If you summarize the new energy market in 2023 in one word, it must be "volume".
This year, some new car-making forces crossed the "life and death line", traditional car companies found the rhythm of tram operation, and joint venture cars began to shake off the "backward" label and show their latecomer tenacity.
At the same time, the price war is intensifying, and new cars are being released faster and faster. In the next three days alone, there will be three blockbuster press conferences: Wenjie M9, Zeekrypton 007, and Xiaomi Auto.
At the moment when new energy vehicles are dying and dying, NIO has set the price of its new car at 800,000.
Last Friday, at NIO Day 2023, NIO's smart electric executive flagship ET9 was officially unveiled.
The price of the NIO ET9 starts at 800,000 yuan, which is benchmarked against the Mercedes-Benz S and BMW 7 Series, and deliveries will start in the first quarter of 2025.
NIO's car and pricing, is it confident or overconfident?
"NIO's background is technological innovation"
At a previous media conference, Li Bin, founder, chairman and CEO of NIO, revealed that "NIO's next-generation flagship model will become the world's most advanced model in terms of intelligence and electrification."
NIO ET9 claims to be "the crystallization of NIO's full-stack technology layout and world-leading technology", and judging from the content released by NIO on Sunday, ET9 has indeed maximized the technological performance.
According to official information, ET9 contains 17 world premiere technologies, 52 leading technologies in the same class, and has applied for 525 patents. Among them, the most prominent are the Shenji chip, the global 900V high-voltage architecture and the Tianxing intelligent chassis system.
Shenji chips
The NIO ET9 is equipped with the self-developed intelligent driving chip Shenji NX9031 and the self-developed vehicle global operating system SkyOS Tianshu.
The Shenji NX9031 is NIO's first 5nm automotive-grade intelligent driving chip.
According to Li Bin, the Shenji NX9031 has more than 50 billion transistors, and through the self-developed inference acceleration unit NPU (NPU TPP computing power, Total Power Performance <4800), it can flexibly and efficiently run various AI algorithms.
Previously, NIO's intelligent driving system used four NVIDIA Orin X chips, and one Shenji NX9031 can achieve the performance of the four flagship intelligent driving chips in the industry.
At the exchange meeting after the NIO Day, Li Bin said that the NIO chip team has 600 people. The combination of Wei's self-developed chips and self-developed operating system realizes the close integration of computing power with its own algorithms, and the sharing of cross-domain computing resources for intelligent driving and cockpit.
900V high-voltage architecture in the whole domain
NIO's ET9's "global 900V high-voltage architecture" uses a self-developed and self-produced 1200V silicon carbide power module, which supports the highest voltage of the 925V vehicle, a peak charging power of 600kW, and a peak charging current of 765A.
The 900V supercharging system can increase the battery life by 255km by changing the battery for 3 minutes and starting with a full charge, or charging for 5 minutes.
Tianxing intelligent chassis system
The "SkyRide Intelligent Chassis System" integrates the three core hardware systems of steer-by-wire, rear-wheel steering and fully active suspension, and is currently the world's only fully intelligent chassis by wire.
The steer-by-wire adopts telecommunication transmission, which does not have the constraints of traditional mechanical structure on shape and space, and has higher control accuracy and response speed.
On NIO Day, such a picture was played: the ET9 with a four-story champagne tower on top of the front lid drove smoothly on the undulating road.
The active suspension of the Skykon chassis system supports large height adjustment, 1,000 torque adjustments per second, and the four wheels are independently controlled.
In addition, the ET9 is also equipped with technologies such as triple lidar, and the ET9 flagship specs 5,325 mm, 2,016 mm wide, 1,620 mm high, and has a wheelbase of 3,250 mm.
In terms of interior, the ET9 adopts the original executive four-seat layout, with the innovative "Sky Island" and "Executive Bridge" design, creating four exclusive first-class seating space experiences.
"A mobile executive space, an efficient executive office, and an exclusive business lounge. Li Bin introduced the NIO ET9 like this.
