Xiaomi is a Chinese company known for its rice cookers, robot vacuums, air purifiers and smartphones. Now, it has pulled off what Apple, its longtime rival, couldn’t: Make an electric car and bring it to market.
And it did it in three years.
To save on time and costs, the company adopted practices from Tesla and other automakers, mined its own product-development know-how and plugged into China’s fast-moving car supply chain. Years of honing laptops, blenders and petcams helped it develop features tailored to a fickle consumer base, including a detachable panel of physical buttons that magnetically clips on below the 16.1-inch center screen for those who don’t like to control their volume or seat via touch screen.
Xiaomi brought on some 6,000 people to work on the car project, Lei said. Some were recruited from foreign carmakers such as Porsche and BMW; others were transferred from other departments, said Ma Yingbo, a member of Xiaomi’s marketing team. Among the cars Xiaomi looked to for inspiration was Tesla’s Model 3.
To simplify development and reduce costs, Xiaomi adopted Tesla’s process of “gigacasting,” which employs large-scale, high-pressure aluminum die-casting to create the car’s frame. The process combines hundreds of manufacturing steps into one, saving on components, weight, cost and time
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