Chinese electric vehicle maker Nio revealed its first sedan model, eyeing a greater share of the world's largest car market. The launch of the ET7, at an event in the western city of Chengdu, came as rival Tesla started selling its China-made Model Y sport-utility vehicle in the Chinese market.

The ET7 is expected to hit the market in the first quarter of 2022. Nio is aiming to expand its product lineup to attract more customers. In China's passenger car market, sedans and SUVs each make up around 46% of overall sales.

Chief Executive William Li said Nio's new high-density solid state battery technology will give the ET7 a drive range of over 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) between charges. The new battery technology will be made available to owners of Nio's other vehicles once the technology is in production.

The starting price for the ET7 sedan will be 378,000 yuan ($58,378) for the car without the battery pack, one of the most expensive EV components, which can then be leased from the company for 980 yuan ($150) per month. With the battery pack, the starting price is 448,000 yuan. Two battery pack capacities will be offered at launch, a 70 kWh and a 100 kWh pack.

Li said the ET7 will be fitted with lidar sensors — which help the car perceive its surroundings, and are often found in autonomous cars — to assist drivers, a technology dismissed by Tesla's outspoken chief Elon Musk.

The Californian automaker, which is selling Shanghai-made Model 3 sedans, has just started selling its Model Y vehicles at a starting price of 339,900 yuan. It uses cameras for driver assistance.

Nio, which delivered 43,728 vehicles last year, has a market capitalization of over $92 billion, surpassing conventional automakers Daimler and General Motors. Investors have poured billions of dollars into electric vehicle development.

It is currently selling three SUV models built at a car factory in China's eastern city of Hefei.

Nio's rival Xpeng also said on social media on Thursday that it plans to roll out a new sedan model. It currently has a sedan and an SUV in its lineup.

Nio also announced that it plans to have 500 battery swap stations operating by the end of 2021. Each station will keep 13 full packs in its inventory and will be capable of handling as many as 312 battery pack swaps per day.

Chinese automaker Nio has been making a strong showing in the electric-vehicle race in China, with aims of challenging Tesla for EV sales supremacy in the country. The automaker claims it prices its vehicles competitively but offers more innovation and technology for the money. Nio CEO William Li says, "We want to provide better product and service at prices lower than Tesla Inc's."

Nio was founded in 2014 in Shanghai, China, with manufacturing starting up in 2017. Deliveries of its first vehicles began in June of 2018. Its debut model was the ES8, a premium seven-seat SUV starting around $68,000. Since then, it's added three additional models to its lineup, and in April of this year, has eclipsed 100,000 vehicles sold, making it one of the most successful EV start-ups.

Tesla built its Giga Shanghai factory in 2018, and it's the main manufacturer for the Model 3 and Model Y in Asia. The Tesla Model 3 was the best-selling EV in China before being dethroned by the Wuling Hong Guang Mini EV, which currently reigns as the best-selling EV in the world. Tesla is still doing extremely well in China but its competitors are increasing, improving, and in some instances, surpassing the veteran EV maker. In an initial quality survey conducted by J.D. Power aimed specifically at EVs, PHEVS, and other players in the "new energy vehicle" market, Nio took the number one spot in the battery electric vehicle segment, with Tesla settling for second.

Nio's latest premium flagship sedan, the ET7, is currently going into production, with deliveries expected for sometime during 2022. The ET7 will come with a standard 70.0-kWh battery and 300 miles of range. Optional is a 100.0-kWh battery sporting 435 miles of range. Nio also says it has been working on a 150.0-kWh battery estimated to reach up to 620 miles. If it is able to deliver on that range, it will trump Tesla's top performer by a sizeable margin, as the Model S Long Range currently maxes out at 402 miles. The ET7 has a starting price around $69,000, undercutting the Tesla by $20,000.


The interior of the Nio ET7 is on par with most premium luxury sedans.Another trick Nio has up its sleeve is its battery swapping service known as Battery as a Service (BaaS). It takes significantly less time to refill an internal combustion engine's fuel tank than it does to charge an EV, but Nio's solution for that is a service wherein the old battery is swapped with a fresh one when it's about to run out. The user also has the option to choose the size of the battery. This subscription costs $151 for the 70-kWh battery and $228 for the 100.0-kWh. Signing up for this service will knock the base price of the car by $10,000, and this discount is available for all Nio models.

