The Xiaomi YU7 was launched on June 26, and the company announced that 240,000 lock-in orders were made in the first 18 hours following the launch.

Xiaomi YU7 can be ordered in two ways. Customers can pay a deposit of 5,000 yuan (700 USD), and their pre-order is refundable for seven days, after which it becomes locked in. Customers also have the option to select their car configuration and lock it in manually, making their order non-refundable.

The second option is to pay a 20,000 yuan (2,800 USD) deposit for a priority delivery order, which is automatically locked in and non-refundable. The priority delivery option is currently displaying “sold out” in the Xiaomi app.

Yesterday, Beijing-based smartphone giant announced it received 200,000 orders in 3 minutes and 289,000 orders in one hour. Those orders were a mix of standard 7-day refundable orders and locked-in orders. This is the first time Xiaomi reports on lock-in order data. Xiaomi didn’t elaborate, but the reported 240,000 lock-in orders are most likely a mix of priority orders and manually locked-in orders.

Xiaomi entered the car-making business in March 2021, announcing an initial investment of 10 billion yuan (1.4 billion USD), and an additional investment of 10 billion USD (71 billion yuan) over the next ten years. In 2022, Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun claimed their target is to sell 10 million EVs annually.

Three years after announcing its entry into the EV-making race, Xiaomi launched its first car, the SU7 sedan, which broke the Chinese internet.

When SU7 started sales on March 28, 2024, it received 50,000 preorders in 27 minutes and nearly 90,000 preorders in the first 24 hours, essentially selling out the car for the rest of the year due to limited capacity at Xiaomi’s Beijing plant. From its launch (March 2024 – May 2025), SU7 delivered over 272,00 units, based on China EV DataTracker.

Lei Jun, Xiaomi CEO, anticipated that demand for the YU7 will be about three times higher than the company’s first model, the SU7 sedan, launched last year. In China, the sales ratio of SUVs vs sedans is about 3:1.

The Xiaomi YU7 starts at 253,500 yuan ($35,300) for the 830 km CLTC range version. That undercuts the Tesla Model Y by 10,000 yuan (1,400 USD) as China’s best-selling car of 2024 starts at 263,500 yuan for the RWD version in China.