Nio Inc.

Nio Inc. (; stylized as NIO) is a Chinese electric vehicle company headquartered in Shanghai. The company was established in 2014 and adopted its current name in 2016.

In 2018, Nio filed for an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange. Nio collaborates with the government-licensed vehicle manufacturer JAC Group to operate two manufacturing plants in Hefei, Anhui, China.

The company is notable for operating battery-swapping stations for its vehicles, as an alternative to conventional charging stations. It operates over 1,300 battery swap stations in China. It also develops semi-autonomous and autonomous vehicle technologies. Nio has participated in Formula E racing since 2014. Nio created a new electric car brand called Onvo in 2024, intending to target the mass market.

Overview

After the brand launch on November 21, 2016 in the Saatchi Gallery in London, England, several companies invested in Nio, including Tencent, Temasek, Sequoia, Lenovo and TPG. Its first model, the Nio EP9 sports car, debuted the same day.

In October 2016, Nio announced that it had been given an "Autonomous Vehicle Testing Permit" by the California DMV and it would begin testing on public roads under the "Autonomous Vehicle Tester Program" guidelines as part of its autonomous vehicle program. According to the company, it planned to launch vehicles with level-three and level-four autonomy.

In May 2018, Nio opened its first battery swap station in the Nanshan district, Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China, dubbed the "Power Swap Station". Only batteries for ES8 cars would be available from this station.

In September 2018, the company filed for a US$1.8 billion initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange.

By 2020, Nio was on the brink of bankruptcy and its share price had fallen 62% since its IPO. The city government of Hefei obtained a 25% stake in Nio. In late April 2020, Nio announced approximately US$1 billion in new funding from a group of Chinese investors, which was needed due to the company's struggles to sell its vehicles. As part of the deal, Nio would transfer assets to a new subsidiary called Nio China, which will be headquartered in Hefei. Hefei's government also helped Nio to obtain loans from six local banks to help it develop its supply chain for batteries, engines, and control systems. Over the next year, the company's car production increased by 81% and the company's valuation reached US$100 billion.

In August 2020, Nio launched Battery as a Service (BaaS) and formed a battery asset management company in collaboration with Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited (CATL), Hubei Science Technology Investment Group Co., Ltd. and a subsidiary of Guotai Junan International Holdings Limited, with each contributing roughly US$31.6 million (CN¥200 million) into the venture, for 25% equity each. BaaS helps lower the purchase price of Nio electric vehicles by about 25%.

In May 2021, Nio announced an expansion plan, saying it would begin delivering cars to Norway by September 2021. In the third quarter of 2021, Nio delivered 24,439 ES8, ES6, and EC6 vehicles, a new quarterly record representing a growth of 100% year over year. In 2021, the company announced plans to expand to 25 different countries and regions by 2025.

In August 2023, Nio Capital led the A-round financing of Mavel, a provider of electric drive solutions. Nio announced in the same month that they were selected to provide electric cars for Oslo-based taxis in Norway.

On 14 December 2023, Nio founder, chairman and CEO William Li stated that in order to cope with competition, Nio would create a new brand and described its product roadmap. This new brand would be focused on the family market. The brand is expected to have only three models in its entire life cycle. This brand will also help Nio enter the 200,000 yuan ("25,000 euros") market.

In December 2023, Nio obtained the production qualification for automobiles and announced the acquisition of JAC factories that manufacture Nio vehicles, at the price of 3.2 billion yuan, which marks the end of JAC's OEM business for Nio.

Vehicles

Nio brand

Nio's first car was the Nio EP9 electric hypercar, presented the same day the brand was launched. Nio revealed the ES8, a seven-seater electric SUV in December 2017 and began deliveries of the ES8 in June 2018. Nio launched the ES6, a five-seater electric SUV, in December 2018, and began deliveries in June 2019. In December 2019, Nio launched the EC6, a five-seater electric coupe SUV with deliveries beginning in September 2020. Nio launched ET7, its electric sedan, in January 2021 and revealed ET5, its most compact sedan at Nio Day in December 2021.

