Reading guide: Shouting out the dream that has been delayed for a long time, we generally call it "painting cake".
Despite the delay in the release of the poor third-quarter earnings report until the fourth quarter, NIO's annual NIODay still held as usual.
Unlike in the past, NIODay has not announced any new vehicles that will be unveiled in 2024. At the end of 2023, NIO has chosen to reveal the details and inventory of its flagship product, the ET9, which will only be delivered in 2025.
The reason is already obvious.
In NIO's Q2 earnings call, Li Bin made it clear that there will be no new product deliveries for the NIO brand in 2024 - in stark contrast, almost all the leading new power car companies will take 2024 as a key year for the intensive release of new products.
Of NIO's current eight models, only the ES6 can sell more than 5,000 units per month. The higher-priced ET7, ES7, and EC7 currently have three-digit monthly sales. The sales of these models obviously did not meet expectations, and behind it was also the sinking of development costs, which directly led to the embarrassing situation that NIO's losses were still high.
In the third-quarter financial report, NIO reported a net loss of RMB4,556.7 million (US$624.6 million), an increase of 10.8% from the third quarter of 2022. Moreover, since NIO first announced its financial report in the third quarter of 2018, NIO has accumulated losses of more than 85 billion yuan in 6 years.
For NIO, the current sales mainstay is the ES6 and ET5 series. Under the new product offensive of many car companies, it is doubtful whether these two models can still remain competitive in 2024.
NIO's multi-product thinking does not bring risk sharing, and the unreasonable timing of product launch will make NIO's risks in 2024 increase sharply. Under the influence of various factors such as the loss has not been significantly narrowed and large-scale layoffs, the choice of ET9, which debuted more than 1 year in advance, is more of a "helpless move".
In other words, the ET9 is NIO's means of boosting confidence internally and externally. The ET9 is more of a delaying tactic than expectations of its sales and earnings.
ET9 is a means, not an end
From the perspective of competition for car companies, it is a high-risk behavior to announce the technical details of their flagship products more than a year in advance, from which competing companies will understand the core competitiveness of the company in the next few years and evaluate whether it is technically benchmarking.
One light and one dark, the side that shows the hole cards first is passive.
However, judging from the technical explanation of the ET9 at this NIODay, NIO mainly showed its own four aspects of planning through this car. They are self-developed intelligent driving chips, 900 V high-voltage architecture, hydraulic active chassis system, and active and passive safety.
The self-developed intelligent driving chip introduced by NIO is named Shenji NX9031, which can achieve the performance of four current industry-leading intelligent driving chips with one computing power. In terms of technical details, the 5 nm automotive-grade process, more than 50 billion transistors, and self-developed ISPs and NPUs are all designed to serve the needs of NIO's own intelligent driving algorithms.
It seems to be inspired by Tesla's self-developed FSD chip, and NIO also hopes to grasp the link of intelligent driving more firmly in its own hands through self-developed chips.
But at this point, NIO is clearly putting the cart before the horse. From the point of view of self-developed chips, Tesla has clarified its own demand for chips after experiencing the restrictions of Mobileye and NVIDIA. In other words, before developing its own chips, Tesla has exhausted the potential of its suppliers' chips and understood how to balance cost, performance and power consumption.
At present, all models sold by NIO are equipped with 4 NVIDIA Orin-X chips as standard, exceeding 1,000 Tops in computing power. However, in terms of the landing progress of urban NOA, it is obvious that NIO has not brought such hardware capabilities into play. NIO previously stated that the urban NOP will complete the coverage of the urban intelligent driving range through the user adding route wishlist mode, not by city.
In contrast, Xpeng will complete the coverage of the 200 urban NGP cities by the end of 2023, while Huawei said that by the end of 2023, the NCA national coverage of urban areas will be completed.
Under the obvious disadvantages of the landing process and algorithm capabilities, NIO has tirelessly pursued the ultimate performance of hardware, and the commercialization model behind it is still unclear.
Tesla, for example, brought in $324 million in revenue from FSD in the fourth quarter of last year alone. However, at this point, the difficulty of the closed-loop commercialization of domestic intelligent driving is not only a problem for NIO as a car company.
From a strategic point of view, self-developed intelligent driving chips can indeed balance cost and performance and better serve their own needs, and NIO has no big problems in long-term planning. But the cruelty of reality lies in the fact that NIO is facing financial pressure, and the software that matches the existing hardware does not make NIO's intelligent driving a bright spot configuration that affects the minds of consumers.
Although NIO's self-developed chips have been successfully taped out, the time from tape-out to meet the verification of vehicle specifications and then to find a suitable foundry to meet production capacity needs is still unknown.
On the ET9, NIO says it has a maximum vehicle voltage of 925V and a maximum charging power of 600 kW with a peak charging current of 765 A.
In order to ensure that the ride comfort of the ET9 does not suffer from the problems criticized on the ET5 and ET7, NIO can only modify the size of its battery pack. However, due to structural limitations, the ET9's battery pack is not compatible with NIO's existing 70, 75 and 100 kWh battery packs.
