Every week, we bring you a fresh insight from the biggest car market in the world.

Today, we are on a media test drive of the Xiaomi SU7.

We're filming this on March the 19th, about nine days ahead of the actual launch.

We know everything about this car except for the price.

I'm gonna have a go at the end of the video and experienced Telescope viewers will know my guesstimate normally are quite correct

So you tell me when you're watching this video on March the 28th. Am I correct or not?

I think I need to re-emphasize especially towards the international customers that this is the real car.

And when you're watching this video, it's already started delivering to customers' hands. So it's not a concept study. It's not a demonstration car, it's the full production car.

I've already done an exterior first look on this car back in December last year

So for my detailed opinion on the exterior design, you can check out that video, but I'll quickly summarize.

It's a very sporty battery electric saloon on extremely traditional proportions.

The focus of today's video are the impressions of the interior and of course, the driving dynamics.

The interior of the SU7 has got a little bit of Performance car theater going on. When you press the starter button. Look at how the dashboard rotates itself.

The steering wheel screams Porsche.

It looks feels and grips like a Porsche steering wheel.

Because this car is quite cheap, you might think that's a good thing. I think this is a negative

I'll come on to this at the end of the video.

You sit nice and low. The a-pillar is very thin from the viewpoint of the drivers. The forward visibility is excellent.

This car has got a very low nose. You notice it even more when you are sitting inside

It's got two wheel arches pointing out where the two front wheels are.

The forward visibility has got a little bit of mid-engine sports car feel to it.

That's how good it is. And probably surprising for full battery electric vehicle in 2024, it's got many physical controls, not just here.

You've got a role of physical controls, but I need to emphasize this is a magnetically attached add-on.

You can choose not to have this but I think it's nice that Xiaomi gives the option to the users.

And that's a big feature of this car is how much you can customize this, this mounting points here, here, here and here.

Xiaomi will open the standard to the market and to its ecosystem to develop all kinds of add-ons.

They even designed quarter-inch mounts on the driver side the passenger side and the center of the mirrors to mount your GoPros.

I quote the manufacturers representative, "If you think that's the end of the ecosystem, well, you're wrong."

What the international audience may not know is Xiaomi is so much more than just a phone company in China.

They make all sorts of things like the air conditioner behind me, the curtain, this ceiling light and every piece of home appliance you see in this sitting room.

We're on a Xiaomi event so, of course, everything you see here are from Xiaomi.

But I need to emphasize that especially towards the international audience that this is the real-life scenario of many Chinese homes.

My mom's house is exactly like this. The TV, the Wi-Fi router, the floor sweeper, the smart speaker, all among the bestseller, if not, the very bestsellers of their respective category.

And the best thing is they are all controlled by just one voice command.

When your phone, your TV, every piece of home appliance is already provided by Xiaomi, now, of course, comes the big one: the car.

And you can control it from literally just about anywhere in your home

In here is kind of the standard affair the infotainment.

Of course, it's silky smooth, but the phone integration is next level.

Here is not a CarPlay on steroids, but the entire phone mirrored onto this screen, full functionality, 60 frames per second.

If you don't want your phone's mirrored image floating on top of the infotainment, what you can do is pin any app straight on to the infotainment itself.

Now it becomes an integrated part of the infotainment. And of course, it's still full functionality, 60 frames per second.

This really is next level phone integration.

Xiaomi's idea for the rear cabin entertainment are these iPad or Android tablet mounts.

It provides power, it's connected to the infotainment. You can control the seating, the music, the air conditioning.

Whatever you want, you can provide navigation tips and pin them straight to the infotainment screen.

Now all of these are kind of expected when you consider Xiaomi makes everything, the car, the phone, the tablet.

What's unusual now is what's in front of me is not a Xiaomi Android tablet, but it's an iPad.

You can achieve everything I just said by just downloading an app through the App Store and your Apple ecosystem works perfectly with the Xiaomi ecosystem.

The front seats are set to my driving position. I'm 5'11 and you can tuck your feet into the bottom of the front seats.

You can see there are enough space, but it's just not executive level. Let's call it that way.

You sit a bit low. There's enough legroom and headroom, but you can see already from the exterior design this is a car that's biased towards the front cabin and a driving experience.

In terms of practicality, it's got a hundred liter plus frunk.

The shape is a bit weird, but you can get a international carry-on size luggage into this and a boot is 500 liter plus.

So standard practice.

Now the driving. Firstly, the throttle pedal. It's very similar to a Model 3. It's heavy.

