Nio‘s Head of User Operations Yang Bo said on Monday that the company is set to deliver the 80,000th unit of its best selling model “this week.”
The third-generation ES8 was launched in September last year with a lower than expected price, leading to more than 100,000 firm orders in about 48 hours.
“According to the recent delivery progress, we will welcome the delivery of the 80,000th new ES8 this week,” he wrote on Weibo, without specifying the date. “Thank you all for your support! We will keep working hard 💪.”
The timeline suggests that the Shanghai-based EV maker is on track to have delivered 10,000 ES8s within 17 to 23 days — a shorter interval between milestones that signals production is recovering after disruptions in February.
The signal came directly from founder and CEO William Li during last week’s earnings call.
Li stated that “we still have ES8 order backlogs,” with the company experiencing “pretty good recovery on the order momentum of the ES8 model” since last month’s holiday.
The Chinese New Year slowed both production and deliveries, with China’s Passenger Car Association (CPCA) noting that this year’s holiday was the longest on record.
Additionally, Nio disclosed late in February that a shortage of audio signal processing chips had forced it to make adjustments.
Delivery Milestones
The EV maker delivered the 70,000th ES8 on February 27, about 30 days after the company reached the 60,000-unit milestone.
The gap between milestones has doubled, considering that it took the company about 14 days to go from 50,000 to 60,000 ES8 deliveries.
Nio delivered 11,260 ES8 vehicles in China last month, totaling 71,260 since the first unit was handed over on September 21, 2025.
Based on these calculations, by delivering the 80,000th unit this week, Nio will have reached 8,740 ES8s in 16 to 20 days of the month.
Share within Nio
The 22,258 deliveries in December made the Nio ES8 China’s best-selling SUV in the 400,000 yuan ($58,200) segment by single-month volume.
Since production picked up in the last two months of 2025, the all-new Nio ES8 has represented the majority of the EV maker’s deliveries.
In January, the all-new ES8 accounted for 17,646 out of the 20,894 units delivered by the brand, representing a 84.5% share of the Nio brand’s registrations and 64.9% across the group.
Last month, the three-row SUV represented 74.3% of the brand’s deliveries and 54.1% of the Nio Group‘s total.
Last week, Nio announced that it expects first-quarter deliveries to account for between 80,000 and 83,000 vehicles.
Considering the 47,979 vehicles registered in the first two months of the year, the numbers imply that the EV maker expects March deliveries to be between 32,021 and 35,021 units.
Incentives and 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 (just over 3 months), 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.
Users who order the ES8 on Monday can expect a delivery time of approximately 3–4 weeks, down from the 24–26 weeks estimated by the time of launch.
The shrinking wait time raises questions about whether ES8 demand is stabilizing after the initial launch frenzy, as the company prepares to unveil the ES9 SUV on April 9.
A few hours after Nio reported its February global delivery figures, the company announced several new offers as it aims to increase demand for its models in China.
For ES8 buyers, Nio is offering a 10,000 yuan ($1,500) purchase tax subsidy and 7-year low-interest financing, along with 5 years of free NOP+ (Navigate on Pilot Plus) usage.
Profitability and Margins
Nio confirmed last week that it has achieved its first profitable quarter ever, and now marches towards achieving full-year profitability in 2026.
One of the key factors in the earnings report was the increase in the margin on vehicle sales, which co-founder and President Qin Lihong had already alluded to in late January, when he said the new ES8 has a gross margin of 20%.
According to figures provided by Lihong, Nio generates 80,000 yuan ($11,600) in gross profit per ES8 sold, indicating that the company has generated over 5.7 billion yuan ($826.5 million) in sales of the SUV alone.
Nio disclosed a 14.7% vehicle margin between July and September, which has jumped to 18.1% in the fourth quarter — a five percentage point increase year over year.
William Li also stated during last week’s earnings call that the vehicle gross margin in the first quarter of 2026 will be “maintained at a similar level as in Q4 last year.”
He justified it on “seasonality factors as well as the policy impacts.”
Speaking about the contribution of the ES8 SUV, Li added that it will “still be playing a major part in our total deliveries in Q1, so that part is guaranteed with the product mix largely decided by the high margin products like the ES8.”
