The moment WEILAI ET5 opened the booking, the Weilai APP collapsed, and crazy fans rushed up to rush to place orders at the first time. Many users have said that "in the booking process, countless times they have been squeezed out offline".
After seeing the PARAMETERS OF ET5 at the scene, some WEILAI ES6 owners transferred their own BMW 3 Series deposits, and the reason for switching to ET5 was simple, "Although ET5 is more expensive, it is better configured."
Some Weibo netizens revealed that Weilai's first-line sales have 15-20 orders per capita, and more than 60% of the orders come from old users.
A car not only enriches the product layout, but also provides more choices.
In 2021, NIO held a NIO Day at the beginning of the year and at the end of the year, and the electric flagship sedan ET7, which aroused strong repercussions, was finally determined yesterday to be delivered on March 28, 2022, while the ET5 was delivered in September half a year later.
After the announcement of the starting price of ET5 of 328,000 yuan, in the various Weilai car owner intention groups, there is no shortage of people who announced the choice of ET5, and it is not difficult to see that the launch of ET5 provides a more segmented choice for users who want to buy Weilai cars.
In this regard, Li Bin laughed and said that it was a happy annoyance, and the two children in the family could do it.
In the face of the upcoming 2022 smart electric vehicle war in the first year, with ET5, what are the odds of Weilai winning?
Killer ET5
In China, Weilai has always been a high-end positioning with an average price surpassing BMW Audi and Tesla, but the cost-effective products such as ET5 were not in the territory before. In contrast, BBA and Tesla have not given up on entering the luxury market. If NIO wants to make a breakthrough outside of luxury SUVs, it needs a product with a price positioning similar to "34C".
It is true that Weilai's high-end positioning has obvious advantages in terms of gross profit margin and user loyalty, but the "breaking the circle" of large brands is the only way to penetrate, and high-end and niche are bound to be the goals of Weilai. The most effective strategy of "breaking the circle" is to explode. Therefore, NIO launched the medium-sized intelligent electric coupe ET5.
Weilai ET5 is Nio's second mass-produced sedan, but the first one, ET7, has not yet been delivered, and ET5 has come to consumers. Although the delivery time of ET7 in March next year is before the delivery time of ET5 next September, ET7 provides a unique luxury configuration in its class, which is very attractive to high-end users, and ET5's high-tech, high configuration and strong driving control are also worthy of young users.
The ET5 looks very appealing, from the car's exterior and interior to the technology and concept, with all the elements that young people and new lifestyle people love.
According to Li Bin, the project began in early 2020, and Li Bin asked the design team to build the smallest and purest car around the power exchange system. The car that can change the power is more difficult to do, the height itself is 200-300mm less than the SUV, the bottom is placed in the battery, and the power exchange mechanism needs to be arranged, which brings great challenges to the vertical space, and a lot of engineering optimization is needed to pinch the height and body posture. Therefore, ET5 as an entry-level luxury, not only the price is scratched to the edge, but also pushed to the current limit in engineering.
Specifically, the NIO ET5 is more like the smaller ONE ET7, but compared with the ET7 luxury and elegance, the ET5 is more sporty. The ET5 features a powerful front hatch rib line and sharper Double Dash daytime running lights. These include the tension shoulder line, the ducktail rear spoiler and the light tail light, all designed to shape its sturdy posture. The shoulder line extends to the ducktail, forming an integrated tail.
Compared with the previous models, the more personalized Weilai knows how to please young car owners.
Nio offers pink car paint to users for the first time through ET5. According to Li Bin, ET5 provides 9 body colors, of which mirror powder and cloud yellow are the exclusive colors of ET5, and the annual color aerospace blue will also be installed on ET5.
The ET5 also features a large panoramic glass light curtain with an area of 1.28 square meters. In Li Bin's words, it is "not to let you miss every inch of blue sky."
In addition to the shape, the mechanical quality of the ET5 can also be remarkable. It features a rare front and rear five-link suspension, combined with a virtual kingpin, front-shaft steering, and a 50:50 front-to-rear axle-to-load ratio, giving it control that allows it to look directly at the 3 Series and Model 3.
