In China, it’s not uncommon to see the smartphone and electric vehicle industries crossover often. Geely directly owns a phone company, Huawei makes the operating system that goes into this Aito M5 and now Xiaomi is looking to make its very own EV with a little help from Beijing Automotive Industry Holding Co. Ltd. (BAIC).
Xiaomi are putting together an electric vehicle called the SU7, and it looks to be a relatively large and high-tech electric sedan. This piece of news was discovered when China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology published a list of vehicles that were going through the homologation process for the month. The filing shows three variants are being developed – the SU7, SU7 Pro, and SU7 Max. The model will be powered by HyperOS, which is said to be able to run both phones and cars.
The Xiaomi move into the electric vehicle space has been in the making for over 2 years now. The brand officially announced this move back in March 2021. More recently, the brand has been teasing a potential affordable electric sports car.
The filling reveals quite a lot, beginning with the powertrain options which include a rear-motor variant with 220kW of power on tap as well as an AWD version with a total of 495kW of motor output. The LiFepo battery pack is being sourced from BYD and that will be on the more lower tier model. The higher tier model comes with a ternary NMC battery from CATL. Interestingly, the top tier model has a very ambitious top speed of 265km/h, which is quite uncommon in EVs that tend to be limited at around 180km/h in non-sports car applications.
The Xiaomi SU7 will go into mass production by the end of this year and deliveries are anticipated to start in February of next year. There’s no telling if Xiaomi will enter the Malaysian market with their EV product or if this will be a China-exclusive product. More information here.
