Living with Xiaomi's Electric Car - It's Insane.

Alright, real talk. The thesis to this review is if I took the badge off of this car and just put it in front of you, and you think you know a lot about cars, and I said, how much do you think this car costs? There is no way you would get it right. In fact, I think the more you know about cars, the less likely you would be to get it right. Because this car behind me right here, this is the Xiaomi SU7. I've been living with it for a few weeks now and really getting to know it. It is a Chinese EV and it retails in China for the equivalent of roughly $40,000 to $45,000 US dollars. But it feels a lot more like $70,000 to $75,000. And so it has been really interesting trying to think of an angle of how to talk about this car because I feel like I have two really big theories with it. Two really big angles. The first one is that this is confirmation of the theory that if these Chinese EVs came to the US that we'd be cooked. These things would take over. They'd be extremely competitive. They're not available here yet, but they're going to be available in Europe soon and they're already doing super well in China. That's one of the main theories. The other one is that while it's made by Xiaomi, this feels like the closest thing to an Apple car that I've been able to review so far. I had a similar theory about a different car, but it's like this is made by a company that makes smartphones and all kinds of appliances. I'm shooting this video right now on a Xiaomi 17 Pro Max. The way that this phone integrates into this car and the software is crazy. So I have all these thoughts running through my head. I have a lot of things to talk about with this car, but in general, if you haven't already seen the main channel video on it, go watch that. Now this is what it's like to live with the car. So first things first, the basics. This is a dual motor, all wheel drive electric car, about 100 kilowatt hour battery underneath. And this is the SU7 Max. There's actually a couple different specs of this. They have a regular SU7. They also have an SU7 Ultra. But anyway, this is the Max. And design wise, it's pretty tame. It probably looks the most similar to a Porsche Taycan and a lot of the proportions and the shapes back here. But they've definitely taken cues from a bunch of other EVs too. You've got this LiDAR box up here, which they use for their full self driving. Careful, don't want to break my phone. But there's also these very McLaren looking headlights up at the front here. This frunk kind of has Lotus lines to me. These wheels also with these big yellow Brembo brakes, a little bit less Porsche Taycan like, but overall a pretty normal silhouette, if you ask me. I think it looks pretty good. It's actually understated. And then you go to the back here. This is where your charge port is. Obviously, that's a Chinese charge port, so it's not going to look like your normal CCS or NACS, but that is where you charge. I had to use a pretty serious adapter. There's also an active wing back here that you can move up and down. And underneath the wing is hidden some specs by Xiaomi. 21,000 RPM motors, 838 Newton meters of torque. Very cool. But you know what they say, anyone can make a good looking car. Where it really starts to get interesting is when you get inside this car. So here's my key card. Let's get inside and show that, shall we? All right. Driver's seat first. Immediately, this is way more impressive. This is a spacious, really clean cabin with a whole bunch of headroom and all this tinted sunroof above me. These really comfortable leather seats, a whole bunch of contrasted materials and stitching, and everything is super well built. There's ambient lighting. And of course, this wheel in front of me looks and feels a lot like that Porsche wheel with these little stalks at the bottom and the general shape of the thing. It's heated. The seats are heated and ventilated. There's the back seat that we'll get to in a second. You've got this screen in the middle. You have a bright HUD behind the steering wheel. You have a tiny display in front of the steering wheel. You have a camera that's watching you for self-driving. You've got a thin bezelless mirror. You've got Alcantara headliner and these magnets. Everything is so nice in this car. So right off the bat, it feels nothing like a $42,000 car. And then you also get to use the car and you realize the software is really, really good. So this is the 16 inch display in the middle of the car that does basically everything. There's a couple of physical controls as well to raise and lower the suspension and the wing and your HVAC controls, fan speed up and down. It's nice that you have physical buttons for that, but you mostly do everything else on the center display. It's also got some stuff attached to it, which I'll get to in a second, but basically it's got this paneled layout that you can expand and contract, make big panels or small panels. The mapping service doesn't work here in the US, but pretty intuitive stuff. And then you've got all these apps that you can open and install more from the app store. But even more importantly in the US, you might be wondering if there's CarPlay and yeah, there is still wireless Apple CarPlay and it's huge. It's this massive full screen CarPlay, which is super cool. So everything you're expecting it to be able to do, it does it all. Then you have a ton of these controls for how the vehicle drives, how the vehicle behaves. And you also have connectivity to, let's say you have, I don't know, a Xiaomi smartphone, because you've got a Xiaomi car and you are wirelessly charging your Xiaomi smartphone on the 50 watt cooled wireless charger in the middle of the car. It's a super fast wireless charger, by the way. So then you can pop this up here and hit the Xiaomi interconnectivity button. And as long as you're signed into your Xiaomi account on the same account that your Xiaomi smartphone is connected to, you can hit this button and you're using your phone. This is now the interface. Actually, I think I can light this up so you can have a little bit of proof. So this is using the Xiaomi smartphone remotely. This is the exact type of thing I would expect Apple to do if they made an Apple car