It's been said that the Xiaomi SU7 is China's Apple Car—a super high-tech electric vehicle that's deeply connected to a popular ecosystem of personal gadgets. If you take that idea to its logical conclusion, and if Apple had actually pulled it off, then you would've been able to buy a car at the Apple Store.
In the end, Apple couldn't make that dream a reality. But Chinese tech giant Xiaomi certainly did. And when you visit China, as I did for the Shanghai Auto Show late last month, you may be surprised to find cars for sale at the Xiaomi Store in your local mall.
It's exactly what it sounds like. You walk into the store, check out some smart watches and earbuds, maybe a new laptop or a tablet, and then, if the urge strikes, you sign the paperwork on an EV so advanced that the Ford Motor Company's CEO didn't want to give his up.
Who needs a dealership, right?
Xiaomi doesn't have any physical stores in the United States. Even now, thanks to various geopolitical tensions and alleged national security concerns, it doesn't sell many of its devices here, including smartphones. But you can probably safely assume what a Xiaomi Store is like: a place to go play with, test out and, hopefully, buy some of the tech giant's gear. It's just a bizarre sight to go to a gadget store and see a car there—and one that you can order that day.
It's hardly a new thing to see cars being sold in physical stores at shopping malls in China. As several car company representatives told me over there, buyers have been increasingly moving to standalone stores like this instead of traditional dealerships, which tend to be more common outside of cities and in rural areas. (China also allows sales direct from the manufacturer, unlike in some parts of the U.S., which makes the Xiaomi store possible.)
In a few jaunts through some malls in Shanghai and Hangzhou, we saw cars for sale from Xiaomi, Huawei, Nio, Zeekr and, of course, Tesla. The first two used the Apple Store model to sell cars alongside their various gadgets. The other ones might be right next to a Fila store or a New Balance store—a jarring sight compared to the car-buying landscape in America, where standalone dealerships represent most new car sales.
Then again, our direct-sold EV startups are running a similar playbook here. It's not exactly uncommon to see a Tesla Gallery in a mall, or even a Rivian Space now. VinFast sells out of malls all over California. Before it went bust, even Fisker had a store near the upscale shopping in New York's Meatpacking District. And for retail-crazy China, this seems like a great way to reach the kind of tech-savvy, upper-middle-class buyer that these car brands are after.
One thing that was especially notable about the Xiaomi Store was that it also sold accessories for the car. Wheels, paint swatches, interior samples and those little add-on buttons were all there to be seen and touched.
In Xiaomi's case, I think this is the ultimate representation of the car as a technological device—the smartphone on wheels. Every SU7 runs a version of the same Xiaomi software found on its other gear. That allows the car to be connected, for example, to more than 1,000 different smart home devices.
While we have things like car-connected smartphone apps here in the West, this dream feels a long way off. Most traditional automakers are still struggling on the software front, and it's highly unlikely we'll see Rivian transform into a smartphone and tablet manufacturer. But Xiaomi started as a tech company and then got into cars, much like Apple once wanted to do; that alone gives it a huge software edge over most competitors.
It's hard to fathom a day when this idea, or something exactly like it, comes stateside. But it does feel like the future, albeit a far-off one. As the auto industry moves more and more toward the software-defined vehicle model, it does feel like various tech companies will be the ones to capitalize on it. And we know that the traditional dealer experience isn't great for EVs, despite everything in the auto industry moving that way.
It may come off as a bad dream to car dealers, but it's already a reality in China.
Contact the author: patrick.george@insideevs.com
Gallery: Xiaomi Store Shanghai
