Li Auto confirmed the L9 Livis for a debut on April 24 at the Beijing Auto Show and a retail launch on May 15, priced at 559,800 yuan (82,100 US dollars). The Livis sits above the existing L9 Pro (409,800 yuan) and L9 Ultra (439,800 yuan), adding a 120,000-yuan premium over the top current trim. What the money buys is not an extra row of seats or a bigger battery. It is silicon.
The Livis runs two M100 chips developed in-house by Li Auto on a 5-nanometer process, delivering a combined 2,560 TOPS of usable compute. For reference: the Nvidia Drive Thor-U that anchors the Zeekr 8X, the XPeng GX, and the Aito M9 delivers roughly 700 to 800 TOPS in the configurations Chinese OEMs currently ship. Li Auto's M100 pair clears that number by a factor of three on paper, which is the kind of claim that requires the show floor to verify.
The Chip Is the Product
Li Auto has been open about wanting to build its own silicon since early 2024, and the M100 is the first in-house chip to reach a retail vehicle. The engineering logic is straightforward. Chinese OEMs are paying Nvidia roughly 2,000 to 3,000 US dollars per Thor-U unit at volume, and the supply allocation is uncertain given US export controls. Building a competitive chip internally removes both the cost line and the geopolitical risk.
The engineering execution is the harder part. Nvidia's automotive silicon carries a software stack, a driver support contract, and a developer ecosystem that has been hardened across thousands of deployments. Li Auto is shipping the M100 with an internal software team and zero external support. That is a bigger bet than the raw TOPS number suggests.
The Rest of the Package
The Livis is an extended-range electric vehicle, same as the rest of the L9 line. Battery is a 72.7 kWh CATL ternary lithium pack rated at 420 km of CLTC pure-electric range. The chassis gets an 800-volt fully active suspension and steer-by-wire, pushing the Livis into the same hardware bracket as the XPeng GX launched earlier this month. Li Auto did not release curb weight, charging speed, or powertrain output numbers at the announcement.
The positioning is clear: the Livis is the flagship that Li Auto wants reviewers to drag-race. The Ultra stays as the volume trim for buyers who want three rows and do not need 2,560 TOPS. The Pro remains the entry point.
What the Show Will Tell Us
Public debut is April 24. The details that matter and have not been disclosed: M100 software stack maturity, what drive modes are actually live at launch, whether the in-house chips handle the full ADAS or whether some subsystems still run on supplier silicon, and whether the claimed 2,560 TOPS is sustained compute or a marketing peak. The Beijing Auto Show press days will get 48 hours with pre-production cars, which is enough time to answer the first two questions and not enough to answer the last two.
First customer deliveries begin May 15. The first real read on the M100 is the reviewer coverage between May 15 and June 30, which will determine whether Li Auto has built Nvidia's competitor or just a very expensive proof of concept.