Written by Cláudio Afonso | LinkedIn | X
Shanghai-based electric vehicle maker Nio said Thursday that nationwide deliveries of its luxurious sedan ET9 will start on March 29 while its assisted driving model will begin trials in early April.
The executive sedan comes standard with two Shenji chips and 31 advanced sensors to provide multiple assisted driving functions, including active safety features and battery swap station parking assistance.
Shenji NX9031 is an autonomous driving chip developed in-house and released by the carmaker in 2023. The software and system adaptation based on these chips are in the final validation stage, with an update to the latest Nio World Model expected by the end of June.
The EV maker also said that models equipped with its Banyan Intelligent System will be the first to receive World Model navigation in early April as a trial, with a gradual rollout to follow to all Nio models equipped with the operating system.
At its Nio In technology event last July, the company introduced the Nio World Model (NWM), claiming it is “China’s first world model for assisted and intelligent driving.”
The NWM is a “multivariable autoregressive generative embodied driving model capable of fully understanding data, performing long-term scenario reasoning, and making decisions.”
Nio claims the system can “simulate 216 possible scenarios in 100 milliseconds to find the optimal decision” and use “a three-second driving video as a prompt to generate a video of up to 120 seconds.”
At the same event, Nio unveiled the world’s first 5nm autonomous driving chip, the NX9031, which it said had successfully taped out. The company also revealed SkyOS, its full-domain operating system for smart EVs.
Nio has reportedly made internal adjustments to its smart driving team in a push toward end-to-end autonomous driving technology, according to a report from local media outlet LatePost in December.
ET9 Sales Outlook
The ET9, a four-seater luxury sedan, starts at 660,000 yuan ($91,300) under Nio’s Battery-as-a-Service (BaaS) program, which allows buyers to lease the battery separately.
The company concluded winter testing of the model earlier this year, with principal chief engineer Danilo Teobaldi confirming in January that the sedan had completed the winter tests.
CEO William Li said last year that selling 1,000 units of the ET9 per month would “make us very happy.” Deutsche Bank later projected sales of 1,500 units per month.
The ‘First Edition’ of the ET9, limited to 999 units and priced at 818,000 yuan ($112,300), sold out within 12 hours. On December 26, Nio introduced a new Signature Edition at 808,000 yuan ($110,900).
The EV maker claims that the ET9 adopts “the world’s first integrated hydraulic fully active suspension, which for the first time highly integrates the shock absorber with the active suspension electric drive unit.”
Amid the launch, Nio said in December that the active suspension allows the model to “adapt to an ultra-large range of transient adjustment capabilities for stiffness, damping, and height, representing the current industry state-of-the-art in suspension technologies, creating a comfortable driving experience for users akin to a passenger aircraft cruising in the stratosphere.”
