I’ll admit, I’m not really that familiar with Xiaomi as a smartphone company; my Motorola Startac has served me well all these years, and when it finally goes, I’ll look into new phones then. Maybe one that plays Snake. But, I’ll just trust that Xiaomi is a big maker of smartphones and a whole lot of other electronics and appliances and now is also the builder of cars. The car is called the Xiaomi Speed Ultra 7 (SU7) and is being positioned as a less-expensive Tesla Model 3 competitor with a lot of styling cues taken from the Porsche Taycan. Let’s see what we can tell about this car so far.
The SU7 starts at $29,874 and goes up to $41,497, converted to US dollars, which is sort of an academic exercise because at this moment there are no plans to bring the SU7 to America. But, just for fun, we can compare it to the Tesla Model 3, which starts at $38,990, making the SU7 nearly ten grand less. That’s a big deal.
Also a big deal are the specs being given for the car. Power-wise, Xiaomi has three different electric motors, which they have named, seemingly in an effort to confuse everyone, after V6 and V8 engines:
The engines are all in the somewhat silly-named “HyperEngine” family, with the “V8” one making 570 horsepower, the “V6” making 295 hp, and the “V6s” making 369 hp. These are all comparable to the horsepower range of the Model 3, which ranges from 271 to 425 hp. Xiaomi says the SU7 Max version of the car will be able to do 0-100 kph (0-62 in freedom units) in 2.78 seconds, which they also suggest is in the “sub 2-second supercar club” but I don’t think that’s what “sub” two seconds means. Still, it’s plenty fast.
Battery-wise, the SU7 uses what’s called a CTB battery, meaning “cell to body,” which just means that the battery pack is integrated into the body of the car. Will this make battery swaps and repairs a colossal ass-pain? I mean, probably, but maybe they have some sort of plan for that. I know everyone is integrating batteries into body structures now, but it still unsettles me.
Here’s what Xiaomi says about the battery pack themselves:
Xiaomi has also self-developed CTB Integrated Battery Technology through innovative Inverted Cell Technology, multifunctional elastic interlayer, and a minimalistic wiring system; it features a battery integration efficiency of 77.8%, the highest of CTB batteries worldwide, a 24.4% overall performance improvement, and a height reduction of 17mm, with a maximum battery capacity of up to 150 kWh and theoretical CLTC recharge range exceeding 1200 km.
So, they’re saying a “theoretical CLTC recharge range” of more than 1200 kilometers, which is over 745 miles! That’s huge! Do I believe that? The standard they’re using is the China Light Duty Test Cycle, which is often a bit higher than the EPA cycle, but not necessarily unrealistic. Will this get real-world 745 miles? Maybe not, but even if it gets 500 miles, that’s pretty damn good.
Mostly, though, I think people are talking about the look of the SU7, for two reasons: it looks really good, and it looks good because the Porsche Taycan looks good, and this thing sure seems to be heavily inspired by the Taycan.
I mean, look:
What’s going on here? 🇨🇳 pic.twitter.com/wvH1BmP4DR
— Gerard A. Malone (@GerardAlba) March 28, 2024
Now, I’m not going to go so far as to say it’s a copy of the Taycan, but there’s no question the Taycan was on the SU7 designer’s mood board. I think the car looks pretty great overall, with good proportions and just enough detailing.
The lighting design is effective as well, both front and rear, which features a full-width taillight unit that has a certain bent-paper-clip-charm:
I can’t quite tell if the rear is a trunk or if the glass opens as well, hatchback-style. I have yet to see any pictures showing the trunk open, sadly.
There are some decent colors, too: that blue, a boring gray, and this fetching green:
Damn, that is verdant.
You may notice that little lump over the windshield there – that’s a LiDAR unit. There’s a lot of hardware on this thing designed to support a (likely semi-) automated driving system:
“On the hardware front, the system is equipped with top-of-the-line configurations, including two NVIDIA Orin high-performance chips with a combined computing power of 508TOPS. Perception hardware includes one LiDAR, eleven high-definition cameras, three millimeter-wave radars, and twelve ultrasonic radars on the Xiaomi SU7 Max model.”
