China's Flying Cars: One Off the Line Every 30 Minutes

In Guangzhou, a factory builds a car that also flies. Since November, one has rolled off the line every 30 minutes at full capacity.

7,000 are already on pre-order.

The mothership and its flight module

Behind the factory sits Aridge, XPeng's flying-car unit (formerly XPeng AeroHT). Its product: the Land Aircraft Carrier, a six-wheeled off-road truck that unfolds a two-seat flight module and lifts off vertically.

The truck runs on electricity with a range extender; the cockpit is carbon fiber. Price: under 2 million yuan, about $280,000.

Regular deliveries in China are set to begin in late 2026. From 2027, the Land Aircraft Carrier is headed to the Middle East, where 600 orders are already in.

First the law, then the landing pads

On July 1, China's revised civil aviation law took effect. It sets the first rules for who can fly drones and air taxis where, and directly affects makers like Aridge, EHang, and AutoFlight.

At EHang, passengers are already on board: its EH216-S is the first air taxi to hold an operating certificate, and the Shenzhen-Zhuhai route is due to launch this year, about 20 minutes in the air for 200 to 300 yuan a seat.

Meanwhile, Guangdong province is building the ground network: 2,500 new takeoff and landing points for drones and 20 helicopter pads, all in 2026.

The plan runs to 2035

By 2030, 100,000 long-range drones and air taxis are meant to be in the air; by 2035, the market is projected at 3.5 trillion yuan, about $490 billion.

Since 2024, Beijing's work report has listed the low-altitude economy as a new growth engine, alongside biomanufacturing and commercial spaceflight. Thirty provinces have since written it into their own plans.

CHART OF THE WEEK 

OUR CONTENT PARTNER: LIMEN CHINA

Board Briefing: China's Massive Investment Push - Smart Platform State, or Heading Into the First-Mover Trap?

The new Limen China lead article (German) reads McKinsey's latest study on global investment flows alongside two concepts that may explain China's economic model more precisely than the usual categories. China as a Platform State, one that optimizes for system-wide gains rather than corporate returns.

And beyond that, the lens of China as a state practicing Agile Governance, one that lets technology run first and only then catches up with regulation, learning as it goes.

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🇰🇷 South Korea makes the biggest chip investment in its history: Samsung and SK Hynix are jointly pouring 800 trillion won ($520 billion) into a new semiconductor hub near Gwangju, in the rural southwest and far from the existing chip belt south of Seoul. The plan calls for four plants, two per company, plus dedicated HBM lines. The government wants to double Korea's memory capacity within five years. The logic is simple: SK Hynix now supplies most of the HBM memory that goes into Nvidia's AI chips, and Seoul wants to nail down that lead before rivals catch up.

🇨🇳 Apple supplier Luxshare raises $3.1 billion in Hong Kong: The contract manufacturer that assembles iPhones, AirPods and the Vision Pro for Apple is placing up to 383.5 million H-shares at a maximum of HK$63.28 and raising around $3.1 billion in the process. Trading starts July 9, making it the largest IPO in Hong Kong this year. On top of its existing mainland listing, the deal gives Luxshare access to international capital. The timing is telling: while Apple slowly pulls its supply chain out of China, its most important assembly partner is raising fresh money on a Chinese exchange.

🇯🇵 Japan builds its most powerful AI supercomputer with Nvidia and SoftBank: At the Nvidia AI Summit in Tokyo, Jensen Huang announced that SoftBank is building Japan's most powerful AI machine on Nvidia's Blackwell platform. SoftBank is putting 150 billion yen ($960 million) into the infrastructure build-out, Nvidia chips included, and has separately piloted the world's first combined AI and 5G network. The government is adding another 114.6 billion yen ($740 million) for six domestic firms. For Japan this is about sovereign compute: its own AI capacity on its own soil, instead of leaning on US cloud providers.

🇨🇳 BYD's overseas business climbs to a record in June: The group sold 403,472 vehicles in June, up 5.5% year on year. The driver sits in exports: BYD moved 175,349 cars abroad, almost 95% more than a year earlier, more than 43% of the month's sales. At home things were sluggish, with domestic sales down 22% to 228,123 units. In the second quarter BYD looks set to overtake Tesla again on pure EVs, with around 557,000 deliveries. The home market is tapped out; BYD is finding its growth abroad.

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🇨🇳 China's robotaxi supplier Momenta was oversubscribed 414 times in its Hong Kong IPO and raised HK$5.89 billion ($751 million). Trading in the Suzhou startup begins July 9. That kind of demand for a self-driving software vendor shows how hot the market is playing this theme right now.

🇨🇳 CATL held 40.2% of the global EV battery market through the end of May, with BYD next at 14.4%. On July 1 China's first official solid-state battery standard took effect: cells with more than 5% liquid electrolyte now count only as hybrids. With it, Beijing sets the benchmark the next battery cycle will be measured against.

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