New Flying Cars with AI: China's Low-Altitude Economy Takes Off

Aviation New Flying Cars with AI: China's Low-Altitude Economy Takes Off

2025-11-26 From Henrik Bork | Translated by AI 3 min Reading Time

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Xpeng unveiled a new flying car at the beginning of November. The "Aridge A868" is the first to start flight tests since the company's aviation division was renamed Aridge. Previously, the flying car division of the Chinese e-car start-up was called "Xpeng AeroHT".

The Xpeng Aridge A868 is a pure flying car with a cabin for six passengers. It has a hybrid drive, which gives it a top speed of 360 km/h and a range of around 500 kilometers.(Image: Xpeng) — The Xpeng Aridge A868 is a pure flying car with a cabin for six passengers. It has a hybrid drive, which gives it a top speed of 360 km/h and a range of around 500 kilometers.
(Image: Xpeng)

It is Xpeng's second model in the field of new mobility after the "Land Aircraft Carrier", which consists of an electric car with a passenger drone on the roof and is due to go into series production in 2026. The new A868 is a pure flying car with a cabin for six passengers. It has a hybrid drive and can reach a top speed of 360 km/h (~224 mph) and a range of around 500 kilometers (~310 miles), Xpeng announced.

Thanks to its rotors, it can take off vertically, making it an Electrical Vertical Take-Off and Landing (eVTOL). In the air, the rotors can then be turned forwards and into a vertical position so that they act like propellers and the A686 continues to fly like a normal fixed-wing aircraft. For landing, the rotors are then returned to the horizontal position familiar from helicopters. This is therefore a so-called tilt-rotor architecture.

New AI Model

In a video published by Xpeng, a pilot can be seen controlling the eVTOL from the cockpit with a kind of joystick. The A686 is therefore not an autonomous passenger drone. It will probably be a while before autonomous passenger drones can obtain licenses in China. However, just like the Land Aircraft Carrier, the pilot of the A868 will have an autopilot with AI and VLA technology at his disposal.

At this year's "Xpeng AI Day" on November 5, the company presented its new product XPENG VLA 2.0. This is said to be a new type of AI model, a "Physical World Large Model", which extends the capabilities of an LLM in the text and image area to include interaction with the hardware. According to the company, a new type of "Vision Implicit Token Action" eliminates the intermediate step via speech when converting visual signals into instructions.

Using Embodied AI Across All Industries

This form of "embodied AI," which can be applied across domains—including humanoid robots and robotaxis—is set to be utilized not only in the new flying car A686 but also in future products of various kinds, said the company's founder He Xiaopeng at the event. He stated that he has repositioned his company as a "mobility pioneer in the world of physical AI and as a global player in Embodied Intelligence." Previously, he consciously focused on AI as the first Chinese electric vehicle start-up.

Now, he signals global ambitions not just as a manufacturer of electric vehicles with artificial intelligence but as a provider of various mobility solutions incorporating AI. The rebranding of the aviation division from "Xpeng Aeroht" to "Xpeng Aridge" should also be understood in this context.

Focus on the Urban Air Mobility Market

With the newly introduced flying car Aridge A686, Xpeng aims at the urban air mobility market for flights of under one hour, particularly within the megacity clusters of the "Greater Bay Area" around Shenzhen and Hong Kong, as well as the cluster around the Yangtze River Delta, including Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Nanjing. It is also intended for tourism, marketed for self-flying tours. "Between 2027 and 2030, the aircraft is expected to become a complementary mode of transportation for interurban commuting," writes the daily newspaper Nanfang Ribao. This is quite a realistic forecast, as China's communist state and party leadership has declared the "Low Altitude Economy"—referring to everything that operates up to about 1,000 meters above ground—a focus of national development in the new five-year plan.

Xpeng's new flying car is another example of how this low-altitude economy in China is rapidly moving from the design and concept phase toward market readiness and mass production. One might even say it is "taking off."

The unmanned, autonomously flying drone CarryAll V2000CG by AutoFlight completed its first commercial operation on September 18, 2025. (Image:AutoFlight)

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