In particular, the width of the car is 1960mm, the wheelbase is 1685mm, and the center of gravity of the vehicle is only 482.6mm, so that its stability of high-speed cornering is far beyond the same level, and even the cross-level comparison is not afraid of the stage.
Continuing THE NIO high-performance gene, ET5 accelerates by 4.3 seconds from zero to 100 km/h, adopts NIO's high-performance four-piston aluminum alloy one-piece cast caliper, has a braking distance of 33.9 meters from 100 km to zero, and a wind resistance coefficient as low as 0.24. With a new generation of high-efficiency electric drive platform using silicon carbide power modules, it is equipped with a standard battery pack (75kWh) CLTC with a range of more than 550 kilometers, a long battery pack (100kWh) with a range of more than 700 kilometers, and a long battery pack (150kWh) with a range of more than 1,000 kilometers.
The ET5 is designed according to C-NCAP and Euro NCAP five-star safety standards, with an ultra-high-strength steel and aluminum hybrid body and a vehicle torsional stiffness of 34,000 N·m/deg. The center of gravity height of the ET5 vehicle is only 482.6mm, with a 1,685mm ultra-wide wheelbase, and the anti-rollover coefficient is 1.7, which exceeds the American NHTSA five-star standard.
Standing in the current narrow price dimension, whether it is market share or daily street visibility, the price band of 20-30 million yuan has been dominated by Tesla Model 3, Xiaopeng P7, BYD Han EV, but to the price of 300,000 yuan and above, which is more jumpy in car buying thinking, customers with better consumption power are looking forward to a product with exquisite aesthetics, high-end characteristics, perfect energy system and intelligent feeling, which is the biggest opportunity for ET5. The arrival of NIO ET5 has broken the barrier between luxury and price, and achieved an excellent balance between product strength and price.
After all, on the one hand, ET5 has almost no shortcomings at the product level, from design to hardware configuration; on the other hand, Weilai's strong brand characteristics have begun to appear, products are becoming more and more mature, and supporting construction is gradually becoming a system. This makes the ET5 expected to become a model that will change the pattern of the electric sedan market in 2022.
Redefining the mid-level sedan with smart technology
Qin Lihong once said that "et5's intention is very clear, to enter the mainstream mid-level car market, to differentiate the existing mainstream high-end brands and leading smart electric vehicle brands in this market share." ”
Looking at the global automotive industry, it has become an indisputable fact that cutting-edge technologies such as intelligent networking are penetrating at a very fast speed, and automotive products are undergoing major epochal "mutations", and brands that climb in the direction of high-end and high added value are rising and falling. The auto market is no longer simply based on volume and low price, but should step into a more high-end field. Having your own personality is the first meaning of luxury cars, cool features and a sense of technology are also the necessary qualities for future luxury smart electric vehicles.
Traditional luxury car companies cannot meet the needs of users in terms of technology attributes, and WEILAI ET5 focuses on this layout.
According to Li Bin at the press conference, ET5 will be equipped with NIO Autonomous Driving,latest autonomous driving technology NAD (NIO Autonomous Driving), which will gradually realize scenarios such as high-speed, urban area, parking, and power exchange, providing a safe and relaxed point-to-point automated driving experience throughout the process. "The COMPUTING POWER OF THE NAD system is 7 times that of tesla's FSD system." Li Bin once stressed.
In terms of hardware, ET5 comes standard with a full set of autonomous driving hardware for THEO NT2.0 platform, including the NIO AQUILA supersensitive system and the ADAM supercomputing platform.
Among them, NIO's ultrasensory system AQUILA is equipped with 33 high-performance perception hardware, including 7 8-megapixel high-definition cameras (compared with the 1.2 million pixel cameras used by Tesla FSD (Fully Autonomous Driving System), the resolution is increased by more than 6 times), 4 surround view cameras, 1 ultra-long-distance high-precision lidar, 5 millimeter wave radar, 12 ultrasonic radars, 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.