The software is, of course, a huge deal here, and we have no real information about it yet. Xiaomi’s press materials talk about “autonomous driving,” but it’s not clear whether they mean an always-supervised Level 2-type system or something that doesn’t require as much driver monitoring, which would be a huge deal on a mass-market car. Like all AV systems and claims, I’ll believe things as I see them.
Xiaomi also echoes Tesla in their use of large castings to simplify manufacturing, noting that their rear underbody assembly will combine 72 components into one, and reducing welded joints by 840. Xiaomi also echoes Tesla’s love of over-exuberant names, calling the process “Hyper Die-Casting” with the in-house-developed casting material being dubbed “Xiaomi Titans Metal.”
Overall, the SU7 looks to be a pretty impressive competitor to the Tesla Model 3, at least in the wildly crowded Chinese EV market. Could it ever come here? Who knows, to be honest. I’m curious to learn more about the SU7, regardless.
I Visited The Craziest Electric Car Brand In China. It Blew My Mind
I Visited GM’s Chinese Joint Venture And Saw All The Weird And Wonderful EVs
I Went To China And Found These Incredible Electric Cars You’ve Never Heard Of
Thanks, but no interest here in buying Chinese cars.
Please watch the launch on youtube, there is an ad about 7 minutes in, and repeated a few times. I was one of the actors in the “band”.
We didn’t know about the car at the time but we knew it was for Xiaomi as they gave us the sheet music and a recording to rehearse to and it was obviously the xiaomi theme. When we saw the car seats on the set we kind of put it together and asked the producers and they said with a wink, we can’t tell you if you’re correct or not.
As for the car, it’s the hottest topic on the social media platforms here in China, however, I only pay attention to car stuff so my algorithm is definitely biased toward that. Still, it’s getting a lot of attention and even my wife is interested in it if we’re we’re looking for a next car.
Oh, not that anyone cares, but I used the earnings from the ad to buy a new LSD for my Camaro…
You live in China and drive a Camaro?
Yes, I’ve had it for over 10 years here. As much as I love Chinese culture I am from Michigan and can’t leave behind my love of American cars.
Calling them engines, especially as V8, V6, V6s? Get the fuck out of here- that’s the stupidest thing ever…THEY’RE CALLED MOTORS!
Derivative yes, but it’s one of the less ugly designs I’ve seen from China. Lose the glass roof and some of the fake vents and I would even consider it. It’s hard to get a sense of scale as to how big this is. Hopefully it’s in the compact class and we aren’t looking at 26″ wheels which would mean it is much larger.
Also, I have had some experience with prototype NVIDIA Orin hardware. Not to throw shade on it, but it’s wildly overkill. IMHO.
I’ve asked before and I’ll continue to do so. Will someone please write a deep dive on the differences between the US, Euro, Chinese, and any other test cycles? What specifically is done? The writers we have here are an Embarrassment of Riches, any of them can take this topic and make it both readable and understandable by a low IQ schmuck (such as myself).
The CTB pan looks similar to the cybertruck battery – bolted in stressed member. Donno about how comparable the crash safety regs are in China vs US, and how that may affect cost.
Also, is this actually for sale now or is this a “in the future” like the $40k Cybertruck announced on 2019?
Oh boy, I can smell the Chinesium from here in little New Zealand, where we do get the Xiaomi smartphones. It will only be a matter of time before these cars show up here as well and just like their phones, they’ll be another disposable product that will be lucky to be on the road in 5-8 years time. Not to mention any OTA updates will be coming from some server in China and with that many cameras on board, expect the data traffic to be a two-way link. Hard pass. Same with their phones.
Chinese EVs are very much a soft power.
Luckily US and Euro cars don’t come with cameras and they don’t send that data back and it won’t be used for certain things.
Anyways Facebook/Meta already knows who you are, where you live, who your friends are, what you daily activities are, where you went, what you eat etc etc. You’re spoonfooding them all that stuff and they used and use it every single day.
