In Conversation with Zhao Changjiang: How the Luxeed RX Aims to Become Huawei's "Pura X"

In July, the Luxeed V9 delivered a rather dramatic result: 10,101 units delivered in a single month, an average transaction price of about 500,000 yuan, and high-spec versions accounting for over 80%. This flagship MPV, priced between 389,800 and 519,800 yuan, established the Luxeed brand firmly in the mid-to-high-end market just over two months after launch.

But Zhao Changjiang, Executive Director and Executive Vice President of Luxeed Auto, is unwilling to interpret the V9's success simply as a product hit. In his view, the V9's real significance is that it proves Luxeed is beginning to have the ability to define high-end products, serve high-end users, and deliver on product value.

Speaking with Leiphone, Zhao Changjiang distilled Luxeed's next strategic step into nine characters: more Huawei, more Luxeed, more innovation. These three phrases may seem like brand slogans, but they actually correspond to a rebuilding of capabilities at three levels: foundation, brand, and product.

More Huawei: From Marketing "Huawei Content" to Full-System Integration

Zhao Changjiang emphasizes that "more Huawei" is first and foremost not about the "Huawei content" in marketing, but about a set of organizational and operational methods. "We need to embrace Huawei across culture and systems, throughout the entire system."

Over the past few years, Huawei has become one of the strongest brand enablers in China's new energy vehicle market. From intelligent driving and smart cockpits to channels, marketing, and even user operations, Huawei continuously exports capabilities to partner automakers. But problems have followed: when Huawei's capabilities are shared across different partner brands, is Huawei a plus for the brand, or a replacement for the brand's own capabilities?

Luxeed has chosen the former path. The most typical case is on the production side. Luxeed has invested billions of yuan in Wuhu, Anhui, to build an exclusive intelligent manufacturing plant, introducing Huawei's closed-loop supply chain management system and AI quality monitoring system. The plant has obtained CMMM Smart Manufacturing Maturity Level 4 certification. Zhao Changjiang believes intelligent manufacturing is not simply about replacing people with machines, but about enabling the factory to predict, analyze, and self-optimize. "Without a manufacturing foundation, no matter how good the brand narrative or how strong the value proposition, it cannot be scaled into real user experience."

Currently, Luxeed has formed dual R&D centers in Wuhu and Shanghai, as well as dual design centers in Shanghai and Shenzhen, with a workforce of over 6,000. The independent closed loop of R&D and production is basically complete, and the delivery and service system is about 60% complete. On the channel side, nearly 90 dedicated network stores were put into use this year, while continuing to receive empowerment from nearly a thousand Huawei terminal stores.

This means Luxeed is not preparing to cut itself out of the HarmonyOS Intelligent Mobility system, but rather trying to form a new relationship: enjoying the scale and capabilities of Huawei's system while gradually building its own closed loop in brand, product, and service.

CMMM Smart Manufacturing Maturity Level 4 Certification: CMMM (Capability Maturity Model for Manufacturing) is a national standard led by the China Electronics Standardization Institute, which divides a company's smart manufacturing level into five tiers from low to high. Level 1 is Planning, Level 2 is Standardization, Level 3 is Integration, Level 4 is Optimization, and Level 5 is Leadership. Level 4 means the factory not only achieves cross-system, cross-process data integration, but also possesses predictive, optimization, and adaptive capabilities based on data analysis, enabling dynamic adjustment of quality, efficiency, energy consumption, and other indicators during production. Currently, the number of complete vehicle plants in China that have reached Level 4 certification is limited, with most enterprises still at Levels 2 to 3. For Luxeed, this certification is a hard indicator to prove to the outside world that its manufacturing foundation does not rely on Huawei's brand premium, but has independent high-quality delivery capability.

More Luxeed: From Shelf Logic to Brand Logic

Zhao Changjiang says bluntly: "Every brand needs its own playbook. You need something that sets you apart from others, something different."

