Xiaomi has added another marker to China's accelerated push into performance electric vehicles, this time without a driver behind the wheel. The smartphone-maker-turned-automaker’s YU7 GT has completed a fully autonomous lap of the Nürburgring Nordschleife on June 8, 2026, in 10 minutes 29.483 seconds, navigating all 73 corners of the 12.9-mile circuit without any human intervention, the first such record set on the German circuit, under partially wet conditions.
The result builds on two years of chassis and software development led by Xiaomi's Europe R&D Center in Munich. The car used to set that time was fitted with Xiaomi's Track Package, which strips out the rear seats in favor of a roll cage, adds wider semi-slick rear tires, and includes an active hydraulic suspension capable of automatically lowering ride height and adjusting power distribution for circuit use.
Xiaomi says the vehicle was not simply replaying a recorded human-driving line, but made real-time corrective decisions, including redistributing torque among individual wheels to recover from situations that could have caused a loss of control, faster than any human driver could react.
As for performance, twin motors produce a combined 1,003 horsepower, enough for a 0-62mph time of 2.92 seconds and a top speed of 186mph. During the lap, the car reached approximately 130mph on the circuit's back straight. A 101.7kWh battery delivers a claimed 438-mile range under China's CLTC cycle, which typically returns higher figures than the EPA standard.
The autonomous time trails the YU7 GT's own human-driven lap of seven minutes, 22.755 seconds, which made it the fastest SUV ever recorded at the Nordschleife, beating the Audi RS Q8's previous mark by nearly 14 seconds. That figure itself followed an earlier Track Package version of the YU7 GT, which first broke the SUV record in May at 7:34.931, narrowly ahead of the Audi RS Q8's 7:36.698.
The production SU7 Ultra held the outright four-door record at 7:04.957, a mark that briefly took the fastest production EV title before Porsche's Taycan Turbo GT, fitted with a Manthey kit, reclaimed it at 6:55.533.
China's performance in the EV segment has produced a rapid sequence of benchmark results, several of which duPont REGISTRY has tracked closely. The trajectory traces back to Nio's EP9 hypercar in 2018, accelerated through BYD's Yangwang U9 Xtreme reaching 308mph and the Yangwang U9 Track Edition's subsequent 472km/h run (293.29 mph), and continued with Xiaomi's own SU7 Ultra prototype lapping the Nordschleife at 6:22.091.
The YU7 GT's driverless run sits outside that competition entirely as it establishes a new category altogether. Robotaxi services already operate commercially in San Francisco, Phoenix, Dubai, and a growing number of Chinese cities, while taxi rides around the Nürburgring itself, driven by professional pilots in road cars, have long been available to tourists. Xiaomi's result raises an obvious question for the circuit's next chapter: whether a driverless taxi lap of the Ring could someday become a reality.
But for now, it needs to be seen how Xiaomi tries to improve on this and if more players operating in the EV and autonomous driving space join this race.
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Images: Xiaomi
