Xiaomi’s Sky Nomad SUVs took 10,000 locked orders in four minutes

Xiaomi opened sales of its four Sky Nomad SUVs at 22:00 Beijing time on 7 September, three hours after pricing them on stage, and counted 10,000 locked orders four minutes later. We covered the Nomad SUVs on 3 September, before those prices came down.

The number counts 锁单, locked orders. That is the point in Xiaomi’s buying flow where a deposit stops being refundable and the car enters the production queue with its configuration frozen. It sits a step past a reservation, and a step past what Xiaomi has usually counted at launch.

What a locked order is

Xiaomi sells the Sky Nomad two ways. A buyer configuring a car pays 5,000 yuan, about KES 97,000, and can still cancel for three days; locking the order ends that. A buyer taking one of the cars Xiaomi built before launch pays 20,000 yuan, about KES 386,000, which locks straight away and is capped at one order per person. Those buyers get their car in one to five weeks.

Locking does not make an order a sale. A buyer can still walk away and forfeit the deposit, and the car is not a delivery until someone drives it home.

How it compares with the SU7 and YU7

The Xiaomi SU7 sedan took 88,898 firm orders in its first 24 hours in March 2024. That total mixed refundable and non-refundable orders, on a seven-day cancellation window that ran longer than the one to three days most Chinese carmakers allowed.

The YU7 SUV took 200,000 firm orders in three minutes in June 2025 and 289,000 in an hour. Xiaomi then counted 240,000 locked orders at 18 hours and never broke down how many of those were priority deposits and how many were buyers locking their own configurations.

Why the number matters to Xiaomi

Xiaomi delivered 30,153 cars in August, down 17.15% year on year and down 3.56% on July, its second monthly fall in a row. Deliveries for the year stand at 246,475, or 44.8% of a 550,000 target. Hitting that target needs about 75,900 cars a month from September to December, roughly two and a half times what Xiaomi managed in August. Its EV and AI segment lost 2.6 billion yuan in the second quarter, a second straight quarterly loss after the business turned a profit for the whole of 2025.

Xiaomi is counting on the Sky Nomad to close that gap.

The four cars are series hybrids. Meaning a 1.5-litre turbocharged petrol engine runs a generator that feeds the battery, and never drives the wheels.

Prices start at

• The Nomad N70 Pro – 209,900 yuan for the five-seater, about KES 4.1 million
• The Nomad N70 Max is 239,900 yuan (KES 4.6 million),
• The NomadN90 Max seven-seater is 269,900 yuan (KES 5.2 million) and
• The Nomad N90 Max Exploration Edition with its pop-up roof 299,900 yuan (KES 5.8 million).

None of the four is coming to Kenya. Xiaomi builds left-hand drive cars only, its 2027 European launch is left-hand drive too, and Kenya’s KS 1515:2000 inspection standard bars left-hand drive imports for civilian use. Unless that changes, we won’t see Xiaomi cars on our roads just yet.