Nio delivered the 120,000th unit of its best-selling model in China on Monday, another milestone for the third-generation ES8 as the SUV’s once-explosive delivery pace settles into a steady monthly rhythm.
The handover came roughly a month after the Nio ES8 reached 110,000 units in Nanjing on May 23, and about two months after the model set a record as the fastest large premium vehicle to reach 100,000 deliveries.
That record run took the third-generation ES8 to 100,000 deliveries in 215 days, which the company said was the quickest for any model priced above 400,000 yuan in China’s passenger-car market.
A Conquest Sale
Since the third-generation ES8 launch in September 2025, Nio has emphasised that the model is pulling buyers out of established premium combustion brands rather than only competing within the electric segment.
Founder and Chief Executive William Li made the same argument on the company’s first-quarter earnings call in May, positioning the ES8 as an all-around SUV for business and family use and the flagship ES9 as a rival to cars such as the BMW X7 and Mercedes GLS.
Official figures lend weight to that claim, with the ES8 ranking as China’s best-selling large SUV across all energy types and price brackets for three consecutive months earlier this year.
The ES8 delivered 45,185 units in the first quarter, accounting for 54.14% of Nio‘s total deliveries in the period.
The Cadence Tells a Subtler Story
The monthly figures behind those milestones show a model that surged after its September 2025 relaunch, peaked at year-end and has since settled into a steady five-figure rhythm.
Nio put the third-generation ES8 on sale in September 2025, lifting monthly deliveries from a few hundred units to 2,803 that month and 6,703 in October, and taking the model to its first 10,000 deliveries in just 41 days.
Volume then climbed steeply to 10,689 in November and a peak of 22,258 in December, as year-end demand and an initial order backlog cleared at once.
That December surge produced the fastest stretch of the entire run, with the 40,000th unit arriving on December 29, just 11 days after the 30,000th.
A bumpier patch followed early in 2026, when the Chinese New Year holiday and an audio signal-processing chip shortage stretched the gap to the 70,000th unit to 27 days by February 27.
Output recovered through the spring, with the 80,000th unit landing on March 20 and the 90,000th on April 3, and deliveries never left five figures, running 17,645 in January, 11,260 in February, 16,255 in March, 13,020 in April and 11,475 in May.
That choppy but durable pace of well over 10,000 units a month now shows in the milestones themselves, with the 100,000th, 110,000th and 120,000th units each falling almost exactly 30 days apart.
The pattern reads less like a fade than a stabilisation, and the order book points the same way.
Li said in May that ES8 order intake had reached its highest level since the October launch during the first 20 days of the month, and that the delivery wait time had begun lengthening again after compressing for months, a sign that demand was once more running ahead of the production line.
When the model passed 110,000 in Nanjing, Li used a Weibo post to underline how dominant the ES8 had become in its home region.
In the Yangtze River Delta large-SUV market, he wrote, the ES8’s penetration rate was “approaching 50%” — meaning that for every two large SUVs sold there, one was an ES8.
A Widening Flagship Line
The 120,000-unit mark arrives as Nio builds out the rest of its premium range above and around the ES8.
Nio began deliveries of the larger ES9 on May 28, a day after launching the executive SUV at a starting price of 498,000 yuan, or 390,000 yuan under its battery-as-a-service rental scheme.
That car pairs a 900-volt architecture with Nio‘s battery-swap network, allowing a full pack to be exchanged in minutes rather than charged.
Billed as the largest battery-electric SUV yet built in China, the ES9 sits above the ES8 and is aimed squarely at business users, with Nio framing the back-to-back launches as the foundation for a second-half recovery.
Registration data showed 3,108 ES9 units in the model’s first four days on sale, and management has guided for second-quarter group deliveries of 110,000 to 115,000 vehicles, which would mark year-over-year growth of more than 50%.
Nio is now extending the ES8 itself.
Executive Ma Lin invited buyers this week to preview a new large five-seat version of the ES8, writing on Weibo that “the golden age of premium all-electric large five-seat SUVs is about to arrive” and predicting the variant would push the segment further towards battery power.
The five-seat configuration will open pre-orders in China on Sunday, June 28.
The Numbers Behind the Milestone
The ES8’s strength has been the clearest bright spot in an otherwise uneven year for Nio.
Group deliveries reached 83,465 in the first quarter, up 98.3% year over year but down 33.1% from the fourth quarter, as seasonal weakness and reduced Chinese subsidies weighed on the wider market.
A softer April, when Nio delivered 29,356 vehicles and its core brand slipped year over year for the first time during the ES8 ramp, gave way to a stronger May of 37,705 — the company’s best month of 2026.
Vehicle margin, meanwhile, improved to 18.8% in the first quarter, a fourth consecutive sequential gain that Nio has tied in part to the richer mix the ES8 brings.
