Nio will hold its NIO IN 2026 innovation technology day in Guangzhou on November 25, the Chinese EV maker said on Wednesday, promising new AI-driven smart cockpit and assisted driving products.
The company will also discuss its thinking and practice as an “AI-native organization,” according to Nio’s announcement.
The technology event is separate from Nio Day, the company’s annual flagship gathering, which will be held in Wuhan in December.
Two Events Within 5 Weeks
NIO IN 2026 will take place two days before the Guangzhou auto show opens on November 27, where Nio plans to launch a second special edition of its ES8 flagship SUV, according to Chinese car portal Autohome.
Nio’s previous innovation technology days were held in 2023, in Shanghai on September 21, when it launched the NIO Phone and first set out its full-stack technology plans, and in 2024, when the event was held in Shanghai on July 27.
Nio said then that its 5-nanometer Shenji NX9031 driving chip had completed tape-out and introduced its SkyOS operating system and Banyan 3 intelligent system, along with the Nio World Model for assisted driving and a second-generation Nio Phone.
The first Nio Phone, built on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, went on sale at 6,499 yuan ($1,000) to 7,499 yuan ($1,100) and used ultra-wideband technology to replace the car key. The second generation, on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, kept the same three price points.
Li said in 2022 that Nio would “develop a mobile phone every year, just like Apple,” but the company did not release a new phone in 2025.
In May, a leaked image circulating on Weibo pointed to a possible third-generation device carrying Onvo branding. Nio has not confirmed a new phone, and Wednesday’s announcement did not mention one.
Nio users chose Wuhan to host Nio Day 2026 in a vote that closed on July 18. The city received 178,854,028 votes in the final round, against Harbin and Xiamen.
Last year’s edition was held on September 20 in Hangzhou, the first time the event moved to autumn, and was used to launch the third-generation ES8.
Nio Day Through the Years
Every Nio Day since the first in 2017 has featured at least one new model or major technology.
The first, in Beijing in 2017, launched the ES8. Shanghai followed in 2018 with the ES6, Shenzhen in 2019 with the EC6, and Chengdu in 2020 with the ET7 sedan and a 150 kWh battery, at an event held in January 2021.
The ET5 sedan debuted in Suzhou in 2021. Hefei in 2022 brought the EC7 and the second-generation ES8, and Xi’an in 2023 the ET9 flagship sedan and the NX9031 chip.
In 2024, Nio used the Guangzhou event to launch the ET9 for the market and to introduce its Firefly small-car brand.
Pressure on the Lineup
The events come as Nio’s sales growth has stalled.
Nio Inc. delivered 34,246 vehicles in October, down 15.2% from a year earlier and its first year-over-year decline since February 2024. The Nio brand delivered 18,125, its lowest monthly total since February.
Onvo deliveries fell 51.7% to 8,383, while Firefly set a second straight monthly record at 7,738.
Founder and CEO William Li told analysts in September that the company’s fourth-quarter target was “achieving an average volume of over 40,000 units per month.” To reach that average, the group would need about 85,750 deliveries in November and December combined, a level it has reached in only one month, December 2025.
Li said on the same call that the Nio brand plans to launch new products from its 5 and 6 series next year, a range that includes the ES6 and EC6 SUVs and the ET5 sedan and ET5 Touring wagon. Answering a question from Morgan Stanley analyst Tim Hsiao, he said that “for the Onvo brand next year we are going to introduce a major strategic new product.”
Firefly, he said, will “keep the single-model strategy but keep rolling out special editions and technology upgrades,” which he likened to “the iPhone approach.”
Spy photos of a next-generation ET5 Touring have circulated on Weibo since August. Nio has not confirmed its name, specifications or timing.
The newest Nio-brand model on sale is the ES9 SUV, launched on May 28, which has passed 3,000 deliveries in Shanghai.
In Europe, Nio told owners in May that no model updates would arrive until late 2027, and it registered no new cars in Germany in October.
Pressure
Li acknowledged the pressure in August. “Investors and employees will exert pressure, and we may even impose pressure on ourselves, and risk losing our determination,” he said at a forum in Shanghai, according to Yicai Global.
At the same forum, he said the coming one to two years would determine which carmakers keep up and which are left behind.
Nio’s US-listed shares closed at $3.21 on Friday, their lowest close since April 2025. Tuesday’s close of $3.19 was three cents above the stock’s 52-week low of $3.16. They were up 2.5% at $3.27 in afternoon trading on Wednesday, about 95% below their all-time high of $66.99 set in January 2021.
Li’s AI Pitch
Li set out the company’s AI case on Wednesday after speaking at the Internet Entrepreneur Forum at the 2026 World Internet Conference Wuzhen Summit.
“Today, smart EVs are the most widely deployed embodied intelligent agents in the world,” he wrote on X. “This makes smart EVs the largest industry for AI applications.”
If AI applications in the automotive industry create 15% more value, “that could translate into more than 1.2 trillion US dollars in business value,” Li wrote.
“In the first half of this year, according to data from four major insurance companies, accident-related losses for NIO users were down 38.4%, and the average safe mileage of human-AI co-driving was 8 times that of human-only driving,” he said.
“The greatest purpose of smart driving should never be to put taxi and ride-hailing drivers out of work,” Li added.
Assisted Driving Data
Nio has said its assisted driving system has logged 9.14 billion kilometers (5.68 billion miles) of cumulative mileage across more than 950,000 vehicles, according to figures it disclosed around the World Intelligent Connected Vehicles Conference, which opened on October 21.
The company says the system is built on a “world model” architecture combined with closed-loop reinforcement learning.
On November 3, Nio pushed its Cedar 1.6.0 software to the ET9, ES9 and new ES8, with more than 60 changes.
Nio has not announced the date of its third-quarter earnings report.
