01
Origins
The AITO M5 of 2022 formalised what the Seres SF5 had improvised: Huawei's deep involvement in a car — the telecom giant contributing design input, the HarmonyOS cockpit, drivetrain electronics and, decisively, its stores as the sales channel — built by Seres in Chongqing as a range-extended crossover. Buyers queued for the software fluency and the brand adjacency; the phone maker's retail machine moved cars at a pace startups spent fortunes failing to match. The M5 was competent; the distribution was revolutionary. It began the AITO ascent that would make the venture China's most-watched partnership, and it settled an industry argument at speed — in the smartphone era, the counter beats the dealership, and Huawei owned the counters.
Aito M5 EV 001 · JustAnotherCarDesigner · CC BY-SA 4.0
