In a Q&A session with Norwegian customers held earlier this week in Oslo, Nio‘s founders were asked about the gap on the software capabilities between the European markets and the Chinese market.
“There are two main reasons,” the company’s founder and CEO William Li stated. “The first reason, which is also the primary reason, is because of the limited resources available to us this year.”
As the Shanghai-headquartered Group targets to reach its first profitable quarter in the final three months of 2025, the management admitted that it cut on R&D investments is the main reason for the slower roll out of features to European customers.
“As we are under the financial pressure, in that case we are more prudent in making investments and also in doing calculations,” the CEO said adding they “have to be very honest with that.”
Li continued by mentioning ADAS (Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems) improvements as one of the most anticipated areas by owners defending that the low volume in Europe makes the investment very costly per unit.
“The second reason is mainly because of certain features and the validation requirements for certain features,” he noted.
“For the ADAS features, we need to consider not just the feature itself, but also the regulations and the validation requirements,” the CEO added.
“To be honest, validating an AD [autonomous driving] solution on 5,000 cars is as expensive as validating that on 800,000 cars,” Li said referring to the fleet size of Nio in China.
According to the vehicle registration platform EU-EVs, Nio Group has registered 6,251 vehicles across its five European markets since entering Norway in September 2021.
The data includes 200 vehicles in 2021, 1,223 in 2022, 2,365 in 2023, 1,630 in 2024 and 833 year to date as of November 7.
These registration figures include internal vehicles for test drives, press cars and leasing vehicles — not only direct customer purchases.
The registrations figures are expected to increase in the last months as the company shipped to Europe this week a new batch of Firefly vehicles, its cheapest model ever with a starting price of about €30,000 ($34,700) — depending on the market.
“When the car population here in Europe is not big enough, for each car, the amortized validation fee is just too high to bear.
“In that case, with very limited resources, we also have to defer that as we will need to calculate the cost.
“We would like to apologize for not being able to offer you the best software experience or the most frequent FOTA [Firmware over the air] updates. It’s our responsibility. We are responsible for your experience.
“Yet, when we have enough resources, when we are better off in terms of the resources, we will be actually also catching up in that regard.”
Orders for both Nio and Firefly brands are planned to open “soon” in Austria, Greece and Portugal, Nio said this week, as the company continues its new European expansion push with a dealership business model.
Service Priority Over Sales
In a separate question, the management was asked about the after sales service and repair capacity in the Norwegian market.
The chief executive said the management team is discussing the user satisfaction of all the markets on a weekly basis.
“Actually, together with Lihong and the entire management team of Nio, we have been reviewing the user satisfaction rating of every single market every Tuesday,” Li stated. “So we have been doing that on a weekly basis.”
The CEO said the EV maker is prioritizing increasing the user satisfaction across the European markets over sales.
“Currently in Europe, the user satisfaction and the user service is actually our top priority and also our primary focus,” Li said. “Sales volume, that’s one thing. We actually are planning for the long term.
“We don’t expect the volume to actually jump over the night or significantly be boosted over the night. In that case, we focus more on serving our users well. And we are actually taking this matter very seriously.
The CEO called for feedback from customers in each market promising to tackle the issues and improve their experience.
“So if you have any feedback, if you have any opinions or comments, please do raise your hand. Please do let us know in a timely manner. And we will also provide the team necessary support so that we can serve our users better.”
The Nio Group has also teased for the first time this week that its most affordable sub-brand will be entering North America.
The brand stated on social media that “driven strongly by Nio‘s national general-distributor model, Firefly is deepening its presence across Europe, North America, and Asia.”
In mid-August, Nio announced it was entering Costa Rica, its first (Central) American market. The EV maker aims to launch in the market “between 2025 and 2026.”
