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When the smartphone and electronics giant Xiaomi wants to disrupt some field, they can do it. We’ve seen it quite a few times before. Now, on the way to a potential disruption of the electric vehicle market comes a new report on the company’s future plant, which is set to produce a very impressive amount of the company’s first electric vehicle.
Coming in strong
According to Reuters, Xiaomi will set up the new manufacturer’s headquarters with the original name Xiaomi EV in Beijing and alongside it also the main vehicle plant that is expected to go into mass production as early as 2024. The Beijing Business Development Agency has confirmed to Reuters that the future plant is expected to produce up to 300,000 vehicles a year.
For comparison, in 2020 Tesla managed to cross the production line of 500,000 vehicles per year for the first time, which was an increase of about 36% compared to last year. Although Xiaomi is not bypassing Tesla here, which also plans to start a new plant in Berlin in the near future, if it really manages to produce 300,000 vehicles in its first plant in its first year of marketing, it is an impressive achievement that could greatly affect the industry.
Xiaomi seems to be taking its electric vehicle project very seriously, as it has already confirmed a host of very interesting data about the project: the company was officially registered as an electric vehicle manufacturer in September, indicating that it is not just exploring the area or wading in it, but plans to enter To him in full force with an investment of $ 10 billion in the next decade.
At the same time, it confirmed that it is in a “significant development phase” in which it employs more than 300 employees, during almost half a year of market research, user surveys and visits to a variety of factories and development sites of manufacturers in the field. In addition, the company acquired an autonomous driving startup called Deepmotion for about $ 77 million, which indicates that it will want to integrate autonomous driving systems in its future vehicle.
Naturally, at this stage there are quite a few question marks surrounding Xiaomi’s ambitious project, with one of the questions still in the air being the production question: Will Xiaomi launch a car it develops from scratch, or will it connect to another manufacturer with which it will launch a joint vehicle under the new branding? According to reports, Xiaomi is already a member of Great Wall, one of the largest electric vehicle manufacturers in the world and in China. In the case of Xiaomi, one of the big questions is of course the question of price – and we will probably have to wait some more time until we find out if Xiaomi can do to the automotive world what it did to the electronics world and break the market under the feet of traditional players.