NIO (car company)
NIO is a Chinese automobile manufacturer headquartered in Shanghai, specializing in designing and developing electric autonomous vehicles. The company is also involved in the FIA Formula E Championship, the first single-seater, all-electric racing series.
Overview
NIO was founded in November 2014 by William Li, the Chairman of Bitauto and NextEV. After launch, several companies invested in NIO, including Tencent, Temasek, Baidu, Sequoia, Lenovo and TPG. Its first model, the NIO EP9 sports car, debuted the same day the brand was established.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 of Shenzhen, Guangdong, 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.
In late April 2020, Nio announced ~$1B 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.
Technology
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 updates throughout 2018 and 2019has enhanced NIO Pilot with features such as lane keeping, adaptive cruise control, lane departure warning, automatic emergency braking, highway pilot, traffic Jam pilot, auto lane change and more.
NIO Pilot sensor suite consists of 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 November 2019, NIO announced a partnership with Mobileye to develop a consumer car equipped with Mobileye's complete Level 4 self driving system that could be sold to consumers by 2022.
Divisions
NIO Life
NIO Life is the company's clothing collection, made in collaboration with Hussein Chalayan.NIO Service
NIO Service is the company's network of service centers.NIO Power
NIO Power is the company's network of battery swap stations, power mobile, power home and super chargers. NIO has 122 Swap Stations around China, including 18 battery swap stations along the G4 Expressway in China.Vehicles
Current models
Upcoming models
Concept models
Battery swapping
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 131 battery-swap stations that covers a few thousand kilometers of Chinese expressways.The first phase was installing 18 battery-swap stations in 14 different places along the G4 expressway. It is a road connecting Beijing with the Pearl River Delta. 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.
Sales
| Calendar year | EP9 | ES6 | ES8 | Total | Notes |
| 2016 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | |
| 2017 | 6 | 0 | 0 | 6 | |
| 2018 | 10* | 0 | 8,101 | 8,111* | *Number not confirmed |
| 2019 | 0 | 20,204 | 8,872 | 29,076 | |
| 2020 | 0* | 11,711* | 2,458* | 14,169* | Sales drop in early 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic *As of June 2020 |
| Total | 16* | 31,915* | 19,431* | 51,356* | *As of June 2020 |
Technologies
NOMI AI
NOMI, an artificial-intelligence technology, claimed to be the first in-car AI system in production vehicles. NOMI can pull up the cars navigation, control the music, and unique to NIO cars can take a selfie of the passengers in the cabin.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 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. This was rebranded under NIO's name and they remain classified as a manufacturer.