Whataboutism you’d say ; well the problem is that the above is a fact, nobody can deny that, since you (or if not you then millions of other people are on Facebook/Meta). But it still has to be seen IF data is shared from a car sold in NZ with China/Chinese or even the manufacturer. Same goes for Xiaomi phones with an international rom ; if those would be sending sensitive data back to China then … wouldn’t we have heard about it already ? Xiaomi has been making tons of phone for close to 10 years.
But I am not here to convince you, just to ridicule your post.
China is a politically closed country bud and we have no idea what happens to any data that is sent there. That’s the difference between using Western apps and Chinese apps – we may be sharing gigabytes of data every year in the Western world on FB, Insta, YT, any browser, but for the most part, that data is used for advertizing. All the data we share in the Western world can def be used against us if we commit crimes, but we still have a judicial system that provides some semblance of protection. Meanwhile, in China, the same data is also used for controlling whether or not we can use public transport, get on airplanes or if the authorities decide we should be taken away for re-education. You simply cannot use public transport in main Chinese cities without a smartphone.
Huawei has been a telecoms company for over a decade and furor over their 5G involvement is well documented (not to mention their 4G telecoms equipment). There’s also a well-known Chinese CCTV manufacturer (name escapes me at this time) that’s been banned from by most Western government buildings because of data concerns.
If you haven’t woken up to the realization that politically, economically and militarily, China is an insidious and untrustworthy nation, then you’re in for a shock.
Americans’ fear of Chinese tech is a five star hardy har har.
Alexa… How do I make orange chicken?
If you study all the ‘proof’ of alleged spying through Chinese network and 4G/5G devices then you find everything is just allegation. There were backdoors or something but nobody could actually show that actual sensitive data was sent to China.
If you are so paranoid that you think that a Chinese car is going to send TONS and TONS of onboard camera data to China then you don’t understand much about network ; with all the cameras on these cars that would be gigabytes and gigabytes of data, per hour, per car, through mobile networks. In the case of the guy in NZ : the local ISP would not notice that? Would would pay for that traffic? What can a Chinese car manufacture do with ‘your’ data even IF they could receive all that data? At best they’d improve their self-driving AI models.
At worst they know you’re driving from A to B.
I’m really curious how someone in New Zealand could be taken away for re-education. As far as I know that only happens in China if you’ve been influenced by or connected to people who had terrorist intentions (feel free to lookup the amount of terror attacks in China a decade ago – it was getting out of control). If that happens in the US you end up in Guantanamo Bay – talking about transparency…
Everyone seems to think the Chinese government is some sort of puppet master but if that is the case where are all the black stealth helicopters which kidnap people outside China and then torture and brainwash them before releasing them back in the wild? Because I don’t see that. All the reports on the internal re-education in the Xinjiang province in China are a lot of suggestions and very few facts. I like maps, including satellite maps, and each time there is some sort of ‘proof’ that on location ABC was some sort of prison for Uyghurs then it shows on maps (by Google, not chinese maps) that it is a ‘building’ where perhaps a few hundred people can live at most. Besides the real prisons (plenty of criminals in the whole of China) there just aren’t nearly enough potential locations to house a 1 million incarcerated people in those areas. The whole story just doesn’t compute. Even when Volkswagen (cars, on topic) did an extensive investigation into forced labor in their supply chain they COULD NOT FIND any evidence. Is Volkswagen stupid? Was the Chinese government so smart to hide hundreds of thousands of slave laborers? Serious?
All in all the whole poor Uyghur story is to slap tariffs on China or cause a negative sentiment about Chinese products. FUD. It is just a way to limit China’s economic growth. I understand -that- but don’t try to do that by telling China has hidden WMDs in the desert and we desperately need to attack them. Operation Desert Storm. Operation Desert Shield. Afghanistan. Vietnam. Cuba. Korea. There are so many occasions where the US lied and started a war and still lied about that it is not funny anymore.
Yet China is bad. The network equipment is unsafe. The cars are unsafe. The cotton is unsafe. Is the government in China oppressive ; yeah against terrorists and separatists. Just like any other government in the world doesn’t like to be overthrown or attacked. The US mainly does it outside its own borders, China does it mainly inside its own borders.