To date, Nio has revealed two concept cars; EVE at SXSW 2017 and ET Preview at Auto Shanghai 2019.

Concept models

Onvo brand

In May 2024, Nio introduced a new brand, Onvo () that targets the mass-market segment. Onvo was developed under the internal codename "Alps", until the name was officially confirmed in March 2024. Onvo stands for "On Voyage", while its Chinese name is meant to evoke a family having a happy time together. The brand is led by Alan Ai (Ai Tiecheng), a senior vice president of Nio.

Its first product is the Onvo L60, which will be delivered starting September 2024. The L60 directly targets the Tesla Model Y as its main competitor, with Ai making direct comparison during the L60 launch. Nio CEO William Li expects to sell Onvo cars in export markets.

Firefly brand

In December 2024, Nio announced its new brand called Firefly (), which was derived from its internal codename "Firefly". It will be Nio's electric small car brand. The brand's first model will be launched in Europe early in the first half of 2025. The car has been described by Nio as a rival product to models sold by Mercedes’ Smart and BMW’s Mini small car brands.

Upcoming vehicles

Battery swapping

Nio's battery swap stations allow owners to upgrade the capacity of their battery packs, either temporarily or permanently. These battery swapping stations have a reported swapping time of under five minutes. Unlike Tesla, which has tried battery swapping but has never deployed it on a large scale and relies instead on its Supercharger network, Nio has built a functioning network of 1,305 battery-swap stations that covers several thousand kilometres of Chinese expressways.

The first phase of its battery swap network was installing 18 battery-swap stations in 14 different locations along the G4 expressway, a road connecting Beijing (the national capital) with the Pearl River Delta (world's largest urban area where Hong Kong and Shenzhen are located). This was completed in November 2018. The second phase consisted of installing battery-swap stations in 8 locations along the G2 expressway, a road connecting Beijing with Shanghai. This phase was completed in January 2019.

On 24 March 2021, Nio completed its 2 millionth battery swap in the city of Suzhou. It has also deployed 193 battery swapping stations, 134 supercharging stations, and 327 destination stations across China. On 10 December 2021, Nio installed its 700th battery swap station in China, hitting its annual target ahead of schedule. Nio's second-generation battery swap station allows the vehicle to automatically park into the station, with which users can experience a three-minute battery swap while staying inside the vehicle. At that point, Nio has provided over 5.3 million swaps to users in China. As of May 2022, Nio has opened its first swap station in Europe, located in Norway, with plans to expand in other cities. As of 31 December 2022, Nio has built 1,305 battery swap stations over all provincial administrative regions in China. They were providing an average of 40,000 daily battery swap services, and have completed a total of 15 million battery swap services. In August 2023, seven swap stations were operating in Germany.

In November 2023, Nio and Changan Automobile signed a strategic agreement on battery swapping. On 29 November 2023, Nio and Geely Holding signed similar agreement in the battery swapping sector, as well as with JAC Group and Chery Automobile in January 2024. These agreements including carrying out cooperation on battery standards, battery swapping technology, battery swapping network expansion and operation, swappable model development, battery asset management, and develop swappable vehicles.

In March 2024, the company opened a new battery swap station, which supports battery swap and energy storage, into operation at the Zhijiang West service area along the G50 Shanghai-Chongqing highway. This is part of an effort to build the same system for motorway service areas to connect battery swap stations to the grid as in urban areas. Also in March, Nio Power signed an agreement with Zhongan Energy of Anhui Province on battery standards, charging and battery replacement technology, and the construction and operation of battery charging and replacement networks.

