Driving Xiaomi's Electric Car: Are we Cooked?

i think probably my favorite example of the software being incredible in this car is you see the speaker and the headrest behind me when i'm driving and my phone is paired to the speakers in this car and i'm navigating you know that part where like you're driving and the music's getting pretty good and right as the bass is about to drop the navigation voice comes on and interrupts it that never happens in this car because it separates out the voice from the navigation and puts it just in that speaker behind me while all the rest of the music and the sound in the car stays exactly the same so as a driver i hear the voice saying turn left turn right but everything else including the music for all the passengers stays sick that is my favorite software feature i've seen in a car in a while

so are we cooked not yet clearly this car is not available here in the us but you can see how we could be soon i i genuinely i'm not exaggerating when i say this this is a $42,000 car that feels like a $75,000 car if it were made here in the us and that's the thing that's most impressive about the xiaomi se seven and that's just this one so really now that i've gotten to live with this and drive this here in the us among all the other cars i test here's my take it's not that there's any sort of crazy bleeding edge tech in this car that's impossible to replicate obviously the software is really good and the modularity and some of the features are kinda sick we haven't seen them before but like if you took this car apart you wouldn't find anything inside any like bleeding edge battery tech or anything that's impossible to replicate this is a car made of normal car parts but it's the putting them all together in one car that's so impressive it's not often you see a car with great software great features great build quality great versatility great range and a great drive and all stacked together like that's pretty elite there is basically no question in my mind that if a car like this was available in the us for $42,000 that it would crush

one of the most common ones is you know have you seen these chinese electric cars if they ever came to the us they would cook everything that we have here they are too good they have too much tech and they are too cheap to not dominate everything and so i figured i should get my hands on one and actually figure out if that's true or not and yeah you could say there's a little something to it there are so many crazy things i've learned about this car while i've been testing it but let's just start with the basics this car here i've been driving for the last two weeks is called the xiaomi s u seven yeah that's xiaomi so the xiaomi that makes basically everything in china tablets headphones robot vacuums printers appliances and smartphones and they even refer to the trims of this car as the s u seven s u seven pro s u seven max and s u seven ultra so this here is the s u seven max and this retails for about 299,000 chinese yuan which actually converts to about $42,000 us which is gonna be a lot more impressive in about five minutes so base specs this is a fully electric four door sedan 101 kilowatt hour battery dual motor all wheel drive 673 horsepower and 320 miles of range already those are specs on paper on the level of like a tesla model three performance which today costs like $55,000

the software is so good this feels like a preview kind of of like what apple might have done if they'd made an apple car i say that because it's super smooth just like a smartphone but also it's a car made by someone who makes a phone and so the car plugs right into the xiaomi ecosystem in so many ways there's a wireless charger but also wireless screen mirroring it connects to various other xiaomi smart home accessories like security cameras you can sign into them with the car with your account so everything from text messages to map directions are all syncing from your phone and hey if all else fails thankfully as a backup this car also happens to have wireless apple carplay and it's nice i think it is the biggest nicest window of wireless carplay i have ever seen in a car

this is a modular interior because hidden around this car are a bunch of various mounting points for modular accessories there's one over here in the corner and another over here in the center all the way around the back of this center display and so on these mounting points you can attach various accessories that xiaomi makes like this extra speedometer and trip display or this magnetic car mount in the corner of the car or this super useful usb hub that gets full power and can pass it along through a cable to passengers in the back seat or wherever they want there's also high quality microphones that pair to the car for a karaoke experience or even long range walkie talkies for some reason if you need to maybe shoot a video with the car and communicate with the camera car what other car does this i've never seen the ability to customize exactly how much hardware or how little hardware you have in the interior layout like xiaomi does i mean they're not a car company clearly but they've come up with some really innovative things to make the car uniquely your own you can make it maximalist you can make it minimalist you can do as much or as little as you want and that'll of course fluctuate the price you pay but hey that's up to you i think that's pretty sick

this is xiaomi we're talking about making this car and they're not a car company which means they don't have any previous designs that they have to pay homage to or any traditional lines and shapes that they have to keep around which means a little bit less prestige yes but also a little bit more freedom because i see them taking stuff from all over the rest of the car industry in this car like these headlights for example that is very much a mclaren looking headlight and they have lotus lines on the hood here and then as you get back even more kinda looks like a porsche taycan from the side profile if i'm not crazy it has these thin bezels like the polestar and then a thicker taillight across the back which kinda looks maybe like a lincoln or some others and then there's a fully active wing on the back that kind of looks like a mercedes amg gt all of these are more expensive cars from more premium brands and so they kind of meld them all together into one car with this kind of unique purple color that honestly think looks pretty good