Nio founder and Chief Executive William Li said on Wednesday that the “second half” of autonomous driving will be decided by whether users pay for it and whether they can clearly feel it is safer than human driving.
Li spoke at the 2026 World Intelligent Connected Vehicles Conference in Beijing on a panel titled “How Should the Second Half of Autonomous Driving Go”, alongside XPeng’s founder He Xiaopeng and other industry executives.
“In the second half of autonomous driving, the core is still whether it can create value for users,” Li said, according to a transcript published by the National Business Daily.
“There are two very important indicators: first, how many users are actually willing to pay? If users are unwilling to pay, there is no real creation of user value,” he said, according to the outlet.
“The other is safety: whether there can be quantified indicators that let users significantly perceive that autonomous driving really is safer than people driving,” Li added.
He said insurers and other parties would need to give “real feedback” on the probability and proportion of accidents, the newspaper reported.
Li also said technology and compliance “must be kept separate.”
He described the July 1, 2027 start of a mandatory national safety standard for automated driving systems as an important marker of the second half, the outlet added.
New Safety Figures
Li said Nio’s assisted-driving system had logged more than 9.14 billion kilometers and more than 112 million hours of use, and had avoided or mitigated more than 9.07 million accidents.
The system is deployed on more than 950,000 vehicles.
Nio has not published the new figures in a filing or press release, and the reports gave no cut-off date beyond “currently.”
On September 14, Li told the World Trade Organization’s World Trade and Tech Day in Geneva that the system had covered more than 7.7 billion kilometers over 98 million hours and avoided or mitigated 8.35 million potential accident impacts.
The two sets of figures imply about 1.44 billion kilometers, 14 million hours and 720,000 events were added in roughly five weeks.
Nio has separately said its active safety system, a different function, had avoided or mitigated more than 8.5 million accidents.
Li also cited a joint assessment by four insurers that the active safety system cut users’ accident losses by 38.4% in the first half of 2026.
From Nvidia Chips to Shenji
Nio’s earlier smart-driving computer used four Nvidia Orin X chips, and Li said in April 2025 that the company spent more than $300 million on Orin X chips in 2024.
Its in-house Shenji NX9031, a 5-nanometer chip with more than 50 billion transistors unveiled in December 2023, entered mass production with the start of ET9 deliveries in April 2025.
Li wrote on Weibo in July 2025 that one NX9031 matches four Orin X chips and cuts about 10,000 yuan from the cost of each vehicle.
Nio unveiled its Nio World Model (NWM) in 2024 and in 2025 added “full closed-loop reinforcement learning,” it said in its annual report filed in April.
The latest NWM version reached more than 700,000 Nio and Onvo users on June 18, Li said on Nio’s second-quarter earnings call on September 1.
Shenji, the chip subsidiary, agreed in February to raise 2.257 billion yuan from outside investors and in June and August a further 493 million yuan at a post-money valuation of 12.25 billion yuan, Nio’s filings show.
The smart-driving unit was reorganized in December 2024, when Ren Shaoqing took direct charge of its large-model team, 36Kr reported at the time.
On the September call, Li said Ren, head of the smart-driving department, had founded a physical AI startup in which Nio is a strategic shareholder, and would stay in his role.
Who Pays for It
Nio began charging 380 yuan a month for its NOP+ navigation feature in July 2023 after a free beta.
New Nio and Onvo buyers now receive a five-year complimentary smart-driving subscription, while used-car owners pay 380 yuan a month, Li said on the September call.
About 20% of used-car owners subscribe, he said.
Li gave his reasons for charging at the same conference in October 2025, saying assisted driving carries fulfillment, training, communication and upgrade costs, and is unsustainable without revenue.
Leaner Budgets, Stricter Rules
Nio’s research and development expenses fell 18.7% to 10.6 billion yuan in 2025, from 13.04 billion yuan in 2024 and 13.43 billion yuan in 2023, its annual report showed.
They were 1.89 billion yuan in the first quarter of 2026 and 2.14 billion yuan in the second, and Nio does not break out autonomous-driving spending.
Chief Financial Officer Stanley Qu said on the September call that adjusted research spending would run at roughly 2.5 billion yuan a quarter this year.
Nio had 35,032 full-time employees at the end of 2025, down from 45,635 a year earlier.
It posted a net profit of 282.7 million yuan in the fourth quarter of 2025, then net losses of 332.1 million yuan and 528.0 million yuan in the first two quarters of 2026.
China’s industry ministry and market regulator said in February 2025 that over-the-air updates must be filed with them, and that updates involving autonomous driving functions require permits.
In December 2025, the ministry granted conditional Level 3 approvals to two models from Changan and BAIC’s Arcfox, and Nio was among seven pilot carmakers still without one.
The standard Li cited, GB 44721-2026, was published on July 30 and covers vehicles with Level 3 and Level 4 systems, requiring them to be at least as safe as a competent, attentive human driver.
It takes effect on July 1, 2027.
