Nio Founder and CEO William Li said the main purpose of autonomous driving should be to free up drivers and cut road accidents, not to take jobs from taxi and ride-hailing drivers, in a speech in China on Wednesday.
Li told the Internet Entrepreneurs Forum of the World Internet Conference Wuzhen Summit that, when the industry began debating the meaning of intelligent driving a decade ago, some saw it as robotaxis, according to Sina Tech.
“But we have always firmly believed that the greatest significance of intelligent driving should be to free up drivers’ energy and reduce traffic accidents,” he said.
“The greatest significance of intelligent driving should not be to make taxi drivers and ride-hailing drivers lose their jobs,” Li said. “We believe the value of AI should be to make people’s work easier and safer, not to deprive human existence of its meaning.”
Li used the final line in its own release on the speech, which said intelligent driving’s greatest significance is not to cost taxi and ride-hailing drivers their jobs but to free up energy and reduce accidents.
The remarks echo Nio CEO’s long-held position that Nio will not operate robotaxis, even as the battery-swap business it is building with Geely is set to serve Geely’s planned robotaxi fleet.
“The significance of the continuous progress of intelligent driving technology lies in reducing the related losses of productivity and life as much as possible,” he said, according to IT Home.
Smart EVs as AI’s Largest Industry
Li said that, as AI moves from the digital world into the physical one, smart EVs have become the largest industry applying it, according to Nio’s summary of the speech.
Vehicles used to be seen as cold machines, but intelligent technology has turned them into mobile living spaces and companions that increasingly understand their users, he said, according to Sina Tech.
He described smart EVs as the most widely shipped embodied AI agents, with each car’s computing power, sensors and large models already linking perception, decision-making and execution.
Li put the global auto industry, from parts and vehicles to sales, services and finance, at about $7 trillion to $9 trillion.
If AI applications add 15% more value for users, the industry and society, they would create more than $1.2 trillion in commercial value, he said.
Safety Data
Drivers across the more than one billion vehicles worldwide spend over 1.5 billion hours behind the wheel every day, Li said, and road crashes kill more than 1.16 million people a year.
The figures come from a World Health Organization estimate published in July for 2025.
Driving without assistance is draining, and the safety risk is high when drivers are sleepy or tired, Li said.
In the first half of 2026, accident-related losses for Nio users fell 38.4%, based on assessments by four insurers, PICC, China Pacific Property Insurance, Ping An Property & Casualty and China Taiping, according to Nio.
Average safe mileage with human-machine co-driving has reached eight times that of human driving alone, the company said.
Nio’s assisted-driving features have logged more than 9.14 billion kilometers (5.68 billion miles) and over 112 million hours of use, and have helped users avoid or mitigate more than 9.07 million potential accidents, according to the company’s own statistics.
Nio said it is building a technology stack covering chips, sensing hardware, world models and the vehicle operating system, including its Shenji NX9031 5-nanometer assisted-driving chip, the Nio World Model and the SkyOS Tianshu operating system.
No Robotaxi Plans
Li did not repeat, in the remarks reported from Wuzhen, his earlier pledge that Nio would not build robotaxis.
“We will resolutely not do unmanned taxis. We believe ‘freeing up energy and reducing accidents’ is the true social value of intelligent driving,” he said in July 2024.
“I think the value of autonomous driving is not to get rid of chauffeur drivers who already work so hard. I don’t find that exciting at all,” he said at the same event, according to Jiemian.
He also argued then that a city can only hold a limited number of operating vehicles, with or without drivers, so robotaxis cannot scale like software or cloud services, Jiemian reported.
At a forum in April, Li said robotaxis are not only a technology problem but also raise questions about operating regulations, their relationship with ride-hailing and taxi services, and social governance, and that Nio had no plans to enter the field, Sina Tech reported.
Swap Network for Geely’s Robotaxis
Nio’s battery-swap business is nonetheless being positioned to serve robotaxis operated by others.
Under a deal announced on September 28, Geely Holding Group will fold Yiyi Hulian, its commercial-vehicle battery-swap operator, into Nio Energy and add 640 million yuan ($96.1 million) in cash, for a stake of about 30%. Nio will take 10% of Geely’s Haohan Energy. The deal still needs regulatory approval.
After closing, the two companies will run separate swap networks for consumers and for businesses, Li said at the signing, according to 21st Century Business Herald. The business network, built on Yiyi Hulian, will cover Geely’s ride-hailing unit Cao Cao Mobility “and future robotaxis,” the outlet reported.
Geely Holding Group President An Conghui said that day that Cao Cao Mobility will fully adopt battery swapping, and that the robotaxi model it is developing will also use swaps. Cao Cao’s Eva Cab robotaxi is slated for mass production in 2027.
Li also said Geely has pressed for the two companies to announce a European swap network plan next year.
Deliveries and Tech Day
Nio delivered 34,246 vehicles in October, down 15.2% from a record 40,397 a year earlier. That included 18,125 Nio-brand vehicles, 8,383 Onvos and 7,738 Fireflies.
Deliveries in the first 10 months rose 38.5% to 334,547. Nio registered no new EVs in Germany in October.
The company will hold its NIO IN 2026 tech day in Guangzhou on November 25, where it plans to unveil new AI cockpit and assisted-driving products.
Nio’s U.S.-listed shares closed down 3% at $3.20 on Thursday.
