EV maker Nio expects to hand over the 150,000th third-generation ES8 this week, an executive said on Monday, putting the model on course for a fifth consecutive month in which it has taken almost exactly 30 days to deliver each batch of 10,000.
“This week we will deliver our 150,000th brand-new ES8,” Yang Bo, Assistant Vice President of User Operations at the Chinese premium brand, wrote on Weibo. “Thank you for your support, we will keep working.”
He gave no day.
The 140,000th was delivered on August 21 in Chengdu, so a delivery on Sunday would make the interval exactly 30 days again. Anything earlier in the week would be the first acceleration in the series since April.
The Same Pace
The third-generation ES8 went on sale on September 20 last year and reached 140,000 deliveries in 334 days.
The first months were far faster than the present run rate.
The model took 40 days to reach 10,000 and then 29 days for the next batch, before a year-end push cut the gap to 19 days and then 11, carrying it from 30,000 to 40,000 units between December 18 and December 29.
It reached 60,000 on January 31.
The pace then loosened through the Lunar New Year and a chip shortage, with the next batch taking 27 days and the two after that 21 and 14. The 100,000th unit arrived on April 23.
Every batch since has taken 30 days. May 23, June 22, July 22, August 21. The regularity, rather than the speed, is what the sequence now shows, and it implies a run rate close to 10,000 a month.
That matches the monthly record.
The ES8 sold 10,288 units in July and 10,999 in August, a rise of 6.9%, after 8,969 in June, according to China Passenger Car Association figures.
Sales have run between 8,969 and 17,658 every month this year, averaging 12,493, with the first quarter carrying the weight of the launch backlog.
August was the second consecutive month above 10,000 and a twelvefold rise on the 87 units the outgoing second-generation model managed in August last year, when the third-generation car was a month from launch.
Cumulative sales reached 99,943 units in the first eight months of this year and about 142,400 since deliveries began, on the same data.
Nio’s own milestone count put the total at 140,000 on August 21, which is the closer figure to use, since the association measures retail sales rather than handovers.
Three Body Styles
The figures count every version of the car as one model, and the mix changed in the middle of the run.
Until July the ES8 was sold only as a six or seven-seater.
The five-seat version opened pre-orders on June 28 and began deliveries on July 10 at 382,800 yuan ($57,000), or 274,800 yuan ($41,000) with the battery rented, against 406,800 yuan ($60,600) for the six-seat Executive Luxury Edition. It is the cheapest way into the model.
The cadence did not change when it arrived. The 30-day interval held for the two batches before the five-seat went on sale and for the two after it. A new and cheaper variant was added to the line without the pace moving.
That leaves two readings, and Nio does not publish the split by seating layout, so neither can be settled from outside. Either production is running at a ceiling of about 10,000 ES8s a month and the five-seat is taking a share of a fixed output, or three-row demand is falling and the new variant is filling the gap.
On the second reading the three-row car is selling below its June level of 8,969 units, and the steady headline number is masking a decline.
Where the Model Sits
Yang posted August retail figures on September 9. He said the ES9 led the segment for cars above 500,000 yuan ($74,500) for a third consecutive month and that the ES8 again ranked first in both the large SUV segment and the segment above 400,000 yuan ($59,600).
The ES8 sold 10,284 units at retail in July, according to China Passenger Car Association data Nio has cited, a 14.7% recovery from June’s 8,966 after the newly launched ES9 drew premium buyers toward the top of the range.
July was also the first full month in which the ES8 was sold in five, six and seven-seat forms, the five-seat version having gone on sale on July 10.
Nio sets no public target for the ES8 alone. It previously guided for group-level growth of 40% to 50% from last year’s 326,028 deliveries.
