Nio‘s founder and Chief Executive Officer William Li said autonomous-driving (AD) technology should prioritize reducing road accidents before seeking to free drivers from the wheel.
Commenting on the customers’ access to the AD features, Li said that paying for such systems should follow a sustainable, subscription-based model.
Speaking at the ‘2025 World Intelligent Connected Vehicles Conference’ in Beijing on Thursday, Nio‘s CEO said more than 1.25 million people die in traffic accidents every year worldwide, calling it “an extremely large number.”
“There are many wonderful things about cars, but traffic accidents arise from complex causes. It’s not that cars themselves are unsafe — often it’s the drivers or the driving environment,” Li said,
“In this regard, autonomous driving technology can make a huge contribution,” the chief executive added — according to the outlet ITHome.
Li called for a focus on reducing road accidents when developing self-driving systems.
“At the current stage, reducing accidents should be the top priority — only then can we truly begin to free up driving effort,” he said.
The company’s World Model — a multimodal system integrating visual, linguistic, spatial, and temporal data for real-time reasoning — underpins ’s autonomous-driving efforts.
The first version launched in June on vehicles using Nio‘s new Cedar operating system, beginning with its ET9 flagship sedan.
Nio plans to roll out World Model 2.0 in stages from late this year through the first quarter of 2026.
The company says the new generation introduces an open-set intelligent engine capable of natural-language interaction and long-sequence cognition through reinforcement learning.
Turning to the business model behind assisted-driving technology, William Li said automakers must charge for these services to ensure long-term viability.
“If the service is truly valuable, users should pay according to their needs,” he said, adding that developing and maintaining such systems involves significant costs in performance, training, communication, and upgrades.
“As an automaker, Nio will continue to stand from the user’s perspective,” Li said. “We will stick with a subscription model for assisted driving.”
Li’s remarks come a week after Nio said it had restructured its intelligent-driving division, following the departure of several key executives including Bai Yuli, head of its AI Platform, and Ma Ningning, who led the company’s Nio World Model program.
Earlier this month, Harry Wong, Nio’s head of intelligent driving product and experience, also resigned.
