive feedback. Breaking 10,000 confirmed orders in 37 minutes, with the Max version accounting for over 85%, means more than 80% of users are willing to pay a premium for high-level intelligent driving.

Looking back at 2024, the launch of the original MONA M03 was a turning point for XPeng's sales leap.

Wallstreetcn has learned that in 2025, the MONA M03 achieved annual sales of 197,500 units, accounting for 46% of XPeng's total annual sales, and held the top spot in the 100,000 to 200,000 yuan pure electric sedan segment for 18 consecutive months. This is a "hero model" that has performed solidly on both financial and market levels.

But as 2026 begins, competition in the new energy vehicle market has not relaxed at all, and XPeng's sales pressure is increasing. The launch of the 2026 MONA M03 at this time is well-timed.

As XPeng's sales pillar, the MONA M03's sales in January and February had dropped to 6,718 and 4,373 units, respectively. One of the main reasons was consumers holding onto their cash while waiting for the update.

The data showing over 10,000 orders in 37 minutes is certainly impressive, but it also represents a concentrated release of previously pent-up wait-and-see demand.

However, the competitive landscape in the 100,000 to 150,000 yuan pure electric family sedan market is changing rapidly. New models like the Dongfeng Nissan N7 and Leapmotor B01 have entered the fray one after another.

Currently, the downward migration of intelligent configurations is accelerating, and ranges of over 600 kilometers are gradually becoming standard. Whether the 2026 MONA M03 can continue its previous record of 18 consecutive months as the segment sales champion will take time to verify.

02 Not Wanting to Be Just a Car Company

The MONA M03 update solves immediate sales issues. The company's name change a week ago points to matters that are more long-term.

On March 27, XPeng announced in Hong Kong that effective April 1, 2026, the company's Chinese name would change from "XPeng Motors Co., Ltd." to "XPeng Group." The English name remains "XPeng Inc.," and the Hong Kong stock short name has been changed from "XPeng Motors-W" to "XPENG-W."

Removing the word "Motors" means that the company no longer wants to be seen only as a car manufacturer.

He Xiaopeng also responded to Wallstreetcn regarding the origins of the name change.

He explained that it had been called "XPeng Motors" for the past decade because it initially focused on smart electric vehicles. However, a new decade has begun, and new energy vehicles must integrate AI to become AI + new energy vehicles.

"I believe people will see massive transformations in the new decade," He Xiaopeng said. "If two or three years ago I still thought the robotics revolution was something for the following decade, in the past year, I've seen the changes in physical AI large models. To be honest, I feel extremely surprised."

He judges that the era of robotics is accelerating significantly. Previously, he believed that L5-level full autonomous driving was impossible for ten years, but now he feels "it's truly possible to achieve very soon." The robotics era might even arrive faster than autonomous driving because the safety requirements for robots are not as high as those for cars.

Based on this judgment, XPeng Group's business map is no longer limited to automobiles.

He Xiaopeng revealed that the company is using automobiles as its basic business and is extending its layout into several directions, including flying cars, humanoid robots, AI chips, and autonomous driving models. In fact, as early as XPeng Tech Day last November, He Xiaopeng redefined the company's core positioning as an explorer of mobility in the physical AI world and a globally-oriented embodied intelligence company.

Since the beginning of this year, the organizational structure has been adjusted accordingly. The Autonomous Driving Center and Intelligent Cockpit Center were merged to establish the General Intelligence Center to integrate AI capabilities and share a single physical AI base model.

According to the plan, XPeng's four major physical AI applications—second-generation VLA, Robotaxi, humanoid robots, and flying cars—are all planned to enter the mass production stage in 2026.

In March, XPeng announced the establishment of an independent Robotaxi business unit, with plans to launch three fully self-developed mass-produced Robotaxi models in 2026. A full-chain mass production base for humanoid robots has also begun construction, with a monthly production capacity target of over 1,000 units by the end of the year.

But behind the grand narrative, a practical problem is inevitably pushed to the forefront: while continuing high investment in the AI field, how will XPeng balance its finances?

