Volkswagen's second co-developed EV with XPeng is a 5-meter smart sedan

Volkswagen’s partnership with XPeng is moving fast. The two companies have developed their second joint model in just 24 months — an electric sedan called the ID.09 that Volkswagen China CEO Stefan Ziezold teased on social media July 10. The car is slated for a second-half 2026 launch.

The ID.09 is a sleek sedan with a fastback roofline, stretching over 5 meters with a 3,030 mm wheelbase. A stylized wolf head emblem — a nod to Volkswagen’s Anhui branding — is worked into the body design. It’s the second vehicle to come out of the VW-XPeng partnership, following the ID.7-derived model that launched earlier this year.

Volkswagen is leaning hard into software for this one. The ID.09 comes with what the company calls the “Xingyun Smart Drive” system — a VLA (Vision-Language-Action) large-model platform for full-scenario assisted driving — paired with an AI assistant and what VW describes as top-tier compute power. The exact specs on that compute hardware haven’t been disclosed, but the claim is clear: VW wants this car’s smarts to compete with the best from Chinese EV makers.

The car has already appeared in China’s MIIT vehicle catalog, which revealed two variants. The single-motor rear-wheel-drive version weighs 2,207 kg and uses a 230 kW rear motor (110 kW rated). The dual-motor all-wheel-drive version weighs 2,307 kg and adds a 140 kW front motor (50 kW rated) to the same 230 kW rear unit. Both top out at 200 km/h.

Both versions use lithium iron phosphate battery cells supplied by CATL, with the battery packs assembled by Volkswagen Anhui Components Co. in China. The AWD variant runs 255/45R21 tires, while the RWD version offers 255/50R20 or 255/45R21 options. Body dimensions are identical across both trims: 5,081 mm long, 1,980 mm wide, and 1,509 mm tall.

The aggressive development timeline — 24 months for two models — reflects how seriously Volkswagen is taking the XPeng partnership. China’s EV market is brutally competitive, and VW, like most foreign automakers, has struggled to match local rivals on smart cockpit and assisted driving features. By tapping XPeng’s technology platform, Volkswagen gets a shortcut to the kind of software sophistication that Chinese buyers now expect as standard.

Whether the ID.09 can deliver on the “first-tier intelligence” promise remains to be seen. But the specs and the partnership structure suggest this isn’t just a badge-engineering exercise — it’s a genuine attempt to build a competitive smart EV from the ground up.