Nio opened pre-orders on Monday for a hardware retrofit that adds an assisted-driving indicator light to older models, signaling to other road users when the vehicle is operating under automated systems.
The retrofit installs a dual-color light bar in the side-mirror housing — yellow for conventional turn signals and a blue tone when the vehicle is operating in any of seven assisted-driving modes.
The list covers NOP+ Full-domain Navigated Pilot, Pilot+ Enhanced Lane Centering Assist, Emergency Active Parking, SAPA Visual Fusion Parking Assist, RPA Remote Parking Assist, NBS Vehicle Close-Range Summon, and PSAP Battery Swap Station Parking Assist.
The retrofit costs 998 yuan, equivalent to $146.
Convergence across multiple Chinese automakers comes amid a safety question across the autonomous and assisted-driving industry — how road users should be able to identify whether a vehicle is operating under driver control or automated systems.
The 2026 Model Year Standardisation
The retrofit follows Nio‘s decision earlier this month to make the indicator light standard equipment on its full “5566” lineup_ the ET5 sedan, ET5T touring, ES6 SUV, and EC6 coupe-SUV.
The flagship ET9 sedan and the upcoming ES9 SUV — which begins customer deliveries on June 1 — also ship with the indicator light as standard equipment, with the ES9 integrating the blue indicators directly into its front-fender LiDAR sensor housings.
Eligible Models and Timing
The retrofit is available for the 2025 model year and earlier ET5 and ET5T, the 2023 to 2025 model year ES6 and EC6, and the 2025 model year ET9.
Nio is structuring the rollout in two payment windows.
Owners can place a 10-yuan deposit between April 27 at 10:00 a.m. and June 9 at 11:59 p.m., with the deposit applied as a 100-yuan reduction against the final balance.
Final payments are processed between June 10 and July 31, with installation following thereafter.
Vehicles must first be updated to a designated software version before the hardware retrofit can be installed, according to the EV maker.
A China-Wide Convention
The “small blue light” has become a competitive benchmark in China’s premium EV segment over the past 18 months.
XPeng, Li Auto and Aito — the latter built on Huawei’s HarmonyOS Smart Drive platform — use blue indicators to signal when their assisted-driving systems are engaged.
Major automakers including Xiaomi, BYD, and Geely have introduced similar conventions across their respective intelligent-driving deployments.
Recent Nio Software and Hardware Updates
Nio has been progressively rolling out its second-generation Cedar software platform across its lineup, with the Cedar S 1.4.6 version powering the assisted-driving stack on the 2026 model year refresh.
The platform incorporates Nio‘s in-house World Model — branded NWM — for lane selection and urban traffic interaction.
Over the weekend, Nio and US chipmaker onsemi expanded their multi-year supplier collaboration to deploy onsemi’s third-generation EliteSiC M3e silicon carbide MOSFET technology across Nio‘s 900-volt platform, including the ES9.
US-listed shares of the EV maker closed at $6.21 on Friday, with the stock trading at a market capitalization of around $15.6 billion.
The company is scheduled to report first-quarter results in late May.
