XPeng's Carbon-Credit Jackpot and Amsterdam Software Win Collide With a Bruised Share Price

XPeng has banked more than 1 billion yuan from CO2 credit sales, with Porsche among buyers, as Q2 2026 overseas deliveries rose 81% year over year.

XPeng has quietly turned Europe's regulatory squeeze on combustion engines into a nine-figure revenue stream. According to the Chinese business magazine Caixin, the Guangzhou-based electric-vehicle maker has now banked cumulative proceeds of more than one billion yuan from selling CO2 credits — with Porsche among the buyers, alongside several other international automakers. The certificates have changed hands across the European Union, the UK and Australia, turning the trading desk into a high-margin sideline that scales directly with XPeng's sales growth beyond China.

That growth is real. Overseas deliveries topped 20,000 vehicles in the second quarter of 2026, an 81 percent jump from the same period a year earlier. The company is pressing its advantage with fresh metal: on Monday it announced the launch of its new entry-level L03 for the New Zealand market. The model line, earmarked for 60 countries spanning Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific, is designed to reach more budget-conscious buyers and, for the first time in the series, will offer range-extender variants alongside pure battery versions.

A Home Market That Keeps Shrinking

The overseas momentum stands in sharp relief against conditions at home, where Chinese industry-wide sales fell by more than a fifth in the first eight months of 2026. XPeng has leaned on technology alliances with established Western players to help bridge the gap. Its joint model with Volkswagen, the ID. Unyx 09, is now rolling off the line at the Hefei plant ahead of an October 2026 market debut. The electric sedan went from drawing board to production in 24 months — roughly 30 percent faster than the German group's customary development cycle.

Software, meanwhile, has become an unexpected calling card. In Amsterdam, the state news agency Xinhua pitted XPeng's NGP 6.3.0 driver-assistance system against Tesla's FSD V14 over an identical urban course, a head-to-head that would have seemed far-fetched just a few years ago. Through a particularly tangled construction zone, the XPeng system threaded the gap in a single pass; its American rival needed two corrections. German Tesla driver André Scheidler summed up the day bluntly: Tesla, he said, is very comparable to XPeng.

The result signals a broader shift. Chinese manufacturers are no longer competing purely on price — they are challenging the incumbents on their home turf of artificial intelligence. XPeng's second-generation VLA model showed a notable ability to adapt to local rules and road conditions in Amsterdam's mixed traffic.

Paper Victory, Pending Permits

Technology leadership, however, is not the same as commercial operation. Tesla already holds approval in the Netherlands, where the vehicle authority RDW signed off on its system after more than 3,000 hours of testing. XPeng remains in the trial phase locally. Without regulatory clearance, the technical dead heat is a showcase with no immediate payoff.

Investors, for their part, have shown little appetite for the story. The stock closed at EUR 8.75 on Tuesday, a fresh 52-week low, and has shed 52 percent since the start of the year. In today's session it slipped a further 2.2 percent to EUR 8.56, hovering just above its 52-week floor of EUR 8.44. The gap between what the cars can do on the street and what the market is willing to pay for them has rarely been wider. Shareholders are focused less on neural networks than on thin-margin export markets and a bruising price war.

XPeng continues to push outward regardless — the X9 and G6 are already on sale in Indonesia, where marketing vice president Hari Arifianto has promised another vehicle before year-end. Yet operational progress abroad keeps evaporating at the exchange. Until the software edge translates into fleet-scale orders and high-margin licensing revenue, the bears retain the upper hand. For now, the only question that matters for the share price is whether the technological step forward is soon followed by an economic one.