The Ideal’s second wave of exposure has finally arrived, revealing only four exterior photos. All friends who are following the L9 no longer need to chase after spy photos.
As usual, let’s take a look at the pictures:
No related information was disclosed in the copy, only the previously announced pre-sale price of 450,000-500,000 yuan and the release during the Beijing Auto Show.
However, these four exterior photos still reveal a lot of information, let’s analyze them one by one.
How much would you give for this exterior design?
We won’t give any comments on whether this exterior design is good-looking or not, leave it to the comment section for everyone to discuss.
The overall design of the Ideal L9 continues the design of the Ideal ONE. The most striking feature of the exterior is the laser radar placed on the roof, which we will analyze in detail later.
In terms of the design of the front face, the L9 has undergone significant changes compared to the current ONE. It still uses the starry ring headlights, but without the huge air intake grille, it adopts a more “electric vehicle” closed front face design.
The lines on the side of the car body are highly consistent with the current Ideal ONE, but it can be clearly seen that due to the increase in body size, the length of the rear door is longer.
The design of the taillights continues the design of the Ideal ONE, and also echoes the starry ring headlights on the front. However, it is regrettable that, judging from the line of the trunk, the Ideal L9 did not adopt the highly popular tailgate design.
After viewing the overall design, let’s take a closer look at the details.
About car paint
These four pictures show two colors of paint for the L9.The first color is similar to carbon black, and we won’t delve into it too much.
The second color is champagne gold, which is a very rare color for full-size SUVs. Currently, it is only known to be used on the Range Rover and Bentley Bentayga.
Because full-size SUVs are large, they generally choose to use dark car paint to make themselves less conspicuous. Dark car paints can also make the car visually smaller and highlight more details of the body lines.
Using gold paint on the L9 is very challenging, and there is no front photo in this picture. Let’s look forward to the effect of the actual car.
About the Wheels
In terms of the wheels, it can be seen that the L9 does not use the same wheels as the ideal ONE, but its style is very similar to the new 2021 ideal ONE.
In terms of size, the L9’s wheels have a size of 265/45 R21. We guess that the ideal series only has this size of wheels, but there are multiple styles of wheels.
In addition, the tires are Michelin Pilot Sport 4 SUV tires.
About the Lights
The L9’s headlights adopt a split design, with an LED star ring daytime running light that runs through the front face in the upper half, and a main low beam and high beam in the lower half.
Unlike the new Ideal ONE, the continuous light strip has no breakpoints. It can be expected to have a very good visual effect when lit at night, but it also means a higher cost.
The low and high beams use LED light sources and an additional lens. The light brightness of the current Ideal ONE is low and often criticized, so we hope to see a breakthrough improvement on the L9.
Other Details
Below the grille, an active grille is used. This design can reduce wind resistance and improve winter heating efficiency, which is also a feature of the current Ideal ONE.2. At the end of the L9 star-ring light, there are two small yellow lights, which is a very rare design. We speculate that there are two possibilities: one is to comply with US laws and regulations and add yellow border lights; the other is to reserve work indicator lights for advanced autonomous driving in the future.
- The camera trim on the side of the car is made of silver material, which creates a contrasting effect with the body.
- The door handle adopts a hidden design.
- The front of the roof of the car is equipped with a LiDAR. There is a dividing line above the B-pillar. Combining with the interior photo exposed last time, we speculate that this is the dividing line of the sunroof, with a small fixed sunshade in the front and an extra-large sunroof extending to the third row in the rear.
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The L9 does not have a luggage rack.
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The “spoiler” of the L9 is very prominent. We speculate that, in addition to hidden rear wipers, it also contains a large number of positioning devices for assisted driving.
- The brake caliper is a floating caliper located in front of the axle, similar to most vehicles with MacPherson suspension. However, according to previous information, the L9 will adopt a double-wishbone front suspension.
About Smart Driving
In the prospectus disclosed by LI (Ideanomics) before, it was revealed that the L9 will be equipped with hardware that supports L4-level autonomous driving. Although only four pictures were released this time, much information about smart driving can still be seen from them.
About LiDAR
Like NIO, LiAuto also places the lidar on top of the car, which has three advantages:
- The higher position of the lidar enables better sensing performance for congested roads and long-distance objects.
- The lidar on the roof, instead of the bumper, reduces the possibility of damage during collisions, leading to lower post-repair costs.
- By placing the lidar on the roof, the design of the bumper can be free of lidar constraints, achieving better performance in pedestrian safety crashes.
However, there are also three disadvantages:
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Although the lidar’s size has been largely reduced, it still looks abrupt on the car, especially when compared to NIO ET7. The design of the LiAuto L9 lidar appears more rough.
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As the lidar requires large amounts of data transmission and good heat dissipation when operating, it may take up too much space on the roof, potentially affecting the interior headroom.
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The bulge on the roof of the car may lead to increased wind noise, significantly testing the L9’s drag coefficient and NVH.
Lastly, it’s worth noting that although the LiAuto L9 places the lidar on the roof, the highest point of the lidar does not exceed the vehicle height.
As for the lidar model, as far as we know, LiAuto uses the Hesai AT128 semi-solid-state lidar, with 128 laser beams, a wavelength of 905nm, a maximum detection distance of 200 meters with 10% reflectivity, and a field of view of 120° x 25.4°.
If you are interested, we can provide a specific introduction to the lidar in the comments section. However, considering the overall performance, it is only moderately better than other lidar systems.
We have also collected lidar parameters of the Li Xpeng G9 and NIO ET7 for your reference.
About ADAS Cameras
As shown in the four images, the LiAuto L9 is equipped with two front cameras and four side cameras for intelligent driving, and four surround-view cameras for parking.
As we can see, the 6 cameras cover only the front and left, right 3 faces of the car. We guess there will be an additional camera for intelligent driving below the rear spoiler.
Therefore, the L9 will be equipped with 7 intelligent driving cameras and 4 panoramic parking cameras, a total of 13 cameras.
It should be noted that the L9’s forward view does not use the mainstream three-camera system, but two cameras.
To put it simply, in the early days, due to chip computing power restrictions, most car models only used monocular cameras for intelligent driving. After the computing power was improved, some car companies adopted tri-camera systems, which included a medium-focus camera, a long-focus camera for long-distance detection, and a wide-angle camera for blind spot detection.
However, with the improvement of camera pixels, more and more car companies have removed the original medium-focus camera and replaced the tri-camera system with higher pixel wide-angle cameras + high-pixel long-focus cameras.
In addition, the 2021 Ideal One has already used an 8 million pixels camera, so we guess that the intelligent driving cameras on the L9 will also use higher pixel and better quality 8 million pixels cameras. As for parking, it may use a 3 million pixels camera like NIO.
Summary
These are the details we see on the appearance of the Ideal L9. If the car’s appearance meets your taste, please feel free to discuss it in the comments section. If there are any details we neglected, please also feel free to add them in the comments section. We will continue to analyze and report more details in the next update.Please translate the following Chinese text in Markdown format into English Markdown format, with professional language and preserving HTML tags inside Markdown. Only output changes and improvements without explaining.
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