Nio plans to open its employee shuttle buses to other companies at the Shanghai business park that houses its headquarters, charging outside riders 12 yuan ($1.80) a trip or 430 yuan ($64) a month, according to an announcement by the park operator reported in China this week.
The Auto Innovation Park in Anting, Jiading district, said on September 7 that Nio would offer shared shuttle service to other tenants on routes covering more than a dozen Shanghai districts including Jiading, Songjiang, Minhang, Xuhui and Pudong.
The EV maker will be reserving seats for outside passengers on the basis of historical ridership, according to an article republished by 36Kr on Monday.
The park’s notice has not been published beyond the account’s report.
Last year, Nio imposed the CBU mechanism on every department. Back then, founder and CEO William Li’s told staff, “any sum of money, any position, any project, any fixed-asset investment must have someone paying you for it. Either earn it from outside or earn it from inside.”
The Park and the Buses
The Auto Innovation Park, opened in 2015 in Shanghai International Auto City, covers 120,000 square metres and describes itself as China’s first business park built for the car industry.
About 12,000 people work there for dozens of companies including IM Motors, Horizon Robotics and Momenta, of whom about 5,000 are Nio’s, according to the article.
Nio lists a commuter shuttle among its employee benefits, and the routes named run from the northwestern edge of the city into its centre and across to Pudong.
A version of the story circulating in industry channels puts the shuttles’ average occupancy at about 50%, citing a ridership survey the park published in June.
That figure does not appear in the article and could not be confirmed.
The System Behind It
Nio set up what it calls Cell Business Units, or CBUs, in January 2025, giving every major department its own cost-settlement centre and a return-on-investment target, 21st Century Business Herald reported at the time.
Departments must show what each project has cost and will cost, and justify spending before it is made.
36Kr reported in March 2025 that Li had held rounds of internal meetings to land the system, that labour was being costed by hours worked, and that the model was meant to “activate idle time” in roles such as battery-swap attendants.
Under it, 36Kr has reported from employee accounts, the administrative department now charges other departments for workstations, including desks occupied by research equipment, and engineers take outside work, one helping a supplier bid for an overseas carmaker’s contract, another building an app for China Mobile for 700,000 to 800,000 yuan, “but Li thinks that’s money too.”
Q2 Figures
Nio’s research spending fell 34.9% in the first half to 4.03 billion yuan, with the second quarter’s 2.15 billion down 28.7% from a year earlier.
The company reported a third consecutive quarter of adjusted operating profit in the three months to June, 207 million yuan on revenue of 32.14 billion, up 69.1%, and an adjusted net profit of 26.1 million yuan.
On a GAAP basis it still lost 528 million yuan in the quarter and 860 million in the half, against cumulative losses the article puts above 100 billion yuan since the company’s founding. Vehicle margin reached 18.5%.
Cash stood at 56.7 billion yuan at the end of June.
Li told analysts on the second-quarter call that per-vehicle costs had risen about 14,000 yuan since the end of 2025 on memory chips, copper and aluminium, and that management expects a further 2,000 to 3,000 yuan of increases in the second half.
Nio’s US-listed shares were trading at $3.79 as of publication time, near the 13-month low. Since its all-time high in early 2021 at $66.99, the stock price has plummeted 94.3%.
