Seventeen thousand sedans in a year. That is how many Maextro S800s Huawei’s luxury brand has moved in China, outselling every European luxury car above the $103,000 mark. Maybach, S-Class, Panamera, all of them. Now patent images reveal the brand is loading the same cannon and pointing it at the ultra-luxury SUV class.
The unnamed SUV, rumored to wear the X800 badge, stretches over 216 inches long and borrows its bones from the S800 sedan. It is designed to compete with the Rolls-Royce Cullinan and Bentley Bentayga, yet its expected price will land somewhere around $120,000, roughly what a BMW iX costs in China. The Cullinan, once you factor in China’s brutal import and luxury taxes, opens above $1 million there. That price canyon is not a footnote. It is the entire business model.
Two powertrains are coming. A plug-in hybrid pairs a 1.5-liter four-cylinder generator with dual electric motors making 523 horsepower, or a tri-motor variant pushing 852. The fully electric option matches the 523-hp output but carries a 95 kWh battery good for 435 miles on the generous Chinese CLTC cycle. DC fast charging, Maextro claims, will handle 10 to 80 percent in twelve minutes.
Inside, three screens running Huawei’s HarmonyOS span the dashboard. An augmented reality head-up display sits behind them. The ceiling scatters constellation lighting across a panoramic roof.
Forty-three speakers. Zero-gravity rear seats. A fold-down television. The spec sheet reads like a Rolls-Royce configurator filtered through Shenzhen’s consumer electronics playbook.
The exterior makes no apologies either. Rose gold mesh intakes, dual-million-pixel headlamps, two-tone paint, and crystal daytime running lights announce themselves with the subtlety of a fireworks barge. A LiDAR pod perched on the roof like a taxi light is the one aesthetic casualty of Huawei’s autonomous driving ambitions. The rear is comparatively restrained, just a full-width LED light bar bisected by more rose gold trim.
JAC Motors will handle production, and an official reveal is expected within months. Six new Maextro models are reportedly in the pipeline, including an MPV, as the brand races to build a full lineup before European and Korean luxury players can react.
The competitive target list tells you everything about Maextro’s ambitions. Cullinan, Bentayga, Maybach GLS, Range Rover, Genesis GV90, Zeekr 9X, BYD’s Yangwang U8. The brand is not picking one fight. It is picking all of them simultaneously, then undercutting every single rival on sticker price.
Americans will not get to make the choice. Maextro has no plans to sell in the United States, and current trade barriers make that prospect even more remote. This remains a Chinese domestic story, which is precisely what makes it so significant for the Europeans losing market share there.
The S800 sedan already proved that Chinese buyers above the $100,000 threshold will choose Huawei’s technology ecosystem over a Flying Lady or a three-pointed star. If the X800 repeats that trick in the SUV segment, where margins are fatter and volumes larger, Rolls-Royce and Bentley will not lose sleep over a few thousand units.
But Mercedes-Maybach and BMW, fighting for every sale in the world’s largest luxury market, will feel it where the quarterly numbers live. Maextro is not trying to be Rolls-Royce. It is trying to make Rolls-Royce irrelevant to the buyer who was never going to spend a million dollars anyway but still wanted to feel like they could have.
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