What China's automotive industry lacks most today is differentiation. A car sells well, and three months later similar products appear; a feature becomes popular, and soon it becomes standard across the industry. Zhao Changjiang even admits that Luxeed initially considered taking this path. "We originally prepared to do that too, but then I thought about it... forget it." The reason is that copying others may work in the short term, but it cannot build a long-term brand.

This logic has already been validated with the V9. The V9 did not enter the 200,000-plus yuan MPV market, nor did it expand share through price cuts. Instead, it locked its price in the 400,000–500,000 yuan range. Ultimately, the average transaction price reached around 500,000 yuan, with over 10,000 units delivered in July alone. This shows that users are not unable to accept high prices; the high price must simply correspond to new value.

By the time of the RX, this approach is even clearer. On August 20, the Luxeed RX officially opened presales, with a presale price of 299,800–399,800 yuan. It is the first SUV under HarmonyOS Intelligent Mobility to be named with an "X," equipped with four lidars, 38 fusion perception sensors, and an architecture designed for future L3 autonomous driving.

Zhao Changjiang does not define the RX as an upgraded version of the R7. The R7 is a five-seat sporty tech SUV aimed at young families; the RX combines smart technology, extreme handling, and avant-garde styling, leaning more toward the driver. This is also why he repeatedly links the RX to Huawei's X series phones—Mate X and Pura X are essentially not simple upgrades, but new product forms created on top of existing technology and brand capabilities.

"X stands for 10 in Roman numerals." Zhao Changjiang directly places the RX above the 9 series. A rear motor of 277kW, a front motor with a maximum of 21,000rpm, front virtual kingpin four-ball-joint double wishbone, rear five-link, dual-chamber dual-valve suspension, 50:50 axle load, 343 body architecture, and full-link redundancy design for L3—together these parameters point to a clear direction: Luxeed does not want to be merely a car with very good Huawei intelligent driving, but also a car that is very good to drive yourself.

Zhao Changjiang thus offers a new brand expression: "Intelligent Drive, Joyful Driving." The logic behind it is the democratization of driving pleasure. In the past, BMW talked about driving pleasure, with rear-wheel drive, chassis, and power forming a relatively high technical threshold; Luxeed hopes to reinterpret driving pleasure through intelligence. For example, vector torque control maintains stability during corner entry and exit by distributing power between front and rear motors, and the intelligent chassis integrates with the intelligent driving system to give the driver a higher safety margin.

In Zhao Changjiang's view, physics is responsible for protection, while intelligence is responsible for raising the ceiling. Intelligence and handling are no longer a contradiction, but a new combination of product character that Luxeed is trying to establish.

L3 Autonomous Driving Architecture and Redundancy Design: L3 autonomous driving refers to the vehicle being able to fully take over driving tasks under specific designed operating conditions, with the driver not needing to continuously monitor but needing to take over when the system requests it. The biggest difference from L2 is that the responsible party shifts from the driver to the system, so the requirements for safety redundancy rise exponentially. An architecture oriented toward L3 typically requires perception redundancy (such as multiple lidars and multi-sensor fusion), computing redundancy (dual chips or dual domain controllers), actuation redundancy (dual redundant braking, steering, and power), and communication redundancy. The Luxeed RX is equipped with four lidars and 38 fusion perception sensors, and adopts a full-link redundancy design, precisely to reserve hardware capability for when regulations allow L3 on the road in the future, avoiding being eliminated due to insufficient hardware at that time. This is also one of the important reasons its pricing is higher than L2 models of the same size.

