MONA L03 orders still exceed deliveries, Yu Tao says

A tip for L05 buyers, taken from the L03

Yu Tao, a vice-president of XPeng Group, wrote on Weibo on 28 October, the evening before the MONA L05’s launch in China. Before every launch, he said, he tells buyers the same thing: order early on launch night, and ask the sales staff to lock the order straight away. Only a locked order, one made final, joins the production queue.

The MONA L03 was his example. Three months after the L03 went on sale in China on 16 July, XPeng still takes more new orders for it each day than it delivers, he wrote.

The L05 starts with cars already built. Its new production line turned out 5,000 before the launch, and buyers can lock an order for a ready car on launch night.

XPeng’s managers have said so since August

Jiang Wen, general manager of the MONA range, apologised on 7 August to buyers with locked orders who were still waiting for their cars. Production had started in small numbers in July, he said, and uneven supply of advanced chips, as demand for AI grew worldwide, had hit August’s. The line had moved to two shifts, and he expected it to reach full output in September and October.

On 30 August Yu Tao said daily L03 orders were still far above deliveries, though output had risen markedly in recent days, the Chinese technology site IT Home reported. On 14 October Jiang Wen wrote that L03 output would rise to full capacity in October, above September’s. The L05 is built in a completely different factory, he added, so it will not slow the L03 down.

Three days later Yu Tao answered rumours that range-extender production had stopped: they were wrong, he wrote. Deliveries were all within plan, and none had been late.

Sales have risen every month

China’s passenger-car association, CPCA, counts the L03s XPeng sells each month in China and abroad. Its September total was 47% above August’s, and the L03 made up 39% of XPeng’s sales in China that month, on XPulse’s arithmetic. XPeng itself put September’s L03 deliveries at more than 14,000. The range-extender L03, first counted in August, was 17% of its sales in China in September.

CPCA’s count. The L03 went on sale halfway through July; the rest sold in China are battery-electric. Exported is CPCA’s count of cars and kits, its total less what was sold in China. Every month is on the L03’s own page.

The wait has not shortened

XPeng’s order page in China quotes a wait for every trim, counted from the day the order is locked. Through October the waits have not shortened. A battery-electric L03 began the month at 16 to 21 weeks, rose to 18 to 23 within days and held there for two weeks, then eased back to 16 to 21 in the second half of the month. A range-extender L03 went from 9 to 14 weeks to 11 to 16 in the first ten days and has stayed there since.

The waits move by powertrain, not by trim. All six battery-electric trims, from the Plus with no Turing chip to the Ultra SE with two, have quoted the same wait at every reading, and so have the three range-extender trims. The detailed data, trim by trim and day by day, is on XPulse’s L03 page.

On XPulse’s arithmetic, an L03 locked at the end of October would be due in February or March 2027 with a battery, and in January or February with a range extender.

XPulse’s reading: a quoted wait is roughly how long the factory needs to work through the locked orders ahead of a new one. If the factory builds more L03s in October, as Jiang Wen said it would, and the wait stays the same, the line of orders ahead has grown as well. That is what Yu Tao describes.

What comes next

XPulse’s reading: for now, how many L03s XPeng sells looks set by how many it can build rather than by how many buyers want one. That matters in the fourth quarter, when XPeng’s chief executive, He Xiaopeng, has challenged XPeng to pass 60,000 sales in a single month: while orders run ahead of deliveries, extra L03s from the factories have buyers waiting for them.

XPeng’s October deliveries are due on 1 November, and CPCA’s count by model is expected in mid-November. They will show how many L03s were sold in the month Jiang Wen named for full capacity.