Nio will deliver the 160,000th unit of its all-new ES8 this week, Yang Bo, the company’s Assistant Vice President of User Operations, said on Monday, putting the large SUV on course for another 10,000 deliveries in about a month.
“This week, we will see the 160,000th delivery of the all-new ES8,” Yang wrote on Weibo. “Thank you all for your support! Let’s charge up together!”
The post landed on the same day that photos circulated of Clarence “Sonny” Weems, the former NBA forward who won three Chinese Basketball Association titles with Guangdong, standing beside a black ES8 wrapped in a blue bow at a Nio delivery center.
A Second Year on Sale
The third-generation ES8, launched on September 20, 2025 on Nio’s NT 3.0 platform, sells in six- and seven-seat versions from 406,800 to 446,800 yuan ($60,800 to $66,800), or from 298,800 yuan ($44,700) under Nio’s battery-as-a-service program.
A five-seat version added in July starts at 382,800 yuan ($57,200), or 274,800 yuan ($41,100) with the battery rented, and its deliveries began on July 10.
The 160,000th delivery would come 13 months after launch, against 41 days for the model’s first 10,000.
10,000 per Month
Nio’s third-generation ES8 reached its 150,000th delivery on September 20, the first anniversary of its launch, with Co-founder and President Qin Lihong handing the car to an owner in Beijing.
A 160,000th delivery this week would extend a run in which each 10,000-unit batch has taken roughly 30 days since May, when the ES8 passed 110,000, after 140,000 on August 21 during the Chengdu auto show.
The executive did not name a day or a city for the milestone.
The cadence matches the monthly figures, with the ES8 delivering 10,542 vehicles in September by Nio’s own count, above 10,000 for a third consecutive month after 10,288 in July and 10,999 in August.
China Passenger Car Association data put the September figure at 10,546.
ES8 deliveries totaled 31,829 in the third quarter, down 4.9% from the second, as the pace settled at around 10,000 a month after the launch surge.
The model took 41 days to reach its first 10,000 deliveries, on October 31, 2025, then passed 50,000 on January 18 and 100,000 on April 23, 215 days after launch, before moving to the steadier rhythm of the past five months.
Its larger sibling, the ES9, recorded 7,706 units in September on CPCA data, so the two large SUVs together supplied most of the Nio brand’s volume in the month.
The model accounted for 49.5% of the Nio brand’s 21,318 deliveries in September and 28.2% of the 37,408 vehicles delivered across Nio Inc.’s three brands, and its 110,485 deliveries in the first nine months of 2026 made it the group’s best-selling vehicle.
June, at 8,969, is the only month since November 2025 in which the ES8 fell below 10,000, and its best month remains December 2025, when it delivered 22,258.
A Year of Monthly Figures
The monthly series shows two distinct phases in 2026, with deliveries sliding from 17,658 in January to 8,969 in June, a drop of 49%, before settling into a narrow band of 10,288 to 10,999 from July to September, an average of about 10,600 a month.
February’s 11,271 reflected the Lunar New Year holiday, and March’s 16,255 was the year’s second-best month, but April, May and June each came in lower than the month before.
The rebound in July coincided with the arrival of the five-seat ES8, launched on July 9 with deliveries from July 10.
Nio has not said how many of the July to September deliveries were five-seat versions, and CPCA data do not separate them from the six- and seven-seat models, so the contribution of the new variant cannot be measured.
Year-on-year comparisons are of little use for most of 2026, because the 2025 base for January to August consists of the outgoing second-generation ES8, which sold between 87 and 1,090 units a month, producing growth rates of up to 12,543% in August.
September is the first like-for-like month, though the 2,812 units recorded in September 2025 combine the last second-generation cars with ten days of third-generation deliveries, and against that base September 2026 was up 275%.
Nio’s monthly figures since the launch add up to about 153,000 by the end of September, including that mixed September 2025 total, which implies about 7,000 more deliveries in the first weeks of October to reach 160,000 this week.
Who Weems Is
Weems, 40, was drafted 39th overall by the Chicago Bulls in 2008 and played in the NBA for the Denver Nuggets, Toronto Raptors, Phoenix Suns and Philadelphia 76ers, with spells in Europe in between.
He moved to China in 2017, joining the Zhejiang Golden Bulls before winning CBA championships with the Guangdong Southern Tigers in 2019, 2020 and 2021 and the Finals Most Valuable Player award in 2020.
He later played for the Shanxi Loongs, returned to Guangdong for 2023-24 and finished the 2024-25 season with the Shenzhen Leopards, and Chinese sports media reported in October 2025 that he was unlikely to find another CBA contract at 40.
Celebrity and athlete handovers are a standard part of Nio’s community marketing in China.
