Chinese Tesla Competitor XPeng Is Using Lidar

In July 2019, Guangzhi Cao, a former engineer at Tesla Inc TSLA, admitted to uploading Tesla's Autopilot source code to his iCloud account.

Tesla had sued Cao for allegedly giving the secret code to Xpeng Inc XPEV.

When Tasha Keeney of Ark Invest mentioned Xpeng's use of Lidar in the company's autonomous driving solutions on Twitter, she said it's a "big deviation from copying Tesla."

That's when Tesla CEO Elon Musk responded, stating Xpeng has an old version of Tesla's software, so their code was unable to drive without Lidar.

Musk said this was a problem with Xpeng and not other Chinese companies.

Benzinga's Take: Whether Xpeng really stole any data from Tesla's Autopilot code is still unknown. But the fact that Xpeng is using Lidar — something Musk has called a fool's errand — shows the tech today is different from what Tesla is using.

Tesla recently started rolling out its Full Self-Driving Beta to a small group of testers. Tesla hopes to rollout its feature-complete Full Self-Driving software by the end of 2020.

Photo courtesy of Tesla.