The NIO supercomputing platform ADAM is equipped with 4 Nvidia Orin chips, and the computing power is as high as 1016TOPS (for comparison, Tesla FSD 144TOPS), which is currently the highest computing platform for autonomous driving computing. 48 CPU cores, 256 matrix computing units, 8096 floating-point computing units, 68 billion transistors, high hardware configuration, the same price point is invincible, so that ET5 has been fully like ET7.
In terms of software, NAD does not take the form of a buyout, but adopts a flexible subscription model of "monthly activation and monthly payment", that is, ADaaS (AD as a Service). At present, the monthly service fee of NIO NAD system is 680 yuan.
In fact, the highlight of the ET5's intelligence aspect is the panoramic digital cockpit PanoCinema. NIO has incorporated VR/AR technology into the ET5, and its AR glasses, jointly developed with Nreal, can project a visual distance of 6 meters, equivalent to a 201-inch large screen. "With it, there is no need for so many screens in the car," Li Bin mentioned at the launch site. In addition, NIO has also cooperated with Nolo to develop NIO VR Glasses, equipped with ultra-thin Pancake optical lenses, which can realize binocular 4K display.
With cutting-edge hardware systems, continuous software development and content expansion, and a new 256-color digital light curtain mood light and 7.1.4 Dolby Atmos sound system, PanoCinema will bring a unique all-sensory immersion experience to the driver in such an exclusive space as ET5.
It is not difficult to see that ET5 redefines the outside world's understanding of mid-level cars with intelligent technology, and the rhythm of new cars that change every year is an important weapon for Weilai to continuously expand its market share and go global.
At the same time, for a "user enterprise", new technology upgrades and service upgrades are also crucial, because they are closely related to old car owners.
The entire 2021 NIO POWER in addition to the construction of 94,000 private charging piles for WEILAI private owners, but also built 3348 destination charging piles and 3136 super charging piles, these charging piles in addition to serving WEILAI models, but also serving other brands, it is worth mentioning that in fact, more than 70% of the charging services are given to other brands, in addition, in terms of power station replacement, Weilai continues to exert efforts, accumulatively built 733 substations.
And next year, NIO will complete 1300+ cumulative substations in 2022, 6000+ cumulative supercharging piles and 10000+ purpose cumulative charging pile construction, almost all of which have nearly doubled amplitude, and WEILAI will also cooperate with Sinopec and PetroChina to ensure that gas stations can also be charged.
On this day, Li Bin also announced that ET7 will open the lock order on January 20, 2022 and start delivery on March 28. ET7 sets the standard for autonomous driving computing power and sensors, with more than 100 comfortable, safe and intelligent configurations as standard, and more than 20 new configurations and functions have been enhanced during the preparation process of mass production, including the acceleration of zero to 100 kilometers to 3.8s, and the wind resistance coefficient is optimized to 0.208.
In the future, ET7 and ET5 will also form a pair of the strongest CP to join forces to open a new pattern in the smart electric car market.
Write at the end
Cars mean new growth rates for Weilai, especially the medium-sized luxury car market where ET5 is located, the compound growth rate of the past five years has reached 16.1%, surpassing the luxury car market, and is expected to exceed one million this year, accounting for 38% of the overall luxury car market, which has surpassed medium and large cars and become the most mainstream segment of luxury cars. Li Bin pointed out, "Many of the cars with more than 200,000 yuan this year have performed very well, and the 300,000 traditional mainstream high-end market products are less." This is also a huge opportunity for us. China's mainstream (luxury) market is about 4 million vehicles, if it can account for 20% of it is not very good, Mercedes-Benz, BMW Audi can reach more than 20%, we still have a great opportunity. ”
For NIO, in the context of increasing systemic efficiency, NIO ET5 has entered the mid-level car market that has remained unchanged for many years with better product strength and lower price, and has the conditions to change the pattern of China's electric vehicle market in 2022. It is to Weilai as the iPhone 4 is to Apple, and the Model 3 is to Tesla. The current ET5 has basically shown the mainstream mid-level electric car in design and technology in ten years. And it is likely to be called the "founder" of the times at that time.