Yesterday Li Auto launched yet another large SUV called the L9. Its starting price of US $68,654 may not seem noteworthy until we consider that the car is even larger than the Mercedes EQS SUV, offers a longer range, is packed with the same intensity of luxury, but carries a price just half as much.
Auto Li L9: Specs
The car packs a 44.5 kWh extended battery, 39.2 kWh of which is usable to give a drive of 180kms according to WLTC. Once this is exhausted, a 1.5T 4-cylinder range extender offers additional run to offer a total range of 1,315km on a single charge. L9 is not a purely electric car and its fuel consumption is around 5.9l per 100kms. These figures make it a highly efficient car at its size. The engine has no direct connection with the wheels. Rather it is used to recharge the battery which then drives the dual electric motors. The motors yield 330kW (442hp) of power and a torque of 620Nm, adequate enough to provide a sprint of 0 to 100km/h in 5.3 seconds.
Auto Li L9: Intelligence inside
Inside, the car comes with an entire set of smart assistance systems. The car uses Li Auto AD Max which has high-definition cameras and LIDAR that fires 128 lasers to build a high-resolution surroundings perception. With 1.53 million per second of a point cloud content, it is the highest performance LIDAR as yet of a production vehicle.
Since its inception seven years ago Li Auto has established a solid footing in the market to no longer be called a startup. It has been producing cars at scale since 2019 and featured in the NASDAQ list 2020 onwards and at the HKSE since 2021. Of the few rare companies for which the recent market trouble did not have losses in store, Li Auto is one of these. And the upcoming L9 certainly has it all to turn out to be the hottest selling car in 2022 in the new energy vehicle sector.
