Xpeng handed over the 20,000th GX on Monday, a little over three months after the SUV launched on 20 May. The keys went to Bu Xinwen, general manager of Bosch Huayu Steering Systems, the company that supplies the GX's steer-by-wire rack. Twenty thousand cars in, the milestone customer was the supplier.
The ramp behind that number is real. CnEVPost's compiled figures put GX deliveries at 284 in May, 6,739 in June and 7,140 in July, for 14,163 by the end of July. Reaching 20,000 by 31 August means at least 5,837 went out in August, or 81.8 percent of the July figure with the month not quite finished.
The Share Went Up Because The Total Went Down
Xpeng says the GX accounted for 18.8 percent of its July deliveries, up from 16.8 percent in June, and presents that as the flagship's contribution growing. Run the arithmetic backwards and something else appears.
If 7,140 GX deliveries were 18.8 percent of July, Xpeng's July total was roughly 38,000. If 6,739 were 16.8 percent of June, June's total was roughly 40,100. Both percentages are rounded to one decimal, so treat these as approximations, but the direction survives the rounding: Xpeng's total deliveries fell by something like 2,000 units between June and July while the GX's share of them rose two points.
That is the number the milestone announcement leaves out. The GX is not lifting Xpeng's volume so much as replacing part of it.
The Order Book Arrived Faster Than The Factory
The GX took 24,863 firm orders in its first 12 hours, more than 80 percent of them for the top Ultra Flagship trim. That concentration is what broke the schedule. By June the wait for the all-electric Ultra Flagship had stretched to 35 weeks, and Xpeng was adding moulds and production lines for key components to catch up.
More than three months later, the 20,000 cars delivered still have not cleared the orders taken on launch day. Xpeng has spent the GX's entire life so far working through a queue it filled in half a day.
What The Car Actually Is
The GX is a full-size six-seat SUV over 5.2 metres long, starting at 269,800 yuan (39,780 dollars) with limited-time incentives against an official range of 279,800 to 359,800 yuan. That opening price sits close to Nio's Onvo L90 and well under the 399,800 yuan Xpeng floated at pre-sales, which is a 130,000 yuan gap between what the company first asked and what it now charges.
Two powertrains are offered. The battery-electric version claims up to 750 km CLTC and takes 5C charging. The extended-range version does 430 km on the battery alone and 1,585 km with a full tank and a full charge.
Steer-by-wire and active rear-wheel steering bring the turning radius down to 5.4 metres, which for a car of this length is the more interesting engineering claim than either range figure. The higher trims carry three of Xpeng's own Turing AI chips for 2,250 TOPS and run driver assistance on cameras alone, with no LiDAR. That puts Xpeng on the opposite side of the argument from almost every Chinese premium rival launching this month, several of which are fitting four LiDAR units and buying their stack from Huawei.
Xpeng launches the G9L in September and the Mona L05 in the fourth quarter, and has said it is targeting 60,000 deliveries a month. Against a July total of roughly 38,000, that is the gap the next two cars have to close.
