On December 23rd, the annual NIO Day gathered a lot of attention from the industry. And Li Bin, who broke away from the "worst" label, showed more of NIO's achievements in energy replenishment and the release of the new ET9 at this press conference. However, Li Bin, who is standing at the end of 2023, is undoubtedly facing a turning point at a crossroads.
On the one hand, the sales volume is less than expected, the loss margin is still high, and the 10% layoff has made it even more questioned by the industry. On the other hand, NIO is also ushering in a turnaround, obtaining production qualifications by buying back factories, joining hands with Changan and Geely to expand the "circle of friends" for battery swaps, and the $2.2 billion financing can further alleviate its financial pressure.
However, it is worth noting that the release of NIO ET9 has taken on the important task of "upward" NIO. At the press conference, Li Bin positioned the new car as a "cross-era administrative flagship, cross-era technology flagship", benchmarking Mercedes-Benz S-Class, BMW 7 Series and Audi A8L. But from the point of view of appearance, ET9 does not feel much amazing and subversive, and still adopts the design of the NIO family, but it is close to the style of the station wagon "crockpot" in terms of styling. There is a big gap between this and the amount of sound generated when the ideal MEGA was unveiled.
Although the appearance of NIO ET9 is not stunning enough, there is no big mistake, and the relatively modest style can also allow it to gain more audiences. And when you think of its pre-sale price of 800,000 yuan and its positioning as a flagship sedan, you can understand the style orientation of its exterior styling.
In terms of creating a sense of science and technology, NIO ET9 is directly full. It can be said that the cutting-edge technology you can think of, NIO has all the brains arranged on ET9. For example, China's first global 900V high-voltage system has higher charging functions and can achieve full coverage of 500V to 1000V fast charging piles. And it is also equipped with a high-performance electric drive with a high-performance SiC.
In addition, the new car is equipped with steer-by-wire technology, which is also a trend in the current chassis development, which realizes the transmission between the steering wheel and the steering motor through telecommunications, without a traditional mechanical connection. Great Wall Motor has also demonstrated this technology before, but it has not been mass-produced on existing models. At the same time, the new car also has advanced technology for rear-wheel steering and "fully active suspension".
In addition, ET9 also adopts China's first in-depth self-developed intelligent architecture, which covers five modules: intelligent hardware, supercomputing platform, global operating system, intelligent algorithm, and intelligent application. The Aquila Super Sensing System has evolved to 2Version 0, named Aquila. The roof is still a watchtower-style layout, with an ultra-long-range lidar in the middle, high-definition cameras on both sides, and a dual-sided wide-angle lidar added to the ET9. In addition, it is worth mentioning that ET9 is also equipped with NIO's self-developed 5nm intelligent driving chip Shenji NX9031.
It can be said that Weilai ET9 is the ceiling model created by Weilai Automobile "upward", of course, the pre-sale price of 800,000 yuan has also become the "leader" among the new forces of car manufacturing, but the arrival of Weilai ET9 may still make Weilai still encounter a "cold winter".
First of all, in terms of **, the pre-sale price of 800,000 yuan is not expensive compared to the traditional luxury model "78S", and it is likely that there will be further sincerity after the listing in the future, but it is still very difficult for NIO ET9 to achieve hot sales. After all, in the ** range of about 800,000 yuan, it is still very difficult to break through in sales. And you must know that car manufacturing still has to pay attention to scale effect, without enough sales as support, everything is empty talk.
At the same time, NIO ET9 will not be delivered until the first quarter of 2025. Next, if NIO ET9 wants to maintain its popularity for about a year, it is still necessary to test NIO's marketing capabilities. Moreover, in the next year, the domestic auto market will continue to roll inward, and it is still difficult to say whether NIO ET9 will face more fierce competition at that time.
In addition, it was previously reported that NIO will not launch a new car in 2024, and now with the release of ET9, this news seems to have been confirmed from the side. Even if all the models of NIO have been replaced by the second-generation platform, today's sales still cannot achieve a significant increase, so NIO is likely to face a situation where there is no license to play.
Write at the end
Although the release of NIO ET9 has allowed consumers to see more cutting-edge technologies, for NIO, the relatively high price range is easy to fall into the embarrassing situation of high and low. However, if NIO is not able to improve its "moat" and come up with stronger technical strength, then its sales will inevitably be further under pressure in the future. In the future, we will continue to pay attention to the overall performance of NIO.
This article is originally produced by Wenwu Lane New ** Studio,**Please indicate the source: Wenwu Lane, the author of this article: Hefeng).