This big blue car is a Li ONE, a large Chinese SUV with an advanced EREV powertrain. I saw it in Beijing on a hot summer’s day. It is painted in a color called Baby Blue and fitted with the original multispoke alloy wheels.
‘Li’ is the brand name. The brand is owned by a company called Li Auto. The Chinese brand name is Li Xiang (理想), and the Chinese company name is Li Xiang Auto (理想汽车). The logo is Li, with a capital L and a lowercase i.
The company was founded in 2015 by a gentleman called… Li Xiang. Yes, he named the business after himself, like Porsche and Ford. It is a Chinese name, so Li is his last name and Xiang is his first name. Li Xiang got rich with the ultra-popular automotive platform Autohome. He used the money he made with Autohome to start Li Auto.
The Li ONE, with ONE spelled in capitals, was Li’s first car. The ONE debuted in 2019 and was manufactured until 2021. It had a rather conservative SUV design, with a large grille, old-school door handles, and lights so large they seemed more 2015 than 2019. But it made a huge impact as the first car of a brand-new car maker. The Li ONE was huge: 5030x1960x1760, with a 2935 wheelbase and a 2825 curb weight.
The interior had a more impressive design than the exterior. It had a cabin-wide screen that was divided into 3 parts: the instrument panel, the infotainment, and the front-passenger entertainment. It had a large-diameter round steering wheel. The screen in the center stack controls the air conditioning and the seats. On the center tunnel the drive selector, a wireless charge, and two cup holders.
This interior color is called White, Li Auto didn’t come up with any poetic interior color names for the ONE. The name seems a bit off, as it looks more like beige instead of white.
Li sold the ONE in six-seat (2/2/2) and seven-seat (2/3/2) versions. The car we have here is a six-seater, and it is way more common than the seven-seater version. The windows of the ONE are notably large, and that makes for a great view out all around. The seats were nice but not super luxurious.
The most interesting feature of the ONE was the powertrain. At the time, Chinese car makers sold ICE, PHEVs, and EVs. The Li ONE, however, is an Extended Range Electric Vehicle (EREV), with an ICE engine as a generator for the batteries. The ICE engine does not directly power the wheels.
In the Li ONE, the power train consists of a 1.2 turbocharged 3-cylinder and two electric motors (one at the front and one at the rear). The output changed a little over the production run, as Li Auto continued to update the ONE. For this post, I used the 2021 numbers.
It has a single-speed EV gearbox and all-wheel drive. The output of the 1.2 turbo is 96 kW. The output of the electric motors is 100 kW/240 Nm (front) and 145 kW/215 Nm (rear). So more torque at the front, and more kW at the rear. The ONE has a 55-liter fuel tank and a CATL 40.5 kWh ternary lithium battery. Fuel consumption was 1.5L/100 km and electricity consumption was 16.9 kWh/100 km. The ONE has an impressive combined range of 1080 kilometers and an EV-only range of 188 kilometers.
The drive train was very advanced for the time, and many other automakers scrambled to develop EREVs, following Li Auto’s lead. The ONE was succeeded by the Li L8, which is the second-largest Li EREV SUV today, after the L9 and before the L7. Recently, Li Auto unveiled their first EV; the bonkers Li MEGA MPV.
The Li ONE sold for 349.800 yuan in 2021. That was a lot of money but it got you a whole lot of car. Li Auto is currently the best-selling ‘new’ Chinese new-energy vehicle (NEV) brand, with sales of some 40.000 cars per month at the time of writing. Impressive cars = impressive sales.