"Up" is the theme of NIO Day 2023, and it is also the theme of NIO's future development.
NIO Day 2023 falls on the second day of the winter solstice. After the longest night of the year, every day for the next half year will have longer and longer light.
As Li Bin, founder, chairman and CEO of NIO, said at the **face-to-face event in mid-December: "NIO has reached the bottom, and every step in the future is upward." ”
In order to consolidate the theme of "upward", NIO released a new executive-level new flagship - ET9 to promote the further improvement of the NIO brand at this year's NIO Day.
As a flagship product that benchmarks Mercedes-Benz S-Class, BMW 7 Series, and Audi A8, NIO ET9 is moving closer to this level in terms of size, space, and design.
At the same time, NIO has also done a lot of innovative practices on the ET9 to distinguish it from the existing executive flagship sedan on the market. These innovations include 200mm of ground clearance, an innovative arched body design, rear seats with up to 45-degree backrest adjustment, an executive table with a wide range of angle adjustments, and more.
Relying only on such a stack of concept innovations, NIO ET9 dares to sell as much as 800,000 yuan, benchmarking Mercedes-Benz S-class, BMW 7 Series, Audi A8 and other luxury brand flagship sedansIs Li Bin floating again?
Of course not. The "password" that Weilai dared to sell for 800,000 yuan was not an ingenuity in design, but a significant "upturn" in technology
The executive flagship has always been the technological flagship. This is Li Bin's understanding of the flagship model of the luxury brand. The flagship models of those luxury brands are also the strongest embodiment of the technical capabilities of related companies.
At this time, some people may wonder if the development of NIO has always relied on service and battery replacementIs the technology reliable?
Li Bin said in the ** exchange session on the second day of NIO DAY 2023 that NIO's "background" has always been technological innovation. He stressed that just because NIO's service is doing well, we can't ignore NIO's efforts in technology.
Since NIO has been so badly harmed by the above-mentioned black-and-white binary theory, Li Bin's hope for this year's NIO Day is to "let the outside world know about a more real NIO".
Previously, NIO has repeatedly said that it has more than 7,700 patents and a cumulative R&D investment of more than 40 billion, and the vast majority of people may not have a too obvious perception. But since NIO Day 2023, everyone's perception of NIO's technology has really become more obvious.
The ET9 alone brings together more than 100 full-stack technologies from NIO, including 17 world premieres, 52 class-leading technologies, and 525 patent applications. At this year's NIO Day, the company showed off a few new car technologies, which caused exclamations at the event.
While many car companies are still talking about the advantages of the 800V high-voltage platform, NIO directly engaged in the 900V high-voltage architecture on the ET9. This is also the first "global 900V high-voltage architecture" in China.
"Global 900V high-voltage architecture" means that unlike the high-voltage technology mentioned by some car companies, which is only a technology of charging voltage, NIO's 900V is the capability of all related components including core electronic and electrical components such as batteries, motors, wiring harnesses, air conditioners, DC-DC, and on-board chargers.
NIO's "global 900V high-voltage architecture" has three world firsts: the world's highest voltage up to 925V, the world's first peak charging power of 600kW, and the world's first peak charging current of 765A. These "firsts" bring higher system efficiency, more extreme performance output, higher safety standards, and better comprehensive energy replenishment experience.
NIO's 900V supercharging system has the characteristics of high charging power, no pile-picking, high battery swapping efficiency, and can be charged, replaced, and upgraded. This allows the vehicle to charge up to 600kW of peak power, peak current of up to 765A, and the fastest 5 minutes to replenish 255km
Thanks to the battery swap technology, NIO ET9 has the world's only 900V battery swap platform, which can achieve 3-minute energy replenishment. In addition, NIO's step-up charging function allows it to cover 500V and 1000V fast charging piles, so that charging can be carried out without picking piles.
For the 900V high-voltage architecture, NIO has also developed its own 46105 large cylindrical battery cell and battery pack, which can achieve 120kWh 5C high-voltage ultra-fast charging. With the new liquid-cooled ultra-fast charging pile, it supports the speed of 255km in 5 minutes.
This 46105 large cylindrical cell has an energy density of up to 292 Wh kg and only 16. The industry's lowest internal resistance loss in Hoou. The battery pack also introduces a thermoelectric separation design, which separates the electrical link and explosion-proof valve at both ends of the battery cell to improve the safety of single-cell batteries, and the battery pack is also equipped with an intelligent high-precision thermal runaway algorithm to prevent special situations.
In order to improve the high space utilization, NIO adopted an ultra-thin variable section design for the cooling plate of the battery pack, which increased the space utilization rate of the battery pack by 24%, and the vertical utilization rate of the battery pack increased to 84%, which is the highest in the industry, effectively reducing the height of the battery pack and leaving more headroom for the cockpit.
