Range anxiety is rarely about the commute. It's about the holiday weekend, the fully loaded car, and the charging station with a queue stretching past the petrol pumps. Chinese car buyers have found their answer to that problem in extended-range electric vehicles, and Xiaomi Auto's latest sales report shows just how strongly the market rewards that formula.
Xiaomi's automotive arm shipped 50,168 vehicles in October, according to figures from the China Passenger Car Association. That is the company's best month of the year, a 25.37% improvement over September and a 3.11% gain on the same month last year, snapping a two-month slide. It also came within a whisker of history - just 44 units short of the 50,212 record set back in December 2025. Yet the real story is not the total itself. It is the fact that, for the first time in Xiaomi's short automotive life, vehicles with a fuel tank outsold vehicles without one.
Source: CnEVPost
The turnaround rests almost entirely on the SkyNomad series, Xiaomi's first extended-range models, which only went on sale on September 7. October deliveries of the SkyNomad line hit 27,147 units - a 118.15% surge from the 12,444 registered in its partial debut month. In other words, one freshly launched EREV family generated 54.11% of Xiaomi's entire October volume. The five-seat Sky Nomad N70 climbed 103.69% month-on-month to 14,558 deliveries, while the bigger N90 flagship jumped 137.66% to 12,589. And the pipeline is far from empty: Xiaomi logged more than 70,000 firm orders in the first 30 days after launch, so the waiting list remains long.
Both SUVs ride on the Kunlun platform, where the petrol engine never drives a single wheel. A 1.5-liter turbocharged four-cylinder sourced from Harbin Dongan produces 150 hp (112 kW) purely as a generator, topping up either a 52 kWh LFP pack in the rear-wheel-drive N70 or a 76 kWh NMC battery in the all-wheel-drive Max versions. To put that second figure in perspective, the Max battery is bigger than what you get in a standard-range Tesla Model Y. The payoff is up to 380 km of WLTP electric-only driving in the N70 Max, and a total CLTC range of 1,461 km when the generator joins in.
On the road, the dual-motor N70 Max and N90 Max behave like proper performance EVs. Their front and rear motors deliver a combined 416 hp (310 kW) and 690 Nm, enough to push the 2,561 kg N70 to 100 km/h in between 4.3 and 5.5 seconds depending on the version. Air suspension with double wishbones up front and a five-link setup at the rear keeps the ride composed, and when the generator eventually fires up, acoustic glass and noise-optimized Bridgestone tires keep it humming quietly in the background. Xiaomi being Xiaomi, there are gimmicks too - the N90 packs six exterior microphones and external speakers, so owners can shout voice commands at the car while unloading at a campsite.
The flip side of the SkyNomad boom is a chill settling over Xiaomi's battery-electric range. Deliveries of the SU7 sedan and YU7 SUV together fell by 4,550 units versus September, to 23,021 in October. The SU7 managed 12,984 cars, down 17.57% on the month and 13.39% on the year - its thirteenth consecutive month of annual declines. The YU7 took a harder hit, dropping 15.08% month-on-month and a dramatic 70.18% year-on-year to 10,037 units.
Source: CnEVPost
The overlap is hard to miss. For roughly RMB 260,000, a Xiaomi showroom visitor can pick between two five-seat SUVs: the YU7, with its coupe-like silhouette, 800-volt system enabling 12-minute fast charging and up to 835 km of CLTC range - or the SkyNomad N70, which trades the sleek roofline for family-friendly space and the freedom to cover 1,461 km across the countryside without planning a single charging stop. Most practical buyers are clearly choosing the safety net.
This reshuffle also puts Xiaomi's official ambitions in awkward light. Through the first ten months of the year, the company has delivered 336,658 vehicles, up 6.75% year-on-year, pushing lifetime cumulative deliveries to 887,966. But against its stated goal of 550,000 cars for the full year, that represents only 61.21%. Closing the gap would require 213,342 deliveries across November and December - roughly 106,671 a month, more than double anything the company has achieved. Barring a logistics miracle, the target is out of reach.
Still, the more consequential number from October may be the smallest one. Wholesale deliveries totaled 50,168, while domestic retail registrations came in at 50,123 - leaving 45 vehicles unaccounted for. Those are believed to be Xiaomi's first export batches, dispatched for homologation, testing, and dealer evaluation abroad. The company confirmed in September that it has signed memoranda of understanding with major German dealer groups to build out sales and service operations ahead of a planned European entry in 2027. For European incumbents already squeezed by Chinese software and battery economics, the prospect of a tech-laden family SUV that covers 380 km on electricity alone and carries its own generator for everything else should be genuinely unsettling.
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