According to public information, XPeng plans to invest 7 billion yuan in R&D in the AI field alone in 2026. For the full year of 2025, although XPeng's net loss narrowed to 1.14 billion yuan, it is still some distance from stable profitability.

He Xiaopeng's attitude is clear: "The reason we are investing firmly is that we believe change will come very quickly... I am very firmly convinced that after dramatic changes, technology is extremely effective." Choosing not to participate in price wars and continuing to build on the strength of intelligent driving is the differentiated path XPeng has chosen. The higher gross margin of the new MONA M03 also provides the confidence for this strategy.

However, the market's patience for profitability is becoming more limited. XPeng still needs to answer how it will balance strategic expansion with financial stability.

He Xiaopeng believes that the present is a brand-new starting point for XPeng. What remains to be seen is not only whether the MONA M03's orders can translate into deliveries and whether its popularity can be sustained, but also how XPeng plays its AI card—how it will be played, when it will come out, and whether it can produce results that match the investment.

The following is a dialogue between Wallstreetcn and others with He Xiaopeng, Chairman and CEO of XPeng Group, and Yang Guang, Product Lead of XPeng Group's MONA (edited for clarity without affecting the original meaning):

Q: What are your views on the profit model for the coming year?

He Xiaopeng: I believe that starting from last year, and for the next 4 to 5 years or so, it is the most critical turning point for the Chinese automotive industry. Scale is important, but scale is not absolute. There are many forms of scale that don't have much value. Previously, from an internet perspective, high-quality scale was the most valuable. A company might need scale first as it grows before it can achieve high quality, but some companies move toward high quality from the beginning.

Starting from last year, everyone will see that XPeng achieved profitability in the fourth quarter. Although we weren't profitable for the full year, we had only a very small loss for the entire year. Last year, our R&D expenses were nearly 10 billion yuan; if you include flying cars, it exceeded 10 billion. This year, our R&D expenses will increase significantly. So, looking at it from another angle, if you don't count our investment in brand-new R&D—including chips, next-generation AI, robotics, and some new things I can't tell you about yet—we are already quite profitable in the automotive field, including this year.

But the reason I say these 4 to 5 years is because we see that technology will generate immense changes. To be honest, I was previously unsure about the effect, depth, pace, and timing of AI changing the physical world, but I saw this more and more clearly in the second quarter of last year. Moreover, this change goes from the entire organization to the R&D paradigm, and finally to the user experience and results. I believe that when you see our second-generation VLA this year, it will still be the first step of VLA. Regarding the effect of XPeng's R&D investment entering the market, I believe everyone will see massive and rapid changes every quarter hereafter.

In the past, software was linear and painful; it might improve by 5% today, and maybe only another 5% next quarter. But AI is not linear. I have great confidence in XPeng this year and in the next few years. You can see the MONA starting in April; it represents the first car of a brand-new second quarter. XPeng is not only at a turning point from scale to high-quality development, but this year you will also see the start of a better balance between scale, quality, profit, globalization, and the ecosystem.

Q: Why the name change to XPeng Group? What is your outlook for the market competition landscape?

He Xiaopeng: In the past 10 years of starting XPeng, we began with intelligent electric vehicles, so XPeng's core business was automobiles. I think this decade will see everyone move from the previous 10 years of new energy vehicles into a new 10 years of new energy vehicles combined with intelligent agents.

In the new decade, many people will see the revolution in robotics. If 2 or 3 years ago I still thought the robotics revolution was for the decade after that—the third decade—the changes I've seen in physical AI large models over the past year have, to be honest, extremely astonished me. Therefore, from another perspective, I believe the era of robotics will arrive at an accelerated pace. I used to think L5 was impossible for 10 years, but now I think L5 could truly be achieved within 10 years, and robotics is even more likely because the requirements for robots are not as high as for L5.

We revised the name from "XPeng Motors" to "XPeng Group." Facing the new global physical AI, and having robots and automobiles enter China and the world within this physical AI, is a very important new decade for us. I believe that current car companies do not have a good business model; they are all in a very involuted mode.

Everyone pursues high-quality development and doesn't want internal competition, but the nature of the car as hardware is not a particularly good business model, which is a fact I've seen in recent years. So, how a new car company becomes a technology company in the future, how it becomes a different kind of company—we are doing a lot of rethinking and layout. Seeing "XPeng Motors" change its name to "XPeng Group" is the layout we are making in this regard.

