"This is the most ordered ever." Just 12 hours before the end of 2021 Weilai Day, Li Bin, chairman and CEO of Weilai Automobile, said in an interview with First Finance and other media.
On December 18, NIO released its mid-size sedan product ET5. The new car equipped with a 75kWh standard battery pack has a range of 550 km, a 100 kWh long battery pack with a range of 700 km, and a 150 kWh ultra-long battery pack with a range of more than 1000 km. At present, the 150kWh ultra-long battery pack on the Weilai APP cannot be booked for the time being.
In terms of intelligent configuration, the ultrasensory system AQUILA equipped with NIO ET5 is equipped with 33 high-performance perception hardware, including 7 8-megapixel high-definition cameras (compared with the 1.2 million pixel camera used by Tesla FSD (fully autonomous driving system), 4 surround view cameras, 1 ultra-long-distance high-precision lidar, 5 millimeter wave radar, 12 ultrasonic radar, 2 high-precision positioning units, 1 vehicle-to-road collaborative perception and 1 enhanced main driver perception. It can generate 8GB of image data per second.
NIO ET5's supercomputing platform ADAM is equipped with 4 NVIDIA Orin chips with a computing power of up to 1016TOPS, which is currently the highest computing platform for autonomous driving. Through THE Aquila supersensitive system and the supercomputing platform Adam, ET5 will gradually realize scenarios such as high-speed, urban area, parking, and power exchange, and realize the point-to-point automatic driving experience.
From the perspective of price, the starting price before the ET5 subsidy is 328,000 yuan, and the starting price before the BaaS (battery rental) program subsidy is 258,000 yuan. Li Bin said that the ET5 will be the lowest priced model among the Weilai brand. From the pricing point of view, although the intelligent configuration of WEILAI ET5 is higher, the starting price is still higher than that of Xiaopeng P7 with similar size and similar battery life (starting at 219,900 yuan after subsidies) and Tesla Model 3 (starting at 255,652 yuan after subsidies).
Although the price is higher than that of competitors, ET5 has received a warm response from the market after the opening of the reservation. The reporter found that after the Weilai APP opened the ET5 booking, the model booking page was once in downtime, and the booking process could not be completed. Qin Lihong, president of Weilai Automobile, said that after ET5 opened the booking, a large number of users poured into the booking, and the Weilai Automobile APP was once "lying down" for 10 minutes.
Some insiders said that as the second car of Weilai Automobile, ET5 does not have much gap between intelligent configuration and comfort configuration and the previously released ET7, and ET5 may affect some market expectations of ET7.
Qin Lihong said that the launch of ET5 will indeed make some ET7 users hesitate, but before the release of "5 is greater than 3", the main competitor of ET5 is two models with 3 (Tesla Model 3 and BMW 3 Series). Li Bin said that one change in ET5 orders is that the vast majority of booking users are new users who have never bought WEILAI.
In addition to the release of ET5, in 2022, WEILAI will continue to lay out the charging and replacing service network, and plans to have more than 1,300 substations, 6,000 supercharge piles, 10,000 destination charging piles nationwide, and open up more than 30 destination charging routes such as the Silk Road and Xishuangbanna Rainforest.
Li Bin also announced at this NIO DAY that in 2022, NIO's products and system-wide services will be officially landed in Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark; in 2025, it will enter more than 25 countries and regions. Li Bin said that in 2022, WEILAI will focus on establishing a service system in Germany
![Also more than 300,000, BMW i3, Tesla and Nio, do you know what the difference is?[fig]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAP///wAAACwAAAAAAQABAAACAkQBADs=)