I should get my bias out of the way first. I am a huge fan of cars, especially supercars. I have spent more evenings than I will admit watching onboard laps of the Nordschleife, and I can tell a V10 from a flat-plane V8 with my eyes shut.
Whatever affection is left over, I give to vintage cars, and most of it goes to the classic Porsches and Ferraris. An air-cooled 911 is not quick by any modern measure. Neither is a 365 GTB/4 Daytona…
Image Credits: The Classic Motor Hub
Neither ever needed to be. The shape carries something a spec sheet cannot hold: a feeling, a vibe, the particular time it came from, and an elegance nobody has managed to design on purpose since. I can stand in front of one that is switched off and going nowhere and be perfectly happy.
So when a consumer electronics fair starts parking hypercars next to the air fryers, I pay attention, and I bring both of those instincts with me.
That is roughly what happened in Berlin this week. IFA 2026 ran from 4 to 8 September at Messe Berlin with more than 1,900 brands from 49 countries, and the most talked-about stands were not televisions or laptops. They were cars. Xiaomi turned up at its first IFA with a 3,300-square-metre hall of its own. Volkswagen cooked currywurst using a power socket in an electric SUV. XPeng brought a car, a humanoid robot, and a flying machine, and argued they were the same product.
None of this is an accident. The centre of gravity in cars has moved from the engine bay to the software stack, and the companies that are good at software stacks already have a booth at IFA.
The hypercar that only exists in a video game
The centrepiece of Xiaomi’s stand (H6.2-101, Hall 6.2) was the Vision Gran Turismo, and it is a properly strange object.
Image Credits: Heise
It was built for Polyphony Digital’s Vision Gran Turismo programme, the long-running project that began in 2013, in which manufacturers design a fantasy car for the Gran Turismo games. Ferrari has done one. Porsche has done one. Bugatti has done one. Xiaomi is the first Chinese brand invited in, and the first technology company of any nationality. The physical concept first appeared in metal at MWC in Barcelona in March, and Berlin was its second public outing.
The numbers are video-game numbers, which is the point. More than 1,900 horsepower, running on a 900-volt silicon carbide architecture. A drag coefficient of 0.29 with a claimed downforce figure of 1.2 and an aerodynamic efficiency rating of 4.1, which puts its downforce-to-drag ratio in Le Mans hypercar territory. Top speed is around 350 km/h.
That’s when it ceases to be a standard fantasy car. Instead of using bucket seats, Xiaomi has adopted what it terms the Sofa Racer arrangement, the seats, the door cards and the dashboard merging together to form one unbroken ring that goes around the driver. An aircraft-type throttle shifter and a steer-by-wire steering wheel in the shape of an infinity symbol are included.
In the middle is Xiaomi Pulse, a 360-degree assistant integrated into the instrument panel that keeps an eye on the driver’s inputs, while a system named HyperVision alters the content displayed on the screens according to the driving mode: showing minimal telemetry when on the track and providing full navigation during a road trip.
It will never actually be constructed; the only aspect of it is that it is playable in Gran Turismo 7, which is all that has been required. As a form of brand publicity it is successful since it does what concept cars are meant to do and almost never manage: it shows what the company believes a car should be used for.
About that Nürburgring record
What I took away from Berlin
Three things stood out, and none of them is about horsepower.
The first is that the barrier to entry has moved. Xiaomi went from announcing a car programme to 700,000 deliveries and a Nordschleife record in about four years. That is not because building cars got easy. It is because the parts of a car that now differentiate it, the battery chemistry, the inverters, the compute, the operating system, are the parts a consumer electronics company already knows how to buy and integrate.
The second point  is that the interesting fight is over the boring cars. The Vision Gran Turismo will get the clicks, but the ID. Cross at €27,995 and the L03 at €35,600 are the products that decide who wins Europe. That is also where the least glamorous detail matters most: Volkswagen’s €24,995 ID. Polo is real on paper and delayed in practice because of LFP cell supply. Cell contracts, not concept cars, set the timetable.
The third point is that people are now offering an ecosystem rather than just selling vehicles; for example, Xiaomi with its Human × Car × Home approach, XPeng with a single chip family that applies to a car, a robot and an aircraft, and Volkswagen with a socket in the boot which powers a 3D printer. The emphasis has moved from what the car does to what the car can do for all the other things you own.
I will admit the supercar fan in me left slightly wistful. There was no engine noise in Berlin, and a 1,900 hp hypercar you can only drive with a controller is a strange kind of progress. But watching a Porsche, a BYD and a Xiaomi trade lap records within sixteen months of each other, I would argue the competitive instinct that made supercars fun in the first place is alive. It has just moved to a different set of companies, and they exhibit in Hall 6.2.
The other half of me, the half that loves old Porsches and Ferraris, is harder to satisfy here. It is not about speed. It is that a 911 or a Daytona was designed to be worth looking at while parked, and very little in these halls was. The one exception is the Vision Gran Turismo, which is also the only car at IFA that will never be built. There is probably a lesson in that, and I am not sure the industry wants to hear it. It is also worth noticing which badge is on the car that currently holds the Nordschleife record. The company that spent sixty years making shapes people keep in garages is the same one still setting the time to beat.
IFA 2026 ran 4 to 8 September at Messe Berlin. All prices are German list prices at time of writing. Chinese CLTC range figures are not directly comparable to European WLTP figures.
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