Xiaomi launched its first EV mannequin, the SU7, in early 2024. By the top of the yr, overseas diplomats, traders, and visitors from different Chinese language firms had already began arriving on the firm’s manufacturing facility in Beijing to take part in one-off excursions, however the firm didn’t create a standardized expertise for the general public till the beginning of 2025. At first, Xiaomi supplied simply three excursions with 20 contributors every monthly.
However the tour proved extremely fashionable, and Xiaomi shortly started scheduling considerably extra slots. In July, the corporate mentioned it’s going to supply one tour each weekday and 6 excursions most weekends, accommodating greater than 1,100 guests in complete. When July registration opened, nevertheless, over 27,000 functions flooded in in a single day, in line with the Xiaomi app—so the possibilities of snagging a ticket stay slim.
These fortunate sufficient to safe a spot can anticipate to first be taken to an exhibit corridor to study notable improvements in Xiaomi’s electrical vehicles. The guests then hop on a shuttle and go into three working manufacturing strains out of six complete to look at the employees and robots in motion.
Afterwards, they will take a look at trip a mannequin Xiaomi SU7 on a racecourse, the place a educated racecar driver demonstrates how the automobile can speed up from 0 to 60 mph in only a few seconds. “It felt superior—takes off actually quick, with an on the spot kick,” Zhao tells WIRED. Not too long ago, Xiaomi additionally began promoting inexpensive meals on the manufacturing facility and souvenirs to finish the expertise.
One other customer notes that the shuttle will quickly cease if it will get in the way in which of a robotic, which is programmed to do its job on a strictly timed schedule and is thus much less versatile than a human employee. Yuanyuan recollects that after the tour ended, her daughter remarked: “I want to review more durable, in any other case I gained’t be capable to discover a job sooner or later. It’ll be robots doing all of the work.”
Xiaomi’s manufacturing facility is a main instance of how Chinese language firms are shortly evolving from labor-intensive manufacturing to extremely automated manufacturing, due to new developments in robotics and synthetic intelligence. Lately, the Chinese language authorities has been closely selling the concept of “lights-out factories” that require no human labor, which means the machines can toil away within the darkness with out anybody needing to show the lights on. Corporations which have managed to attain this excessive degree of automation, from Foxconn to home appliance giants, have turned their factories into advertising alternatives, inviting people to marvel on the expertise relatively than do work.
Nio, one other main EV maker in China, has been publicly showcasing one in all its extremely automated factories since late 2023. In 2024, over 130,000 folks visited the manufacturing facility, the place sure manufacturing strains just like the physique store have achieved one hundred pc automation, in line with a press release despatched by the corporate. Zhang says when her newest tour group visited Nio’s manufacturing facility within the metropolis of Hefei final month, the contributors have been in a position to view three out of the 4 manufacturing strains. (The automobile portray course of, nevertheless, was excluded from public visits.)
