Ideal L9 Livis: Li Xiang turns an SUV into a robot to save his company (again)

Remember when the height of luxury in a Chinese SUV was a built-in fridge, a huge TV for rear passengers, and a plush ottoman? Ideal Auto founder Li Xiang upended the market back then by betting on family coziness and straightforward comfort. Today, though, nobody is impressed by "fridges" anymore — everyone from Geely to Xiaomi installs them.

The company's sales have started to slide, and Li Xiang has decided it's time to rewrite the rules again. Enter the refreshed L9 and its range-topping Livis version. The price tag is nearly 560,000 yuan, but this time Ideal isn't just selling premium hardware — it's selling "the firstborn of embodied intelligence."

Ideal Auto's situation looks suspiciously familiar. Four years ago, the company was in deep crisis as rival AITO (a Huawei brand) was gutting sales of its first model, the Ideal One. The rescue came with the launch of the first L9, which turned a money-losing startup into one of the market leaders and helped the company post an annual profit.

Last year, however, cooled the optimists' enthusiasm: deliveries fell by almost 20%, and the ambitious push into pure EVs stumbled over delays to the i6. Buyers who had hoped to drive their new cars home for Chinese New Year were left empty-handed, and employees began openly questioning the company's direction. Li Xiang is responding in his own style: he has announced an "All in AI" strategy.

At a recent internal meeting, he didn't even discuss the problems in the car business, focusing entirely on forecasts for neural network development. In his view, the car in its final stage of evolution is not transportation but a robot. That's why he spends 70% of his working time on the AI effort.

The new L9 Livis is supposed to prove that "embodied intelligence" isn't a marketing incantation but real technological value worth paying a premium for. So what does this mean for the end user? Li Xiang promises to move away from the "spec war" toward an "experience gap."

The car should stop being a passive tool. Thanks to a full AI stack, the new L9 will recognize its owner, understand the context of a situation, and offer services proactively. Where a car used to simply take you from point A to point B, it is now supposed to become an active partner.

The irony is that Li Xiang is trying to sell technological magic at exactly the moment the market is demanding lower prices and pragmatism. The 400–550 thousand yuan segment is oversaturated: it includes the refreshed AITO M9, NIO's luxury models, and even German classics like the Audi Q5L and Mercedes GLC, which are aggressively cutting prices. The success of the L9 Livis will show whether mass-market buyers are as willing to pay for intelligence as they were for comfortable seats.

If Li Xiang can prove that his AI really "sees and understands" people, he will once again pull Ideal Auto out of the hole. But if it all comes down to updated auto-parking algorithms and a slightly snappier voice assistant, the company will have to find more down-to-earth ways to survive in brutally fierce competition. For now, Li Xiang is staking everything on the claim that the future belongs to robots, not cars with screens.

The bottom line: Can the "robot on wheels" concept become as powerful a sales driver as the fridge-equipped "home on wheels" once was?