IM Motors

The parent’s problem

When SAIC Motor (上汽集团, Shànghǎi Qìchē Jítuán) — China’s largest automaker by revenue — watched its net profit fall from ¥24.5 billion in 2021 to ¥1.67 billion in 2024, the arithmetic was existential. A 93% profit collapse at a state-owned enterprise employing over 200,000 people does not produce incremental responses. The joint ventures with Volkswagen and General Motors that had funded SAIC’s dominance for two decades were losing ground as Chinese consumers abandoned foreign badges for domestic electric alternatives. BYD was ascending. Tesla had built a factory in Shanghai. NIO and XPeng were rewriting the rules of what a Chinese car brand could be.

Into this crisis, SAIC produced IM Motors (智己汽车, Zhìjǐ Qìchē) — a premium EV brand conceived as “Project No. 1” (一号工程), backed by ¥10 billion in first-round financing, the largest ever raised by a Chinese NEV startup. The brand name, drawn from the I Ching, translates loosely as “wisdom of self-knowledge.” The three-way joint venture — SAIC 54%, Alibaba 18%, Zhangjiang Hi-Tech 18% — was designed to combine manufacturing scale, technology DNA, and Shanghai municipal backing into a single entity. SAIC chairman Chen Hong personally oversaw the initiative. The question was whether China’s old automotive establishment could build something the market would choose, not merely tolerate.

Priced for admiration, not for volume

IM Motors launched its first vehicle, the L7 sedan, in June 2022 at ¥36.88 to ¥40.88万 — positioning it squarely against Tesla’s Model S and NIO’s ET7. The pricing signaled ambition. The sales figures signaled reality. September 2022 produced a peak of 1,019 monthly deliveries. By December, that number had collapsed to 455. The trajectory was unmistakable to anyone watching the Chinese EV market: HiPhi (高合汽车), another premium-only Chinese EV brand, was tracing a nearly identical curve at similar price points, and would suspend production in February 2024 before declaring bankruptcy that August.

The LS7 SUV, launched in March 2023, broadened the lineup without changing the fundamental problem. Monthly sales stabilized between 1,000 and 3,000 units — enough to keep the production line warm, not enough to justify the investment behind it. The year closed at 38,253 deliveries against a target of 45,000, while SAIC’s own profit declined another 12.5%. The parent was deteriorating faster than its supposed savior could grow.

Premium positioning without sufficient volume is a trap with a known outcome. HiPhi proved it conclusively. And SAIC had already run this experiment once before. Rising Auto (飞凡汽车), the group’s other premium EV brand, launched in 2021 with ambitions that mirrored IM’s own. By April 2024, Rising Auto was delivering 68 units per month. In November, SAIC dissolved it entirely, reabsorbing its operations into the Roewe brand. IM Motors’ leadership would have understood the precedent with perfect clarity: the parent had demonstrated its willingness to kill a premium EV brand that couldn’t find volume. IM had approximately twelve months to prove it was different.

The descent and the pivot

The first half of 2024 compressed every pressure into a single frame. HiPhi’s collapse in February established the stakes publicly — a well-funded premium Chinese EV brand could die. In April, IM’s launch event for the L6 produced a triple embarrassment: a specification comparison against Xiaomi’s SU7 contained errors, triggering viral criticism and requiring three separate public apologies. By August, with 28,469 deliveries against a 120,000 annual target, reports surfaced questioning CEO Liu Tao’s (刘涛, Liú Tāo) position.

The response was not a marketing adjustment. It was a structural capitulation on price — and a structural innovation in product strategy. The LS6, launched in October 2023 at ¥22.99万, had already broken below the ¥30万 floor that defined IM’s original positioning. The L6, arriving in May 2024 at an effective starting price of ¥19.99万, abandoned the premium-only thesis entirely. The price represented a 46% reduction from the original L7’s launch tier — not a discount, but a wholesale repositioning of where the brand competed.

The innovation was in what the lower price included. Rather than stripping features to hit a number, IM made LiDAR, the Lingxi digital chassis, four-wheel steering, 800V architecture, and the full autonomous driving stack standard across all configurations. Entry-level equaled fully loaded. The strategy inverted the premium playbook: instead of high-end features filtering down over time, every buyer received the complete technology platform from day one. The options game that premium brands typically depend on for margin was eliminated. The bet was that technology density, not exclusivity, would justify the brand.

The Lingxi Digital Chassis (灵蜥数字底盘) became the pivot’s centerpiece. Its Vehicle Motion Control system integrated four-wheel steering, adaptive air suspension, and real-time torque vectoring into a single platform. The chassis achieved a moose test world record above 85 km/h — a technical benchmark that translated into social media virality in China’s specification-obsessed EV market. When the refreshed LS6 debuted at the September 2024 auto show with Lingxi 2.0 and the IM AD 3.0 autonomous driving system, it was no longer a premium sedan wearing a discount. It was a technology demonstrator at a competitive price.