is give you that type of remote use. So that is super sick. And then these attachments. So this is a totally optional attachment, a module that you attach to the top screen of this car. This is also an optional attachment that you can add to the bottom, which gives you these USB cables that you can give to someone in the backseat. Totally optional. These are modules that actually talk to the car's software. So I hit smart devices and the smart dashboard up here. I can turn that on. It's got a couple other things like a walkie talkie system, which is charging down here. It's also got the smart underglow lights, which you might've seen in the first part of this video and wondered why there's underglow. There's also a karaoke microphone, all sorts of things that are attached to this car. And there's also more that you can buy. You can have these little strips of light that attach to the side and light up like with your music and all of this would show up here and you can turn it on or off. So this is like this totally interesting modular car interface that I've never seen before. We can buy accessories for your car and add them, subtract them, make it super modular, minimalist or maximalist. I've never seen anything like this before and it's all so good and it works so well. Then, okay, there are the modes of this car. So right down here is your drive mode selector. If I flip that, it'll go from comfort to sport to sport plus. And all of the settings for these different modes, if you go into driving are all controllable here. You also have custom profiles if you want, and you have the ability to break down like how much rear wheel or front wheel bias you have and how much creep there is when you come to a stop and when the spoiler deploys and all this other stuff. Really, really customizable drive mode settings. So in, let's see, comfort mode, which is probably the mode you can leave it in the most often, the car rides really nice. In fact, I think I'd like to be a passenger in it in comfort mode because for the most part, the suspension, the air suspension is super pliable. It erases the bumps on the road and yeah, it's something I could drive around people in the back seat and they'd be totally comfortable in. And speaking of the back seat, this is what that feels like. Behind a 6.3 driving position, I feel like I have a pretty good amount of room, definitely more than a Taycan. This is kind of like Model 3 type of leg room. And then over here, of course, you have this Xiaomi display, which will also control the car and give you HVAC controls. So Xiaomi tablet, control even more of the car with that. Ambient lighting back here, tinted windows, whole bunch of sunroof. Comfort mode is nice. You'd want to be in the back seat of this car during comfort mode. It feels as good as any Lucid or Model S's air suspension. But this is kind of like a wolf in sheep's clothing because the thing, like I mentioned at the beginning of the video, has like 700 horsepower, which is crazy. So that means it does all the straight line tricks too. It does the launch control. It does the 0 to 60 in like 2.5, 2.8 seconds or something ridiculous. And it will go on to do probably a 10 and a half second quarter mile. I haven't measured it, but it feels like it's that quick. And that's all from sport mode. So if I hit that drive mode button, it'll give me a temporary 20 second boost of power of maximum responsiveness to the accelerator pedal. Then I can cancel it by hitting it there. So even if you're not in sport mode, you can get all the fun of merging onto a highway or an entrance ramp or whatever, just for those 20 seconds. Every feature you can think of from an EV, all the best stuff from all the other parts of the car world are all shoved into this car, including things I've never seen like the great software and the screen mirroring and the modules. It's just, there's so much. There really is so much. I've probably forgotten to mention some things. There is even this little corner module slot where I can put a little magnetic mounting slot for a phone. I showed you these buttons already, but there's also this soft opening center console storage, which is super nice. The car key goes here, but these 50 watt wireless chargers are still super fast. Like I said, I'm kind of at a loss for words. I was conservatively saying like, this is a 70 to $75,000 car. I think it's actually more than that. If you're going to compare it to a Taycan and you're going to compare it to a Model S and a Lucid, this is starting to feel like a six digit car. My number one favorite feature is it's a pretty quiet car overall. So if you're driving in comfort mode, the active noise cancellation from this 25 speakers around the car do a really good job of making it feel silent. The seal from the windows makes it super silent. But also if you are navigating, it separates out the navigation voice and puts it just in the speaker behind the driver's head. So all of the rest of the music of the car stays playing full volume and you just get a little voice behind you instead of ducking all of the music for the music volume while it says your instructions for driving. It's really nice that it does that. I actually don't really know how it does that. It seems to work with any phone I pair to the car. It's amazing. So, okay. There's a lot going on here. Extremely well-built car, really good fundamentals, really good specs, really good build quality, really good software. It kind of doesn't have any downsides and it's like a wolf in sheep's clothing. It looks really tame and chill and yet it has all that horsepower and it has all those features. And I think the question a lot of people ask themselves is, yeah, if this came to the US, would it succeed? Would it be really good? I don't think there's any question. Yeah, it would cook. But tariffs, import fees, et cetera, it's not happening in the US anytime soon. But if you can get your hands on a car like this, whether that's in Europe in 2027 or if that's somewhere in Asia where they already sell it, I'm not shocked if you pull the trigger. This is a really impressive car. Yeah, I've seen the Let me know, would you buy a car like this if you could in the US? Thanks for watching. Catch you guys in the next one. Peace.