The domestic market certainly has some challenges, but I think it is instead an opportunity for high-quality development; the overseas market is a huge opportunity. We see our peers developing very well in overseas markets. Among the new car-making forces, XPeng's layout over the past 5 years plus this year will lay a very good foundation for XPeng's globalization in the second half of this year and next year. And we hope that next year, we will not only take our cars global but other product lines as well.

I have always felt that the final outcome will be a process where a hundred flowers bloom, resulting in final high-quality development where the strong eliminate the weak. In the end, it will certainly be difficult for so many companies to remain. A few years ago, I often said that by 2030, there might be only 5 Chinese-led car companies with scale left in China. I still very firmly believe this. I believe that having a certain scale is only the first threshold; it is far from being a prerequisite for victory.

Q: Why add the Ultra SE version?

Yang Guang: When our project team was working on this last year, we felt that the MAX version was already very good and the price-performance ratio was already very high. Since the chips for the SE version are expensive this year, we thought about whether we should skip it. That was until one day when Tingting brought a test-drive car for Lao Jiang and me to try. We maneuvered through that little alley, and after the test drive, Lao Jiang rushed to report to He Xiaopeng to add the SE version. I think this is a typical example of a massive change in user and product perception brought about by a major technological iteration.

Q: What is the source of your confidence in the sub-150,000 yuan pure electric market? Are there plans for overseas expansion?

Yang Guang: It's not that the competition is only fierce in the 150,000-yuan-level market; every level of the Chinese car market is extremely competitive. Now there are about 180 to 190 brand-new cars every year, and if you count facelifts and annual models, it's about 1,200 to 1,300 models. The M03 must have some unique aspects to achieve its results.

Young users overseas will also like youthful cars. Young users all over the world simply like products that are beautiful, intelligent, trendy, cutting-edge, and truly understand them. So we are very confident that if MONA goes overseas, young users abroad will also like it. We will synchronize the overseas expansion plans with everyone in the future.

Q: Is the primary competitor for the M03 the Model 3? How will you win over the youth?

Yang Guang: The M03 is a very special product, and its entire product form is very differentiated in this price segment. Its user base is a very typical "alternative-seeking" user; many young users like very good things, but they have limited economic conditions as they have just entered society.

But being young doesn't mean they have to use bad things, so we use a differentiated way to provide them with a very good, high-quality, and youthful product. Of course, these users will also look at the Model 3. Everyone knows that Tesla is a very excellent benchmark in the industry. So, is there a competitive relationship? Certainly, it is also our competitor. It's more about us providing users with different services at different price points, using different products and images.

Q: Why change the cockpit chip? Is there a plan for an independent IPO for the chip business?

He Xiaopeng: XPeng is currently using chips from both MTK and Qualcomm in our cockpits. Both of their chips performed very well in the original mobile phone field, so we will combine them in different models and obtain very good capabilities. My view on cockpit chips might not be exactly the same as many other companies.

I personally feel that as intelligent assisted driving becomes more and more powerful, car screens will increasingly change from being interactive to being primarily for playback. The role of car instrument panels will become lower and lower. Cars are increasingly about computing power rather than just CPU or GPU; the logic will likely be primarily NPU-based. So we will see that intelligent assisted driving will change the car.

Secondly, after our Ultra full-performance version features come online in the second half of this year, everyone will see some brand-new capabilities in the cockpit. At that time, everyone can see the changes in our thinking on chip positioning. There is no information to share yet. But I still believe that the strong AI companies of the future must all develop their own chips; this point is absolutely unchanged. I believe this very, very firmly.

Q: Will the MONA series launch models such as SUVs and station wagons?

He Xiaopeng: MONA will definitely have more cars beyond the M03, and it will definitely go from China to the global stage. This is what can be shared now.

Q: How do you balance AI R&D investment and output? How has the gross margin of the new model changed?