Only the latest Gen 3 battery swap station and the upcoming Gen 4 battery swap station are designed with the ET9's 120 kWh battery pack in mind. The family's flagship models can't enjoy all the battery swap resources, but the older NT 1.0 and NT 2.0 can—from this point of view, battery swapping brings NIO the advantage of energy replenishment, and at the same time, it is also wearing shackles to develop new products.
NIO, which is keen on full-stack self-development, said it will equip the ET9 with a new large cylindrical battery cell of 46105. Considering the reality that Tesla, which proposed the 4680 large cylindrical battery plan in 2020, will still have difficulty giving birth at the end of 2023, it remains to be seen whether NIO can successfully mass-produce 46105 battery cells on a large scale in 2024.
The "Champagne Tower", a tribute to the iconic Lexus advertisement, became the climax of NIODay - the ET9 is equipped with the "SkyRide" intelligent chassis system, which allows the car to pass through continuous speed bumps without spilling the liquid in the wine glass.
The technology is provided by ClearMotion, a chassis company invested by NIO. The advantage of active hydraulic shock absorbers is that the shock absorbers are highly integrated with the active suspension electric drive unit, which is more compact and responsive than non-integrated active suspension.
Although NIO says that this "fully active suspension" is the world's first integrated hydraulic fully active suspension. But in fact, BYD released a similar technology as early as April this year - Yunlin X. The Yangwang U9 equipped with Yunnan-X technology showcases fully active hydraulic body control technology, which can achieve advanced functions such as "0 roll", "0 pitch", "three-wheel driving", "vehicle dancing" and "jumping on the spot".
From the perspective of 2023, both NIO's "Tianxing Intelligent Chassis System" and BYD's "Yunlin-X" represent the development direction of new energy vehicle chassis in the future, but at present, not only NIO has relevant technical reserves - even if the ET9 can be guaranteed to be delivered on schedule in the first quarter of 2025, it is still a question mark whether the system can still be at the forefront of technology or the fastest model to land this technology at that time.
Judging from past practice, NIO often chooses to publish long-term forward-looking plans on NIODay. However, the rapid iteration of technology in the new energy era and the shortcomings of NIO's short-term planning often make it face the embarrassing situation of "ideal plumpness and realistic skinny".
At NIODay in 2021, NIO announced plans for a 150 kWh solid-state battery pack. This battery, which was announced in 2021 and was supposed to be mass-produced in 2022, jumped to the week before NIODay in 2023. And limited by the high cost of close to 300,000 yuan, NIO will adopt the method of "rent-only, not sale".
Power battery industry insiders estimate that a battery pack similar to NIO's 150 degrees will cost about 1 billion yuan from testing to small-scale mass production, which is twice as high as mainstream power batteries. Looking ahead to 2021, a high-capacity battery pack can indeed alleviate the anxiety of long-distance battery life. However, NIO has clearly misjudged the technical barriers and costs of solid-state battery packs. On the other hand, the battery swap mode and the large-capacity battery are inherently contradictory.
The 120 kWh battery pack used in the ET9 has almost failed to announce a 150 kWh mass production plan, but the 46105 large cylindrical battery cell has brought new challenges, and we still don't know how much NIO's promising expectations will be realized.
Judging from the data in 2022, the annual sales of Mercedes-Benz S-Class are about 25,000 units, the BMW 7 Series is about 14,000 units, and the Audi A8L is about 10,000 units - the limited capacity of the D-Class makes the ET9, which has a pre-sale price of 800,000 yuan, destined not to bear too much pressure on brand revenue and delivery.
However, it is gratifying that NIO, which has tested the waters of this level of pure electric models for the first time, still retains its own unique brand tonality, which has become its most valuable and irreplaceable wealth, and also gives it the possibility and hole card to come back from the dead.
In business, only "idealism" will surely dieNIODay, the annual banquet guest, NIO still tells everyone the beautiful vision of "building a tall building".
Being able to dream and dare to dream gives NIO a unique temperament that is different from that of other new power brands - high EQ is idealism, and low EQ can also be idealism.
Another meaning of idealism is the general dream of going to an unreachable utopia, a rampage that ignores reality and objective laws, and a meaningless heroism of Don Quixote.
No business company that understands it will boast of "idealism" as a label. The dream is a bright future, but the reality is a dangerous situation surrounded by wolves. The idealist is better off being a lonely philosopher than a business conglomerate with the responsibility of reality for itself and tens of thousands of people.
That's not fair to anyone.
The premature birth of the ET9 is a smoke bomb from NIO. On the other side of the smoke, everyone still pretends that the world is peaceful, and still says auspicious words, and on the other side of the smoke, we seem to see that the former idealist chose to break his wrist and enter the WTO.
On the road of the new forces to build cars, from life to death, to death. Many car companies have crossed the sea and shown their own magical powers. The only thing that remains unchanged is that no one can escape from the swamp and the pit that should be stepped on. ET9 can't save NIO in 2024, and neither can Abu Dhabi, which is crazy in the snow.
Who can save NIO? It may be the Alps, but at the bottom is NIO's own sense of crisis. Once you figure something out, all that's left is execution. As for whether it will be life or death after the execution, it can only be left to time.