Electric vehicle startup Xpeng and its investor Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba are opening a computing centre to train software for driverless cars. The seven days of training are going to be reduced to an hour. Technology from Alibaba’s cloud division is set to be used for computing needs. The centre called Fuyao would be located in Inner Mongolia in northern China. The move is bound for Xpeng to challenge giants like Tesla and BYD. Its other initiatives include a driver assistance programme called XPILOT that enables automatic lane switching. It also launched City NPG which allows changing lanes, adjusting speed, overtaking cars, and entering and exiting highways. Xpeng has been investing in robotics and flying passenger drones, making it a technology company rather than an automaker. Another business trying to compete in the electric vehicle space is Tencent with its foreign automakers to use for various automotive technology. These companies have been encouraged by Chinese regulators.

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