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A close look at the China-specific Li Auto L9 electric 3-row SUV

27th June 2023, 18:42 by Rahul Nagaraj

The size of the vehicle can be compared with a Kia Carnival or maybe the BMW X7.

BHPian Ovais recently shared this with other enthusiasts.

Hello all. I hope you are all well. I have recently moved to China and found out that the Chinese Automobile market has come a long way since 2019 when I last visited China. Back in 2019, quite a major population of vehicles on the road constituted of Chinese designed and made vehicles, with many of the Chinese manufacturers into car production for over a decade, but since those were the earlier renditions by the manufacturers, they were generally at par with Japanese or American Cars from the early 2000s in terms of features and much lower than them in terms of quality.

Now however, the dynamics of the Chinese Automobile market have greatly changed and while the world was focusing on the chaos caused by the Covid-19 Pandemic, the Chinese were hard at work, designing some amazing vehicles that not only are packed with features, they boast a marked increase in quality as well. Yes, the Chinese have worked really hard to up their Automobile game and it shows.

The car that I’m going to be sharing in this thread is no different. With its sleek and minimalistic design, The Li Auto L9 is packed with some amazing features that would put many vehicles in higher price brackets to shame.

Li Auto was founded in 2015, by Li Xiang. The orientation of the company is towards Electric Vehicles, equipped with an onboard range extender, which essentially is an engine, that does not power the wheels, but it charges the batteries and provides electrical energy to the motors to drive the car. The first car that Li Auto introduced was a Li One, which, owing to the features that it offered, took the Chinese market quite substantially. Since then, Li Auto has been even harder at work and in 2022, it introduced three new vehicles, the L7, L8 and the L9.

This review is about Li Auto’s flagship model, the L9 which is a 7-seater Crossover Utility Vehicle (CUV). Let’s start with the exterior of the vehicle.

The exterior of the car follows a very minimalistic, yet modern design all around. This is not a small vehicle by any standard. It is quite a huge vehicle which is 5218mm long, 1998mm wide and 1800mm tall, with a wheelbase of 3105mm. The size of the vehicle can be compared with a Kia Carnival or maybe the BMW X7, which happens to be the vehicle whose customers Li Auto has targeted.

While the design may be minimalistic, there are some design features that really make the vehicle stand out from the crowd. Take the 2.1 metre-long LED Day Time Running Light bar up front as an example. Li Auto has spent a fortune on designing this LED light, which continues from one corner to the other, without any breaks. Li Auto calls it the Halo Bar.

You could see an LED bar in the Li Auto ONE as well but what sets this LED bar apart from it is the fact that it is a single piece, compared to the 3 pieces in the ONE. There is no light bleeding and it glows evenly throughout. It is placed inside a clear glass casing in a way that makes it look like it’s floating. With Amber Corner Marker lights, you can easily tell the L9 apart in the traffic, with this unique design feature. The Halo Bar can be seen on the L7 and the L8 as well.

The rear also has a similar LED bar in red. While this LED bar glows perfectly from corner to corner as well, it is in three pieces for obvious reasons.