I normally try to stay out of the political stuff, but the fear of made in China is getting out of hand. If you don’t want OTA updates for your (Chinese) car then just remove the SIM card or disconnect the antenna. Then NO data will ever get out of your car.
Thank you for posting this. I won’t pretend I don’t have some suspicion of China–and “the great firewall” still concerns me in general–but a huge part of me suspects a lot of fear is simply a variant of xenophobia and also media/government creating an external source of fear. I’m sure tension is good for military recruiting, and just generally keeping a fearful population focused on things other than, you know, our own internal issues.
Porsche Taycan with McLaren headlights. Attractive, but highly derivative
May e Speed Ultra by Xiaome or SUX for short? Not a bad looking copy. By enlarging the photo it appears the rear door lines go up to the top of the glass so I guess hatchback. But to be sure what does the Taycon do? Not a big fan of where the front fenders meet the doors. It appears the fender has no indent but the door doesn’t like putting on a door from a different car after a wreck. Not by an expert. Not to bad but certainly not worth the price.
I’d buy that for a dollar.
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/robocop/images/7/78/6000sux.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20140424053954
You rather pay roughly 5 times more for the Porsche Taycan?
I don’t mind, I bet the Porsche drives better.
Not sure if everyone has such deep pockets.
That price is very competitive.
The local price for the fastest version (2.8 seconds or something) is about $42,000 in China. Thanks to our beloved governments we will have to pay more, but it would still be considerably less than a Telsa.
What matters here is a decent review. Maybe that SU7 car drives like shit. Who knows. It would be sour for Tesla it would be close to a model 3. Considering this is the first car of this phone manufacturer and the Model 3 has not only been on the market already for quite a while ; Tesla also has been around for well over 14 years now.
So I expect this Xiaomi car to be not particularly good, but it is just decent or acceptable then that is going to be interesting.
Nope this is one of those neither comparables
Love these armchair generals knowing more about a new car which hasn’t been officially released and review by more than a handful people, nor touched by the person himself. It says a lot of a person if you make such claims. You just discredit yourself.
Years ago Volvo XC60 cars were made in China and exported to the US. The plants in China had less automation – more manual work – than other Volvo plants ; a requirement of the Chinese local government who rather had 1000 extra people working than 1000 robots replacing them.
The quality reports were interesting ; the manually made cars had less problems/defects/better tolerances than the ones made with automation/robots ; the supervising was that good / strict that the people worked better than what robots could do.
The specific Volvos coming from China were the best made in the world.
Now is this true for every model, for every car, for every brand? Not likely, but let’s see how these cars are actually made, for example after Sandy Munro has taken them apart and analyzed the parts and build process and quality.
did anyone lose their keys to gigafactory shanghai?
Did anyone care when motorcycle engines started being a stressed member? I don’t think a battery being a floor or a part of the body is terribly different.
Engines, if maintained, can last 50-100 years. And replacing a large part of a small (compared to a car) motorcycle is still something that could be done DIY or at your local independent shop. Having a large part of a much larger car integral to the structure of the car makes DIY replacement impossible and way more difficult, i.e., expensive, to be done at a local independent shop. From the Cybertuck tear down article, it sounded like Munro had to buy new lifts to pull the battery-floor out of the truck.
The average age of cars on the road in the US is >12 years. If EV batteries need to be replaced 10-15 years, that is going to result in a whole lot of scrapped EVs if replacing batteries remains a huge, complicated expense.
But, if you insert the cells into the body couldn’t you reuse the frame and interior and attach a whole new body design on the old frame? Giving the owner a new car for a smaller price? After all the 2.8 second 0-60 time isn’t something you need to beat. It would be refresh the frame and attach a new body at predetermined points. A new car for a percentage of the price? This is out of my comfort zone even out of my pretend to be an expert zone, maybe Adrian an DT together could evaluate this idea?
You’re talking about the skateboard approach, only the opposite. The skateboard chassis puts all the running gear in the “frame” – batteries, motors, etc. Then you bolt a body on top of it. The idea is that when the batteries wear out, you swap skateboards and keep the body. Under some ideas for the design, people could also swap bodies if they wanted a different style of car.
