China’s tech giant Xiaomi launched the much-awaited electric car on Thursday in the country’s capital, Beijing.
Amid the intense and competitive landscape of the electric car industry, Xiaomi’s founder and CEO, Lei Jun, said the car will be highly cheaper than Tesla’s Model 3.
Jun boasted about his company’s first electric car, the SU7, by calling it a “dream car.”
He revealed that the standard SU7 model will cost 215,900 yuan while the Max version is fixed at a price of 299,900 yuan.
They are only lagging behind Tesla in two areas, which, according to Lei, will be advanced in the coming years. One of the main advantages of choosing SU7 over Model 3 is that it has a better minimum driving range of 700 kilometers (nearly 435 miles) compared to Model 3’s 606 kilometers.
Xiaomi’s electric car is expected to cover a significant market share in the country, considering that more than 50,000 cars were booked within the first 27 minutes of the sales on Thursday. The deliveries of these cars will reportedly begin by the end of April.
The car, which will be available in nine colors, can be manufactured in the company’s car factory in just 76 seconds. This is because the factory is completely automated to perform crucial tasks, as revealed by Lei Jun.
As per a Reuters report, Lei Jun acknowledged the challenges faced in focusing on vehicle manufacturing while maintaining their position in the electronics market. He said,
In the three years of developing this car, my biggest realization is that making cars is extremely difficult. Even a giant like Apple gave up on it.
So today, every person who is still persevering in making cars is a hero of our time,
