Chinese EV Spotted at Ferrari Headquarters

A Xiaomi SU7 Ultra was seen at Maranello recently.

It’s thought that this may have been imported for benchmarking against Ferrari’s first electric sports car. However, the Italian has delayed that project until 2028 because of what it claims is ‘zero’ demand. Here is a company that knows its customers! Still, Ferrari clearly has a bob each way if it has gone to the effort of obtaining a benchmark like this.

Of course, there may be other reasons that the Xiaomi SU7 Ultra prototype was seen leaving Ferrari headquarters in Maranello. That said, the SU7 isn’t sold in Italy, and this car wasn’t wearing regular Italian plates. Therefore, Ferrari must have imported the EV for some good reason.

The SU7 Ultra recently shredded the production EV lap record around the Nürburgring, with a time of 6min 22sec. The tri-motor monster outputs 1154kW, and has a sprint time of 1.98sec. Its top speed is almost 360km/h so you can see why people at Maranello might have raised an eyebrow.

The designers and engineers are presumably chasing similar figures from their first EV. The SU7 Ultra has a special thermal management system designed for sustained high-speed driving. That’s probably just one of the things that Ferrari engineers are studying, amongst others. There’s also a suggestion that a delegation from Ferrari visited the Xiaomi HQ last year to talk about future high-performance EV motors. Perhaps that is how this all came about.

Whatever, they have plenty of time to ponder the inner workings of the SU7 Ultra, at least three years unless action in the EV sector picks up dramatically in the interim.