Nio defended the hidden door handles on its new flagship model over the weekend, saying all models currently on sale comply with existing rules and will remain legal under the phased implementation of China‘s new national safety standard.
The statement, posted to Nio‘s Weibo account, came a week after the ES9 opened pre-sales with a retractable hidden door handle design that had drawn public questions about its compatibility with the mandatory national standard for automotive door handle safety.
“All Nio models currently on sale can normally use the hidden door handles, and are fully compliant,” the company said in the statement.
The Shanghai-headquartered brand said it “participated deeply in the entire process” of the new standard’s development and would continue to apply “requirements higher than industry standards” to itself.
The ES9 is China’s largest SUV, and nationwide deliveries are planned to begin on the first day of June.
The New Standard
The Standardization Administration of China approved GB 48001-2026 — formally titled Safety Technical Requirements for Automotive Door Handle — on January 28, 2026.
The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, which organised the drafting, published the full text on February 2.
The standard is the world’s first mandatory national regulation specifically targeting automotive door handle safety.
The new rule requires every door of a passenger car or light commercial vehicle must be equipped with an independent mechanical exterior and interior handle capable of opening the door through a mechanical mechanism.
Non-impact-side doors must be operable through a mechanical structure after a crash or power failure.
The drafting began with a project announcement in May 2025 and spanned nearly nine months, involving more than 40 automakers and parts suppliers.
The Phased Timeline
The standard takes effect in three stages, a structure that allows already-approved models to continue selling with existing designs for up to three years.
From the first day of 2027, new models seeking type approval must fully comply.
From January 1, 2028, all newly manufactured vehicles — including facelifts of existing models — must comply.
From January 1, 2029, all in-production vehicles must be fully compliant, ending the transition period.
In its statement, Nio said the ES9, which opened pre-sales on April 9 and enters deliveries in late May, falls under the first-phase deadline.
Because the ES9’s type approval was secured before December 31, 2027, it can continue to use hidden handles through the end of 2028, after which the second and third-phase rules apply.
The Industry Backdrop
The new standard follows a sequence of high-profile fatal incidents that put hidden door handle safety at the centre of China‘s public debate over electric vehicle design.
In March and October 2025, two Xiaomi SU7 electric sedans were involved in fatal crashes in which occupants were unable to open the doors, Bloomberg reported.
The incidents accelerated what had been a slower policy debate dating back to July 2024, when MIIT began examining door handle standards following at least two earlier fatal crashes where passengers were trapped.
Beyond the ES9 and Nio‘s ES8, the standard will affect Tesla‘s Model 3 and Model Y, BMW‘s upcoming iX3, Li Auto‘s i8, XPeng‘s P7 and Xiaomi‘s YU7.
BMW has already altered its approach ahead of the deadline.
The China-specification iX3 Long Wheelbase — developed specifically for the Chinese market and scheduled to go on sale in the second half of 2026 — switched from the global model’s flush retractable handles to a more conventional handle treatment.
Nio’s Safety Architecture
In the statement, Nio said the ES9 is equipped with redundancy layers beyond what either the current or the 2027 standard requires.
After a collision, the vehicle automatically unlocks and extends the exterior door handles, the statement said.
If the handle fails to extend, a mechanical structure at the handle’s front or rear edge allows it to be opened manually from the outside.
Inside the cabin, each door has an emergency mechanical pull handle beneath the floor carpet marked with a fluorescent indicator for visibility in darkness or smoke.
The ES9 uses a dual low-voltage battery redundancy system to prevent a single-circuit failure from disabling handle operation.
For cold climates, the ES9’s handles incorporate an ice-breaking function that can be triggered through the Nio mobile app or through the NOMI voice assistant from outside the vehicle, allowing the handle to force open through a layer of ice.
Li Bin’s Earlier Defence
Nio founder and CEO William Li addressed the door handle question at the ES9 launch event on April 9, a week before the company’s formal statement.
“Not all hidden door handles are unsafe,” Li recently said.
Li said hidden handles “are not all the same” and rejected a uniform characterisation of the design.
“Since the first-generation ES8 by Nio, its concealed door handle has been equipped with both mechanical and electronic systems,” Li said.
“In this iteration, the dual power supply and dual communication redundancy in the Nio ES9 make it even safer.”
Li also signalled that Nio would need to adapt future product design to the 2027 rules even for models “not yet in the later stages of their product lifecycle.”
An “Unmet Market Need”
At a separate media session the morning after the pre-launch event in Hangzhou, Nio management said the ES9 had tapped demand the company argued no other product was serving.
Orders from buyers outside the existing Nio community were running at more than 1.5 times the pace of the third-generation ES8 launch a year earlier, Li told reporters, without disclosing absolute figures.
Li explicitly named BMW‘s X7 and Mercedes-Benz’s GLS as the competitors the ES9 is designed to displace, rather than the broader “all-scenario” SUV market served by the ES8.
Bank of China International said last week that it expects the ES9 to stabilise at monthly deliveries of 3,000 to 4,000 units, pushing combined ES8 and ES9 sales above 10,000 units per month.
Li said the ES9 would generate the highest gross profit amount of any Nio SUV — a significant claim given that the ES8 was the single largest contributor to the margin improvement behind Nio‘s first-ever GAAP net profit of 282.7 million yuan in the fourth quarter of 2025.
What Comes Next
The April 18 statement closed with an explicit commitment on future models.
“For the design of subsequent vehicles, Nio will rigorously study the requirements of the new regulations and ensure that all models comply with the new rules,” the company said.
That positions Nio alongside BMW among the automakers publicly pre-committing to redesign ahead of the 2027 deadline.
