Tesla goes full circle and copies its own copycat with new Model Y

Tesla unveiled its new Model Y with a refreshed design in China and many pointed out that it looks remarkably similar to Xpeng’s P7, which is funny because Xpeng itself was a Tesla copycat at its inception.

It goes full circle.

Henry Xia, who founded Xpeng in 2014, admitted openly that he was influenced by Tesla and by the automaker’s announcement that they were open-sourcing their patents.

It was reportedly the first company to actually take up Tesla on using their patents for free.

But things took a turn for the worse from there.

 Xpeng went beyond just taking inspiration from Tesla and its somewhat open patents. It copied Tesla’s Autopilot and cluster user interface:

Tesla later also initiated a lawsuit against Guangzhi Cao, a former Autopilot engineer who quit to join Xpeng’s autonomous driving team. The automaker accused the engineer of stealing Tesla’s Autopilot source code for Xpeng.

The lawsuit was settled in 2021. Xpeng was not the party to the lawsuit and stated that its own driver-assist features relied on in-house development.

But Xpeng didn’t stop copying Tesla there. The Chinese company blatantly copied Tesla’s website for a brief moment in 2020:

Now, a few years later, you could argue that it is going the other way around.

Yesterday, Tesla unveiled its Model Y design refresh in China with the biggest change being a front-end redesign that is remarkably similar to Xpeng’s P7+ and other vehicles in the Chinese EV automaker’s lineup.

It features the same 3-section lightbar and very similar headlights coming out of the side air intakes:

Xpeng senior designer Rafik Ferrag also noticed the resemblance, and in a new post on Instagram today, he said that he believes Tesla is “paying tribute” to Xpeng’s design with the new Model Y refresh:

In 2019, Xiaopeng P7 brought a trend of front cross-over lamp to the entire industry. In fact, this set of solutions was designed by us in 2018 and has been used as Xiaopeng’s DNA and identity since then. It is still being paid tribute to by various manufacturers such as Tesla and LX.

Right before Tesla’s unveiling of the new Model Y, Xpeng shared the first official images of its new G7 SUV, which features a similar front-end:

Xpeng has seen its vehicle deliveries surge 34% in 2024 compared to Tesla’s deliveries being down 1%. The G7 is also positioned to be one of Tesla’s top Model Y competitor in China, which is its most important market.

Electrek’s Take

It always goes full circle. There’s no doubt in mind that Xpeng copied Tesla in the past and while I can’t confirm that Tesla copied Xpeng here, it seems extremely likely to me.

Xpeng has been doing very well with its lineup in China this year and now the G7 is serious competition to Tesla’s main money maker: selling Model Y vehicles in China.

Is Tesla getting nervous?