Lei Jun, founder and CEO of Xiaomi, hosted the company’s first livestream of 2026 by dismantling one of its own YU7 electric SUVs on camera, walking viewers through its build quality piece by piece in a direct response to mounting public scrutiny of Xiaomi’s electric vehicle safety record. The scrutiny followed two documented fatal incidents involving Xiaomi’s SU7 sedan: a March 2025 collision in Tongling, Anhui province, in which three people were killed while the vehicle’s smart-driving system was active, and an October 2025 crash in Chengdu, Sichuan province, in which an SU7 caught fire and a low-voltage power failure prevented its doors from opening.
Xiaomi’s response, laid out through 2026, has been concrete rather than purely rhetorical. On March 19, the company unveiled a revamped, new-generation SU7 that made lidar and 4D millimeter-wave radar standard equipment across the lineup, added redundant backup power specifically to keep door locks operable in a low-voltage failure, and introduced mechanical exterior door handles as a manual backup to electronic release mechanisms — a direct engineering response to the Chengdu incident. Despite roughly 20,000 yuan in added material costs from those upgrades, Xiaomi held the price increase to just 4,000 yuan, setting the new model’s starting price at 219,900 yuan, still 2.4% below Tesla’s comparable Model 3. Separately, a Xiaomi vice president overseeing the company’s safety department said Xiaomi is establishing a dedicated vehicle safety advisory committee with what the company described as “one-vote veto power” across every stage of vehicle development — meaning the committee can reportedly block a design or feature on safety grounds regardless of other departments’ input.
A Sales Slide the Safety Push Is Meant to Reverse
The safety concerns have coincided with a sharp decline in YU7 sales momentum: monthly deliveries fell from 37,869 units in January 2026 to 20,196 in February, 13,558 in March, and 9,876 in April — a steep four-month slide that predates and likely reflects, at least in part, the public attention on the fatal crashes and Xiaomi’s response to them. Lei Jun has continued to publicly commit to an ambitious 2026 delivery target of 550,000 vehicles, building on the more than 410,000 vehicles Xiaomi delivered in 2025, its first full year as a volume EV manufacturer — a target that industry analysts have described as increasingly difficult to hit given the sales trend, and one that has drawn additional scrutiny amid separate reports of inventory pressure tied to the YU7 rollout.
From Phones to Cars, With Lei Jun’s Personal Brand Attached
Lei founded Xiaomi in 2010 as a smartphone company, building it into one of the world’s largest phone makers before announcing in 2021 that Xiaomi would invest $10 billion over ten years to enter the electric vehicle business — a striking bet by a company with no prior automotive manufacturing experience. Lei has personally attached his own public image to Xiaomi’s cars more directly than most automotive CEOs, appearing in SU7 launch events, marketing videos, and now safety-focused livestreams himself, a strategy that built enormous initial consumer excitement around the SU7’s 2024 launch but also means Lei personally absorbs a disproportionate share of public scrutiny whenever the vehicles face safety criticism, given how closely he has tied his own name and reputation to the product.
Transparency as a Trust-Rebuilding Strategy
Lei’s decision to personally host a public teardown livestream, rather than delegate the safety response entirely to engineering or communications teams, reflects a deliberate strategy of using his own personal credibility — built over more than a decade as one of China’s most recognizable technology founders — to directly address safety concerns rather than let the crash reporting stand unanswered. Notably, Xiaomi’s approach mirrors an identical tactic from a direct competitor: Li Auto’s founder Li Xiang live-streamed his own multi-hour vehicle teardown just months later, in August 2026, suggesting the public teardown format may be becoming a broader industry response to price-war-era consumer skepticism about build quality across the entire Chinese EV sector, not a strategy unique to Xiaomi’s specific circumstances.
The Cost of Being a First-Time Automaker
Xiaomi’s entry into automaking without prior manufacturing experience carried real risk that the fatal crashes and subsequent scrutiny have made concrete: unlike phone hardware failures, which rarely carry life-or-death stakes, defects or design gaps in a mass-produced vehicle can have fatal consequences, and Xiaomi’s rapid, well-funded ramp into EV manufacturing has now been tested against that reality in full public view, with Lei’s own personal brand directly on the line alongside the company’s.
What This Means for Philippine Founders
Xiaomi’s phones and consumer electronics have deep market penetration in the Philippines, and any Filipino distributor or retailer positioning itself for a future Xiaomi EV entry into Southeast Asia should track how thoroughly the company’s safety response actually holds up under continued scrutiny, since brand trust built over a decade in phones does not automatically transfer to a category where safety failures carry far higher stakes. Philippine hardware and consumer product founders should also note Lei’s specific crisis-response choice: publicly, personally, and transparently addressing a safety failure — rather than routing the response purely through corporate statements — can meaningfully preserve consumer trust, provided the underlying engineering fixes genuinely address the documented problem rather than serving mainly as a public relations exercise.
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