Xpeng has taken the old adage ‘go big or go home’ literally, and teamed up with Huawei to create a mega head-up display (HUD) that covers the whole windshield. The AR-HUD uses augmented reality to give navigation directions, alert drivers to safety issues, and minimize reaction times, blind spots, and, er, distracted driving.
The 87-inch display—yep, 87 inches across—shows the speed limit, the speed of the car, the navigation directions, and the time it’ll take to get to wherever you’re going.
Oh, and should you drive the wrong way down a road (more common than you might think), a graphical and unmissable ‘X’ will flash up on the screen. The system will show how it plans to execute self-parking maneuvers, too, and in dense fog, it will flag up corners to reduce the odds of getting suddenly familiar with the nearest hedge/ditch/ravine/sheer cliff face. Nice.
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Xpeng and Huawei hope to use the massive HUD to engender trust with drivers, particularly when driver assistance—and subsequently self-driving—features are deployed. “The system will show when the car needs to overtake; it will show the choice of the overtaking path,” explains Chen Yonghai, vice president of Xiaopeng Automobile.
Xpeng also says it has sorted out several technical headaches, such as picture fluttering, and uses complex algorithms to control distortion and ensure that brightness and contrast are clear in all light environments.
The Chinese carmaker is claiming the AR-HUD as an industry-first and plans to launch it on the G7 SUV, but we do recall JLR mucking about with similar tech conceptually, and BMW presenting a windshield-wide HUD panel (pictured above) at the 2025 Consumer Electronics Show back in January. That’ll be coming on the new iX3—BMW’s first Neue Klasse car—later this year.
Would this entice you to buy an Xpeng vehicle? Or put you off entirely?
NOTE: This article first appeared on TopGear.com. Minor edits have been made.
