Xiaomi doing some clickbait saying it’s the fastest 4-door car… quite misleading. It’s a race car.
However, this is still a remarkable achievement. China stay winning
Saying that they’re a phone maker doesn’t even scratch the surface, they’re to China as Samsung is to South Korea as far as I know. They make pretty much every kind of appliance under the sun, from smartphones and cars to lamps, flash drives, blow dryers and tape measures. It’s insane how wide their product portfolio is.
That’s the standard version.
Here’s the prototype racecar version that did the lap posted above:
Here’s the road legal version that you can buy, starting at 112 000USD in China:
Holy fucking shit how is it gripping on some of those high speed corners it’s like this thing is on rails.
EDIT: THE TRACK IS WET WTFFFF
Holy fucking shit how is it gripping on some of those high speed corners it’s like this thing is on rails.
Slick tyres will do that lol. The difference between even the best road tyres and slicks is huge. Over a 90 second lap, slicks will give you a 3+ seconds advantage per lap versus even the best road legal tyres, and a 6+ second advantage over good tyres. On a track like the Nurburgring, you’re probably looking at around 15 seconds at least over the best road legal rubber.
While the handling through the high speed is very good, you can see the driver is having to hustle through the low speed quite a lot, the front is sliding leading to understeer. A lot of that is just inevitable given how heavy most electric cars are, but I’d say there’s definitely room for improvement in the road legal version, and I have no doubts that the engineers will use the data from this test to improve on it.
Surely they’re not running slicks in the wet? I can literally see water on the road in most of the corners on the track.
All the photos of the car on track and in the official marketing materials show it running on Pirelli slicks. The only really wet part was foxhole, which is why the driver lifted through there, in a car with this level of performance that entire section is usually taken flat out.
This prototype also has a diffuser and front splitter that would never pass a roadworthy test, which makes sense given the downforce numbers claimed at over 2000kg of downforce. The body is also full carbon fibre, the interior is stripped out and there’s a roll cage. It’s basically a full on race car. The road legal non prototype version is probably aiming for a lap time of around under 7:10, and hopefully aiming to break the production EV record of 7:05.
It’s on slick tyres and with a fully stripped out interior and carbon fibre body, that’s easily worth 40+ seconds of lap time at the Nurburgring Nordschleife. But it also did the lap when some parts of the track were damp, which would’ve slowed it down through those sections a little. I imagine the road legal version might crack under 7:10 in perfect conditions. My guess is that Xiaomi is aiming to break one, or both, of the electric production car records, at 7:07 for the four door Porsche Taycan, and 7:05 for the Rimac Nevera. This race car prototype also understeers heavily, so there’s time to find in the handling and setup. But the time to be found there is limited by the fact that it’s an electric car with heavy batteries, so understeer through the low speed is always going to exist at some point.
Still very impressive to essentially be at GT3 race car pace with an electric prototype based on a production car.
The first consumer car xiaomi released looked cool. Very nice but cheap by western standards.
They have a factory which is very automated and can churn out a shit ton of cars. I think they’re expanding too.
