Drew Meehan looks at a new Chinese car brand designed ‘from the touchscreens out’. The brand’s English name is Leading Ideal, but in Chinese it’s *Lixiang Zhizao*, a play on founder Li Xiang’s name. And that founder is key to understanding the brand. A non-university educated web billionaire, he’s sometimes referred to as the Elon Musk of China (even by the spokeperson on the show floor at Shanghai 2019). He founded Autohome, a website that provides information about car purchasing and ownership, in 2005, when the Chinese car market was just starting to grow, and he’s never looked back.
While large touchscreens aren’t new to the Chinese auto market, the scale and scope of their integration is taking on ever-greater importance year by year. Auto Shanghai 2019 demonstrated the touchscreen arms race that is currently underway in the increasingly competitive market, and it is easy to be shocked at the sheer scale of digital integration in even the most mainstream cars. But there was a new brand that stood out from the masses for not just the size of their touchscreen integration, but also the completeness of the user experience design.
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