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A finished electric car rolling off an assembly line every 76 seconds sounds like a marketing slogan, but at Xiaomi Corporation’s (HKG: 1810) vehicle plant on the southern edge of Beijing, that figure describes a normal working day. The factory, officially called the Xiaomi EV Hyperfactory, is the company’s first complete car manufacturing site, built after Xiaomi entered the electric vehicle business in 2021 with no prior automotive experience of any kind.
It helps to separate two numbers that often get blended together in coverage of the plant. The 76 second figure describes how often a finished car exits the line, not how long any single vehicle spends moving through the plant from raw material to showroom ready condition. Xiaomi has not published an official door-to-door build time for the SU7 sedan produced at this site. What the company has disclosed is narrower, and in some ways more telling: inside the body shop, the time it takes to pick up parts and fully assemble them onto a car body runs under 30 seconds, which Xiaomi says is twice as fast as the industry norm for that step.
The reason Xiaomi can move that quickly traces back to a single piece of equipment called the Hyper Die Casting 79100 Cluster. The machine applies 9,100 tons of clamping force, weighs roughly 1,050 metric tons, and consolidates 72 previously stamped and welded parts into one die cast rear underbody structure made from a proprietary titanium-based alloy. That single casting eliminates roughly 840 welding joints and cuts about 45% of the production time needed for that component, with each unit cast in about 100 seconds. The finished part is about 17% lighter than the version it replaces, reduces road noise inside the cabin by roughly 2 decibels, and is rated for more than 2 million kilometers of use, over 10 times the lifespan of a traditional stamped floor panel.
The approach echoes, and by one measure exceeds, what Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) pioneered with its own large single piece castings, widely known as the Giga Press. Tesla’s most advanced U.S. machines apply around 9,000 tons of clamping force, meaning Xiaomi’s 9,100 ton system edges it out on that specific figure, even as Tesla still leads on overall manufacturing scale and years of production history. On raw output, Xiaomi’s 76 second cadence works out to roughly 40 cars an hour at full capacity, while Tesla has cited a chassis target of about 45 seconds at Giga Berlin, closer to 80 an hour, with a fully wired and finished car reportedly exiting closer to once a minute, or about 60 an hour, once later assembly stages are counted. A separate claim, published by the blog NextBigFuture in October 2025 and not confirmed by Tesla itself, describes a newer Unboxed assembly method at Giga Shanghai cutting total build time to roughly 2.5 hours per vehicle with 95% of the car built robotically, up from a historical 70% to 80%. That figure has not appeared in any official Tesla disclosure and should be read as speculative rather than confirmed. Xiaomi developed its version of the die casting equipment, along with the titanium-based alloy that feeds it, in-house rather than licensing the technology from an outside supplier.
The speed shows up in the numbers Xiaomi has reported publicly. The 100,000th SU7 rolled off the line in just 230 days from launch, which the company describes as the fastest a new automaker has reached that milestone. For all of 2025, Xiaomi Auto delivered 411,082 vehicles and generated $15.8 billion (CN¥106.1 billion) in revenue, a 223.8% jump from the year before. Demand has, at times, outpaced what the factory could produce. At one point the original plant reportedly ran at 160% of its rated capacity, which pushed Xiaomi to add a second production shift and plan for combined output of 300,000 vehicles a year across two build phases.
None of this happened by accident. Xiaomi has put more than $14.9 billion (CN¥100 billion) into research and development over the past five years and has committed a further $29.7 billion (CN¥200 billion) over the next five, spending that underwrites not just the die casting cluster but the broader push toward faster, more automated production across the plant. Whether that pace holds as Xiaomi scales toward its stated 300,000 vehicle a year target, or as rivals catch up with their own casting technology, is the part of the story still being written.
