Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer XPeng is preparing its sixth series production model, which will be called X9, according to the brand’s CEO, He Xiaopeng, who teased a photo of the car’s name badge on his Weibo account.
The company’s chair confirmed that the upcoming XPeng X9 will be an MPV (which means multi-purpose vehicle) aimed at young buyers and that the X9 codename that was used during development will, in fact, be the vehicle’s official model name. In other words, it will be a fancy minivan.
“In addition to the G6, we have been polishing a new MPV — X9 recently, and we will use this product to open up the ‘young’ MPV market,” He Xiaopeng wrote in the social media post.
The new XPeng EV is reportedly scheduled to debut in the fourth quarter of this year, as Electrek reports, but BMW might have a thing or two to say about the Chinese company’s name choice.
As far as we can tell, the German carmaker doesn’t own the trademark rights for the X9 name – at least not in the European Union – and it doesn’t make any car that bears this name at the moment, but it does have the rights to the iX9 model name.
And with XPeng planning to expand to Europe, where it will presumably sell the new X9 sometime in the future, alongside its P5, P7, G3, G6, and G9 models, we smell a legal battle coming.
It would be far from the first time this would happen, with only last year Audi suing Chinese EV maker Nio over the names ES6 and ES8. The German brand argued that the two are too similar to its own S6 and S8 designations, and at the beginning of 2023, it won the case, although the decision was not final.
As for XPeng, a company that was established in 2014, it managed to sell a little over 120,000 vehicles last year, but in 2023 sales went down dramatically, with a 42 percent slump for the January-April period, which amounted to 25,309 units sold.
As always, we’d like to know what you think about this, so head over to the comments section below to give us your thoughts.
