Author: Chen Nianhang

In the just-passed November, NIO delivered 15,072 new cars, with a cumulative delivery of 144,278 vehicles from January to November, and the total delivery has exceeded 235,000 vehicles so far.

Entering 2022, NIO’s sales have been rising steadily, with the highest monthly delivery volume exceeding 18,000 vehicles to date. In recent months, it has also maintained a high level and achieved surpassing new car manufacturers in the high-end market.

Relying on its super high cost-effectiveness, NIO has carved out its own path in the smart electric vehicle market.

Raising the Banner of Intelligence

In the face of the criticism of “trading price for quantity,” NIO launched the mid-to-high-end smart electric car model, the NIO S. It is a B+ level coupe model, including a range-extended version and a pure electric version, with a price range from RMB 200,000 to RMB 340,000.

On the last day of November, NIO S officially started delivery, with the pure electric version delivered first, with a price range of RMB 2.5 million to RMB 3.4 million. The high-end version will be equipped with a lidar sensor and Huawei’s MDC smart driving computing platform, and will subsequently have advanced intelligent assisted driving functions.

From the perspectives of product strength and price, the NIO S is NIO’s upward attempt to compete in the market for higher-level car models with a price difference from several of its previous budget models, earn more profits, and also drive the brand toward the mid-to-high-end market for the subsequent product launch preparation.

The NIO S is crucial for NIO, as it is a vehicle model for carrying on the past and opening the future, and is also the first vehicle for NIO’s new vehicle platform and technology platform. Its success or failure is key to NIO’s breakthrough battle. It should be noted that the competition is fierce in the field of pure electric sedans priced at over RMB 200,000 in China.

Regarding the exterior and interior design of the NIO S, we will not go into detail here, after all, “individual tastes differ.” Personally, I appreciate the exterior of this car, which is more youthful and sporty, and the interior is also worthy of this price range, using a lot of suede materials with refined style. With a wheelbase of 2,980 mm, the driving and riding space is quite adequate, and the backrest of the rear seat supports electric adjustment.

In terms of mechanical abilities, here are some parameters and configurations for your reference:

• Drag coefficient of 0.216Cd
• Moose test score of 80 km/h
• Front double-wishbone and rear multi-link suspension structure
• Four-wheel drive model has acceleration of 3.9 seconds per 100 km, braking distance of 33.5 meters per 100 km and redundant brake system
• Uses a permanent magnet synchronous motor with a peak power of 170 kW and can be equipped with one or two motors
• Finally, there is the range (CLTC): a single-motor long-range model can go 715 km, a dual-motor performance model can go 650 km, and an extended-range version can go 1160 km (pure electric drive can go 310 km, as the data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology differs due to testing standards, it is 190 km).

On paper, the NETA S has sufficient performance, a substantial chassis, and little anxiety about its range. Overall, it has robust comprehensive performance.

While the NETA S is being delivered, I have once again had the opportunity to test the product power of this car, including its driving experience in urban/high-speed roads and a set of smart cockpit systems that NETA invested heavily in.

Unfortunately, the smart driving capability of the NETA S has not yet been activated, so it can only be tested later.

Let me introduce NETA’s plans for its intelligent driving system. NETA has two sets of intelligent driving systems, Neta Pilot 3.0 and Neta Pilot 4.0, which differ in sensor configuration and computing platform.

• The mission of Neta Pilot 3.0 is to promote the popularity of advanced driver assistance functions, so it includes some common and basic functions like ACC, LCC, and so on.
• Neta Pilot 4.0 is reserved for the incremental upgrade of the system in the following years, such as the addition of lidar sensors and the use of Huawei’s MDC 610 computing platform. The system will continue to evolve into a central supercomputing platform, with additional features such as High-Speed Leader Navigation Assist (NNP) and City Navigation Assist (NCP).

The ultimate goal of Neta Pilot is to achieve point-to-point, full-scene intelligent driving assistance, including areas with and without high-precision map coverage. This includes a complete set of functions, such as ACC, LCC, automatic ETC (Electronic Toll Collection), high-speed navigation assistance, urban navigation assistance, memory parking, and automatic summoning.

These intelligent driving functions will be OTA delivered to consumers starting in 2023.

Now it’s time to test the capabilities of the self-developed intelligent driving team at NIO.

