The Electric: Xiaomi Is Likely to Upstage Apple With a Tech-Laden EV

Since 2014, Apple has worked on a quasi-secret project it calls Titan—an effort to create an electric vehicle worthy of the company’s name. The company has cycled through four Titan leaders, changed its vision for the car, changed it back again, spent more than $1 billion in some years on the project—and still produced no EV. Adding insult to the ordeal, Apple’s vaunted tradition of secrecy has broken down, leaving much of the unflattering drama to spill out in the media.

The same year Apple engineers began working on Titan, China’s Xiaomi—the world’s third-largest seller of smartphones—paid $13.7 million for a small stake in a Chinese GPS navigation company. It was the first of more than 70 investments in batteries, chips, charging, lithium, autonomous driving—and almost every other major technological aspect of an EV. Now Xiaomi, with a $10 billion, 10-year EV development budget, plans to release its first electric vehicle, code-named MS11 but reportedly to be called Modena. The launch is planned for the first half of next year, after an expected final regulatory approval from China.