Nio delivered the 100,000th unit of its third-generation ES8 on Thursday, reaching the six-figure milestone roughly seven months after the first unit of the three-row SUV was delivered on September 21.
Founder and CEO William Li personally delivered the vehicle in Beijing, where the company states, “one out of every two large SUVs sold is an all-new ES8.”
The 100,000th unit was delivered a day before the Beijing Auto Show begins.
“I’m very pleased to share that today in Beijing, I delivered the 100,000th all-new ES8 to Mr. Merlin Jiang Zheyuan, founder of Songyan Dynamics,” Li wrote on Weibo.
“It took only 215 days! Thank you to every user for your trust and support. We’ll keep working hard—let’s keep powering up together!” — Li added.
According to Nio, the new ES8 has set “a new record in China’s passenger vehicle market for premium models priced above 400,000 yuan in both sales and delivery speed.”
The third-generation ES8 was launched at the ‘Nio Day’ event in Hangzhou last September.
The model debuted with a starting price of 406,800 yuan ($57,200) — a significant reduction from the second-generation’s 498,000–578,000 yuan range — which contributed to more than 100,000 firm orders in about 48 hours.
At launch, Nio disclosed that 49.2% of ES8 buyers were switching from German luxury brands and 62.4% from traditional premium combustion vehicles — conquesting directly from BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Audi rather than cannibalising existing EV demand.
Delivery Milestones
Nio reached the first 10,000 deliveries in 41 days from the start of production.
The pace accelerated through the fall, with the 20,000-unit mark coming 29 days later on November 29 and the 30,000th unit following in 19 days on December 18.
The fastest interval came in late December, when Nio needed just 11 days to go from 30,000 to 40,000 units.
Production then needed 20 days for the next 10,000 and 13 days for the one after, before a chip shortage and the longest Chinese New Year holiday on record stretched the 60,000-to-70,000 interval to 27 days.
Nio disclosed late in February that a shortage of audio signal processing chips had forced it to make production adjustments, compounding the holiday disruption.
Since then, production has recovered — with the 80,000th delivery was reached in 21 days on March 20 and the 90,000th in 14 days on April 3.
The Shanghai-based EV maker needed 20 days to go from 90,000 to 100,000 units.
For comparison, Nio took about two and a half years to deliver the first 100,000 units of its previous best-selling models — the earlier-generation ES8, its first production model in 2018, and the more affordable ES6 SUV, for which deliveries began in mid-2019.
Delivery Waiting Time
The Nio ES8’s delivery waiting time has continued to fall as production has caught up with demand.
When the model launched in late September, wait times reached 24–26 weeks — nearly half a year.
By mid-January, that figure had fallen to 13–14 weeks, and by February 11, to 8–9 weeks.
In the two weeks that followed, the window was cut roughly in half again, dropping to 6–7 weeks, then 4–5 weeks in the first week of March.
As of Thursday, new orders placed through the online configurator show an estimated delivery window of 2–3 weeks.
The figures represent the shortest since the model’s launch and are a fraction of the nearly six-month wait buyers faced at the September launch.
ES8 Deliveries
The ES8 has dominated the Nio brand’s — and the group’s — delivery figures since production ramped up in the final two months of 2025.
The SUV became China’s best-selling model in the 400,000 yuan ($58,000) segment by single-month volume when it delivered 22,258 units in December.
In January, the ES8 accounted for 17,646 out of the 20,894 units delivered by the Nio brand — an 84.5% share of the brand’s registrations and 64.9% across the group.
The three-row SUV represented 74.3% of the brand’s deliveries in February, and 54.1% of Nio Group‘s total of 20,797 units.
It accounted for 16,255 of the brand’s 22,490 deliveries — a 72.3% share — with monthly deliveries jumping 44.4% sequentially as production recovered from February’s disruptions.
For the first quarter, the ES8 drove 45,160 of the Nio brand’s 58,543 deliveries, or 77.1% of the total.
The quarterly ES8 figure alone surpassed the total brand deliveries for the entire first quarter of 2025, which stood at 27,313 units.
Nio Delivery Figures
The Nio Group delivered 83,465 vehicles in the first quarter, exceeding its guidance range of 80,000 to 83,000 units.
The Nio brand delivered 58,543 units in the first quarter, reclaiming its position as the group’s best-selling brand after briefly losing that spot to Onvo last Summer.
By then, the sub-brand had just launched the L90 SUV, with the model accounting for more than 30,000 units in its first three months of deliveries.
March deliveries for the group totaled 35,486 vehicles, with the Nio brand accounting for 22,490 of those — a 63.4% share of the group’s monthly total.
The group’s Q1 total represented year-on-year growth of between 90% and 97%.
ES8 Margins
The ES8 was the key vehicle behind Nio‘s financial turnaround.
Co-founder and President Qin Lihong said in January that the new ES8 has a gross margin of 20%, generating roughly 80,000 yuan ($11,600) in gross profit per unit sold.
Based on those figures, Nio generated an estimated 3.17 billion yuan ($455 million) in gross profit from ES8 sales alone in the fourth quarter of 2025.
The model was the single biggest contributor to the company’s first-ever GAAP quarterly profit — a net profit of 122.4 million yuan ($17.5 million) in Q4, compared with a net loss of 7.13 billion yuan a year earlier.
Vehicle margin for the fourth quarter reached 18.1%, up from 14.7% in the third quarter and 13.1% a year before — a five percentage point year-on-year improvement.
With 100,000 units now delivered at a 20% gross margin, the ES8 has generated an estimated 8 billion yuan ($1.16 billion) in gross profit since its September launch.
The ES9, which Nio unveiled on April 9, is expected to build on that margin profile.
President Qin Lihong said last week that the ES9 will generate the highest gross profit amount among all Nio SUVs.
“The ES9 has higher-spec equipment, but it’s priced more than 100,000 yuan ($14,600) above the ES8,” Qin said. “So it will certainly also have a reasonable gross margin.”
Qin noted that the pre-sale pricing accounts for raw material cost fluctuations and is designed to balance value delivered to users with reasonable corporate profit.
ES9 Unveil
The EV maker unveiled the ES9 on April 9 — a full-size six-seat SUV that replaces the ES8 as the brand’s flagship and is now the largest fully electric SUV in China.
Founder and CEO William Li described the ES9 as “the most important product of the year” for the brand.
He said that orders from first-time Nio buyers in the initial period after the pre-launch exceeded the equivalent figure from the ES8 launch by more than 1.5 times.
Li expressed confidence that existing Nio owners would also convert.
“Our existing users — I believe that as long as they have a genuine need, the vast majority will still come to the ES9,” the CEO said.
The ES9 is built on Nio‘s 900-volt architecture and shares the SkyRide intelligent chassis — combining ClearMotion’s fully active suspension, steer-by-wire, and rear-wheel steering — with the ET9 executive sedan.
The model runs on two in-house Shenji NX9031 intelligent driving chips and carries three LiDAR sensors.
Nio opened pre-sales in three trims starting at 528,000 yuan ($77,200), or 420,000 yuan ($61,400) under BaaS.
Customer deliveries are scheduled to begin on June 1, with the official launch event and final pricing due on May 28.
The ES9 is expected to make its first public appearance at the 19th Beijing Auto Show — which runs from April 24 to May 3.
The company will also showcase the updated version of the Onvo L90 — which debuted earlier this week, with LiDAR-equipped trims for the first time — and the five-seat L80 SUV.