That’s never come to fruition, although manufacturers are already doing it internally (the Hyundai Ioniq 6 is on the same platform as the Ioniq 5). The main problem with the idea that customers will swap skateboards or bodies is that in either case, it’s going to be one hell of an expensive buy. People junk their cars and get new ones when the head gasket blows, and that fix is cheap compared to what we’d get charged for a whole new battery pack in a brand new skateboard. No one’s going to spend 20 or so grand and not drive off in a 100% new car.
That’s also the problem with your approach, because regardless of whether the batteries are in the skateboard or the body, you’re looking at 10 or so grand just for the battery pack, plus whatever the rest of what you’re swapping costs. Only if you swap the batteries and body rather than the batteries and chassis, that means you still have the old chassis sitting under there. That’s fine if you live in Arizona, but up here in Minnesota we’d end up with a new body on top of an old rusting heap of a chassis.
Good points all
“Could it ever come here?”
Hell no, as long as we have a government more interested in getting votes than actually doing something about climate change.
Nope, our EVs have to be big, tall bricks on wheels to make those with fragile masculinity feel better about driving something without a V8 or $100K+ tech toys for the rich so they can show off how much they care about the environment while driving to the airport to fly off in their private jet so they don’t have to mill about with the common people on an airliner, or better yet, a train
which they could also afford.Cynicism aside, the only way I can see Chinese EVs being able to be sold here is if a) they were made here by American workers and b) they had OTA updates disabled so they couldn’t share data with the Chinese government. I can see China acquiescing to the former but not the latter, so we’ll probably be stuck with the bricks and tech toys.
The soonest is probably going to be c) they say “Buick” on them. (Technically it might be clones of the Chinese Buicks built in South Korea to avoid Tariffs.)
Maybe talk to your handlers about China screwing over the rest of the world and explain that’s why they aren’t trusted. There is no question they steal all technology and attack and bully smaller nations and practice genocide on certain people. [The Government and Elite ruling class] are just not nice people. Maybe you are okay with that if you save money on a new car but alot of people are against genocide, murder, torture, ang intellectual property theft. But hey you do you.
> They are just not nice people.
Not cool.
* I think Mr Sarcastic means the Chinese Govt and the business elites, not the regular peeps, who on the whole are nice people.
Yes thank you for clarification for me
Yeah, I figured, but it doesn’t cost anything to phrase things differently.
Maybe you should talk to your handlers about treating people with respect, and also ask them to point out that at no point did I ever say that I disagreed with any of what you said about the Chinese government.
All I’m saying is that turning the methods to fight climate change into a political football will be our undoing because ultimately it isn’t a sociopolitical issue. Wildfires, floods, resource wars and the hardships that come with forced migration don’t care how you voted last election, what God you pray to or how you pray to them, the color of your skin/the shape of your eyes or what type of body you find attractive. Because no human being, Caucasian/Asian/African/Hispanic/Latino/Pacific Islander/straight/gay/cis/trans whatever, is flame retardant, amphibious, bulletproof or can stay healthy very long without adequate food, water or sanitation.
I do not like Tesla, but I would take them every time over a Chinese government funded car company
Given the existence of the Shanghai (sigh) Gigafactory and the founder’s dedication to undermining things in a weird way, are we entirely certain that Tesla is not a Chinese funded car company?
You see bent paperclip taillight, I see Lincoln MKZ. Not a particularly good association, or a design I would have chosen to steal.
I don’t go to a dairy to buy vegetables and I’m not buying a car from phone manufacturer.
The tailights were described thus:
“… a full-width taillight unit that has a certain bent-paper-clip-charm:”
My question: can you use those paper clip taillights to get the battery out?
Wait until you find out that Toyota was originally an automatic loom manufacturer.
So that makes Toyota cars Fruit of the Loom?
This is a vastly underrated comment. Well played Canopysaurus!
And Mazda started out making cork products.