The serpentine tube designed by NIO for the new battery pack can achieve double-sided cooling, improve heat dissipation efficiency, and provide a safe temperature environment for 5C charging.
NIO's next-generation 900V high-performance intelligent electric drive platform uses a 180kW induction asynchronous motor in the front and a 340kW permanent magnet synchronous motor in the rear: the first 180kW induction asynchronous motor reduces the weight to 69kg, and the power density reaches the highest in the industry by 26kw/kg；The rear 340kW permanent magnet synchronous motor is the world's first 925V continuous wave winding motor, with a maximum speed of 20,000rpm, a peak torque of 5,000Nm, a weight of only 79kg, and a power density of 43kw/kg。
NIO's new-generation electric drive adopts the first W-PIN winding process in China, which is welded without end, integrally formed, and extremely compact. The electric drive adopts a high-efficiency oil-cooled cooling system, the stator adopts a 3D spray oil-cooled design, and the rotor adopts a symmetrical direct-cooled oil-cooled design, which increases the maximum continuous power by 30%.
In order to ensure the performance and reliability of the motor, NIO has developed and produced a new 1200V silicon carbide power module, which has the characteristics of low loss, low thermal resistance, and ultra-long durability, which can achieve 300,000 power cycles and a power density of 1315kWl.
Whether it's active suspension, steer-by-wire, or rear-wheel steering, these are all technical advantages that can be discussed separately. But NIO directly got them all and combined them into the "Tianxing Chassis System".
The "Tianxing chassis system" is based on the direction of high performance, high safety and high intelligence, and is a full-wire intelligent chassis system, which is composed of three core hardware: "Tianxing full active suspension", "steer-by-wire" and "rear-wheel steering".
"Full Active Suspension" is NIO's world's first intelligent and highly integrated active suspension system. Each shock absorber of this active suspension is highly integrated with an independent electro-hydraulic pump, a brushless DC motor is responsive, and the controller has microsecond information collection and processing capabilities.
The height adjustment of the "Tianxing Full Active Suspension" has been significantly improved in terms of height range and speed, which can meet the driving needs of more scenarios and cope with more complex road conditions. This active suspension can also be deeply linked with the cockpit movie-watching plot, and the overall body movement is greatly moved through the chassis, bringing an immersive audio-visual experience in a dynamic cinema.
In addition, the "Tianxing Full Active Suspension" is also an intelligent suspension that can self-learn, with strong perception + supercomputing + rapid response ability, which can perceive and judge road conditions in advance.
For the first time, NIO has applied the aerospace industry-grade "steer-by-wire" technology to an automobile.
From NIO's point of view, steer-by-wire is a truly software-defined steering system that can be flexibly defined according to the usage scenario to improve driving pleasure. This technology means that the transmission of signals between the steering wheel and the steering motor is lightweight. NIO's steer-by-wire system can improve transmission efficiency by 40% and support OTA iterative upgrades.
Thanks to the fact that the steer-by-wire mechanism has no mechanical connection, the vehicle can avoid the danger caused by the intrusion of the steering structure into the cockpit in the event of a collision and achieve greater passive safety. At the same time, the steer-by-wire system also has an aviation-grade safety redundancy design, so that the car can be effectively controlled in the event of an accident.
In scenarios such as low-speed parking and U-turns, the steer-by-wire system automatically adjusts the steering sensitivity, reducing the driver's operating burden - no need to cross hands to make directions. In intelligent driving and parking, the ET9's steering wheel can also be retracted to free up the driver's legroom
For cars longer than 53 meters with a wheelbase of more than 32 meters, more than 2 meters wide for large cars, the advantages of the "rear-wheel steering" system will be more obvious.
Although it is an executive-level flagship model positioned in the D-segment market, the rear-wheel steering angle of the NIO ET9 with rear-wheel steering system can reach up to 83°, the turning diameter is only 109m, so that it can easily and flexibly deal with narrow road U-turn scenarios.
In addition to a smaller turning radius, the rear-wheel steering system can also make the ET9 have a more stable high-speed cornering ability and a more stable driving ability on slippery roads through automatic co-directional rotation, so that the passengers in the car have better performance in terms of ride comfort and smoothness.
ET9 is equipped with NIO's in-depth self-developed intelligent system architecture, covering five modules: on-board intelligent hardware, vehicle supercomputing platform, vehicle global operating system, intelligent algorithms, and intelligent applications, which can provide users with digital technology experience in intelligent driving, intelligent cockpit, and intelligent networking.
NIO's first self-developed intelligent driving chip, the Shenji NX9031, was first equipped on the ET9. This is the industry's first 5nm automotive process with more than 50 billion transistors. From the perspective of comprehensive capability and efficiency, one chip can play the role of four current industry flagship-level intelligent driving chips, which can realize the combination of computing power and algorithms, allow intelligent driving and cockpit cross-domain computing resource sharing, and improve safety and efficiency.
