Author: Cherio Cheng Yuan

In the era of 40 years ago when fuel cars were prevalent, the first German brand car entered China in the form of CKD completely knocked-down assembly. Since then, it opened the myth of German cars’ sales on the land of China.

In the era of electric cars after nearly 40 years, China’s new electric power is no longer just a follower. The electric car culture originating from China has begun to input into traditional automotive powerhouse Germany in reverse.

In the early hours of today, NIO Berlin officially started after several exquisite promotion videos of EL7, ET5, and ET7. After that, William Li, also known as Li Bin, the familiar domestic entrepreneur, stepped onto the European stage!

Firstly, he reviewed the process of creating NIO, including many key points, which is a new fascinating story from the Far East for the European people.

Li Bin stated that NIO has more than 250,000 users in China and Norway, with a total mileage of over 6.8 billion kilometers and deployed 1,158 battery-swapping stations. He also announced that NIO will enter 25 countries and regions by 2025.

Europe is the first station of NIO’s global expansion.

The second to appear is Andreas Nilsson, NIO’s Chief Designer. Li Bin said that this brother had aspired to be an automotive designer since he was 10 years old.

Before designing cars, NIO first designed its own value system, discussing who they are and what they should do. It may sound a little mystical, but values are indeed essential to NIO, including:

• Honesty
• Care
• Vision
• Action

On the basis of values, Andreas summarizes NIO’s design language as “pure, warm, technological, and exquisite”.

The perfect integration of AD perception system and vehicle design makes every perception unit in the right place, such as the layout of roof-mounted lidar and lookout camera; in the cabin, NIO avoids the sense of intrusion brought by technology and seeks to create a fully sensory immersive mobile space with a user-centred approach; NIO has developed NOMI, which means “understand me”, by using AI technology.

Design embodies NIO’s values of purity, warmth, technology and delicacy, and this is NIO Design.

Taking over the design is user experience.

As the first employee at NIO, Ted Li, besides Li Bin, is the only Chinese person who has ever gone on stage. He is responsible for product experience at NIO. NIO’s intelligent system consists of five major components: the vehicle computing platform, the vehicle operating system, vehicle-mounted intelligent hardware, intelligent algorithm and intelligent application, which can be continuously iterated, and is therefore named after trees. Banyan is NIO’s latest generation of intelligent system.

We already know that NIO has self-developed full-stack intelligent driving capabilities.

For the first time, they integrated an 8-megapixel camera into mass-produced vehicles, which has stronger visual detection capabilities compared to the 1.2-megapixel camera.

Aquila LiDAR has a longer detection range of 500 meters and 3D modeling capability. The tower deployment pattern also enables these sensors to better function, meeting the driving requirements in urban areas. NIO’s supercomputing platform ADAM, equipped with 4 NVIDIA Orin X chips, has a total computing power of up to 1016 TOPS.

All of the above are standard equipment on NIO’s Banyan system vehicles.

Powerful hardware targets higher-level intelligent driving. Ted revealed that NIO has been testing its autonomous driving in Europe since April 2021 and will push it to users via OTA updates in the future.

If intelligent driving is the part of the car closest to cutting-edge technology, then the cabin is the part of the car closest to the user.

NIO’s digital cockpit, with a Qualcomm 8155 chip, supports 5G and Wi-Fi 6 connections, as well as Bluetooth, NFC and other functions, and provides parking modes such as Sentry (awaiting OTA), camping, pets, and rest.

PanoCinema’s all-sensory immersive digital space provides Spotify music services and karaoke functions in audio. (European audiences applauded upon hearing this, it seems they also like to sing in the car.)

NIO believes that the key to human-car communication is not only voice, but also eye contact and more emotions, leading to the birth of NOMI. Currently, NOMI generates 1.5 million conversations with users every day.

To make NOMI smarter at communicating with European market users, NIO will provide English, German, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian languages. NOMI even greeted the audience in German at the launch event.