Nio definitely does not want people taking any chances while driving its vehicles with NOP (Navigate on Pilot). When Lin Wenqin, the founder of Chinese restaurant brand Meiyihao, died after crashing his ES8 while using the advanced driving assistant, the Chinese brand created a test to verify if its customers are prepared to deal with the system.
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This is not a new idea. Xpeng offers a similar ADAS with a similar name: NGP (Navigation Guided Pilot). The Chinese company started to demand in March that customers that want to use it take an exam.

According to CNEVPost, some users shared on the DDXQ.tech Forum images of the video Nio displays through the Nio App for anyone willing to use the Level 2 ADAS. Apart from NOP, Nio would also have the Nio Pilot. We are not sure if they are just different names for the same thing or if any of them offers more capabilities than the other like FSD supposedly does compared to Autopilot in Tesla’s case.

Nio starts the testing section with a six-minute video. After watching it, Nio customers have to answer ten questions related to the use of NOP and Nio Pilot. The owners that get all ten questions right receive 200 Nio Credits. These credits are a sort of digital currency that allows Nio clients to buy goods from the company or pay for services.

It is not clear what happens if owners fail the test. If Nio requires the test to be taken before NOP or Nio Pilot can be used, logic suggests the ones that do not manage to pass do not get to use the system. We will try to confirm if that is the case with Nio.

Regardless of how effective and enforcing this is, Nio shows it is as hard as possible to teach customers what its cars are actually capable of doing. They are not autonomous, as no vehicle currently for sale is or ever was. This is quite a lesson in preventing autonowashing and its fatal effects.

NIO seems to be pretty proud of its first sedan. The ET7 obtained a remarkably low drag coefficient: only 0.208. NIO said it is the second-lowest result for production vehicles, but it failed to inform which one is the best: the Mercedes-Benz EQS, with a 0.20 drag coefficient. The ET7 ties with the Tesla Model S Plaid and beats the Lucid Air’s 0.21 cx. However, what really caught our attention in the pictures released by the Chinese company were the LiDAR and high-definition cameras the electric sedan will present.

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Called Watchtower sensor layout, it puts the LiDAR in the center of the upper extreme of the windshield, with an 8-megapixel high-resolution camera on each side. NIO said its aerodynamics team had a lot of work to ensure these sensors would not hurt the car’s efficiency in that matter. What was inevitable was spoiling the aesthetics. The LiDAR and the two cameras look like horns depending on how you look at the ET7.

NIO was aware of that when it said, in its press release, that the need for such sensors “redefines the exterior design in the autonomous driving era.” The euphemism is just to warn those who are not willing to drive their cars themselves will have to make do with the “horns” and praise the technology instead. Many will just pass on the autonomous driving promises to have a better-looking car.

To achieve the low aerodynamic drag, NIO would have made “over 800 CFD simulation cases and 120 hours of wind tunnel testing.” The company informs that this process allowed it to optimize 13 areas of the car design. However, those are not the only solutions NIO adopted to make the air flow along the ET7 body instead of fighting against it.

The ET7 has an AGS (active frill shutter) that closes the air intake when it is not necessary. It also has a standard air suspension that lowers the vehicle at higher speeds, reducing its frontal area. For the air that goes underneath the body, a lightweight underbody coverage would also help cut air drag.

That aerodynamic profile will help the ET7 become one of the most energy-efficient vehicles NIO ever sold. When it receives the 150-kWh solid-state battery pack the company promised for 2022, it would have a range of more than 1,000 kilometers (621 miles), probably under the NEDC cycle. When converted to WLTP or EPA cycles, the numbers are lower.

NIO wants to be recognized as a luxury brand. That’s why we had rumors circulating about an affordable brand until William Li said it would be to NIO what Toyota is to Lexus. Interestingly, the ET7 shows that NIO will get there by charging a fraction of the price other premium brands have for their EVs. And it has started doing that on March 28 for this sedan.
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Deliveries of the ET7 started on this day at the company’s current headquarters in Hefei. The company is building a new one that will be in the same Chinese city but in another part of it: NeoPark, a 16,950-acre (68,594,183.46-square-meter) “smart electric vehicle industry park” that will deliver 1 million EVs and 100 GWh in battery pack production per year when it is at full capacity.

