Having started deliveries of serial electric vehicles of its debut model SU7 at the end of March, the Chinese company Xiaomi recently released its 100,000th car, reaching an important milestone in just 230 days. Let us remind you that by the end of this year, Xiaomi expects to produce 120,000 electric vehicles.
Image source: Xiaomi
Xiaomi founder Lei Jun marked the occasion by posting a photo of himself sleeping on the floor of a car assembly plant. This environment should be reminiscent of Elon Musk’s efforts to ramp up production of the Tesla Model 3 electric vehicle in 2018. The American billionaire then spent the night at the Tesla plant, thereby having the opportunity to quickly intervene in the process of preparing a new mass model of an electric car for production. It was the entry of the Tesla Model 3 into the market that predetermined the commercial success of the entire company and increased Musk’s personal wealth to values that allowed him to be considered the richest person on the planet.
Image source: Weibo
As it became known later from Musk’s memoirs, the need to sleep on the floor of a car assembly plant was then dictated by his desire to demonstrate to the company’s employees the manager’s involvement in solving its problems. “Any time they felt pain, I would like to feel even worse,” explained Elon Musk, who, if he wanted, could have stayed in a hotel next door, but instead slept right at the enterprise. In 2022, the billionaire recalled that he lived at enterprises in Nevada and California for a total of three years, and they were his main places of residence.
According to the South China Morning Post, Xiaomi intends to ship its 100,000th electric vehicle by the end of this month, but for now it simply noted that it has already been released, and it took 230 days to overcome this milestone. Since June, at the only enterprise in Beijing, where the first-born of the brand is assembled, a second shift was introduced, and this made it possible to deliver more than 10,000 electric vehicles to customers every month from June to September inclusive, and in October the figure was doubled.
In any case, even at such a pace of production expansion, Xiaomi cannot yet compete with the old-timers of the Chinese electric vehicle market. BYD, the leader, sold more than 470,000 cars in October, while Li Auto and XPeng each sold 51,000 and 23,000 electric vehicles. American Tesla is also trying not to lose its position in China; in October it sold more than 40,000 cars on the local market.