EV makers rose in morning trading in Hong Kong. Leapmotor rose 8%; Geely Auto rose 5%; Li Auto, Nio, XPeng rose 2%; Xiaomi rose 0.1%.

LEAPMOTOR saw a surge in deliveries last month as the slow season at the beginning of the year gradually passed.

The Chinese new energy vehicle (NEV) maker delivered 37,095 vehicles in March, up 154.65 percent from 14,567 in the same period last year and up 46.70 percent from 25,287 in February, according to data it released.

In the first quarter, Leapmotor delivered 87,552 vehicles, a year-on-year increase of 162.05 percent.

As of the end of March, Leapmotor's cumulative deliveries since its inception stood at 687,100 vehicles, according to data compiled by CnEVPost.

Leapmotor's first global model in the B series, the B10, is set to be officially launched on April 10, the company emphasized in a poster on Weibo.

Leapmotor began pre-sales of the B10 compact SUV (sport utility vehicle) on March 10, with prices starting at RMB 109,800 yuan ($15,120).

Shortly after pre-sales of the all-electric model began, Leapmotor said it had received more than 15,010 pre-orders in one hour, with 73 percent of those for the LiDAR-equipped variants.

In a media interview after the B10 pre-sales event, Leapmotor management said that the company's C-series models have already achieved monthly sales of more than 40,000 units, and the future B-series models will be even higher.

Leapmotor was confident that it would see monthly sales of more than 40,000 units for the B-series models, the company said. In addition to the B10, it will launch more B-series models this year.

Leapmotor's sales target for 2025 is 500,000 to 600,000 vehicles, its founder, chairman and CEO Zhu Jiangming said on March 11.

The company delivered 293,724 vehicles in 2024, an increase of 103.76 percent compared to 2023.

China’s XIAOMI-W, a consumer electronics giant turned automaker, said it was cooperating with a police investigation into a fatal crash involving one of its electric vehicles while the driver was using the car’s autonomous driving features.

A Xiaomi SU7 sedan drove into a concrete guardrail on an expressway in eastern China late Saturday at around 60 miles per hour, according to a post on Xiaomi’s official social media account. On Tuesday, local media published reports about the collision and ensuing fire, which killed three college students, along with pictures of the charred remains of the vehicle.

Xiaomi said the driver had deployed the company’s Navigate On Autopilot, an assisted-driving feature, while going around 70 m.p.h. on the expressway. The car was traveling at that speed when it reached a roadblock, because a portion of the road was under repair with traffic diverted into a different lane.

Seconds before the collision, the car warned that there were obstacles ahead and started to decelerate, but it was too late. The company said it had called the police and emergency services.

Leapmotor saw quarterly profitability in the fourth quarter of 2024, with record deliveries and an improved gross margin as a result of product mix optimization.

In a separate post on social media, Lei Jun, Xiaomi’s founder and chief executive, expressed his condolences to the families of the deceased and thanked people for their “attention and criticism.” He said there were many questions that the company could not answer at the moment about the crash, but he pledged that Xiaomi would not try to avoid responsibility.