Intelligent Cabin with High Playability

Since the intelligent driving system cannot be experienced currently, we conducted an in-depth experience on the intelligent cabin system of NIO S, which has a high degree of completion.

It took about a year and a half for NIO to develop this intelligent cabin system, which was fully developed by NIO and is very efficient in terms of development efficiency.

This cabin has 4 screens: a dashboard, a vertical center console screen, a passenger entertainment screen, and an AR HUD. All four screens are powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8155 cabin chip.

I believe that everyone is very familiar with this chip, and its characteristic is that it has fast processing speed and the system operation is very easy to use. The Android R operating system driven by it can be started up in less than 5 seconds. When NIO S car is started, there is no boot animation, which also shortens the entire car machine startup time.

The size of the center console screen is 17.6 inches, and the screen resolution is 2.5K, which is completely adequate in terms of clarity. In terms of the performance of the black border, the narrowest is 6.5mm, and the screen ratio is close to 90%, supplied by the display screen giant BOE.

The size of the passenger screen is 12.3 inches, mainly used for playing music, watching videos, setting navigation, and karaoke. With this passenger screen, the playability of the passenger seat is greatly enhanced, which is also a standard configuration for many intelligent electric vehicles at present.

The instrument panel adopts an embedded design, which is like it is hidden. After the screen is off, it feels integrated with the background. It does not display much information, and a lot of content is displayed on the large-size AR HUD.

The AR HUD of NIO S is as much as 49 inches and is projected 7 meters in front of the vehicle. The brightness and contrast performance are good, and it can display navigation, vehicle speed, speed limit information, AR arrows, and relevant information of the intelligent driving.

Let’s turn our attention to the central control screen system.

The UI design of this car machine system is relatively simple, without hiding too many deep function options.

The main screen gives the most prominent space to the navigation map, with a small window floating in the upper right corner of the main screen where you can check the tire pressure and a rendered animated vehicle model.

At the bottom of the central control screen are card-style applications that support custom editing, and a fixed menu bar at the very bottom, including the home page, air conditioning, vehicle, application library, and seat adjustment button, which opens a secondary menu when clicked.

One thing to mention here is that the seat adjustment for the NIO ES6 we experienced did not have physical buttons and could only be controlled by voice or touch screen. However, physical buttons have been added back in the production cars.

In addition, this car machine system also has a pull-down shortcut menu and a swipe-left-out negative one screen that includes account login and recently used applications, audio mode, and scene mode.

In my personal opinion, operating this screen has a relatively low learning curve, the UI design is aesthetically pleasing and is considered above average quality, but vertical screens will compromise the viewing experience when watching videos.

As the most relied-upon system in people’s daily car use, the car navigation system of the NIO ES6’s team has also put in significant effort.

Their team worked with Amap to jointly develop a software algorithm that uses the car’s on-board sensors and map positioning. As a result, the NIO ES6’s car navigation system has centimeter-level positioning accuracy and can provide timely travel directions to the driver, even in more complex scenarios where GPS signals may be lost, such as on elevated bridges, in tunnels, and underground parking lots, more quickly and accurately than if we were to use a phone stand for navigation in our car.On the other hand, if the intelligent assisted driving function is turned on, the in-car system will also display the environment modeling rendered at the lane level. Although we did not experience this, other competitors of NETA such as XPeng and Ideal have done related work, and NETA is catching up with them.

At the cabin interaction level, voice interaction is still the core ability of NETA S. In addition, there is eye tracking and gesture interaction.

The in-car system is equipped with a DMS (driver monitoring) camera and an OMS (in-car monitoring system) camera. Because of the existence of these two sensors, the system can track the driver’s gaze and recognize the gestures made by the passengers in the car.

For example, when the driver looks at the center screen navigation interface, the system will predict that the driver has operational requirements. At this time, the voice system will be in a standby state without waiting for the wake-up command, ready to execute the driver’s voice command at any time.

In terms of gesture interaction, it supports simple and common interactions such as volume control, fast forward and rewind of videos.

As the most commonly used voice interaction function in the car, NETA S is also catching up, directly targeting the set of voice interaction systems on the XPeng G9.

In addition to the conventional controls such as navigation, air conditioning adjustment, music playback, video playback, seat adjustment, window opening and closing, there is also a very practical visible and speakable ability, which can support uninterrupted conversation with a single person for up to 120 seconds, with a very fast response speed.

