Xiaomi's YU7 Is an SUV-Sized Middle Finger to Tesla's Model Y

WIRED

2 days ago

In just three minutes Xiaomi took 200,000 pre-orders for only its second ever EV—four times what Cybertruck has sold in its 18-month lifetime. But at $35,000, it's really gunning for Elon's family SUV.
Another week, another Chinese electric car poised to deliver an extinction event to Western automakers.
This time it's Xiaomi, a Beijing-based tech firm best known for smartphones and the company behind the Porsche Taycan-baiting SU7, which in late-2024 was so popular that Xiaomi increased its sales forecast three times in a matter of months.
Now Xiaomi is back, and this time it has an electric SUV up its sleeve. Resembling the lovechild of a Ferrari Purosangue and an Aston Martin DBX707 described down a patchy phone line, the YU7 hits all of the benchmarks you'd expect from an EV in 2025.
The $35,000 YU7 has top specs for low money: 0-62 mph in 5.88 seconds and 800-volt electric architecture. Photograph: Xiaomi
There are three models, ranging from the YU7 Standard, a single-motor car with 235 kW and a 0-62 mph time of 5.88 seconds, through the more potent, dual-motor YU7 Pro and, leaning into smartphone nomenclature, headed by the YU7 Max. That model has 508 kW of power—38 kW more than the electric Porsche Macan Turbo—and a supercar-like 0-62 mph time of 3.23 seconds.
Using China's somewhat generous CLTC test cycle, range claims span from 472 miles for the Max, to a whopping 518 miles from the less powerful Standard. Xiaomi claims the car's 800-volt electric architecture delivers a 10-80 percent charge time of just 12 minutes, or can add 385 miles of range in 15 minutes.
All very impressive, but especially so when you consider the Chinese market price. The YU7 starts at 253,500 yuan, which is about $35,000 in the US—the exact price Tesla briefly achieved with its first-generation Model 3 in early-2019, before heading back up to the $40,000 mark. The Pro and Max versions of the Xiaomi YU7 are priced at 279,900 yuan ($39,000) and 329,900 yuan ($46,000) respectively, while Tesla's Model Y starts at 263,500 yuan ($36,500).
Meanwhile, Tesla has just missed its own deadline for putting more affordable cars into production. Despite canning its so-called Model 2, the company said at the start of 2025: 'Plans for new vehicles, including more affordable models, remain on track for start of production in the first half of 2025.' We're into July now and still waiting.
A tech-laden interior includes a windscreen-wide HyperVision panoramic display, plus Xiaomi's ecosystem also allows for its Pad 7S Pro tablet to be attached to the rear of the front seats. Photograph: Xiaomi
Small wonder that increasingly patriotic Chinese car buyers descended on Xiaomi's website in huge numbers when the YU7 went on sale last week. The company claimed 200,000 pre-orders in the first three minutes, and 289,000 within an hour of the order books opening. If all those $700 paid pre-orders turn into actual sales, that's more than what the entire UK car industry produces in four months. It also smashes the 90,000 pre-orders Xiaomi's SU7, its first EV, earned in its initial 24 hours last year.
But, as Elon Musk will tell you, pre-orders are one thing and deliveries can be quite another.
Should we take the huge YU7 pre-order figures with a pinch of salt? You can if you like, but Xiaomi already has impressive form here, having delivered more than 250,000 examples of its SU7 saloon since an almost equal number of pre-orders arrived just a year earlier. The company said in March how it expects to deliver 350,000 vehicles this year, suggesting the new YU7 could add at least 100,000 sales to what Xiaomi's already managing with the SU7. In response to the YU7 orders, Xiaomi's share price has soared.
The new Chinese SUV is priced to directly take on the recently refreshed Tesla Model Y. Photograph: Tesla
Compare this to the Cybertruck, which pulled in a claimed 146,000 reservations in its first 36 hours, back in 2019. This soon passed 250,000 and Musk went on to claim that 'over one million' orders had been placed between the 2019 unveiling and when production finally began some five years later. But, according to data associated with a March recall issued because Tesla used the wrong glue on its stainless steel body panels, fewer than 50,000 Cybertrucks appeared to have been sold in 14 months.
One million pre-orders and 46,000 sales doesn't sound great, but is roughly in line with the 2 to 16 percent conversion rate the automotive industry aims for. While that doesn't say much about the Cybertruck's sales performance, it further underscores the phenomenal early success of Xiaomi's auto business. The world's third-largest smartphone company only started making cars 18 months ago, and so far offers just two models, in the SU7 and newer YU7, yet is already braced for enormous growth, both at home and overseas.
