A year ago, Chinese EV maker Nio announced it had successfully completed the tape-out of its NX9031 smart driving chip and introduced the country’s first smart driving foundation model, the Nio World Model (NWM).
A Nio customer claimed on Monday that he drove 254 kilometres (158 miles) with no manual intervention using the Chinese electric vehicle (EV) maker’s newly released software.
According to a screenshot shared in an owner chat group, the driver covered 254 km with Nio Pilot engaged for 99.4% of the distance and 94.8% of the total time, which lasted 3 hours and 1 minute.
The companion feature, Full Scenario Navigation Assist, recorded 253 km of usage, also representing 99% of the distance and 94.8% of the time, according to the app data.
“No intervention at all — it handled ETC lanes, residential gates, everything by itself,” the owner wrote in a chat message.
He added: “They didn’t let me sleep. I dozed off twice and got woken up both times. Otherwise, I could’ve slept all the way back.”
Another comment read: “As soon as I close my eyes for three seconds, the system starts beeping.” Below is the screenshot shared by the driver on Chinese social media.
Nio began rolling out the first version of its NWM software on May 30 to more than 400,000 vehicles built on its Banyan platform, with updates for its Cedar platform vehicles due by late June.
Vehicles based on the newer Cedar system, which serves the ET9 but also the recently refreshed EC6, ES6, ET5 and ET5 Touring, will receive the update by the end of June, Nio said.
“Prioritizing safety, the first version of NWM delivers comprehensive upgrades in both technology and user experience across four major scenarios: active safety, highway pilot, urban pilot, and intelligent parking,” Nio said in a statement in late May.
The company had shared an internal test video in mid-May showing a car completing a 39.3 km point-to-point route with zero interventions, navigating 23 traffic lights and highway toll gates.
Nio’s vice president of smart driving, Ren Shaoqing, unveiled the NWM last July, describing it as the world’s first smart driving world model capable of deriving 216 possible scenarios in 100 milliseconds to make optimal decisions.
The latest Cedar platform features Nio’s in-house designed “Shenji NX9031” chip, which the company claims matches the top industry flagships in AI capability and leads in memory bandwidth.
NWM is a multimodal autoregressive model that integrates visual, linguistic, spatial, and temporal data to enable real-time reasoning and decision-making, according to the carmaker.
The first version introduces a “mapless” autonomous navigation function for complex environments such as underground parking lots.
Unlike conventional systems that rely on preloaded maps or fixed interface commands, NWM allows drivers to use natural language to instruct the vehicle—such as “take me to the exit” or “go to Building 18.”
The system interprets signage and surroundings using onboard cameras and sensors to generate an appropriate driving path.
The company described NWM as a foundational step in enabling point-to-point autonomous navigation without pre-defined routes.
“Parking Lot Autonomous Navigation” is the first application of the model, combining spatial perception, environmental understanding, and multi-turn reasoning within a map-free setting.