Battery specifications

To allow for easy swapping and maximizing compatibility across different vehicles, Nio's swap compatible battery packs all have similar dimensions. Nio's original 'standard range' battery was a 70kWh NMC pack produced by CATL. In 2021, the 70kWh battery was replaced by a new 75kWh LFP-NMC dual chemistry battery, which consists of an undisclosed ratio of serially connected LFP and NMC battery cells assembled in a cell-to-pack format and a special pack management system, and it allows for a blend of each chemistry's advantages: the higher energy density, better cold weather charging, and accurate state-of-charge readings from NMC cells, and the lower costs, lower wear, and improved fire safety from LFP cells. In 2024, the 75kWh battery was updated to use only LFP cells assembled in a cell-to-pack moduleless construction, which also features an increased peak DC fast charging rate of 170kW compared to the previous pack's 140kW rate.

In mid-2024, Nio started taking deliveries from WeLion for its new 150kWh NMC batteries, which are the first ever mass produced automotive battery packs with a semi-solid state electrolyte. It feature battery cells with an energy density of 360Wh/kg, and the pack weighs only more than the 100kWh pack with a conventional liquid electrolyte. Initially, this battery will only be available for short-term rental from a battery swap station, but a buyout option is planned to be offered later. At the announcement in February 2024, Nio said that each pack cost as much as an entire ET5 at launch, which has a starting price of , or (approximately , or ) with a battery subscription.

Technologies

Nomi AI

Nomi is Nio's digital assistant for the car dashboard to provide a closer engagement with its drivers and passengers and Nio claims is the world's first in-car AI system for production vehicles.

The Nomi Mate 2.0 features a circular AMOLED display and incorporates artificial intelligence with a human face-like interface that swivels and blinks its oval ‘eyes’ to address each vehicle occupant directly, depending on their location.

Nomi learns user preferences over time to understand the specific context of the car in relation to its owner. For example, Nomi can set the personal seating and steering wheel positions whenever it senses a driver approaching the vehicle. Users can also give Nomi verbal commands to adjust the cabin temperature, open or close windows, or snap an in-car selfie and have it displayed on the radio screen.

Nio Pilot

Nio Pilot is the company's SAE level 2 semi-autonomous system that offers ADAS features. It launched with the introduction of Nio's ES8 model. Several over the air updates throughout 2018 and 2019 has enhanced Nio Pilot with features such as lane keeping, adaptive cruise control, lane departure warning, automatic emergency braking, highway pilot (Nio Navigate on Pilot, NNOP), traffic Jam assistance, auto lane change and more.

Nio Pilot sensor suite consists of 23 sensors, including a trifocal forward camera, 5 radars, 12 ultrasonic sensors and a driver monitor camera. Nio was the first automaker to launch a car model utilizing Mobileye's EyeQ4 vision chip.

In August 2021, Lin Wenqin, a 31-year-old Chinese man, was killed after his Nio ES8 collided with a construction vehicle. Nio's self-driving feature was still in beta, and could not deal with static obstacles. Though the vehicle's manual at the time clearly stated that the driver must take over when nearing construction sites, there was an issue regarding whether the feature was improperly marketed and unsafe. Lawyers of the family of the person killed called into question Nio's private access to the vehicle, which they argue could lead to the data being falsified.

Aquila (Nio Autonomous Driving)

In November 2019, Nio announced a partnership with Mobileye to develop a consumer car equipped with Mobileye's complete Level 4 self-driving system called Aquila that could be sold to consumers by 2022. Aquila features 33 sensors, including 11 high-resolution cameras, LiDAR, 5 radars, 12 ultrasonic sensors, and two high-precision positioning units: V2X and ADMS.

The system was first on board of the Nio ET7. The company begun deliveries of the model in Q1 of 2022.

Autonomous driving chips

Adam

Nio introduced its Adam autonomous driving hardware system with the ET7, announced in early 2021 and the first deliveries in early 2022. It utilizes four Nvidia Drive Orin processors for a total of 1,016 TOPS of performance. It is used by all Nio vehicles on the NT2.0 platform.

