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

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.

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. 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.

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