Sold for RMB448,000 ($70,337 at the current exchange rate) in its entry-level version, it cost 41.5% of what Mercedes-Benz charges for the entry-level version of the EQS in China: RMB1,079,600 ($169,500). The German electric sedan will have to have convincing arguments to cost so much more than the ET7 – especially if it delivers on some of the promises NIO made about it.

The first is its capacity to travel more than 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) when it gets its 150-kWh battery pack in 2022. This new swappable component will have a semi-solid-state cell that will increase energy density in battery packs of the same size as the 100-kWh pack that the vehicle already has.

The second is the NAD (NIO Autonomous Driving), a subscription service the Chinese company plans to offer by Q4 2022. The worrying name suggests that NIO will either provide autonomous driving capabilities – which is highly unlikely to happen in 2022, even if the ET7 uses LiDAR – or follow Tesla’s steps in autonowashing. As Liza Dixon explained when she coined this expression, it means to imply that a vehicle is more autonomous than it really is. NIO Autonomous Driving is not much better than Tesla’s Full Self-Driving in that regard.

A more feasible promise is Banyan, which NIO describes as a piece of software “that keeps evolving and grows together with our users,” suggesting some sort of machine learning and AI (artificial intelligence). That may be possible due to NIO’s NT2.0 platform, which counts on four Nvidia DRIVE Orin chips.

Each of them has a computing power of 254 TOPS (Trillions or Tera Operations per Second). For reference, the Tesla Model 3 counts on 144 TOPS, while the enhanced computer system of the ET7 would beat that with a single Nvidia DRIVE Orin processor. Its four chips give it 1,056 TOPS.

In terms of dimensions, the EQS has an advantage. The ET7 is 5.10 meters (200.8 inches) long, 1.99 m (78.4 in) wide, 1.51 m (59.5 in) tall, and has a wheelbase of 3.06 m (120.5 in). It is a shorter machine than the EQS, which is 5.22 m (205.5 in) long, 1.93 m (76 in) wide, 1.51 m tall, and has a wheelbase of 3.21 m (126.4 in).

We’ll have to watch how well the ET7 does not only in the Chinese market but also in Norway, where it is supposed to go on sale by the last quarter of 2022. It may already arrive in Europe with the 150-kWh battery pack NIO promised. If it sells better than the EQS, we’ll have a winner. Pricing alone may help it get there.

NIO, one of China's numerous automakers, has reached a production milestone today. The brand has celebrated its 200,000th vehicle, which left the JAC-NIO Advanced Manufacturing Center in Hefei, China, earlier today. The brand has been making cars since May 2018, so you can say that things are getting serious.
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The first 100,000 vehicles took almost three years to make, but the second hundred thousand units were three times faster to the finish line, with just a year's worth of waiting between them. According to the marque, this is just the beginning, as NIO wants to speed up its production even further, as it makes its NT 2.0-based vehicles.

Currently, three models represent the bulk of NIO production. We are writing about the ET7, ET5, and ES7. Later this year, they will unveil the ES8, ES6, and EC6. The latter three will come with the company's latest tech regarding digital cockpit hardware and software, as well as the retrofit and upgrade possibilities imagined for existing customers.

While expanding its line-up along with increasing production, NIO will also enter markets like Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands. The company's goal is to start production at its second manufacturing facility, NeoPark, in the third quarter of 2022.

Moreover, NIO is on a hiring spree, as it plans to grow its research and development team to 9,000 people by the end of this year. The company has not specified the size of its current team, but what is mentioned by the company is its plan to double investments in research and development on a year-on-year basis.

By the end of this year, NIO wants to open 100 new stores, as well as over 50 NIO Service Centers and authorized service centers in China. After all, making more vehicles per year is nothing if you have nowhere to sell them.

What is the most interesting part about this announcement is the fact that there is no mention of the company being affected by the global chip shortage