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Volkswagen Opens Presales for Its Second Xpeng-Built EV as It Fights to Stop the Bleeding in China
Volkswagen kicked off presales Thursday for its second electric vehicle built in partnership with Chinese automaker Xpeng, pushing further into a strategy the German carmaker is counting on to turn around a genuinely rough stretch in what remains its single largest market.
The new model, called the ID. UNYX 09, is an electric fastback sedan and the latest product to emerge from Volkswagen’s “in China, for China” push, an initiative built around developing vehicles faster and with more locally relevant technology so the company can better match the pace set by domestic rivals like BYD and Geely. It follows the ID. UNYX 08, an SUV that marked the first vehicle to come out of Volkswagen’s collaboration with Xpeng and that went on sale earlier this year.
The timing of this second launch matters given just how badly Volkswagen has been struggling in China lately. The company reported in July that its deliveries there fell 26 percent to 971,000 units during the first half of 2026, a decline it described at the time as something it simply couldn’t escape. That drop marks Volkswagen’s weakest half-year showing in China in 16 years, a genuinely alarming figure for a market that’s long served as one of the company’s most important sources of global sales and profit. Homegrown Chinese brands have steadily chipped away at the market share Volkswagen once commanded, with Geely overtaking the German company in China’s rankings last year, a shift that pushed Volkswagen down to third place in a market it used to dominate more comfortably.
The ID. UNYX 09 is meant to show that Volkswagen can actually move at the speed China’s EV market now demands. The company says the car went from development to production in just 24 months, roughly 30 percent faster than its usual timelines, a jump credited to Volkswagen’s newer, China-specific vehicle architecture built specifically to shave time off the traditional development cycle. That architecture is central to the broader logic behind the Xpeng partnership itself: rather than trying to out-engineer Chinese EV makers using processes built for a different, slower era of car development, Volkswagen is borrowing speed and software capability directly from a local partner that’s already competing at that pace.
Under the hood, the ID. UNYX 09 runs on battery cells supplied by CATL, one of the world’s largest EV battery manufacturers, and uses Xpeng’s VLA intelligent driving assistance system to handle its automated driving functions. Both the new sedan and its SUV sibling are being built at Volkswagen’s Hefei plant, located west of Shanghai, a facility with annual production capacity of 350,000 vehicles that also manufactures the Cupra Tavascan SUV for export to European markets. Presale pricing for the ID. UNYX 09 starts at 199,900 yuan, roughly $29,785, with the vehicle set to officially go on sale by the end of October.
Volkswagen’s relationship with Xpeng dates back to 2023, when the two companies first announced their partnership before Volkswagen followed through by acquiring roughly a 5 percent stake in the Chinese EV maker later that same year. The arrangement gave Volkswagen access to autonomous driving technology and Xpeng’s own Turing AI chips, capabilities the German automaker didn’t have readily available through its own internal engineering at the time. By early 2024, the two companies had formalized that relationship further through a master agreement covering platform and software collaboration, one built specifically to cut time-to-market by more than 30 percent while also setting up a joint sourcing program meant to bring down costs for both companies through shared purchasing. Ralf Brandstätter, the Volkswagen Group board member overseeing its China operations, said earlier this year that the company’s in China, for China strategy is delivering real results, pointing to the ID. UNYX 08 as the group’s largest electric vehicle push in the country to date.
The ID. UNYX 09’s launch is just one piece of a much larger product push. Volkswagen has said it plans to roll out more than 20 battery-electric and plug-in hybrid models in China this year alone, an aggressive release schedule that reflects just how urgently the company feels it needs to respond to eroding market share before Chinese rivals extend their lead any further. Xpeng, for its part, isn’t limiting its own ambitions to just the Volkswagen partnership either. Reuters reported exclusively this month that Xpeng is looking to offer its technology to other foreign automakers as well, suggesting the Chinese company sees itself less as a single-partner supplier and more as a broader technology provider other legacy carmakers might eventually turn to as they face similar pressure to catch up in China’s software-driven EV market.
Whether the ID. UNYX 09 helps meaningfully reverse Volkswagen’s declining fortunes in China remains to be seen, but the model’s rapid development timeline and its reliance on Chinese battery and driving-assistance technology make clear that Volkswagen has accepted a new reality: competing in China’s EV market increasingly means building with Chinese partners rather than trying to go it alone.
