ChinaChery says its new Fulwin A9 sedan locked 18,173 firm orders within 72 hours of pre-sales opening on July 9, 2026, starting at 115,900 yuan ($17,100) for the base Pro trim. Reported as a standalone number, 18,173 sounds enormous. In context, it is mid-table at best.
Xiaomi’s YU7 took 200,000 orders in three minutes when it launched in June 2025, 289,000 within an hour, and 315,900 within the same 72-hour window Chery is now citing. Of that first surge, only 120,000 were non-refundable locked orders rather than soft reservations. Even 18 hours in, Xiaomi’s locked-order count already stood at 240,000, more than 13 times Chery’s three-day total.
The comparison is not really fair to either brand, and that is the point. “Locked orders,” “pre-orders” and “reservations” are three different commitments with three different refund policies, and Chinese automakers rarely say which one they are reporting or over what exact window they counted. The numbers are self-reported, unaudited, and never benchmarked against a shared definition, so a headline figure tells you almost nothing about how many buyers will still want the car once it reaches a showroom.
European launches barely play this game at all. Volkswagen opened orders for the electric ID. Polo on April 29, 2026, and only confirmed a cumulative “25,000 orders” figure at the end of July, weeks later, with no time-window attached. Renault opened orders for the new Twingo E-Tech on January 8, 2026, and has not published an order count since.
What actually matters is what happens after the ordering window closes. Xiaomi’s 315,900 three-day orders for the YU7 turned into 6,024 deliveries in its first full month, a gap driven by battery and production capacity rather than cancelled orders, but a gap all the same. For any car with a headline-grabbing order count, monthly insurance registrations and delivery figures are the numbers worth tracking, not the ones a press release leads with.
Chery has since lowered the Fulwin A9’s official guide price to 109,900 to 129,900 yuan at its July 25 launch, below the 115,900 to 135,900 range it quoted during the pre-sale window that produced the 18,173 figure. Even the price behind an early order count is not necessarily the price a buyer ends up paying.