Shenji NX3091

Nio announced its first self-developed autonomous driving SoC, the Shenji NX9031, at December's Nio Day 2023, and announced the chip had been successfully taped out in July 2024. The chip was first used in the ET9, which began deliveries in March 2025. It has a CPU consisting of a total of 32 ARM CortexA78AE and CortexA65AE cores in a big.LITTLE configuration capable of 615k DMIPS of performance. Nio says that it has compute performance comparable to four Nvidia Orin-X chips used in their previous Adam computer; external sources estimate that the Adam computer is only effectively capable of around 300 TOPS due to interconnect bandwidth bottlenecks, and estimate that the NX9031 is capable of around 500 TOPS. It uses a self-developed 26-bit ISP capable of processing 6.5gigapixels per second with a delay of less than 5 milliseconds. It uses LPDDR5x 8533 memory, for a total of 204GB/s of bandwidth. It achieves the ISO 26262 ASIL-D functional safety certification with the help of ARM Cortex R52 cores. The chip contains over 50 billion transistors and is fabricated on Samsung 5nm process.

Production and sales

Milestones

Divisions

Nio Phone

On 22 February 2022, it was announced that Nio is planning to venture into China's smartphone market and preparing to make its own handsets. The company has formed a smartphone division in Shenzhen, and is hiring staff to expand the team. The move is preceded by similar plans to manufacture smartphones by automakers Geely and Volvo.

The first Nio Phone was launched in September 2023. It is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 system-on-chip and has a 6.81-inch curved screen with 2K resolution from Samsung Display. The phone is equipped with a 5200 mAh battery that supports 66-watt wired charging, 50-watt wireless charging, and 10-watt reverse charging. It is equipped with an action button that allows drivers to launch over 30 functions related to their EV controls. CEO William Li believes that many competitors will learn from the smartphone innovations, however the primary interest of the automaker is likely to collect user data rather than making the phone a key contributor to revenue.

Nio Life

Nio Life is the company's design lifestyle brand. The brand launched in 2018 with a capsule collection made in collaboration with Hussein Chalayan. In 2021 Nio Life launched its sustainable fashion label "Blue Sky Lab". The label collaborated with the Parsons School of Design challenging students to create new products made of leftover car manufacturer materials and, thereby, providing opportunities for young designers.

Nio Service

Nio Service is the company's network of service centers. Nio Users can request a "pick-up-and-delivery" service for their car to the service center. Additionally, mobile service vehicles can carry out simple maintenance work on demand.

Nio Power

Nio Power is the company's network of battery swap stations, power mobile, power home and super chargers. Nio has 1,305 swap stations around China as of 31 December 2022, including 346 battery swap stations along highways. In addition to the battery swap stations, Nio has 1,223 supercharging stations in China and 1,058 destination charging stations.

Performance and Engineering

Nio's performance and engineering division has international offices including in the UK, Germany, and the USA.

XPT

XPT is a subsidiary of Nio, with locations in Nanjing, Hefei, and Shanghai. Nio bought out its minority partners in the company in November 2020, taking full ownership.

XPT designs and manufactures key components for Nio's supply chain, including the EV car motors, powertrains, and gearboxes, which are later assembled elsewhere by Nio and its assembly partners. Nio runs its XPT company as a separate business, as it intends for XPT to become a supplier for other companies in the future.

Management

William Li

William Li is a Chinese business executive and entrepreneur who is the founder and CEO of Nio. In June 2021, ''Bloomberg Billionaires Index'' estimated Li's net worth to be US$7.11 billion. Li co-founded and invested in over 40 companies in the internet and automotive industries.

Awards and honours

* GQ China Entrepreneur of the Year – 2017
* China Automobile Dealers Association Person of the Year – 2017
* 2017 Top 10 Economic Personages of China
* Forbes Most Intriguing Newcomer in the Transportation Awards – 2020
* TopGear.com Electric Awards 2024: EV person of the year

Lihong Qin

Lihong Qin is a Chinese business executive. He is a co-founder and CEO of the electric car manufacturer Nio.

