Xiaomi, a company that makes smartphones and other consumer electronics, sent its second EV around the famously difficult Nürburgring racetrack, and once again set a record with it, beating every other SUV, gas or electric.
The Xiaomi YU7 GT is an upcoming high-performance version of Xiaomi’s YU7 SUV. The new performance version of the model was revealed in February, and is launching in China this week. It has 990hp and a 186mph top speed, underneath a family SUV body.
It’s expected to be offered at around $66-74k USD (450-500k CNY), though we’ll find out more about that later this week.
In advance of that launch, Xiaomi is up to its same old tricks: beating literally everyone around one of the toughest tracks in the world.
It’s common for automakers to use laptimes as publicity stunts, especially in advance of the launch of a new vehicle. The race has been heating up lately with upstart Chinese brands taking their cars to European tracks and beating European brands with racing heritage on home turf, and today is no different.
When Xiaomi first launched the high-performance version of its SU7 Ultra sport sedan, it took the car around Nürburgring and set a record as the fastest four-door car ever, gas or electric – albeit with a stripped-down prototype version of the car (it’s since improved on that record, beating everything but 3 custom-built racecars). It later came back with the mass-produced, non-stripped version and won a production EV record instead, which has since been beaten.
It looks like the same story has happened again, as the YU7 GT has also set a new record, again beating every other SUV – gas or electric – around the punishing track known as “the Green Hell.”
Xiaomi says it set a 7:34.931, shaving almost two seconds off of the previous record time of 7:36.698 set by an Audi Q8 RS in 2024. Prior to that, Porsche held the record with a Cayenne GT Turbo and a 7:38.925.
The official lap certification shows that Xiaomi’s lap took place on April 2, which is around the same time that the YU7 GT was spotted at Nürburgring. It had been spotted testing last September, too, but we didn’t hear about any lap records from that time around.
In-car video of the lap is available (here’s Xiaomi’s Weibo post), which looks like it may show some modifications were made to the car. Xiaomi says the YU7 GT has a “track package” installed, but we’re not sure what that entails.
A roll cage is a standard modification for safety purposes on record runs like this, but it does look like the rear seats may have been removed – though it’s hard to tell in the small interior camera. If the car has been stripped-down in a non-production manner, the Germans will surely point this out to save face.
If that’s the case, it’s possible that we’ll see another visit by Xiaomi in the future, with the production version of the YU7 GT, setting a slower but still impressive laptime, probably just behind the quickest gas SUVs out there, but still within a reasonable shout of them.
Notably, the YU7’s lap is much slower than the SU7 sedan’s time, which lapped the track a full half-minute faster in production form. This is because an SUV is not a sportscar, something that everyone seems to be forgetting these days and that I’m going to keep saying until this madness ends.
Nevertheless, it is a great laptime… for an SUV. But if you want something sportier, look at the SU7 instead.
With deliveries starting soon of the most powerful Porsche ever, the Porsche Cayenne Electric, we would not be surprised for Porsche to bring its 1,139hp monster out to Nürburgring to reclaim the top SUV spot. A prototype Cayenne EV already beat every SUV ever in a British hill climb, so grabbing back the prize at Porsche’s playground in the Eifel mountains would be an appropriate stunt for the performance brand.
But there’s an important point to be made here: Porsche and its European compatriots have been lapping Nürburgring for decades, using these times to highlight their performance heritage.
Xiaomi, up until about three years ago, was a smartphone and consumer electronics company. And now a smartphone company has beaten the Europeans on home turf – twice.
Meanwhile, Porsche mulls canceling its EV sportscar projects and admits its EV intransigence cost it $6 billion, Audi pushes back its all-EV target, and much of the the EU auto industry have lobbied for a slower EV shift.
Today’s record, from a smartphone company, is just another data point to show how fast the Chinese are moving, and how everyone else better pick up the pace.
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