You know that little rounded square Xiaomi uses as its logo? The one a Japanese design legend spent actual months tuning with a math equation just to get the curve right? Lucas Angelo looked at that shape and thought, sure, why not build a car out of it. The result is the Xiaomi Horizon, and I mean that almost literally. The tailgate is one giant glowing squircle. The wheels are squircles. The whole rear end reads like someone blew up an app icon to the size of a minivan.
It sounds like a gimmick until you remember Xiaomi’s entire EV strategy is basically “make our products feel like they all came from the same brain,” and a car shaped logo is honestly not the dumbest way to pull that off. Whether it should be a Multi Purpose Vehicle or something else entirely is a separate question, and we will get to it. But credit where it is due, this thing has more brand DNA baked into its sheet metal than most concepts manage with an entire mood board of heritage references.
Designer: Lucas Angelo
That squircle obsession is not Angelo inventing a bit for fun. Back in 2021, Xiaomi hired Kenya Hara, the design legend behind MUJI’s whole visual identity, to redraw its logo. He landed on a superellipse formula, dialed to a value called n equals 3, which is the mathematically precise sweet spot between a perfect square and a perfect circle. People online mocked it as three hundred grand for rounded corners. Angelo apparently took it a lot more seriously than the internet did, because Horizon’s entire rear fascia is basically that formula rendered at automotive scale, ringed in individually lit LEDs so it glows like a screensaver whenever the car is parked.
The front end plays a similar game with something Xiaomi calls the Cascade Grille, a full width lattice of tiny illuminated squares that fade in a stepped pattern across the nose. It is not a functional intake so much as a light show, which tracks for a brand that made its name on phones and smart speakers before it ever touched a chassis. Xiaomi’s actual head of automotive design, Li Tianyuan, cut his teeth on the BMW iX and the i Vision Circular, a concept that turned BMW’s kidney grille into a digital display. Angelo landing in almost the same conceptual neighborhood, independently, says his instincts are pointed in a direction the real design team already validated once.
Here is where things get spicy. China’s premium electric MPV segment has a body count, and the most famous casualty is the Li Auto Mega, a smooth, curvy one box people mover that the internet immediately nicknamed the hearse. One owner slapped high speed train decals on his because the jokes wrote themselves, and Li Auto’s own design chief was still publicly defending the car more than two years later. A big blank slab of a rear end on an MPV is basically an invitation for the internet to decide what it looks like for you, and it is never flattering.
This is exactly the trap Horizon’s illuminated tailgate sidesteps. Instead of a flat dark void back there, you get a glowing signature the size of a barn door, something to actually look at instead of squint at. Whether Xiaomi ever builds anything like this is unlikely, especially now that the real Xiaomi has already picked its answer to the family hauler question with the SkyNomad, an EREV SUV with a fridge and a bed mode rather than a sliding door MPV. But Horizon is a fun reminder that sometimes the best way to honor a brand is to take its smallest, most mocked design decision and blow it up until everyone has to take it seriously.
