Huawei and Chinese automaker Chery on Tuesday began taking orders for the second model under their premium electric vehicle brand Luxeed, priced between RMB 268,000 and RMB 348,000 ($37,654 and $48,894) and featuring what an executive called the world’s most advanced driver assistance system.
The Luxeed R7 five-seater sports utility vehicle has a sloping, coupe-style roofline, making it the most aerodynamic production car in the SUV segment, and boasts a roomier interior space than that of the Tesla Model S, according to the companies.
“We have conducted comprehensive evaluations from multiple aspects and found that Huawei ADS is the most powerful and safest intelligent driving system, bar none,” Richard Yu, chairman of the board of directors of Huawei’s Intelligent Automotive Solution business unit, said at a press event (our translation). Yu previously said Huawei’s employees narrowly avoided several incidents where a Tesla almost crashed into stationary objects such as trucks during a recent test drive in the US and Canada, TechNode reported.
The smartphone maker said drivers of ADS-enabled EVs traveled over 200 million km (124 million miles) in August, while its autonomous emerging braking feature has prevented more than 560,000 collisions for users as of Monday. By comparison, Tesla FSD users surpassed 1.3 billion cumulative miles in three years as of March this year.
The entry-level R7 has a driving range of 667 kilometers (415 miles) on a single charge and is capable of handling on-ramp to off-ramp driving and lane changing autonomously on national highways without the assistance of expensive lidar units. The higher-end versions of the R7 crossover travel 802 km at most per charge and feature the third version of Huawei’s Advanced Driving System (ADS), which the tech giant claimed allows cars to carry out most driving functions automatically from garage to garage nationwide.
The two companies expect the second model to help expand their product portfolio and drive sales for the new brand, following the lackluster sales performance of the S7 sedan, which reported deliveries of only 15,608 units from January to July. An earlier price cut did little to lift sales after customers complained about delivery delays and rivals such as Xiaomi and Zeekr rolled out their competitive offerings.
Meanwhile, Huawei, with another of its manufacturing partners Seres, has also introduced (in Chinese) a five-seat variant of their M9 full-size SUV priced between RMB 469,800 and RMB 569,800. Huawei said the three-row, six-passenger SUV has secured more than 130,000 reservations with non-refundable deposits since its launch in December and has been the top-selling model in the price segment of more than RMB 500,000 in China in the past five months.