Xiaomi Auto Expects to Start Mass-Production in H1 Next Year
“Xiaomi will produce excellent vehicles for consumers and never live up to everyone’s expectations,” Lei Jun, deputy to the National People’s Congress and founder, chairman and CEO of Xiaomi, said at a meeting on March 5, “Xiaomi Auto has made more progress than expected. Recently, the winter test has been finished and we expect to mass-produce within the first half of the next year.”
Consistent with information disclosed by Xiaomi on its Investor Day, Lei Jun spends half of his time on the company’s automobile business. Xiaomi has invested more than 3 billion yuan ($433 million) in new businesses such as automobiles in 2022, and the automobile R&D team has grown to over 2,300 people. With a relatively high R&D investment and rapidly expanding team size, Xiaomi continues to sail towards its original production date.
“We invested about 17 billion yuan in research and development last year, and we will invest more than 20 billion yuan this year and at least 100 billion yuan in the next five years,” Lei Jun said. In recent years, Xiaomi has vigorously promoted the training and long-term incentives of technical talents through a series of measures such as the Young Engineer Program, Entrepreneur Program and Million Dollar Award.
On the eve of the opening of the first session of the 14th National People’s Congress, Lei Jun submitted three suggestions, mainly focusing on robot manufacturing and the automobile industry, suggesting the support of industry chains and tackling key problems with bionic humanoid robots. He also called for building and perfecting the data security management system of the automobile industry as a whole.
He stated that Xiaomi has made great efforts in self-developed chips, AI, imaging, bionic humanoid robots, intelligent manufacturing and other fields in recent years. In his view, the bionic humanoid robot is a complex dynamic system, which is closely related to emerging technical fields such as automatic driving, and its development will become the key to social and economic development and international scientific and technological competition.
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At present, China has issued a number of national standards for automobile-related data security, which still cannot cover the whole field. For this reason, Lei suggested speeding up the formulation of data security standards around the automobile and data life cycles while building an automobile data sharing mechanism, so that the data among automobile enterprises can be better circulated.
In addition, Lei believed that moderately lifting the restrictions on automobile modification and establishing national standards for modified spare parts and the automotive aftermarket can provide a foundation for the development of diversified automobile culture.
