Pull up the cow and build a car together! NIO's million-level new car exposure against the Range Rover Big G?

Recently, NIO's million new car project has been exposed again!

After being announced that it will launch a million-dollar sedan that benchmarks Maybach, the latest news points out that the first model of NIO's new luxury brand will be a pure electric off-road SUV, and I don't know if this transformation was caused by the recent release of BYD's look up to the U8.

Interestingly, the news pointed out that the new luxury brand is owned by the start-up company "Zhixing" invested by NIO Capital, of which Zhixing will cooperate with NIO in terms of platform, supply chain, charging system and other aspects.

From this point of view, it seems that NIO intends to participate more as an investor in the project.

Before the million-dollar car project was made public, NIO had announced that it would launch two sub-brands codenamed "Alps" and "Firefly", of which the former focuses on the market of 200,000-300,000 yuan, and the latter is for the market below 200,000 yuan.

However, compared with the limited information disclosure of the sub-brand and Li Bin's personal response, this time in the source of the million-dollar car brand, the news directly pointed out that NIO Capital invested in the start-up Zhixing, which created this new brand, and also disclosed the information of Zhao Lei, the founder of Zhixing.

According to the report, Zhao Lei has worked for Zebra Network, once served as the senior director of Li Auto, responsible for user operations, and became the co-founder and CEO of Chaojing Auto in early 2021, launching the modified car "Cyber Tank 300" in cooperation with Great Wall Motor.

At the beginning of 2022, Zhao Lei left Chaojing Auto and founded Zhixing, and with the support of Li Bin, Zhixing obtained tens of millions of dollars of seed round investment from NIO Capital and reached a deep cooperation.

It is not difficult to see that compared with the two sub-brands of "Alps" and "Firefly", this time NIO is obviously more active in the background of the million-dollar car project.

Even so, considering that NIO Capital invested tens of millions of dollars in Zhixing in the seed round, and Li Bin also emphasized internally that "hatching the project is NIO's strategic layout in the market segment", it can be seen that NIO still has absolute control over Zhixing.

The reason why NIO has become more behind the scenes, combined with its investment amount and the "incubation project" in Li Bin's mouth, is not difficult to see that NIO intends to implement more social financing for the super luxury brand project.

Regarding the R&D investment and brand building of Chaohao brand, the amount of resources required is self-evident.

Taking Geely Holding's Lotus as an example, it was officially announced to invest 6.3 billion yuan to build a global headquarters in Wuhan, another 8 billion yuan for factory construction costs, and also 12 billion yuan for product and technology research and development expenses, bringing the total initial investment to 26.3 billion yuan.

In addition, considering that the launch of the NIO super luxury brand is similar to the launch time of the other two sub-brands, it is not difficult to foresee that NIO's capital expenditure will face greater pressure in the next one or two years.

Because of this, NIO needs more social support, so this time it is more willing to stand behind the scenes when disclosing the information of the Chaohao brand.

In fact, NIO has also had relevant experiences before, including NIO Capital's investment in Lotus in September 2021, when Li Bin also appeared as an investor.

After less than two years, NIO has changed from a simple investor at that time to a leading party in building a super luxury brand, and NIO can probably apply its previous experience to this project.

Based on NIO's approach to posing as an investor in the new Chaohao brand, this move is not only to facilitate external investment seeking, but also to protect its own financial data and valuation.

Of course, for more people, this is still a dream process, and after the Chaohao brand is independent of NIO in the name of a new company, future listing and financing are naturally included in the plan.

And if this dream can be successfully realized, it depends on what conditions NIO has prepared to practice.

A new luxury brand has been incubated on top of the luxury brand, and similar cases have already happened to Volvo and Polestar.

Interestingly, this time responsible for incubating the NIO super luxury brand is Zhixing Company, and the name seems to be in line with Polestar.

Referring to the current SPA2 architecture shared by Polestar and Volvo, in the future, the NIO Chaohao brand will also share the NT 3.0 platform with the NIO brand, and the two will cooperate deeply in supply chain and charging and swapping systems, and it is expected that the new car will support 800V ultra-fast charging and battery swapping modes.

On this basis, considering that the new brand is priced at the million-dollar level, to some extent, Zhixing is also benchmarking against Polestar.

Regarding the first model of Zhixing, this news pointed out that it will be a pure electric off-road SUV with a similar positioning to BYD's U8, rather than the previous report referring to the Maybach sedan.

This change in product strategy may be because NIO intends to keep up with the market trend, after all, considering that Mercedes-Benz Big G pure electric version and Dongfeng Mengshi pure electric SUV are about to be launched, and the future Zhixing will enter the global market, so it is better to choose to follow up the strategy of launching SUVs than to open up a new market by yourself.

After determining the direction of the shared NT 3.0 platform and off-road SUV, the outside world's expectations for Zhixing may be more focused on NIO's self-developed results.

At present, NIO is forming a huge self-developed ecosystem, from batteries, motors, seats, chips, assisted driving and even electronic technology products such as mobile phones and watches, NIO is making a layout through self-research, so that we will probably see the final results after the star begins to launch in the future.

In the past, Li Bin pointed out in an interview that NIO's ultimate opponent is Apple, and under the influence of Apple's user ecology and brand power, Apple Car will be very competitive in the future, so NIO needs to have a certain impact resistance before the arrival of Apple's shock wave.

As for other new entrants other than Apple, Li Bin believes that they may not be direct opponents of NIO.

Under Li Bin's attention to Apple, this is probably the main reason why NIO chose to embark on the road of self-research ecology, which is not only to reduce costs and improve efficiency, and to create a new lifestyle for users, but to learn more Apple's playing methods to counteract.

Dare to challenge industry leaders, this has always been the true color of NIO's brand, and it is probably an important reason for the establishment of Zhixing.

If the solstice star is a major weapon used by NIO to resist the Apple car, it depends on whether NIO's self-developed ecology can release enough energy on the solstice.

Not long ago, NIO announced that in the pure electric car market of more than 400,000 yuan, its market share has accounted for more than 70%, and it should be said that NIO has largely surpassed the BBA brand.

If combined with other brands such as Ideal and Extreme Krypton are also successful in the high-priced market, NIO seems to have no reason not to follow BYD's example of testing the million-yuan market.

So what kind of performance the solstice star will give next, we will wait and see.