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).
Nio said on Thursday it will begin rolling out the NWM on May 30, marking the first large-scale deployment of its proprietary foundation model architecture for intelligent driving.
The update, announced on the official WeChat account of the premium EV maker, will be delivered in batches to all vehicles built on the Banyan platform — vehicles from the second-generation platform manufactured over the last 3 years.
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.
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.
In mid-May, Nio’s Head of Smart Driving Product and Experience, Harry Wong, shared footage of a nearly 40-kilometre drive in China completed without any driver intervention.
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.
Nio and Zeekr announced on Thursday that their charging networks will now work together, letting users of both brands charge at each other’s stations across China.
