NIO Day: An Event for Users and Fans

Li Ronghao, who just sang a song, said during a break that he hadn’t seen so many people gathered in one place for a long time.

This is true. Apart from the fiery Chinese Super League in Chengdu recently, you have to count NIO Day, where a large number of people participated.

It has to be said that this is the return that Li Bin has gained after insisting on being a user enterprise and doing it for so many years. After all, for new car manufacturing companies like NIO, a group of fixed and constantly growing user communities are more important than any new technology, new product, or a constant stream of investors.

These users grow with the company. Their support is not only limited to buying cars, but also permeates all aspects of the company’s growth. They sincerely love this company, are willing to maintain it together, protect it, and accompany it to grow. Therefore, you will see that NIO Day is “forced to be held” in many aspects of user wishes.

The reason for the “must-be-held” is also simple. For NIO, it needs such an event to promote the company’s strategy, product strategy, and supporting facilities strategy; for outsiders, it needs a channel to understand what NIO has done and what it will do in the future; For car owners who participated in NIO Day or NIO employees, they need simple things, such as getting together, enjoying themselves, visiting in person, caring about and pointing out the direction of the company’s development.

Therefore, like previous NIO Days, this year’s event also involves extensive user participation. More than 1,400 users participated in the co-creation of NIO Day, and 717 volunteer users from Hefei and all over the country warmly received car enthusiasts nationwide. After all, everyone, including Li Bin and Qin Lihong, needs a grand gathering after going through the difficulties of 2022 to re-aggregate and set off with NIO again.

Just like the performance of “Feel the Light” by Huang Yida, a user of NIO, on NIO Day.

New goals, not unattainable

Every year on NIO Day, Li Bin always comes up with some new goals in a sudden inspiration.

For example, many years ago, when NIO was still in its planning phase, Li Bin proposed a “small goal” of winning a Formula E championship. Given the circumstances at the time, this was an ambitious plan. After all, people even doubted whether the brand could survive for more than 3 years.

However, now NIO’s growth status no longer needs to be doubted. Despite the great difficulties encountered in production and sales in 2022, the goal of delivering more than 100,000 vehicles has been achieved (106,671 vehicles delivered from the beginning of 2022 to now, a year-on-year increase of 31.8%). Compared to those big brands that used to aim for millions, this is still a starting point.

But for NIO, people can already give a “auntie’s smile” full of relief.

Therefore, at this year’s NIO Day, Li Bin brought the best-selling BMW among BBA to the stage. First of all, with “respect”, he hopes to benchmark and win some voice on product power. But more importantly, with the rising sales of NIO’s products in the Shanghai market, and even in the postal district market, he is undoubtedly confident and hopes to push NIO’s products and KPI even higher.

Like Formula E, in the media interview on the 25th, Li Bin began to envision his new sales goals. It may be a good idea to first win the fuel car product line of Lexus, a second-line luxury brand that has not landed production in China, before dealing with the first-line luxury of BBA.

This is another “temporary motion” without prior communication. Qin Lihong obviously hesitated for a moment after receiving this sudden KPI, but after making some adjustments, he said that it is not impossible.After all, the boss’s wish is the direction for the employees to strive for. NIO’s new SUV-coupe EC7 and SUV ES8 can bring a wave of sales to the market.

But more importantly, NIO’s potential surge is not only reflected in these two products.

According to NIO’s plan, 2023 is the year for the sales release of the second-generation platform. In the coming year, three new models will be released, and it is expected that the important products of NIO’s second-generation platform will be fully released and on the market in the fourth quarter of next year. Simply put, existing NIO owners have a reason to upgrade, and new customers have the possibility of attending the NIO Day of the next year.

What’s more important is that if Toyota has indeed begun the full electrification of Lexus, then the sales of fuel vehicles will inevitably decrease. After all, the production capacity is limited, and it still needs to be transported to the Chinese market. If only fuel vehicles are supplied, it may lose at least the market share of customers who want to buy pure electric vehicles in the Chinese market and the electric vehicle market share that may need to be fought for in the future.

It is difficult to choose either way.

How to choose and trade off actually tests Lexus’s marketing strategy and corporate wisdom. Therefore, choosing Lexus as the target of the next stage of NIO seems temporary but should be fully considered. This should also be a realistic reason why Qin Lihong dared to take on this KPI.

