Tours of electric vehicle factories have quickly become the hottest ticket in Beijing, with tens of thousands of people signing up each month for the chance to win a free visit. Chinese smartphone giant Xiaomi, which has reinvented itself as an EV maker in recent years, started offering the one-hour tours in January to visitors interested in seeing its factory up close and getting a race car experience in a Xiaomi EV.
As Chinese EV brands expand from competing on low prices to promoting premium features and sleek designs, they are increasingly putting their factories in the spotlight. At least two Chinese EV brands, Xiaomi and Nio, offer regular tours for the general public this year, and three more automakers have announced plans to follow suit.
“More and more Chinese EVs are using factory tours as an important channel of communication between the brand and the outside world. It offers a chance to not only see the production line up close, but also experience the human side of the brand,” says Freya Zhang, a research analyst at the investment consulting firm Tech Buzz China, who has been organizing tours for foreign investors to visit Chinese electric vehicle startups for two years.
People who have visited the Xiaomi factory say they were struck by the amount of automation on display. The company says that the overall automation rate at the factory has reached 91 percent, with some production lines like casting fully automated.
“The factory is huge with only a handful of workers. As I stood there watching, it was all robotic arms doing the work. The robots were all running preset programs—picking up parts from one place and delivering them to another, all in a very orderly manner,” says Yuanyuan, a Beijing resident who took her 13-year-old daughter on the Xiaomi tour last month. Yuanyuan says she had been applying to get tickets since January, but since the limited spots are awarded on a lottery basis, she was only finally able to secure them in May.
The EV factory tour trend is not entirely new: Chinese companies have long opened their manufacturing plants to potential investors, entrepreneurs, and groups of young students, but they haven’t become a universal tourist attraction until now. Like Coca Cola, Ben & Jerry’s, and other household names in the West, some Chinese EV brands have become so popular that the idea of getting a behind-the-scenes look has become exciting to a wide range of Chinese consumers. Many of the tourists aren’t even potential car buyers but are just there to marvel at the industrial robots as a weekend activity.
Zhao Mingfei, a Beijing resident, says he first learned about Xiaomi’s tours by watching livestream broadcasts by the company’s founder, Lei Jun, whose charismatic personality and annual motivational speeches have turned him into a celebrity in China. Zhao says he has long admired the CEO and owns a number of Xiaomi consumer gadgets. He tried to sign up for a tour in January immediately after registration opened, but didn’t get a spot. In February, however, he was one of 60 lucky people selected from more than 7,000 applicants, according to a screenshot he shared with WIRED of the reservation system.