The NX9031 has a CPU computing group with super concurrent task processing capabilities and abundant memory access bandwidth, which can reduce data processing latency and improve data processing stability. The chip is based on a 32-core BIGBuilt on the Little CPU architecture, it has 615K DMIPS computing power and the fastest LPDDR5X in the automotive grade with a speed of 8533Mbps.
Due to the improved performance, the Shenji NX9031 chip has the industry's highest processing performance ISP with 6.5 billion pixel processing capacity, and the processing delay is reduced by 75% compared with the industry average latency, with the industry's highest processing bit width of 26 bits, which can achieve earlier braking response in emergency scenarios in bad weather and extreme light environments.
According to official data, NIO's self-developed inference acceleration unit NPU helps the BEV algorithm performance of the Shenji NX9031 chip to be improved by 4 compared with the industry's flagship chip3 times, the performance of transformer algorithms is improved by 65 times, and the performance of LiDAR point cloud processing algorithms is improved by 4 times.
The NX9031 chip can turn on and off the corresponding modules as needed according to the application scenario, and realize the millisecond-level dynamic wake-up of each subsystem, reducing the overall power consumption level. In addition,The chip also has more than 1,000 chip-level functional safety designs, which can complete microsecond-level monitoring and maintain stability under extreme conditions such as high-frequency vibration, strong magnetic field, high and low temperature, and long-term use
Tianshu SkyOS, the global operating system of the whole vehicle, can be said to be the "soul" of NIO ET9. The system is the world's first vehicle-centric intelligent electric vehicle global operating system, involving vehicle system, intelligent driving system, intelligent cockpit system, China Unicom service energy supplement and mobile Internet, which can solve the problems of security, real-time and application complexity between different domains of each system, and establish a comprehensive and three-dimensional technical system.
SkyOS-L is the first real-time operating system to achieve domestic replacement and large-scale commercial use of AUTOSAR, which can be more closely integrated with NIO's self-developed chips to give full play to hardware computing power, integrate software and hardware, achieve more open functions, and continuously optimize user experience.
In order to maintain data security and user privacy, NIO has created the industry's first vehicle-centric end-to-end secure channel for multi-device interconnection, has the industry's first on-board certificate issuance system, and China's first remote vehicle control command based on end-to-end encryption authentication, and built a root chain of trust from the chip level.
The NIO ET9 is also equipped with the company's self-developed next-generation vehicle digital architecture, which has super perception and computing power, and supports high-speed and secure data transmission and processing.
More importantly, NIO's intelligent system can support multiple brands and models at the same time, and has reusable atomic capabilities and systematized capability output. The system's hardware and software can be independently iterated, which greatly improves the upgrade speed, development freedom, and production efficiency, and reduces production costs.
Li Bin said that the ET9 will be delivered in the first quarter of 2025, not because NIO is in a hurry to launch the car before it is developed, but because NIO hopes to take a longer time to verify the car so that it can deliver a more reliable and perfect product to users.
Because he was worried that everyone would find it too boring, the ET9 technology shared by Li Bin at NIO DAY 2023 is at most one-third of the overall technological innovation of the product.
According to Qin Lihong, co-founder and president of NIO, in the next few months, NIO will organize a series of seminars on ET9 and innovative technologies, so that everyone can understand more specifically and fully how far NIO and China's cutting-edge technology has developed.
In addition to NIO's own long-term time and cost on R&D, NIO Capital has also invested in more than 70 companies in the smart electric vehicle industry chain, such as CATL, Sunwoda, Chongxinhang, Rongbai Lithium Battery, Tudatong, etc., thus forming a synergy with NIO.
Of course, while NIO is improving its technology, it is also promoting service improvement through the accelerated layout of charging and battery swapping infrastructure, and promoting the upward ...... of sales through lower-level channelsAt the same time, NIO has not given up on the "downward" market.
Behind the upward trend of the NIO brand, NIO is also in full swing to promote the development of the second brand. The brand will be aimed at family users in the mass market, mainly in the range of 20 300,000 yuan**, and enhance the competitiveness of products by reusing NIO's software capabilities and energy supplement system, so as to create a popular model with monthly sales of tens of thousands of units.
However, in the face of the current fierce market, NIO is not in a hurry to launch the second brand and the third brand after that. Li Bin said that in terms of technological innovation, we must "dare to be the first in the world", and in terms of brand release, we must "dare to be the first in the world".
Li Bin admits that NIO has also gone through many detours, and the current strategy cannot be guaranteed to be 100% correct. But he hopes that everyone will not judge heroes because of temporary success or failure, and give enough time to verify the playing style of the strategic dimension.
At least in the next few months, we can continue to scratch the "background" of NIO's technology to verify whether their technological innovation is really enough to fight.
Text丨Zhang Yuzhe.
Editor丨Wang Xin.
Produced 丨 There is a driving report.