Xiaomi SU7 Launched: The First Car from a Smartphone Maker

It has been coming and now it is here. Not really here in Malaysia but the tech company has launched their first car for market in China. Introducing the world’s first car by a tech company that mostly known about their smartphones or devices and even air conditioning; and now they’ve come up with a Xiaomi SU7. To make things more interesting is that the car is already hitting their dealers network, all 59 of them across China and deliveries will starts in April.

The SU7 will be priced in a range of 215,900 – 299,900 yuan (29,900 – 41,500 USD). Considering that pricing, we’d say that the car is coming in with a pretty “provocative” strategy to stir up the already ultra-competitive car market specifically the EV segment in China. But if the car is to hit our shores anytime in the future, we’re looking at some serious proposition coming off from this one at around RM200,000 price mark for the top of the range or maybe slightly more than that. Again, it is a very competitive price that can quickly steal some attentions away from an already established brand here in the country.

Drivin On was not present during the launch but we’ve learned that the Mr. Lei Jun, Xiaomi’s CEO made a pretty remarkable opening or speech by welcoming their competitors, William Li, CEO of Nio, He Xiaopeng, chairman of Xpeng, and Li Xiang, CEO of Li Auto, who were in the audience. In his speech, he mentioned “They all gave us many suggestions in the past years to avoid traps on the road during the EV development,” Jun expressed gratitude.

We learned that Xiaomi have had a serious talent pool within their firm to came up with the SU7. They brought in former BMW Group Chief of Design Chris Bangle along with another high profile designer who worked with Mercedes-Benz, known as James Qiu. They were some of the more notable personnel that was taken into the team to ensure the vision of Xiaomi turned to reality. Here it is now, the car is almost ready to be delivered to their early adopters and we’d be following their progress closely to see how the public actually reacts to the car being on the road.

Now what can we learn a little bit from the information shared regarding the car? Lei Jun previously claimed that the company’s smart driving R&D team consists of 1,500 engineers and today, he presented the results. Xiaomi SU7 will have two advanced driver-assistance system (ADAS) options:

Xiaomi Pilot Pro
- Based on pure vision, like Tesla
- Nvidia Drive Orin chip with 254 tops computing power
Xiaomi Pilot Max
- Pure vision + lidar
- The city NOA pilot-assisted driving feature will begin testing in April and will be available in 10 cities by May. It will then go live in China.
- two Nvidia Drive Orin chips with 508 tops

Xiaomi SU7 also supports Apple CarPlay and iPad connectivity.

The car were said to be based on Xiaomi’s Modena platform, and its dimensions are 4997/1963/1455 mm (L/W/H), with a wheelbase of 3000 mm. The SU7 has around 105-liter frunk and a 517 liters boot space.

What is more astounding, at least for us is inside the car, it offers a fridge with 4.7 liters of space, good enough for 6 cans of soda cans. Designers put lots of thought into storage space, and SU7 features many smart compartments for laptops or smartphones