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.