The machine beneath the brand

The technology stack reflects the joint venture’s original architecture — and reveals how deeply Alibaba’s 18% stake shaped the product. Alibaba did not merely invest. It embedded Banma OS as the vehicle operating system, DAMO Academy’s AI research as the foundation for autonomous driving, Alibaba Cloud as the backend infrastructure, and Tongyi Qianwen large language models into the cabin experience. The result is an intelligent nervous system controlled by a technology company, not an automaker — a distinction that matters when the automaker’s traditional engineering culture meets Alibaba’s platform-first instincts. Zhangjiang Hi-Tech’s 18% stake represented Shanghai municipal government backing through the Pudong innovation corridor, providing not just funding but regulatory access and land allocation within the Shanghai Free Trade Zone.

The validation that mattered most came from outside China. Audi signed a memorandum of understanding to co-develop electric vehicles using IM’s platform architecture — an acknowledgment from one of Germany’s premium automakers that a four-year-old Chinese brand had built chassis technology worth licensing. The Audi E5, expected to launch in China on SAIC/IM architecture, would represent the most concrete endorsement possible: a legacy automaker choosing a Chinese startup’s platform over its own.

Separately, IM’s partnership with QingTao Energy produced the world’s first mass-produced semi-solid-state battery sedan — the L6 Lightyear Max, launched in October 2024 with a 130 kWh pack delivering over 300 Wh/kg energy density and a claimed CLTC range exceeding 1,000 kilometres. The technology remains early-stage in volume terms, but its significance is structural: semi-solid-state batteries represent the next generation of EV energy storage, and IM reached production ahead of every competitor. These were not consumer marketing claims. They were institutional endorsements of engineering capability, and they arrived precisely when IM needed credibility most.

IM was also among the first Chinese automakers selected for L3 autonomous driving road trial permits — ahead of both Huawei and XPeng — a regulatory endorsement that positioned the brand’s autonomous capabilities as production-ready rather than aspirational. The IM AD system, developed with Momenta and running on Nvidia’s Orin X chips, offered city-level navigate-on-autopilot nationwide, a capability that competitors restricted to select cities.

The ¥9.4 billion Series B round that closed in December 2024 — with CATL, Momenta, China Pacific Insurance, and Bank of China Asset Management among the investors — brought total capital raised to ¥27.4 billion. The round closed during IM’s most precarious quarter, suggesting that institutional investors saw the technology platform’s value independent of the brand’s sales volatility.

Survival proven, triumph unproven

October 2024 delivered the inflection: 10,001 monthly deliveries, a 121% month-on-month increase and IM’s first five-digit month. The full year closed at 65,503 units, up 71% year-on-year. The number demands context. Rising Auto was dissolved that November after selling 68 units in its worst month. HiPhi was bankrupt. Of the premium Chinese EV brands launched between 2020 and 2022, IM Motors was among the few still operating. Survival in that cohort is itself an achievement.

But 65,503 represented barely 55% of the 120,000 annual target. SAIC’s broader position had deteriorated beyond what any single brand could repair. BYD overtook it in 2024 with 4.27 million vehicles to SAIC’s 4.01 million, ending eighteen years of domestic sales leadership. Excluding non-recurring gains, SAIC’s core automotive business posted a net loss of ¥4–6 billion in 2024 — deeply unprofitable for the first time since 2009. The joint ventures with Volkswagen and General Motors that had funded SAIC’s empire for two decades were hemorrhaging market share as Chinese consumers abandoned foreign brands for domestic EVs.

And a new complication emerged from within SAIC itself. In 2021, SAIC chairman Chen Hong had declared the company would never let Huawei become its “soul” (拒绝让华为成为灵魂) — a pointed refusal to cede technological autonomy. By February 2025, new SAIC president Jia Jianxu had reversed that position entirely, signing a partnership with Huawei to launch Shangjie (尚界), a premium brand competing directly in IM’s segment. The reversal both validated IM’s importance — SAIC needed multiple bets to survive — and threatened it. If Shangjie succeeded, IM’s role as the sole premium salvation would be diluted. If IM faltered, the parent had already built its replacement.

The unfinished question

International expansion offers a partial answer to whether survival can translate into scale. IM entered Thailand in March 2025, launching a 15-market strategy that leverages SAIC’s existing MG dealer infrastructure — over 2,000 service points globally and 31 car-carrying vessels — across Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Australia, and select European markets. The EU’s 35.3% additional tariff, the highest imposed on any Chinese automaker, explains the conspicuous absence of continental Europe from that list; IM targets the UK and Norway but avoids the continent entirely. Export models were renamed — L6 becomes IM5, LS6 becomes IM6 — a pragmatic concession to international brand architecture.

The LS9, IM’s first extended-range hybrid, attracted 5,000 orders in 25 minutes at its November 2025 launch, suggesting demand for the technology platform extends beyond the battery-electric segment. Through November 2025, IM had delivered 69,199 vehicles.

The brand has demonstrated something that three factors made possible and that HiPhi’s death made visible: a state-owned parent willing to absorb losses, a technology partner in Alibaba with genuine engineering capability, and the institutional willingness to abandon premium pricing when the market demanded it. These are not founder virtues. They are structural advantages — and they kept IM alive while founder-led competitors burned through capital and conviction in equal measure.

What IM Motors has not yet demonstrated is that survival translates into the scale SAIC needs. The parent’s 93% profit collapse created this brand. Whether this brand can reverse that collapse — while competing against its own parent’s Huawei-powered hedge — remains the open question.

Last updated: March 16, 2026