As Chinese tech billionaire and Xiaomi founder Lei Jun stripped down the world’s first car made by a smartphone company, car enthusiasts recognized the source of the design’s inspiration: the Taycan from 93-year-old German automaker Porsche.
Introduced in December and launched in March, the Xiaomi SU7 shook up the world’s largest car market. Xiaomi had orders for more than 88,000 cars by the end of April. Last month, the company raised its sales target for this year to 120,000 cars from 100,000.
Porsche, by comparison, suffered a 24 percent year-on-year sales decline in China in the first quarter to 16,340 vehicles.
Xiaomi’s stunning debut highlighted the rapid progress of China’s electric vehicle industry from the earlier perception of ugly and low-quality models to sleek, technologically advanced and affordable cars.
Lei Xing, founder of Chinese consultancy AutoXing, said local industry leader BYD, which now rivals Tesla for the title of the world’s largest EV maker, began to change opinions about four years ago with its Han sedan. Also in 2019, local start-up Nio released its ET concept, which later became the group’s flagship luxury model, as another example of Chinese design progress.
“The style, proportions and sportiness were different from anything BYD had done before,” said Xing. “Same for Nio ET.
Since then, China’s EV industry has boomed, and the design credibility of the local industry has made huge strides. The International Energy Agency predicts that 10.1 million electric cars will be sold in China this year, compared with 3.4 million in Europe and 1.7 million in the US.
Tu Le, founder of consultancy Sino Auto Insights, pointed to Human Horizons’ HiPhi X, a luxury SUV launched in 2020 by the now-struggling Shanghai-based EV maker, as “the first real cyberpunk vehicle to stand out”. .
At the other end of the spectrum, the Wuling Hongguang Mini EV, produced from 2020 by a joint venture involving General Motors of the US and two Chinese state-owned automakers, “started a huge trend” for plug-in microcars.
Still, some experts said the Xiaomi SU7’s unmistakable resemblance to Porsche design also highlighted the industry’s long-standing struggle to find its own identity.
Xiaomi’s first car “very clearly mimics” the Porsche Taycan, said Robert Dooley, a strategist at British consultancy Car Design Research. “From a design perspective, it’s a missed opportunity.”
In many aspects of car design, including user experience, technology and interiors, some Chinese brands are “leading” their Western rivals, Dooley said, but many are still struggling to highlight “their unique qualities of being Chinese”.
“Even though they are more technologically advanced in some cases, for the most part they try to imitate the Western brand,” he said. “What are our strengths? How does the market know us positively? How do we accomplish these things? . . . For me, this is a big challenge that is not being solved.”
Companies are now hiring more local employees who have a better understanding of Chinese consumers. Xiaomi brought in Li Tianyuan, the first Chinese designer hired by BMW, to head its car design team in 2021, while Chinese employees make up 90 percent of Geely’s Shanghai-based design team.
The rise of the country’s electric car industry is also allowing advanced driver assistance and entertainment systems to be integrated into car designs faster than the rest of the world.
“Foreign brands’ infotainment systems may not be as good as Chinese EV makers,” said Guo, a 27-year-old car buyer in Beijing who preferred spacious interiors and luxurious decor. Its popular brands Li Auto and Huawei-backed Aito are known for their full-size SUV models equipped with huge screens in the cabin and seats with built-in massagers.
Chinese automakers are increasingly rethinking—and reshaping—interiors to fit the lifestyles of their local consumers. In many premium models, much more attention is paid to the arrangement of the so-called second row, where most of the business executives sit, while they are driven by private drivers.
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The efforts follow years of poaching top design talent from the West, including Kris Tomasson, a former Ford and BMW designer who joined Nio in 2015 when it was an ambitious start-up founded by serial entrepreneur William Li.
Tomasson, whose industrial design credits range from a Gulfstream G650 business jet to a Coca-Cola bottle, said Li understood from the start that a “strong design DNA” would be critical for the company as it competes with decades of experience.
“Abilities grew here, talents grew here, expertise grew here. It’s just an experience,” he said. “Now they’ve actually gone through the process of designing the cars.
Tomasson added that foreign rivals still underestimated the speed at which Chinese companies could move through the design process, “working almost from the gut” with fewer design iterations.
Stefan Sielaff, who spent 30 years working for European carmakers including Audi, Volkswagen and Bentley before joining Geely, said the “high demands” of China’s tech-savvy consumers have driven him to develop increasingly connected and autonomous cars at an unprecedented rate.
“They are very energetic, open to technology and live a fast-paced lifestyle. . .[while]in other parts of the world people still think the car is [merely] an object that you drive from A to B,” he said.
Zeekr, the Geely brand that Sielaff helped launch, typically takes two years to turn around a new model, less than half the development cycles of most established European automakers.
Sielaff attributed the pace to a “low hierarchy” at the company that helped it respond to recent changes in Chinese consumer tastes, with simplicity and understatement being the new watchwords.
“[Western carmakers] they have the benefit of a very good name and high value in the eyes of customers,” he said, “but when it comes to reinventing and disrupting yourself, it’s also a burden. That’s a burden we don’t have.”
More news from Wenjie Ding in Beijing