Chinese electric vehicle maker Xpeng Motors has picked Californian IoT connectivity Real-Time Innovations (RTI) to provide the connectivity framework for its latest production model, the Xpeng P7 intelligent electric sedan. The Xpeng P7 will make use of RTI’s Connext DDS, which is designed to provide reliable, robust and advanced autonomous driving systems. Xpeng Motors will begin deliveries of its P7 vehicles to customers in Q2 of 2020, making it the first Chinese company to use Connext DDS in the production models of autonomous vehicles.

Over the past few months, Xpeng Motors has unveiled a series of high-end technology and design features of the P7, making it the first production vehicle to implement financial industry standards-compliant authentication digital car key technology, and first to carry Alibaba’s In-Car Mini APP platform. Xpeng Motors also announced in November that it has signed an agreement with Alipay to jointly develop in-car payment functions, which will first be implemented in the P7 vehicle. The Chinese smart EV maker also announced in November the signing of $400 million in Series C funding to accelerate its business growth.

Built on the Smart Electric Platform Architecture (“SEPA”), the P7 will employ the XPILOT 3.0 autonomous driving system. This is powered by Connext DDS and enables the progressive implementation of Level 3 autonomous driving. RTI is enabling Xpeng’s vision of producing intelligent and autonomous vehicles for the middle-range market in China, the largest segment of the world’s biggest electric vehicle market.

Xpeng Motors uses Connext DDS in its complex P7 autonomous system to send and receive data in real time. RTI Connext DDS mitigates risk and delivers low-latency, high-reliability, scalability and security essential for distributed systems.

Connext DDS is deployed in hundreds of autonomous industrial applications and is capable of supporting autonomous vehicle development from research to production. The plug-and-play architecture, DDS Security, and support from ECU to back-end allows Connext DDS users to develop and reuse software across the entire network stack.

In the development of the P7, Xpeng Motors relied on new features in RTI’s Recording Service, the first off-the-shelf solution for reliable and non-intrusive recording, analysis and replay of real-time data, messages and events at high data rates and high fidelity. With the Recording Service, users now have the ability to temporarily store the recording log in RAM and flush it to storage as needed, allowing longer use of SSDs while in the field. This offers an easier and more efficient fix for system debugging.