It's reassuring. It tells you it's got a lot of performance, but it's not difficult to modulate in low-speed traffic.

I know that may sound contradictory on so many levels if not driven a Model 3, but it really is like that.

So the Xiaomi's throttle pedal is similar to the best throttle pedal in my opinion in electric vehicles, and that's the Model 3.

I think that's no bad thing.

The steering in the comfort mode at low speed is very light, fingertip light.

I think you can do a u-turn just using one finger.

It's that light.

But once you build up the speed, the difference in terms of steering weight between different modes are not actually that different.

I've seen there's a beta track mode in the infotainment system. It's got 10 stages of traction control. It's got multiple levels of stability programs.

It's not open yet. And right now at this moment in time, it's still biased towards stability.

Let's hope in future, Xiaomi can invite us back on a track to experience its full dynamic capabilities.

We are traveling at 120 kph at the moment, wind noise, I think you can tell it's very impressive, especially for single-layer glass.

The tire noise, well, I've heard a number of people say it's there's some tire noise. I don't know what cars they're driving.

Maybe they are driving Mercedes EQS all day long. But in my opinion, it's already quite good

So let's say the tire noise divides opinion at the moment.

We're also on the highway cruise control of this car. It can switch its own lane, overtake cars.

It's got LiDAR all-round camera vision and two NVIDIA O-ring chips.

It says it will have nationwide assisted driving coverage by the end of this year, but that could also mean just a point-to-point mode.

And this highway cruise control at the moment, it's usable, but it's not near the industry-leading level. Let's put it that way.

The overriding impression for me today is there's nothing particularly wrong with it.

I think you will be even more amazed if you are very experienced with cars.

You know how difficult it is.

You know how easy it is to mess something up in your first attempt in a road car, in an electric vehicle, in a smart electric vehicle.

I mean, a lot of legacy automakers mess it up. But Xiaomi, this is the first car and it drives completely normal and I need to emphasize it's not mediocre good.

It's very good. If it is possible to blindfold me while driving, you can tell me this is the latest Audi electric vehicle and I wouldn't be able to tell anything that's Significantly not Audi's level.

It's that good. It's a very complete experience. I know it will sound Incredible. It doesn't sound very convincing if You're watching this video for the first time and you know nothing about Xiaomi's effort in the past three years trying to make this car.

But I will say it's a very sincere effort and my last doubt on this car is that there must be something wrong with the driving dynamics. It's been proven wrong. It's a very, very complete car.

When a phone company makes its first attempt on a car, you expect them to make some rookie mistakes. You expect something to be fundamentally wrong.

To be honest, that's my expectation coming into this test, but I didn't find any.

It looks okay, if not, a hundred percent original, the interior feels solid and of course, Xiaomi knocked it out of the park in terms of connectivity and the ecosystem.

And a biggest surprise to me, it drives really well.

It feels every bit as sporty as the Tesla Model 3, but so much more refined.

Those are all quite boring words.

But I think I need to put you into perspective.

When the rest of the world are scaling back on EVs and Xiaomi, a phone company comes out with this in three years and I'm struggling to find anything that's particularly wrong with it, that in itself is nothing short of a miracle.

The car we have here today is the SU7 Max.

It's the 800-volt dual motor with the big battery. We're expecting this car to cost around 42,000 US dollars. The base model was just a 400-volt, smaller LFP battery, we're expecting that to be around 30,000 US dollars.

By the time you're watching this, the price would be out.

So tell us if I'm right or not.

On closing thoughts, I think I need to address the elephant in the room and that's its lack of originality in design.

I think that's a great shame because this is a very solid EV.

It's much more solid than many legacy automakers first attempt on electric vehicles.

If you benchmark this against all of the EVs that's coming out in 2024, it will be very close to the very very top.

But I also understand why some critics will easily label this car as a Porsche copycat.

Its proportions on the exterior design, especially the steering wheel.

I mean, there are ways to design a sporty good-feeling steering wheel without being that similar to the Porsche steering wheel.

As I mentioned this car starts at $30,000 and this car we see here today is $42,000. Some people could forgive it for being that similar to Porsche because of the pricing.

But I think it should be its own thing. It's the Xiaomi car. It's the first car in the world made by a phone company.

It's already world-leading in connectivity and has its own ideas for ecosystemm.

And it's so solid just being a car. It should not be a cut-price replacement on an imitation of anything.

Let's hope the Xiaomi car can find its own identity in its second iteration.

That is all from the Telescope today. If you enjoyed this video keep watching, keep subscribing, more videos coming along very soon