The electric tricycle market is calling for "automotive-grade intelligence"
On March 27, 2026, the 24th China Northern International Bicycle & Electric Vehicle Exhibition was held at the National Convention and Exhibition Center (Tianjin).
Among the crowded pavilions packed with parameter competitions and promotion shouts, the booth of "Jixun Technology" in Hall S15 appears very distinctive.
For example, when it comes to electric tricycles, the label of "low-speed leisure tricycle for the elderly" is deeply rooted in people's minds — but the products exhibited by "Jixun Technology" show more designs that fit the aesthetic preference of young people, including the "Totoro" bionic design language that removes rigid and blunt obtuse angles, presenting a rounded and friendly look. There are also some "dopamine" colored light strips dotted on the vehicle body.
When we sit on "Zhiyue S" and "Zhiyue C", we can find that the previous hard iron seats have been replaced with ergonomic seats used in automobiles, which even support large-angle hovering, making parking for rest more comfortable when you are tired. In addition, some functions that were only available on automobiles have been installed on the tricycles, such as Auto Hold, vehicle-machine interconnection, intelligent reverse braking and so on.
This brand-new "new species" of electric tricycle may become a highly symbolic section of China's electric tricycle industry: an industry that has long been regarded as low-end and grassroots has finally ushered in a brand-new transformation.
The electric tricycle market is in urgent need of upgrading
The beginning of this transformation stems from an accidental observation: on a rainy day, a mother fell down accidentally when riding a two-wheeled electric vehicle to pick up her child from school due to slippery roads and improper operation.
This seemingly ordinary moment became the source of the entrepreneurial idea of Zhang Zhansheng, President of "Jixun Technology". Behind this, he keenly captured a message: there are neglected gaps in safety and comfort in the high-frequency rigid demand scenario of short-distance family travel, and the unmet needs of users also hide huge business opportunities.
Based on this intuition, before starting the business, Zhang Zhansheng and his team spent nine months conducting thorough research, collecting tens of thousands of feedback on electric tricycles from more than 20 cities across the country.
Zhang Zhansheng, President of Jixun Technology
On the surface, in China, electric tricycles, as the "capillaries" of urban and rural travel, are seeing a growing basic market — data shows that the market size of China's electric tricycle industry increased from 25.7 billion yuan in 2017 to 45 billion yuan in 2024. Industry forecast analysis points out that the demand for China's electric leisure tricycles will be about 3.62 million units in 2026.
But in fact, Zhang Zhansheng and his team found that there is a huge gap between the demand side and the supply side of electric tricycles.
First of all, on the demand side, the core scenarios of electric tricycles have undergone tremendous changes — users' demands for them have gradually deepened from the single purpose of cargo transportation and "mobility tools for the elderly" in the past. New scenarios include short-distance family travel such as picking up children, daily commuting, grocery shopping, and even suburban trips.
At the same time, electric tricycles are no longer "exclusive to the elderly", and user portraits have also been generalized. They have expanded from middle-aged and elderly men in the past to mothers who hold decision-making power over family travel, silver-haired groups who focus on quality of life, and young people who need a second or third supplementary travel tool for their families.
The changes in scenarios and user portraits on the demand side precisely reflect the shift in user value behind it: users' demands for electric tricycles have shifted from the basic requirements of "able to run" and "able to carry cargo" in the past to safety, comfort, intelligence and decency.
However, this demand of users has never been met by the supply side.
In the past on the supply side, the traditional tricycle industry was mired in the quagmire of homogeneous competition, and the focus of competition often centered on price, load capacity and durability.
At the same time, due to the long-term lack of unified technical standards for "leisure three-wheel electric motorcycles", a large number of small and medium-sized enterprises are addicted to low-level assembly and price wars.
All these factors have jointly led to the common feeling of practitioners in the electric tricycle industry that "the work is hard and the profit is thin", which also makes manufacturers unable and unwilling to invest in R&D to meet the high-level needs of users. A negative cycle has thus arisen.
To bridge the huge gap between supply and demand, Zhang Zhansheng's strategy is to "reinvent" a smart tricycle with automotive-grade standards.
"Inventing" smart tricycles, starting from the core genes
It is worth noting that what "Jixun Technology" is doing is not only making adjustments to electric tricycles at the product level, but also fully benchmarking against the automotive industry, carrying out a thorough genetic recombination of electric tricycles from technology, products, channels and brands.
To achieve subversion in products, the first step is to polish the core of technology.
In 2025, "Jixun Technology" has announced seven core technology systems, including zero-gravity seats, smart cockpit, intelligent dual drive, intelligent assisted driving, biometric sensing steering wheel, UV-C intelligent sterilization cockpit, and holographic projection instrument panel.
(Author's note: Zero-gravity seat: seat with 121° scientific elevation angle design; Smart cockpit: mobile phone screen casting + in-vehicle applications, etc.; Intelligent dual drive: dual-motor architecture + intelligent torque distribution algorithm to improve climbing ability and load capacity; Intelligent assisted driving: adaptive cruise + emergency braking + deviation warning, etc.; Biometric sensing steering wheel: senses the driver's heart rate to provide fatigue warning and health reminders; Intelligent sterilization cockpit: disinfection of the in-vehicle environment; Holographic projection instrument panel: AR technology combines navigation and vehicle speed with real scenes)
These technologies seem complex, but they actually take the on-board central computing platform (brain) as the core, and support three dimensions of driving safety, intelligent interaction and driving comfort. These basic capabilities also form the technical moat of "Jixun Technology", supporting the iteration space of products.
