Xiaomi just sent its YU7 GT electric SUV around the Nürburgring Nordschleife with nobody behind the wheel and came away with an official time. The run wrapped up in 10 minutes and 29.483 seconds on June 8, establishing the first publicly validated autonomous lap on the 12.94-mile track that features 73 turns and more than 1,000 feet of elevation change.
The very same model had broken the production SUV lap record a few weeks previously, thanks to a human driver behind the wheel who shaved 7 minutes and 22.755 seconds off the clock. This new driverless effort lags around 3 minutes behind that remarkable mark, which still puts it in a very obvious category of its own for the brand, a technical step forward, to say the least. The car really showed its thing on the lengthy back straight, reaching 210km/h with no human intervention on the accelerator.
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The very same model had broken the production SUV lap record a few weeks previously, thanks to a human driver behind the wheel who shaved 7 minutes and 22.755 seconds off the clock. This current driverless effort lags about 3 minutes behind that impressive milestone, but it remains in a very obvious category of its own for the brand, a technological step forward to say the least. The car really showed its thing on the lengthy back straight, reaching 210km/h with no human intervention on the accelerator.
The footage shared by Xiaomi and Nürburgring shows the SUV threading the needle around turns with ease, using steady, cautious lines rather than white-knuckle maneuvers. They gave themselves plenty of room to maneuver rather than clipping the apex of a corner or really pushing the tires to their limits, which kept everything nice and safe while still allowing for quick exits into the straights where instant torque would come in handy to recover some lost seconds. The speed limits did come in around 131 mph on the Döttinger Höhe straight, costing them a few seconds that they could have saved.
Officials at the Nürburgring timed and confirmed it, eliminating any questions about its accuracy. The onboard cameras show that there is no one in the driver’s seat, and the vehicle drives from start to finish without any external assistance or safety driver. Xiaomi describes this as an early baseline rather than a final product, and that the data will be used to improve their autonomous systems in the future, eventually making its way into regular production vehicles.
This lap is in some really interesting company, since the 10:29 time would have easily kept up with certain historic manned laps from decades ago, but it’s all because to some clever software decisions rather than a professional driver’s split-second reflexes. For Xiaomi, which has previously used the YU7 GT platform to chase outright performance records, this run demonstrates that they have the hardware in place to support some real autonomous operation on the outskirts of what your normal production car would see.
