China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has published homologation filing photos of a refreshed Li Auto i6, corroborating an announcement from the automaker a day earlier that the 2026 i6 will open pre-orders in late September and begin deliveries in early November. The filing shows the model's headline changes are mechanical rather than cosmetic: a switch to a self-developed 5C fast-charging battery and Li Auto's own Mach assisted-driving chip.

Visually, the refreshed i6 sticks close to the outgoing car, carrying over Li Auto's pure-electric family design language. The shark-nose front end and its stacked, star-ring headlight cluster are unchanged, and the roof-mounted lidar pod stays in place. The side profile keeps the fastback roofline of the current model, with the one visible update being new semi-flush door handles.

Li Auto's current i6, whose front-end design carries over unchanged in the 2026 refresh (Li Auto)

Body dimensions are listed at 4,950mm long, 1,935mm wide and 1,655mm tall (194.9 by 76.2 by 65.2 inches), on a 3,000mm (118.1-inch) wheelbase. Every figure matches the outgoing i6 except height, which drops slightly. At the rear, the filing shows the same full-width light bar and spoiler as the current car, with no visible change to the taillight graphic.

The filing lists both single-motor and dual-motor all-wheel-drive variants, with outputs matching what Li Auto already sells: 250kW (335 hp) for the single-motor version, and a 150kW front and 250kW rear split for the dual-motor flagship. The drivetrain numbers carry over unchanged, leaving the battery and chip as the refresh's actual news.

That battery is developed in-house from the ground up. Li Auto's 5C pack for the new i6 covers the cell chemistry, pack architecture and battery-management software internally, though manufacturing stays outsourced: the automaker has contracted Sunwoda EVB and CALB to build the cells it designed, while assembling the finished pack itself.

A 5C rating means the pack can theoretically be charged at up to five times its capacity per hour, the metric behind Li Auto's claim of roughly 500km of range from a 10-minute stop. Delivering on that in practice depends on charging infrastructure built to match, and Li Auto's own supercharging network passed 4,000 stations nationwide by the first quarter of 2026, giving the automaker a hardware base it controls end to end, from the cell in the car to the charger on the highway.

The push toward in-house batteries follows a rocky supply run for the current i6. The SUV became Li Auto's best-selling model, delivering more than 120,000 units in the first half of 2026, but demand outran cell supply badly enough that order-to-delivery waits stretched to nearly 17 weeks in February, an issue largely tied to constrained CATL battery output. Li Auto said in the following months that it had resolved the bottleneck and cut delivery times by six weeks.

This month, Li Auto added CALB as a third battery supplier for the i6, alongside CATL and Sunwoda, in a bid to secure supply and control costs. CALB ranks as China's third-largest EV battery maker by shipment volume, behind only CATL and BYD, and the move puts Li Auto in the same position as rivals that have spent 2026 diversifying away from single-supplier dependence on CATL. CALB already holds a substantial share of that business elsewhere in the industry, having built up a position as XPeng's largest battery supplier and as a cell partner for GAC's Aion brand, so the i6 contract extends an existing manufacturing relationship rather than starting one from scratch.

That diversification is part of a broader shift Li Auto announced on September 7: the automaker is moving its entire lineup to in-house 5C ternary-lithium batteries. Orders for the Li Mega Home placed after 3 p.m. Beijing time that day already ship with Li Auto's own cells instead of CATL's, after CATL-sourced reserves ran low on stronger-than-expected demand, while the upcoming i9 flagship, due in mid-September, will start on CATL supply before transitioning to in-house cells as production scales.

Li Auto has backed the shift financially, investing 2.65 billion yuan ($389.7 million) into Sunwoda EVB for an 8.79% stake and becoming the battery maker's second-largest shareholder. Liu Zhimin, Li Auto's senior director of power batteries, said the company treats cell technology "not as a commodity," arguing that owning the underlying design lets it guarantee supply and iterate faster than buying off the shelf.

The Mach chip, meanwhile, is a known quantity for Li Auto rather than a debut. It first appeared on the i8 flagship SUV, which launched in July 2025 at 321,800 yuan ($47,955), with Li Auto claiming roughly 2,000 TOPS of compute per chip. The current i6, by contrast, ships standard with Nvidia's Thor-U chip for its AD Max driver-assist suite, so the refresh marks Nvidia's exit from the i6 lineup alongside CATL's.

The outgoing i6 that the refresh will replace launched on September 26, 2025 at a single-trim price of 249,800 yuan ($37,225), built on an 800V architecture with an 87.3kWh LFP pack rated for 720km (447 miles) of CLTC range in rear-wheel-drive form and able to add roughly 500km of range from a 10-minute charge. Li Auto has pitched the mid-large electric SUV against the Xiaomi YU7, Tesla Model Y and NIO's Onvo-brand L90.

The current-generation i6, the model a September MIIT filing confirms will get new battery and chip hardware (Li Auto)

Li Auto has not disclosed pricing for the refreshed i6, and the MIIT filing does not indicate whether the car will carry a new nameplate or model-year badge beyond the running "2026 i6" reference used in the automaker's own announcement. With pre-orders due to open before the end of September and first deliveries scheduled for early November, a full price sheet and specification list should follow within weeks.

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