In terms of product experience, NIO has accumulated considerable experience in iteration in China and believes that European users can have a satisfactory experience from the beginning.

Regarding the driving experience, Danilo Teobaldi, the head of engineering of NIO, will take care of it.

NIO’s high-performance genes flow on every NIO product.

The electric drive system is the core of an electric vehicle, and NIO can independently research and produce motors. Each car is equipped with an advanced chassis system, but hardware is just the first step in achieving high performance. NIO fine-tunes the chassis through software systems to maximize users’ personalized driving experience.

It is worth mentioning that NIO repurchased an ES6 that had driven more than 400,000 kilometers, and after various tests, it was found that the condition of the car was not inferior to that of a new car. NIO will announce the relevant test details later.

Speaking of NIO’s driving and chassis, battery swapping is an important focus. It is related to daily use experience and has an important impact on the chassis structure. Up to now, NIO has completed more than 13 million battery swaps.

And a larger and stronger 150 kWh battery pack will also be launched in Europe from next year.

Danilo believes that the innovative CSU architecture enables every NIO car to have the ability to be rechargeable, interchangeable and upgradable, which is the new starting point of vehicle engineering.After watching all night of TVC promotional films, NIO Berlin is drawing to a close, and ET7, EL7, and ET5 have successively appeared in Europe!

Chang Yan, who was present at the scene, witnessed this scene and sincerely exclaimed: “After watching countless NIO press conferences, this moment is definitely the most exciting moment for me. Chinese cars are going global. It finally appears in the country of inventors in a mature, advanced, and internationalized way. This is undoubtedly something to be proud and proud of.”

Why didn’t NIO choose to cooperate with local dealers when selling cars in Europe, instead, they recruited people to establish a direct sales system by themselves.

The recruited people include Ralph Kranz, the general manager of NIO Germany, and branch managers responsible for Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Holland, and other places.

The battery swapping infrastructure that is closely related to NIO users’ daily use of cars has also begun construction.

NIO’s first battery swap station in Europe is located in Lier, Oslo, and the first battery swap station in Germany is located in Schönefeld.

Although it is already 2022 Q4, NIO said that the number of battery swap stations in Europe will continue to expand this year. By the end of 2022, NIO will launch 20 battery swap stations in Europe, and by 2023, this number will further exceed 120.

NIO House service, as one of the terminal manifestations of NIO user operations, will also be fully transplanted to Europe.

Since its opening in 2021, NIO’s Oslo center has received 423,000 visitors. The second NIO center in Europe —— Bull House in Berlin, Germany, will also open to customers soon, followed by more European cities such as Stockholm and Gothenburg.

The above mentioned are all the user services that NIO will launch in Europe. Regarding services, NIO wants to redefine the “car-owning” experience.

NIO provides short-term and long-term subscription services in Europe, including various configurations and battery capacities, as well as various NIO-style services. The subscription period is 12-60 months, and the prices are shown in the picture.

It is not clear how European users view this car hardware subscription service and NIO’s pricing, as there does not seem to be a completely buyout price form. It can be said that NIO redefines the experience of owning a car.

When will the latest NIO electric cars be available in Europe?

It is reported that ET7 will start delivery in Germany and the Netherlands on October 16th, and in Sweden and Denmark on November 15th; EL7 will start in late January 2023; and ET5 will start in late March 2023.

As Professor Chang Yan, who was present at the event, said, it is undoubtedly the most exciting and inspiring moment when Chinese car brands go global. Even though I have test-driven the three products launched at the European conference in China, I still feel a sense of “opening the door to a new world”.

Since its establishment in 2014, NIO has taken 8 years to walk from Shanghai, China, to Berlin, Germany, and stepped onto the stage of the European market. It is hard to imagine that a Chinese brand can compete with international luxury brands such as BBA in places such as Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands, relying on products and services.

But all of this became a reality in the early morning after the National Day holiday ended, making us proud and proud.

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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.