Xiaomi may still be best known for its smartphones. But at IFA 2026, the Chinese technology company presented plans for a future that no longer fits inside people’s pockets.
Home appliances and connected devices have become an increasingly important part of its business. Now, Xiaomi is putting greater emphasis on four wheels — and the shift is hard to miss at IFA.
Inside the company’s exhibition space in Berlin, one of the first things visitors encounter is a futuristic-looking car carrying the familiar Xiaomi logo, but on a very different scale.
Xiaomi cars are already a familiar sight for consumers in China. Now the company wants to bring them to European roads too.
In that spirit, Xiaomi announced at IFA 2026 that it plans to launch its electric vehicles in Europe in 2027, marking the next stage of its expansion beyond smartphones and consumer electronics.
But simply selling cars is not the company’s ultimate goal. Like many of the technology companies exhibiting in Berlin, Xiaomi is increasingly focused on connecting different parts of everyday life.
It calls its approach “Human x Car x Home”, an ecosystem designed to link personal devices, the car and technology around the home. In practice, the idea is to let you steer your home from behind the wheel of your car.
Euronews took a closer look at Xiaomi’s vision at IFA 2026 to see how that ecosystem is supposed to work.
‘Human x Car x Home’: The vision
Rather than treating the car as a separate product, Xiaomi wants to integrate it into the same connected system that already links devices around the home. The aim is for users to move between different environments while staying connected to the devices they rely on every day.
At IFA, Xiaomi demonstrated what that could look like in practice. From inside the car, users could control devices back at home, including opening and closing connected curtains and switching the air conditioning on or off.
This means the car could effectively become another control point for the smart home. Someone leaving work, for example, could adjust the air conditioning before arriving home, while other connected devices could be controlled directly from the vehicle.
Xiaomi says AI and its HyperOS operating system are intended to provide the technological link between these devices. Its longer-term vision goes beyond users manually controlling individual appliances, with AI eventually using contextual information to coordinate devices across the car, smartphone and home.
For Xiaomi, the car is therefore not only a new product category, but another part of a wider connected ecosystem — extending its technology beyond smartphones and the home and onto the road.
Alongside its more concrete plans, Xiaomi has also left room for imagination, exploring what could become possible further down the road.
Among the concepts presented at IFA is the Xiaomi Vision Gran Turismo. The electric hypercar concept was developed for the Gran Turismo racing game series and explores ideas around design, aerodynamics and digital interaction.
For now, however, this vehicle remains firmly a concept rather than a preview of a production model expected to hit the road any time soon.
Local partners
But despite leaving room for experimentation, Xiaomi also made clear that its European ambitions go beyond concepts. At its IFA press conference on 3 September, the company took concrete steps towards its planned market entry.
During a signing ceremony, the company signed letters of intent with eight German automotive retail groups: Emil Frey Germany, the Ernst Dello Group, Autohaus Dinnebier, Hahn Automobile, the LUEG Mobility Group, Fett & Wirtz, SPT Avior and Penske-Jacobs.
Germany, however, is only intended to be the starting point, with Xiaomi planning similar partnerships in other European markets.
“Europe is a key market for our global strategy,” Xiaomi Chief Marketing Officer Xu Fei said during the press conference.
The company is also planning significant investment to support this broader strategy. Between 2026 and 2030, Xiaomi says it intends to invest more than €24 billion globally in research and development, with a focus on areas including AI, operating systems, semiconductors, intelligent vehicles, robotics and smart manufacturing.