Toyota Industries is still a major textile equipment manufacturer, headed by Tetsurō Toyoda, Akio Toyoda’s cousin. Toyota Motor Corporation owns about 25% of Toyota Industries, and Toyota Industries, in turn, owns about 8.5% of Toyota Motor
Or what Mitsubishi and Hyundai also make
Would you buy a motorcycle from a piano maker?
That’s absurd! Everyone knows the best motorcycles are made by the makers of planes, trains, and cargo ships!
But for a year or so their planes went all crashy into American ships.
Used, maybe.
Trust a smartphone company I’ve never heard of to build a car that looks like the automotive equivalent of a generic Walmart smartphone.
It’s not bad looking, but somehow you can tell it’s kind of the discount amalgamation of more well known brands.
You’ve never heard of Xiaomi? They’re a MASSIVE brand all across Asia.
Right? We even own 2 or 3 of their phones. Pretty great phones for a steal of a price. Never had any issues with them. I would not be surprised if this car is the real deal and is OK or possibly even good.
I honestly can’t say that I have, but I’m not in the loop on most things in life.
Xiaomi is a pretty huge company, just not one with a lot of traction in America. You know how basically every phone has no bezels nowadays? Xiaomi did it long before Apple or Samsung. Xiaomi was also one of the ones to mess around with unique phone materials before that became a thing.
Back when I was in IT and not cars, I used to import Xiaomi flagship phones (which back then was the Mi Mix and Mi Mix 2). They had great build quality and polish, especially for the price, but in my eye couldn’t compete with Samsung on display or cameras. Apparently, the S version of the Mi Mix 2 solved most of my complaints, but I switched to a network that the phone wouldn’t work on.
That’s the fun part about importing phones. Gotta make sure you can get it to run well on your network…
Oh my god it’s a Porschelaren McTaycamara 9720S I love it
The body language is saying ‘Taycan’, but the eyes are giving me the ‘McLaren 750S’ look.
Oh man, another strikingly original Xiaomi design! I will say it does make sense that if you blatantly rip off Apple in the tech space, Porsche is the natural one to steal from in the automotive space, given the very established design philosophy behind both companies.
“Power-wise, Xiaomi has three different electric motors, which they have named, seemingly in an effort to confuse everyone, after V6 and V8 engines”
Perhaps Stellantis should take a page out of Xiaomi’s playbook and call their new Charger’s EV motor a “V12”
That should satisfy the gender-affirming needs of their clientele.
“Power-wise, Porsche has multiple different trim levels, which they have named, seemingly in an effort to confuse everyone, after turbo engines”
If the shoe fits – just tell everyone you wear a size 12.
“I can’t quite tell if the rear is a trunk or if the glass opens as well, hatchback-style.”
If you follow the trunks seam line it cuts across the back glass about four inches up from the bottom. (Weird)
Looks to be a trunk to me, instead of an old Mazda 6 style hatchback, unfortunately.
Take that Apple! We can build a car and make smart phones.
Just in time for the Friday Song, “Show Me”!
No surprise it looks like a Model 3 and a Taycan, EV sedan designs are pretty constrained by aerodynamics. I see a seam above the back window, so hopefully it’s got a big ol’ hatchback.
Looks like they hired the same marketing people that ripoff companies on amazon use to sell battery boosters and phone chargers.
Xiaomi is an interesting company. They were one of the first to put out a “flagship killer” phone that matched specs of the top-of-the-line phones and undercut them in price by a significant amount. But that market segment became flooded and Xiaomi lost their foothold in smartphones. They’ve dabbled in a bunch of other things . . . They had an early smart watch, well-regarded headphones, TV streaming boxes and I had heard they were going to build an EV but that was years ago and this is the first new news I’ve come across in a while.
I still use a step tracker from them. And yes they are one of those everything companies now. They are reaching for that Honda everything money.
I have a MiBand that I generally like, but they have some very weird oversights in their software design. Like there are 12 different variations on HIIT workouts in the fitness tracker part, but no mountain biking. Also no snowshoeing, and although they have something called “flowriding”, there is no standup paddleboarding. I have absolutely no idea where they came up with their list of workouts.