Here, “visible and speakable” refers to most of the adjustable buttons you see on the screen can be voice-controlled, such as favorite songs, fast-forwarding or rewinding songs or videos to a precise position, and using voice to control scrolling up and down on the page, etc. The overall experience is very smooth and fluid, and it can be called a dazzling technical skill.

Please check the following video for specific “visible and speakable” voice interaction:

This voice interaction system is still constantly being upgraded and iterated. For example, the current system does not yet support multi-person wake-up-free operations, which will be updated in subsequent iterations. Similar and more complex and practical functions will also gradually reach consumers in subsequent research and development.

In the era of intelligent cars, the richness of cabin applications is also a very important product feature. On NETA S, its in-car application ecosystem includes various music applications, long video applications, short video applications, various K-song and selfie applications, and a wealth of mini-programs, including Tencent’s audio and video entertainment applications. Overall, it is quite rich.

Struggling with Car Audio

With so many audio-visual applications, a useful audio system in the car becomes particularly important. Creating a good in-car audio system for consumers has become the focus of work for most intelligent car companies.

NETA Automobile has specially designed an immersive audio system with “surround sound” for NETA S.

In fact, the in-car audio system has undergone several major iterations:

• In the 1.0 era, it was a normal stereo with fewer speakers, lower output power, and a single sound effect;
• In the 2.0 era, it was a single-scene surround sound with many more speakers, increased power, and more sound effect adjustment range, but the scene was still relatively single;
• In the 3.0 era, it was a multi-scene and multi-dimensional surround sound with a very rich in-car speaker layout, very detailed sound adjustment, and a qualitative change in the overall in-car audio effect, making more car owners willing to enjoy audio and video entertainment in the car.

In order to achieve the sound effect of the 3.0 era, NETA S crazily “stacked materials” on the hardware configuration of the audio, equipped with 21 speakers, a maximum output power of 1216 watts, including 12 main speakers, 1 subwoofer, 4 ceiling speakers, and 4 headrest speakers. Moreover, NETA chose to cooperate with Ruijie Technology to promote more affordable audio on board, rather than choosing expensive big brand suppliers.
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Besides the hardware, the NETA S also applies a set of special sound algorithm technology, including sound field reconstruction, phase correction, FIR filter, etc., tuning the effect of the sound system to a level comparable to that of a luxury car worth 500,000 yuan. Moreover, a professional team was invited to test it to achieve the best optimization results.

At present, the sound modes of the NETA S include the driving enjoyment mode, the general mode, the main driving private enjoyment mode, the deputy driving private enjoyment mode, and the deputy driving Bluetooth headphone mode, supporting different sound experiences for different scenes and needs. For example, the main driving private enjoyment mode is only for the driver to enjoy the navigation, phone, and music.

Please check the following video for specific sound effects:

The official of NETA Auto revealed that more than 50% of the reserved users of the NETA S chose this special sky surround sound system.

There is still room for improvement in driving experience

As a sports car model, the NETA S uses front double wishbone and rear five-link suspension and is equipped with dual motors. After a brief driving experience on city roads and highways, my personal evaluation of its driving experience is as follows:

The acceleration is undoubtedly very powerful. The chassis is very stable at low and medium speeds. When the speed reaches 110 kilometers/hour on the highway, the vehicle is a little bit floaty and not compact enough. The steering is slightly light with some small dead travel. Due to the relatively slim steering wheel, the grip feeling is slightly lacking, but the steering force is still very appropriate. The linearity of the pedal is not enough, with some play in the front and “thief-like” in the back. Especially when driving at low speeds, stepping on the accelerator pedal will make the vehicle jump a bit.The driving experience mentioned above is all based on comfort mode and closely related to personal driving style. Personally, I prefer a tight and slightly harder chassis, such as NIO ET5 and Tesla Model Y. Additionally, the version of NIO ES8 that I drove is not the final production version, so the most authentic experience still requires a deep test drive in the future.

However, this does not prevent the fact that for most consumers, NIO ES8 is an easy-to-drive car.

Furthermore, in terms of high-speed NVH, NIO ES8 has double-layer laminated glass on all four doors, and the sound insulation is quite good. However, there is still some gap between it and the top-level NVH, after all, it is a mid-range car priced at RMB 250,000.

Therefore, with such high playability of smart cockpit, decent appearance and good endurance, as well as intelligent driving features worth looking forward to, will NIO ES8 be your sedan of choice?

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.