Stick to the high-end market
"Actually, at NIO DAY 2023, we only talked about 20%~30% of ET9. Li Bin said.
In fact, among the three Wei Xiaoli, Weilai has always positioned itself in the high-end market and benchmarked against BBA. But the starting price of 800,000 yuan this time still makes people can't help but sweat for Weilai.
Many Weibo influencers said that they asked 800,000 friends whether to buy Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, BMW or Weilai, and most of the answers they got were the first three.
So, why did NIO dare to set the price at 800,000?
Li Bin previously said that in the market of more than 300,000 pure electric vehicles, NIO's market share has never been low. "Since July, NIO's sales in Shanghai have exceeded the sales of all brands with more than 300,000 units. In November, NIO sold 1,000 more units than BMW, which is twice as much as Audi."
As for the sales of ET9, Li Bin also has a rational judgment, "In the category of ET9, all (cars) are less than 100,000 units a year, so we have a clear understanding that last night's order was much better than expected."
In other words, ET9 is more of a façade technical responsibility, but in the subsequent competition, NIO and Li Bin have other ways to play.
In addition to the full-stack self-developed technology, at present, Li Bin also holds three cards.
First of all, there are cash reserves that can support more than a year.
Although NIO's gross profit this year is not ideal, the Q3 financial report shows that NIO's cash reserves are 45.2 billion yuan, an increase of 13.7 billion yuan from the previous quarter.
Recently, NIO announced that it has received another $2.2 billion investment from Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth fund, and its current cash reserves are about 60 billion yuan.
In addition, in addition to ensuring the launch of core technologies, sales, and products, NIO has also started to "reduce costs", merging departments and positions that are duplicated, changing inefficient internal work processes and division of labor, eliminating inefficient positions, and postponing and reducing project investment that cannot improve the company's financial performance for three years.
Secondly, the second brand, known as "Alps" externally and "Dabie Mountain" internally, will be launched next year.
Although NIO did not mention the second brand this time, the outside world is no less curious about it than ET9.
At the previous exchange meeting, Li Bin said that the VB car of NIO's second brand has rolled off the assembly line. The second brand is based on the family market and efficiency-oriented. In the life cycle of the second brand, there are only three cars.
"Many people say that the sinking market is the low-end market, but it is not. According to their statistics, more than half of the sales of mainstream high-end brands such as BBA in the Chinese market come from so-called "third-tier cities" and below.
"Wherever Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Audi have 4S stores, it is worth visiting NIO. 」
In addition, NIO's full-stack self-developed technology may also be copied and shared with a second brand. "Smart electric vehicles also bring new opportunities, and there are many things that can be shared between different brands, such as intelligent driving capabilities, software and systems in the intelligent cockpit, and hundreds of thousands of cars can be shared with tens of millions of cars. Li Bin said.
Finally, after continuously optimizing the organization and efficiency, NIO has improved its sales capacity.
In the second quarter of this year, NIO's sales were not ideal, falling 6.1% year-on-year and 24.2% quarter-on-quarter. Li Bin believes that this is due to the fact that "the number of sales personnel and sales capacity lag behind competitors, and they cannot meet the demand for selling eight models at the same time".
Therefore, starting from July this year, NIO has comprehensively improved its sales capacity, with an internal target of 30,000 units per month (sales), and laying sales staff and outlets.
"It takes six months for a user consultant to become a skilled user, and NIO now has a team of 3,000 people. By the second quarter of next year, most of my colleagues will become mature, and I am very confident that the sales will increase after the second quarter of next year. Li Bin said.
Li Bin also believes that "in the face of today's rapidly volatile market environment, the risk of long-termism is increasing". At a time when NIO was "both want and want", it also adjusted its five-year strategic plan to two years, balancing long-term and short-term goals.
NIO wants to compete with Maybach and Porsche, wants to build "100-story high-rise buildings", and wants to occupy a place in the "world's top 10 automobile groups" in the future.
But before these lofty ideals can be realized, NIO needs to survive the explosion of the high-end pure electric market in 2024 and survive the fierce competition in the new energy market.