He Xiaopeng: I looked at the trend charts for the change in the absolute value and relative ratio of R&D investment for many car companies last year. I think XPeng has followed a process of higher revenue but also a higher relative ratio of R&D investment. I think this would be wrong in most eras of the automotive industry, but today I very firmly believe that technology is extremely effective when it is undergoing dramatic changes. Our commercialization capabilities will be reflected very soon, which is why I said that if you don't count other innovative businesses, XPeng's automotive business already feels like it has very good profits both last year and this year.

But why do we invest firmly? We believe that change will come very quickly. So today, having the scale of automobiles alone is not enough. Your second question also reflects that XPeng's 2026 MONA has much better profit than the 2025 MONA. It reflects a very important capability of XPeng: cars are getting better and better, and we are pursuing higher and higher gross margins. Moreover, we are increasingly convinced that XPeng will be a technology company in the future, not just a car company. I believe there is no value in making cheap, low-profit cars, so you will see that XPeng won't touch cars under 100,000 yuan in the automotive field. There is scale, but we believe the value is too small.

Q: How do you view the industry's talk about the number of car companies and new versus old forces?

He Xiaopeng: Two or three years ago, I said that I think around 2030, only 5 large-scale Chinese car companies will still be alive in China, and others will be very small or find it hard to last long-term. At that time, many people didn't believe it because in the past time for automobiles, there was no such problem; there were 100 or 200 companies, and everyone had something to eat. That was in a physical world without the combination of an AI world.

I believe that with high computing power—to put it bluntly—all cars in the future will have high-level automatic assisted driving, and eventually, when technology and regulations are OK, they will all be driverless cars. I think it is an inevitable process. In the past software era, the difficulty of achieving this was relatively high, but I think it's not far off in the AI era.

Q: Have the annual sales targets been adjusted? Are there any plans for new vehicle-machine related functions?

He Xiaopeng: We never make plans for our annual targets. If people are speculating, we will certainly not adjust them downward; they will only be higher than what people guess. This is why I said in January this year that everyone would believe in the opportunities for XPeng's sequential growth in the first, second, third, and fourth quarters, as well as next year.

This comes from many capabilities, including the release of the MONA M03 today. I think the MONA is a car with very good product strength, a comprehensive product strength. I think the product is the 1, and everything else is a 0. If the product cannot stand firm, there is no way around it. At least from our perspective, XPeng's comprehensive product strength is gradually becoming visible at the inflection point of multiple products.

Q: What is the trend of car market prices this year? What car-buying advice do you give consumers?

He Xiaopeng: I personally feel that after 17 car companies joined together in the second quarter of last year to pursue high-quality development, the possibility of that kind of disorderly internal competition in the past should basically be zero; everyone is pursuing higher-quality development. And I particularly want to say that if car companies only engage in disorderly internal competition in the physical world, they will ultimately not survive; it's just a question of which day they fail—sooner or later.

You can see that in the past year or so, we have been pursuing a combination of high aesthetics, high quality, high intelligence, and then forming high value for customers and the enterprise. We are moving very steadily, unlike before when we changed rapidly with environmental changes, so I personally think that at least this year, the situation you mentioned will not occur. However, in the coming years, when the entire AI era crushes the original old automobiles, I think there will definitely be a period of pain in the market, especially for traditional car companies, where there is likely to be massive change. At that time, there may be many new things.

Q: Why not simplify the vehicle models and intelligent driving SKU versions?

He Xiaopeng: The automobile is a very long-term marathon; it is a super-large-scale industry. It is not like many traditional manufacturing industries with small scales where, once a certain scale is reached, there is no need for competitors to enter. The automobile is not that kind of business model. So it is both a hardware business and yet not a general traditional hardware business. Therefore, I still believe that in this field, it is very difficult for most car companies globally to succeed with only two or three models.

If in 10 years—because in the past I think software only accounted for maybe 10% of the power or value, but in another 3 to 5 years software might account for half, and maybe 3 to 5 years after that software might account for 70%. When the proportion of software is higher, remember that the change from hardware diversity to a few types will be more violent, but today this global market change is particularly large. Different places, different scenarios, technology, hardware, software, data, and scenarios require different data capabilities. Our automotive product personnel need to have a broader and more far-reaching view and cannot just look at one corner.