Based on this, at the just-held 2026 new product launch conference, Jixun Technology officially delivered its first product answer — the full matrix of the first-generation smart tricycle products. Among them, the Zhiyue series is equipped with four industry-first technologies: intelligent reverse braking, intelligent automatic parking, intelligent steering warning and intelligent vehicle-machine interconnection.
Zhiyue S Smart Tricycle
To make these pioneering technologies cover different groups faster, it has also designed a comprehensive product line covering three major categories: the Zhiyue series (leisure tricycle) for fashion family users, the Jirui 01 (full-enclosed tricycle) for all-weather travel, and the Kaiyun series (cargo tricycle) for practical needs. Multiple positioning provides systematic intelligent travel choices for users with different needs.
In addition to making drastic changes at the product and technical levels, "Jixun Technology" also makes adjustments on channels to upgrade the old distribution model, hoping to truly achieve "win-win" with dealers.
The first is to provide a profit engine: Jixun Technology hopes to help dealers jump out of the original vicious circle through more differentiated products, obtain healthy profits and do "high-quality business" with the value proposition of "safety, intelligence and comfort".
The second is to open up a growth track: through the full-category matrix, Jixun Technology allows dealers to cover all scenario needs such as family travel and cargo transportation through a single store, obtaining more certain growth space and customer stickiness.
The third is to achieve deep empowerment: Jixun Technology plans to accurately attract online customers through a digital middle platform, and design a flexible supply chain system to greatly reduce the inventory and capital risks of dealers, so that they can go into battle lightly and focus on customer service and market operation. In addition, it will also provide 4S-store-level full-link store opening support.
Various channel measures mark that the industry will move from the previous stock competition of resource plunder to incremental win-win that jointly creates user value. "We want merchants to do business that is more high-quality and sustainable in the long run," Zhang Zhansheng said.
At the same time, in terms of brand, Jixun Technology has also chosen a completely different strategy from traditional electric tricycles — combining high-profile brand promotion to seize user mindshare with precise implementation.
At the 2026 CCTV Spring Festival Gala, Jixun Technology became the first smart tricycle brand in the industry to appear on the Spring Festival Gala. In addition, Jixun Technology also chose to cross-border participate in exhibitions such as AWE (Appliance & Electronics World Expo) to add a sense of technology and trend to the brand, hoping to break the stereotype that "tricycles are equal to low-end products".
It is understood that "Jixun Technology" also plans to combine offline activities such as community test drives with the theme of "family safety" in the future, so that products can accurately reach core users such as mothers and silver-haired groups, and achieve fission communication through word of mouth.
This also means that China's electric vehicle industry is welcoming a new and ambitious disrupter in its upgrading process.
The electric tricycle industry welcomes a "dimension-upgrading pusher"
For the entire industry, Jixun Technology is like a catfish, which not only contributes a brand-new business model sample, but also leverages the evolution direction of the entire industry.
In the future, the competition of electric tricycles will no longer focus on "who is cheaper", but on "who is safer, smarter and has a better experience". For most industry players, this will also force them to shift their focus from hardware parameters in the past to user experience and technological innovation. It can be expected that the industry will move from the red ocean of price wars to the blue ocean of value competition.
Secondly, through the combined force of products and brands, Jixun Technology is transforming electric tricycles from "low-end" transportation tools into fashionable and smart travel partners. This is also promoting this category to evolve from the previous tool attribute to a category with a sense of value. This cognitive revolution also opens up space for high-end and branding for the entire industry.
In the process of polishing technology, Jixun Technology is also gradually driving industrial concentration — since September 2025, the new national standard for electric vehicles has been mandatorily implemented, with stricter requirements for vehicle body flame retardancy and anti-tampering, and it also requires some commercial tricycles to be equipped with Beidou positioning modules. The state is also promoting the "trade-in" policy to encourage the elimination of non-standard old tricycles. Under the guidance of the new policy, safety and intelligence have changed from the previous bonus points to entry requirements.
Jirui Series Smart Tricycle
In the near future, those low-quality production capacities that lack core technology and only rely on assembly will gradually lose their living space in the full competition of the industry, while the remaining high-quality enterprises with technical barriers will promote the whole industry to move towards higher-quality development.
This entrepreneurial idea of "transforming electric tricycles with automotive thinking" is not a "stroke of genius" like Steve Jobs creating Apple mobile phones to some extent, but it comes into being as the general trend of China's industrial development.
In the past few years, the ultra-rapid development and full competition of China's new energy automobile industry has nurtured the world's most mature smart automobile supply chain with cost advantages. The technology, talents and production capacity related to the automobile industry chain have seen a certain spillover, and are seeking new application scenarios.
Therefore, the emergence of smart tricycles is not just a commercial case of product innovation, but also a microcosm of the kinetic energy transformation of China's manufacturing industry — shifting from large-scale manufacturing relying on cost advantages to value creation relying on technological innovation and user experience.
Looking to the future, Zhang Zhansheng said at the launch conference that more than 70 new models will be launched within the year.