When Chinese tech billionaire and Xiaomi founder Lei Jun unveiled the world’s first car produced by a smartphone company, car enthusiasts immediately knew where the inspiration for the design came from: the Taycan from 93-year-old German automaker Porsche.
Unveiled in December and launched in March, the Xiaomi SU7 has shaken up the world’s largest auto 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 from 100,000 to 120,000 vehicles.
Porsche, on the other hand, suffered a 24 percent drop in sales to 16,340 vehicles in China in the first quarter compared to the previous year.
Xiaomi’s impressive debut has underlined the rapid progress of China’s electric vehicle industry: it is transforming from ugly and low-quality models to sleek, high-tech and affordable cars.
Lei Xing, founder of Chinese consultancy AutoXing, said opinions about local industry leader BYD, which now competes with Tesla for the title of the world’s largest electric car maker, changed about four years ago with its Han sedan. Also in 2019, local start-up Nio launched its ET concept, which later became the group’s flagship luxury model – another example of progress in Chinese design.
“Styling, proportions and sportiness were different from anything BYD had done before,” said Xing. “The same goes for the Nio ET.”
Since then, China’s electric vehicle industry has boomed and the local industry’s design credibility has made tremendous progress. The International Energy Agency predicts that 10.1 million electric vehicles will be sold in China this year, compared to 3.4 million in Europe and 1.7 million in the United States.
Tu Le, founder of consulting firm Sino Auto Insights, called Human Horizons’ HiPhi X, a luxury SUV launched in 2020 by a currently struggling Shanghai electric car maker, “the first real-world cyberpunk vehicle designed to stand out.”
At the other end of the spectrum, the Wuling Hongguang Mini EV, produced since 2020 by a joint venture between U.S.-based General Motors and two Chinese state-owned automakers, has sparked “a huge trend” toward accessory-enabled mini cars.
However, some experts believe that the Xiaomi SU7’s unmistakable resemblance to the Porsche design also puts the industry’s long-standing struggle for its own identity in the spotlight.
Xiaomi’s first car “clearly emulates” 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 areas of car design, including user experience, technology and interior design, some Chinese brands are “ahead” of their Western competitors, says Dooley. Yet many still struggle to highlight “their uniquely Chinese qualities.”
“Although in some cases they are more technologically advanced, for the most part they are trying to imitate a Western brand,” he said. “What are our strengths? What are we positively known for in the market? How do we deliver those things? … To me, that’s a big challenge that isn’t being addressed.”
Companies are now hiring more local employees who better understand Chinese consumers. Xiaomi brought in Li Tianyuan, the first Chinese designer hired by BMW, to lead 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 vehicle industry is also enabling faster integration of advanced driver assistance and entertainment systems into vehicle designs than in the rest of the world.
“The infotainment systems of foreign brands may not be as good as those of Chinese electric car makers,” says Guo, a 27-year-old car buyer from Beijing who prefers spacious interiors and luxurious features. Her favorite brands, Li Auto and Huawei-backed Aito, are known for their full-size SUV models that come with huge in-cabin screens and seats with built-in massagers.
Chinese carmakers are increasingly rethinking and redesigning interiors to suit the lifestyles of their domestic customers. In many premium models, far greater attention is being paid to the design of the so-called second row, where most business people sit while being chauffeured by private drivers.
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The effort follows years of poaching the best design talent from the West, including Kris Tomasson, a former Ford and BMW designer who joined Nio in 2015 when the company was still an ambitious start-up run by serial entrepreneur William Li.
Tomasson, whose industrial design credentials range from the 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 sought to challenge competitors with decades of experience.
“This is where the skills have grown, this is where the talent has grown, this is where the expertise has grown. It’s just experience,” he said. “Now they’ve actually gone through the process of building a car.”
Tomasson added that foreign competitors still underestimated the speed at which Chinese companies could go through the design process because they worked “almost from the gut” with fewer design iterations.
Stefan Sielaff, who worked for European carmakers such as Audi, Volkswagen and Bentley for 30 years before joining Geely, said the “high demands” of tech-savvy Chinese consumers had prompted him to develop increasingly connected and autonomous cars at an unprecedented pace.
“They are very energetic, tech-savvy and lead a fast-paced lifestyle…[while]In other parts of the world, people still believe that a 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 develop a new model, less than half the development cycles of most established European automakers.
Sielaff attributed this pace to the “low hierarchy” within the company, which helped it respond to recent changes in the tastes of Chinese consumers, whose new buzzwords are simplicity and understatement.
“[Western carmakers] “We have the advantage of having a very good name and a high value in the eyes of customers,” he said, “but when it comes to reinventing and changing, that is also a burden. We do not have that burden.”
Additional reporting by Wenjie Ding in Beijing