“You cannot say pickup. In Australia you say ute.” That is how Xpeng vice chairman and president Brian Gu opened a conversation in Melbourne about a vehicle the Chinese brand has never built. A pickup.
The format is alien to China — almost nobody buys one there, and Gu admitted it himself. Australia, though, lives on them, and so do a handful of countries in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. “So we are thinking about whether it’s a format we want to develop,” he said.
For now it is only a study. Nothing has been settled — not the body construction, not the platform, not the powertrain. The pickup could be fully electric, or it could take the Kunpeng EREV series hybrid that Xpeng is already rolling out across its range.
But the powertrain is far from the biggest problem here. Every large Xpeng crossover sits on a monocoque, even the giant GX at 5265 mm long — more than a Toyota Land Cruiser. A pickup, on the other hand, needs a ladder frame: payload, towing, rough ground. Which means the chassis would have to start from zero. “It is going to require quite a different development process, as the chassis and the requirements are different,” Gu added.
The most obvious shortcut is already closed. Volkswagen is an Xpeng shareholder, and the Germans have a ready-made Amarok frame. Except that frame is inherited from the Ford Ranger and sits inside the commercial vehicle agreement between Volkswagen and Ford. Handing it to the Chinese is almost certainly off the table.
The stakes are high. Utes accounted for 16.6% of new vehicle sales in Australia in the first half of 2026. A year earlier the figure was 19.2% — the segment has slipped, but it remains one of the biggest on the market.
And the rival has already been named by Xpeng itself: the company openly calls Tesla its key competitor. The Cybertruck was unveiled back in 2019 — and it has no ladder frame at all, because Tesla went the exoskeleton route. So Xpeng has to decide whether to repeat that experiment or build an honest frame like the Ranger and the HiLux.
Worth remembering: the Cybertruck scored just 34 reliability points out of 100.
