On May 15, 2024, International Day of Families, on the 10th anniversary of NIO's founding, the second new brand "ONVO" was released.
As for why the second brand was released, Li Bin said that based on the laws of the automotive industry, especially the forward-looking judgment of the market development of the intelligent electric vehicle industry, the company has been brewing a multi-brand strategy since its establishment in 2014.
After more than 7 years of development since its release in November 2016, NIO has established a brand development strategy that focuses on the business executive car market, taking into account the family and personal car market, and has established the image of a high-end pure electric vehicle brand. At the beginning of 2021, the company began to formally form a team to build the ONVO brand.
The Ledao brand focuses on the family car market, with the concept of family fun and family care, and is oriented to family users.
Ledao Automobile's first product, Ledao L60, is a mid-size SUV, bidding for Toyota Rongfang, Tesla Model Y, its pre-sale price starts at 219,900 yuan, Ledao L60 will be officially released and listed in September this year.
At the same time, it supports NIO's SAAS battery leasing program, and its actual car purchase price is expected to drop to around 150,000 yuan, according to reports, Ledao will open a financial car purchase program with a down payment of 15% at the same time, and you can place an order for 30,000 yuan.
It can be seen that the NIO team has set up a goal for the Ledao L60 to only succeed and not to fail.
This time, Ledao L60 only announced a few data such as appearance and cruising range, and it has a very high cost performance from the pricing point of view.
From the perspective of NIO's internal system, Ledao L60 will impact the sales of NIO ES6 and EC6.
The two models are of comparable size, but Ledao L60 is based on the third-generation platform of Weilai NT3.0 to build, the interior space of the two cars is similar, but Ledao L60 The central control screen adopts a suspended design, the size is larger, in terms of intelligent driving, it also supports urban NOA, and uses a stronger performance NVIDIA Orin X chip, but it is not equipped with standard lidar, and it takes the pure visual route.
At the same time, it also supports battery swapping, and the battery has two options: BYD's lithium iron phosphate and CATL's ternary lithium.
According to the information obtained from other sources, it will not support four free battery swaps per month like NIO models.
However, with the price difference of 100,000 yuan between the two cars, Ledao L60 can be said to have extraordinary cost performance.
However, for the competition of internal products, the president of Weilai saw it very clearly, and he said to Zhijia.com: "The market competition is very fierce, and without Ledao L60, Xiaomi will not come?" Xiaopeng won't come? If you don't rob it, someone will rob it. ”
However, "it is a little regrettable that the release of the Ledao brand was a year later than originally planned. Qin Lihong said that at the beginning of its establishment in 2014, Wei established a multi-brand strategy, but due to the epidemic, the release of the Ledao brand was a year late.
This means that according to the original schedule, the first model of Ledao will be released earlier than the Xiaomi SU 7.
With a one-year lag in time, China's new energy vehicle market can be described as very different.
However, Ledao also has a strong advantage when it was released at this time, that is, NIO's battery swap system and network are close to maturity.
Ledao has systematic advantages in business segments including technology research and development, supply chain, intelligent manufacturing, quality, charging and swapping network, sales and after-sales service.
Since last year, NIO's battery swap circle has not only expanded to Geely, Changan, GAC and other first-line independent brands in China, but He Xiaopeng also made it clear that he is ready to join.
The much-criticized battery swap model is reaching a tipping point, and NIO's long-term approach is nearing success in its 10-year history.
In the past few days, NIO's stock price has shown an upward trend, and the sales volume in April has also shown an extremely high trend.
Currently, NIO has more than 11,000 R&D engineers.
NIO said that in the past two years, NIO has invested more than 24 billion yuan in technology research and development, built 12 full-stack technology layouts, carried out comprehensive self-research in multiple fields, and has a large number of industry-leading technologies and patents in the R&D fields such as vehicle global operating system, intelligent hardware, intelligent system, intelligent application, three-electric system, and vehicle engineering.
NIO has built a R&D organizational structure, R&D system capabilities, and R&D results application model suitable for the efficient development of multiple brands. The release of the Ledao brand will further enhance the efficiency of the company's R&D system.
In terms of production, the Ledao brand and NIO brand models are produced on the same line at the company's two digital smart factories in Hefei. NIO said that the mature manufacturing, quality and supply chain management system has laid a solid foundation for Ledao's large-scale and high-quality production. The release of the Ledao brand will also further enhance the systematic efficiency of the company's intelligent manufacturing.
Li Bin, Founder, Chairman and CEO of NIO, said: "Over the past three years, the Ledao brand has established its own system capabilities, and combined with the accumulation of NIO in the past 10 years, the launch of the Ledao brand has come naturally. The implementation of the multi-brand strategy gives us the opportunity and ability to serve a wider range of users. With the support of the company's system competitiveness, we are full of confidence in the development of the NIO brand and the Ledao brand. ”