Vector Torque Control and Intelligent Chassis Integration: Vector torque control refers to actively changing the vehicle's yaw moment by independently controlling the drive/braking force of left and right wheels or front and rear motors, thereby suppressing understeer or oversteer during corner entry and exit, and improving handling limits and stability. In the era of fuel vehicles, this technology mostly relied on complex mechanical differentials, with high cost and slow response; electric vehicles, because motors can be independently and quickly controlled, have greatly reduced implementation costs and improved response speed to the millisecond level. Luxeed integrates vector torque control with the intelligent chassis and intelligent driving system, so that in emergency obstacle avoidance or low-friction road conditions, the intelligent driving system can predict in advance and call chassis actuators, extending "intelligence" from the cockpit and assisted driving to the dynamic control layer. What Zhao Changjiang calls "physics is responsible for protection, intelligence is responsible for raising the ceiling" refers precisely to this integration logic: mechanics provide the safety lower bound, while intelligence dynamically expands the handling upper bound.

More Innovation: Compete on Value, Not Price

"We don't want to boast now; we want to keep our feet on the ground." This is an attitude Zhao Changjiang repeatedly emphasizes.

On one side is increasingly fierce price competition; on the other, after Huawei's technological capabilities spread rapidly, relying solely on an intelligent label makes it harder and harder to form a long-term moat. Zhao Changjiang's choice is to create new value through technological innovation. He believes the value of a car cannot be judged only by today, but by whether it can continue to be used and upgraded in the coming years. "Users are buying a car for five or ten years, not three years."

This is also why he is unwilling to simply put the RX's price into a comparison table with competitors. The starting presale price of 299,800 yuan is not low in today's market. But Zhao Changjiang's view is: don't compare only price, compare value. If all the features were stripped out, Luxeed could of course make the car for 250,000 yuan, "but I won't." Because doing so would have no value for the industry, the company, or the brand.

The V9 similarly did not enter the 200,000-plus yuan MPV market due to fierce competition. Luxeed would rather accept the limited market capacity of the 400,000–500,000 yuan segment than sacrifice brand positioning for sales. Zhao Changjiang even set a fairly restrained long-term goal for the V9: stably achieving 4,000–5,000 units per month in this price range would already be satisfactory. Now that the V9 sells over 10,000 units a month, that goal instead seems conservative.

In Zhao Changjiang's plan, the RX, R7, and V9 each play different product roles, ultimately forming a relatively complete product matrix. Not every car needs to be a hit; rather, every car needs to establish value within its own price segment.

Final Thoughts

From the V9 to the RX, Luxeed is completing a key brand migration. The V9 answered whether Luxeed can make a high-end car at the 500,000 yuan level, and the market has already given the answer. The RX must answer another question: if Huawei's technology has become a shared capability across HarmonyOS Intelligent Mobility, what exactly makes Luxeed Luxeed?

"More Huawei" solves the foundation problem, truly integrating Huawei's technology, systems, and management capabilities into the company; "More Luxeed" solves the brand problem, establishing its own product character and user value; "More Innovation" solves the product problem, creating new value through innovation in technology, category, and experience.

The three must ultimately form a closed loop: Huawei gives Luxeed capability, Chery gives Luxeed manufacturing and the automotive industry foundation, and Luxeed itself must answer "who am I." This is also the real difficulty of Luxeed 2.0.

One-line Summary

Luxeed V9's over-10,000 monthly sales validate its high-end capability, as Zhao Changjiang drives the brand's 2.0 migration with "more Huawei, more Luxeed, more innovation."

Paragraph Summary

In July, the Luxeed V9 delivered 10,101 units with an average transaction price of about 500,000 yuan and high-spec models accounting for over 80%, establishing the brand in the mid-to-high-end market. Executive Vice President Zhao Changjiang distilled the next strategic step into nine characters: more Huawei, more Luxeed, more innovation, corresponding to capability rebuilding at the foundation, brand, and product levels. "More Huawei" emphasizes full-system integration from culture to manufacturing, with the exclusive Wuhu plant obtaining CMMM Level 4 certification; "More Luxeed" advocates differentiation, rejecting shelf-style copying, with the RX positioned as a new category analogous to Huawei's Pura X; "More Innovation" insists on competing on value rather than price, with neither the V9 nor the RX sacrificing features or cutting prices to chase sales. The three form a closed loop: Huawei provides capability, Chery provides manufacturing, and Luxeed answers "who am I."