Xiaomi prepares to export EVs: why the SU7 waitlist is longer than the trip to Europe itself

Xiaomi / 小米 — a company the world knows for smartphones — has sold over 300,000 units across two electric vehicle models, the SU7 sedan and YU7 crossover, in under two years on the market, according to trade media covering the company's plans. Xiaomi president Lu Weibing announced the company will begin exporting these vehicles starting in 2027, with Europe as the first destination.

A problem rarely discussed out loud

Before talking about exports, Xiaomi has a more pressing task — managing its own domestic demand. The SU7's current wait time is 41 weeks, and YU7 orders won't be fulfilled for over a year — meaning the company physically can't scale production fast enough even for the home market. That's exactly why leadership says plainly: production capacity needs to grow significantly first, and only then will spare capacity exist for export shipments.

First steps on European soil

A symbolic but telling signal: a photo of a Xiaomi SU7 Ultra with German license plates, published by Lu Weibing himself, who called it the company's first experimental vehicle registered in Europe. It's not a commercial shipment, but a test unit — yet it shows market-entry preparation is already happening at the certification and local-requirements level, not just in press releases.

Why this matters for anyone tracking Chinese auto

Xiaomi's story is a telling example of how a smartphone brand built EV manufacturing from scratch and reached, in two years, sales volumes that would take a classic automaker a decade to build. For anyone who wants to see this ecosystem from the inside — from assembly lines to the logic of entering new markets — that's the point of the China auto and EV plants program: watching companies at exactly this growth stage, rather than reading about already-established giants after the fact.

A current catalog of Chinese auto industry companies is available on the GlobalTechTour site.