Chinese electric vehicles factories have become tourist hotspots

Xiaomi published his first model of EV, the Su7, at the beginning of 2024. By the end of the year, foreign diplomats, investors and guests of other Chinese companies had already started to get to the company factory in Beijing to participate in 20 visits to each month, but the company did not create a standardized experience for the public until the beginning of 2025. In the first place, Xiaomi offered only three tours with each month.

But the excursion proved incredibly popular and Xiaomi quickly started planning significantly more slot. In July, the company said that it will offer a tour every day and you are tours almost every weekend, hosting over 1,100 visitors in total. When the July registration was opened, however, over 27,000 questions were flooded during the night, according to the Xiaomi app, so the chances of grabbing a ticket remain scarce.

Those lucky enough to secure a place can expect before being brought to an exhibition room to get to know significant innovations in Xiaomi’s electric cars. Visitors then jump on a shuttle and enter three out of six working production lines to observe workers and robots in action.

Subsequently, they can test an Xiaomi Su7 model on an exam, in which a trained racing car driver demonstrates how the car can accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in a few seconds. “It was fantastic: he turns off very quickly, with instant football,” says Zhao in Wired. Recently, Xiaomi also started selling meals at affordable prices at the factory and souvenirs to complete the experience.

Another visitor notes that the shuttle will stop temporarily if it hinders a robot, which is scheduled to carry out its work on a strictly temporary program and is therefore less flexible than a human worker. Yunyuan recalls that after the end of the tour, his daughter observed: “I have to study more, otherwise I will not be able to find a job in the future. They will be robots that do all the job”.

The Xiaomi factory is an excellent example of how Chinese companies are rapidly evolving from highly automated highly automated production production, thanks to new progress in robotics and artificial intelligence. In recent years, the Chinese government has heavily promoted the idea of ​​”factories of lights” that do not require human work, which means that machines can work in darkness without anyone needing to turn on the lights. Companies that have managed to reach this high level of automation, from Foxconn TO giants of domestic applianceThey transformed their factories into marketing opportunities, inviting humans to wonder about technology rather than to do work.

Nio, another main manufacturer of electric vehicles in China, has publicly shown one of its highly automated factories since the end of 2023. In 2024, over 130,000 people visited the factory, where some production lines such as the bodywork reached 100 %automation, according to a declaration sent by the company. Zhang states that when his last group of tour visited the Nio factory in the city of Hefei last month, the participants were able to view three of the four production lines. (The car painting process, however, was excluded from public visits.)