As well as reporting a near-50 percent jump in fourth-quarter revenue, Xiaomi said in March 2025 that it plans to open 10,000 of its Mi Home stores in foreign markets over the next five years, almost doubling the number of stores it already operates in China.
These brick-and-mortar shops stock everything from Xiaomi's smartphones and tablets, to wearables, smart-home devices, televisions, computers, home appliances, luggage and, yes, electric cars. Although tariffs mean US expansion remains on ice, Xiaomi president Lu Weibing said there is great potential for Xiaomi's products overseas, and that it aims to start shipping cars abroad in 2027.
Little else is known about Xiaomi's plans to follow in the tire tracks of BYD, Nio and other Chinese car brands that have expanded to Europe and elsewhere. Xiaomi's last shot across the bow of Western automakers came in late-June, when it was announced that a modified version of its SU7 Ultra had become the third-fastest car to ever lap the Nürburgring Nordschleife.
Wearing slick tires and reinforced with a motorsport-spec roll cage, the car topped 210 mph and completed the course in 6 minutes 22.091, lowering its previous best time by 24 seconds and slotting in behind only the Porsche 919 Evo and Volkswagen ID.R on the track's overall leaderboard.
The YU7's front seats have one-touch reclining and 10-point massage, while rear seats can also go back to a 135-degree 'lounge position'. Photograph: Xiaomi
Such a feat may be of less interest to Chinese buyers who are, rightly, more concerned by smartphone connectivity. But to a European audience accustomed to seeing performance brands like Mercedes-AMG and Porsche tout Nurburgring times in the same breath as wheel size and truck capacity, it's a big deal.
As for the new YU7, just like the SU7 before it, Xiaomi seeks to pack in a lot of bang for its buyers' buck. Every model gets double-laminated glass and what the company describes as industry-leading airtightness that's claimed to reduce outside noise to a level 'surpassing even million-[yuan] level luxury models.'
As with any new Chinese car, connectivity is king. Xiaomi's operating system, called HyperOS, gives its cars a smartphone-like user interface, but also lets passengers access controls for other Xiaomi products, like robotic vacuum cleaners, air purifiers, door locks and home security cameras.
User profiles and associated content like music playlists are synced in the cloud across multiple Xiaomi devices, including cars, phones and computers. Fully invest in the Xiaomi ecosystem, and a meeting added to your phone calendar will supposedly trigger the car to pre-condition its cabin ahead of your drive, and tell the robotic vacuum to clean up while you're out. Xiaomi's ecosystem also allows for its Pad 7S Pro tablet to be attached to the rear of the front seats.
Another dose of innovation comes from Xiaomi's 'Human X Car X Home' ecosystem, which uses nine magnetic powered mounting points for installing action cameras and wireless phone chargers in the YU7. They can also be used for adding accessories such as tissue boxes, glasses cases and physical buttons for controlling the infotainment system—the latter being Xiaomi's ingenious answer for drivers who prefer tactile switchgear to touchscreens.
The company even offers a 4K camera, attached to a gimbal, which mounts to the rearview mirror and can be used for on-the-go video calls, or for checking on pets left in the car.
The YU7 Max has 508 kW of power—38 kW more than the electric Porsche Macan Turbo—and a supercar-like 0-62 mph time of 3.23 seconds. Photograph: Xiaomi
Xiaomi would rather drivers use one of its phones, but iPhone users aren't left out in the cold. Remote unlocking over UWB (ultra-wide band) is supported, along with iOS Control Center shortcuts and an option to use the iPhone's Action Button as a remote lock/unlock switch.
CarPlay is here too—unlike in any Tesla—but instead of taking over the entire display, it can be pinned as a desktop widget, leaving space on the rest of the 16.1-in touchscreen for the car's own apps. Apple Music is baked into Xiaomi's own OS, and there's also an Apple Watch app.
Xiaomi's driver-assistance tech looks impressive on paper, too, with lidar, an Nvidia Drive AGX Thor chip with 700 TOPS (trillion operations per second) computing power, millimeter-wave radar, 11 HD cameras and 12 ultrasonic sensors. But, although it too uses the 'autopilot' name, Xiaomi stops short of calling its cars autonomous—and, after a fatal SU7 crash earlier this year, in which the ADAS system was reportedly enabled, its approach to self-driving is more cautious than Tesla's.
When he revealed the second-generation Tesla Roadster, all the way back in 2017, Elon Musk described its significance as 'a hardcore smackdown' to the rest of the industry. Eight years later, with the Roadster little more than vaporware, Cybertruck sales falling well short of initial demand, and more affordable cars still nowhere in sight, it's Xiaomi that's landed the haymaker.