The mid-year auto market is never short of noise.
NIO is hyping the launch of the new ONVO L60, the first XPENG GX owners are taking delivery, news of Huawei's million-yuan MPV is stirring up the premium segment, and Saidou Tech has announced a new automotive brand, "AIVA"...
Amidst this cacophony, Li Auto seems unusually quiet.
No glitzy new model launches, no blanket marketing campaigns, and barely a peep in the tit-for-tat sparring that rivals love.
Yet, that very silence is hard to ignore.
With everyone else pushing hard, why isn't Li Auto in a hurry?
As NIO and XPENG roll out new models rapidly, Li Auto's product cadence feels a beat behind. Look at the scorecard: May deliveries hit 33,350 units. The new Li L9 officially launched and began deliveries in May, with the L9 Livis securing over 10,000 firm orders in just two weeks. Meanwhile, the pure electric i6 SUV has surpassed 20,000 monthly deliveries for three months running.
The products are moving, and the numbers are climbing, yet Li Auto isn't rushing to make noise.
Founder Li Xiang has kept a low profile himself. His last public appearance was in May on "Luo Yonghao's Crossroads," but the topic wasn't new cars—it was autonomous driving and embodied intelligence.
That three-hour conversation unexpectedly became the key to understanding Li Auto's current "silent mode."
Slowness doesn't mean inaction.
Image Source: Li Auto
Here is Li Auto's launch rhythm since 2026:
On May 15, the all-new Li L9 officially debuted, offering Ultra and Livis variants. It carries the in-house Mach M100 chip, delivering 1,280 TOPs of computing power on a single chip and 2,560 TOPs in a dual-chip setup—billed as the world's most powerful intelligent driving platform.
The new L9 marks the start of a full refresh for the L series. The all-new L8 is slated for a late-June release. As the L series completes this new generation cycle, Li Auto's product matrix will get a significant update.
On the pure electric front, the flagship i9 SUV is expected to launch in the second half of 2026.
This timeline reveals that Li Auto's "quiet" phase is actually "calm before the storm"—building strength in the first half to play a dense hand in the second.
The reason for this rhythm lies in a fundamental shift in corporate strategy.
In early 2026, Li Auto upgraded its corporate vision: to become a "global leader in embodied intelligence."
This means Li Auto is no longer content to rival peers on the sheer volume of new models. Instead, it has elevated the battlefield to an unprecedented level, asking how to give every car on the road its own "brain."
In essence, Li Auto is undergoing a radical transformation from a traditional product iteration model to one driven by AI infrastructure.
Li Xiang admits that 2026 is the "final window period" for top AI companies to enter the embodied intelligence arena.
Behind the silence in the new car race, Li Auto is sprinting furiously on another "invisible" track.
From CVPR 2026 to the Embodied Intelligence Launch: What Is Li Auto Building?
Li Auto's so-called "quiet" is simply energy diverted to another front.
Recently, Li Auto announced that 12 of its papers were accepted at CVPR 2026 (the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition).
CVPR is a premier academic conference in computer vision and pattern recognition, ranking alongside ICCV and ECCV as the field's "Big Three."
The 12 accepted papers span core fields like multi-modal perception, end-to-end planning, and world models, systematically showcasing Li Auto's deep research capabilities in embodied intelligence.
Li Auto has always viewed basic research as the engine for long-term growth, and its R&D spending figures are staggering.
By the end of the first quarter of 2026, Li Auto had maintained R&D investment of around 3 billion yuan for five consecutive quarters, with full-year 2025 R&D expenses reaching 11.3 billion yuan.
Over the past five years, Li Auto has published nearly 100 papers in top academic conferences and journals like CVPR, ICCV, and ECCV, focusing on multi-modal perception, end-to-end learning, and cognitive models.
Image Source: Li Auto
The "silence" on the product side is finding its loudest echo in technology.
According to the latest teaser, Li Auto will host "Livis Day"—a software and AI launch event on June 15—to explore exactly what embodied intelligence is and where the company is headed in software and AI.
Notably, Li Xiang laid out a clear timeline for embodied intelligence during his talk with Luo Yonghao: autonomous driving is the first half, and general humanoid robots are the second half.
He divides autonomous driving into three phases: Phase 1, assisted driving (2018–2023); Phase 2, L3 autonomous driving (now until 2028); and Phase 3, L4 autonomous driving (2028–2033).
Today, Li Auto is trading "quiet" for future momentum.
While NIO, XPENG, and others scramble to push new models and fight for market share, Li Auto has chosen a different path: completely reshaping its R&D skeleton. It has split operations into three parallel teams—humanoid robots, software entities, and foundation models—rewriting its corporate story from "building cars" to "pursuing embodied intelligence."
Quietude is not inaction.
As Li Xiang put it: "Cars shouldn't be defined as traditional transportation; their ultimate form is robots with embodied intelligence."
In the summer of 2026, away from the noise, one automaker is quietly gathering strength for the distant future.
