Xiaomi had a great year thus far, the company managed to sell (or will soon) 60 million devices and by doing that reach their goal for this year. These are especially great results if you considering they moved “only” 19 million devices a year before. Unfortunately, Xiaomi’s sales in India were stopped by the New Delhi High Court considering Ericsson filed in a patent infringement charges with the court. This will quite probably shake up Xiaomi to some extent considering the ban won’t be lifted before February 5th. That being said, some new reports came our way from China carrying some really interesting news.
This Chinese OEM is well-known for manufacturing smartphones and tablets, but they also dabbled in smart TVs and fitness trackers, for example. It seems like Xiaomi plans to differentiate even more and build and release a Xiaomi branded car, yes, you read that right. This has been rumored a while back, but almost no one took those rumors seriously until Tesla cars were sighted in front of Xiaomi offices in Beijing. The newest report from China claims that Xiaomi is working with an unnamed Chinese car manufacturer in order to manufacture their own A0 class car codenamed “Mistla”. A0 class basically means that these are extremely small cars, which are extremely popular in China, and Chinese people really love their cars and you can really see a lot of diversity there considering the significant number of car manufacturers. This car will reportedly come with a built-in Android operating system (Android Auto?) with MIUI being included in the picture of course. The price is said to be around 39,999 Yuan ($6467), which is extremely cheap in my opinion, but there are many more cheaper cars being driven in China as we speak.
No matter whether you like Xiaomi or not, this is very, very interesting. I personally always like to see news like this, it would certainly be interesting to see a smartphone manufacturer release something like this, especially if we’re talking about an electric car or at least a hybrid. What are your thoughts here?