On May 10th, according to the 2022 Anhui Major Project “Cloud Contract-Signing” event, Hefei Economic and Technological Development Area signed a cooperation agreement with NIO for NeoPark New Bridge Intelligent Electric Vehicle Industrial Park’s Phase II and key core component supporting projects.
The project covers an area of 1860 mu, and under the agreement, it will introduce NIO’s new high-end brand intelligent electric vehicle products and other products. It is planned to be built and put into operation by 2024. Currently, the core team of the new brand has been established, and the first batch of products have entered the key research and development stage.
The news of NIO’s new high-end brand has been circulating for nearly a year, initially revealed by Li Bin.
The new brand’s competitors are Volkswagen and Tesla. The price range for this new brand is expected to be significantly lower than that of the NIO brand, and it is expected to focus on the 200,000 to 300,000 yuan market.
NIO’s brand has already established a foothold in the high-end market, and after the launch of the ES7 and ET5 later this year, the NIO lineup will have six models. The 200,000 to 300,000 yuan mid-to-high-end market is still an incremental market and has great potential for development.
Different from XPeng and Li Auto’s bottom-up strategy, NIO’s strategy from high-end to mid-to-high-end can rely on its accumulated market reputation and battery swapping network as a strong endorsement for this new brand. However, considering the differentiation from the NIO brand, it’s unknown if this new brand will also focus on providing services as one of its selling points.
One issue with NIO’s new high-end brand is that it currently only has one pure electric platform: NT 1.0 and upgraded NT 2.0. Unlike Volkswagen’s MEB and PPE, which focuses on different sub-segments of the pure electric platform, if NIO uses the NT 1.0 platform for its new mid-to-low-end vehicles, it will lose its competitiveness, and if it uses the NT 2.0 platform, it will damage the NIO brand. The most likely approach is to develop a new platform for the new mid-to-high-end brand, with differences in hardware, three-electrics, and assisted driving hardware.
This article is a translation by ChatGPT of a Chinese report from 42HOW. If you have any questions about it, please email bd@42how.com.