There is still a lot to do

For new car brands today, their survival environment is far worse than that of established car brands more than 100 years ago.

Although people had more doubts about cars at that time, they came from concerns such as “there are too many cars and not enough roads.” But the benefit was that even though there were not enough roads, no one thought of making car manufacturers build roads. For new car brands, choosing electric power as the energy source has basically determined that their development path cannot only be making cars.

The logic is simple. Whether the endurance and energy replenishment of electric vehicles can be solved well is the most important indicator that is prior to luxury and technology. Taking the initiative to come up with a layout and strategy is no longer a particularly forward-looking concept. The real direction to solve the problem is to gradually implement a strategic plan.And for NIO, there may be more than one solution.

At the NIO Power Day held this summer, NIO has already put forward a plan for the paving of the charging system until 2025. According to the plan, by 2025, NIO will have built a high-speed battery swapping network which covers the “Nine Verticals and Nine Horizontals and 19 Major City Clusters”, and the number of global battery swapping stations will exceed 4,000.

And at this year’s NIO Day, NIO first released their third-generation battery swapping station. The first problem solved by this set of battery swapping stations is efficiency. That is, by using three working positions and collaborative swapping mode, the service capability of the second-generation battery swapping station is improved by 30%, and the maximum daily swapping capability is increased to 408 times.

It seems that the battery can be installed more and the swapping efficiency is faster. But if we look deeper, it is actually enhancing the confidence in sales volume and market share. Otherwise, who cares whether it is fast or not when there are only a few cars?

This third-generation battery swapping station will also be equipped with two LiDARs and two NVIDIA OrinX chips to achieve a total computation power of 508TOPS. Currently, NIO hopes to realize the vehicle call-and-swap function through this battery swapping station. Of course, given the reality that all intelligent driving assistance is currently stuck on the ceiling of L2 level, how the battery swapping station achieves linkage with the car, whether this function can be realized, and how much computation power is needed for realization with 508TOPS, are all still uncertain.

Currently, NIO’s third-generation battery swapping station is no longer just staying on the basis of providing battery swapping services. As NIO puts it, the battery swapping station will realize: rechargeable, swappable, upgradeable. Although it is still unclear what it will be upgraded to, the hardware has already been stacked up and the goal of upgrading has been clearly defined. Therefore, this makes people more curious about the undisclosed outcome.But what is certain is that, whether it’s the third generation charging stations or the 20,000 charging poles to be implemented by 2023, or the 500kW ultra-fast charging equipment also announced at NIO Day, NIO has clearly indicated that it has entered acceleration mode on the “mega charging infrastructure” path.

Undoubtedly, this is a field that everyone wants to get a slice of, and players such as Ningde Times, who produces batteries, and traditional energy companies like China Petroleum and Chemical Corporation and China National Petroleum Corporation have already entered the fray. Whether NIO, with its own capabilities alone, can outpace these stronger adversaries with more extensive coverage remains to be seen, yet it is worth observing and anticipating.

But the obvious benefit is that as long as pure electric power remains the mainstream direction, whoever finishes this segment first will have the ability to set standards and discourse on energy supplementation in the future.

This may be the most important puzzle piece that NIO needs to win the future.

Where there are people, there is light

For NIO, however, the so-called new products, targets, and strategies are not the core of NIO Day. Its core lies in the users. Through NIO Day, the entire operational logic of NIO and the user community and ecosystem, which already has 300,000 users, has formed a tightly-closed loop.

In this loop, users deeply participate in the development process of the company and show their endorsement (in fact, endorsing their ability to influence the industry). Meanwhile, every product and strategy release by the company reinforces the user’s likelihood of choosing and continuing to choose NIO’s products. This sense of belonging is something many companies strive to achieve, but fail to do so.

Most of the time, this tight connection between enterprises and users ultimately creates a strong synergy between the two. And if we consider the various uncertainties and risks that the entire market may witness in the future, the kind of power that can help NIO weather the storm is perhaps this synergy.At the NIO Day event, NIO user Huang Yida performed a song called “Feel the Light,” seemingly representing the expectations of everyone at NIO, including Li Bin, Qin Lihong, and all NIO users and employees. Perhaps for NIO, “light” means having people.

This is the most important and fundamental meaning of NIO Day.

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.