Kris Tomasson

Kris Tomasson is an American industrial designer and vice president of Design at Nio. He was born in New York to Marlene and Helgi Tómasson. He studied transportation design at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, and graduated with honours as a Bachelor of Science (BS). After graduation, he worked as a designer in various companies, from 1992 to 1998 for the first time for BMW, then as design director, Innovation of the Arnell Group, for The Coca-Cola Company (as Global Design Director), Gulfstream Aerospace, Ford and from April 2014 to May 2015 again for BMW, where he worked for the body design of the i-models was responsible. In June 2015, he moved from BMW to Next EV, which became Nio. The design studio where Tomasson is based is located in Munich/Bogenhausen.

Hui Zhang

Hui Zhang is vice president Nio Europe. He manages both the German and UK locations of the electric car manufacturer. After studying in Beijing and Utah, Hui Zhang completed his MBA in International Management at Pforzheim University of Applied Sciences in 2002. Initially, he worked in purchasing and supply chain management at VOITH AG in China and Germany. After positions at Kiekert AG as Vice general manager and at Lotus as general manager from 2011, he was responsible for the Business Group Industry and Healthcare China at Leoni AG as a China Board Member from 2014. Hui Zhang is Deputy Chairman of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce in Germany.

Motorsport

Formula E

The Nio team is one of the original Formula E teams, originally competing under the name Team China Racing. Before the first season was completed, they rebranded as NEXTEV TCR. In this inaugural season, their main driver Nelson Piquet Jr. became the FIA Formula E Driver's Champion, after winning two races in Long Beach and Moscow. The team was only able to achieve fourth in the constructor's championship though, in part due to a rotating line-up of second drivers that didn't achieve as consistent level of success as Piquet.

From season 2 onwards, Formula E opened up car development, with teams creating their own powertrains. Nio used their own design NEXTEV powertrain, but it saw a downturn in the team's performance for the constructor's championship, as they finished only 9th in season 2, 6th in season 3 and 8th in season 4. By this point, the team had morphed through NEXTEV, NEXTEV Nio until renamed simply Nio. Season 5 would see the team's meagre successes diminish further, as they languished 11th and last in the championship.

For season 6 (2019–20) the team was sold on to Lisheng Racing and renamed Nio 333 Racing. For the first time since season 1, Nio did not provide their own powertrain for the car, instead using the previous year's Dragon powertrain. It was rebranded under Nio's name and they remained classified as a manufacturer. This didn't change the team's fortunes, as they would go on to have their worst ever season, with neither Oliver Turvey nor Ma Qinghua being able to score any points in 2020. In season seven Nio improved marginally, as whilst Turvey and new arrival Tom Blomqvist amassed a total of 19 points throughout the campaign, the squad still remained in last place.

Nio once again changed their driver line-up for the 2021–22 Formula E season, as Blomqvist made way for former Red Bull and Williams junior Dan Ticktum.

The team ended its Formula E involvement after the 2022–23 season, with the team being rebranded as ERT Formula E Team for the 2023–24 season.

World records

Nio set five records in their track-only EP9 for the fastest lap for an electric-powered car in the Nürburgring Nordschleife, Circuit Paul Ricard, Circuit of the Americas, and Shanghai International Circuit tracks.

Public listing

In Sep 2018, Nio listed on NYSE after raising about $1 billion selling American depositary shares at $6.26 apiece. The shares started trading under the symbol NIO.

In 2018, while Nio was preparing for an IPO, the company told investors that they were building a new factory in Shanghai. Then in March 2019, Nio disclosed that the factory would never be built. According to former employees, construction had never started. Investors sued and accused Nio's promoters, which included Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, of negligence in examining Nio's financial statements.

See also

* Automobile manufacturers and brands of China
* List of automobile manufacturers of China
* Automotive industry in China
* New energy vehicles in China
* XPeng
* Li Auto
* Leapmotor

References

External links

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* by Everything Electric AUSTRALASIA

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Electric vehicle manufacturers of China
Battery electric vehicle manufacturers
Car brands
Car manufacturers of China
Companies based in Shanghai
Multinational companies headquartered in China
Vehicle manufacturing companies established in 2014
Chinese companies established in 2014
2018 initial public offerings
Companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange
Chinese brands
Luxury motor vehicle manufacturers
Sports car manufacturers