A former member of Nio’s US team has said the Chinese EV maker will not sell cars directly in the United States, but its technology will appear there through a licensing arrangement tied to McLaren Automotive.
As exclusively reported by EV last June, the premium brand halted its expansion operations to the US market, laying off the Go-To-Market (GTM) team and the Chief Business Officer, Saurabh Bhatnagar.
“There’s no way Nio is able to launch in the US,” the former employee wrote on Reddit. “It’s effectively illegal for them to sell a Nio vehicle in the US due to [the] connected car rule and no path to any of the alternatives.”
The comments come months after the US Commerce Department issued a final rule in January banning imports of “connected” Chinese and Russian cars, as well as key hardware and software components that could be used to spy on Americans or take control of vehicles.
The regulation marked the first US policy directly targeting cyber-security threats from foreign-made connected cars.
In a separate Reddit post, the former Nio employee noted that even aside from U.S. cybersecurity restrictions, the cost and technical hurdles would make direct entry difficult.
“US FMVSS is meaningfully different from EU/CN homologation standards,” the person wrote, referring to the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, which define vehicle design and performance requirements under the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
As exclusively reported by EV last June, Nio suspended its plans to expand into the US market, an ambition it first announced in 2021 as part of a goal to offer services in over 25 countries and regions by 2025.
Nio has been operating an innovation center in San Jose since 2016, which was later expanded to a larger 18,500-square-meter campus in early 2022.
In December, Chinese outlet LatePost reported that Nio had eliminated San Jose-based roles in its smart driving and engineering units as well.
Sources close to the matter told EV that Nio’s decision to halt its US push has accelerated amid worsening trade tensions and new tariffs announced by US President Donald Trump earlier this year.
As part of the retrenchment, Nio has laid off its Chief Business Officer, Saurabh Bhatnagar.
“It is extremely expensive to build a new version of your car for another market. If you are losing money in China, it’s hard to get the money to go do that, even if all the other stars align,” the user added.
CYVN — a government-backed investment and the main Nio backer — announced in April the creation of McLaren Group Holdings Ltd., combining McLaren Automotive, its non-controlling stake in McLaren Racing, British EV startup Forseven, and a new McLaren Licensing business.
“Nick Collins did a great job with backdoor merging McLaren into a master NIO tech licensing agreement, so you’ll likely see some pieces of NIO on US roads,” the former employee added, referring to McLaren Automotive’s chief executive officer.
McLaren Automotive will incorporate electric-vehicle technology from Nio as part of a restructuring led by Abu Dhabi’s CYVN Holdings, which has taken control of the British supercar maker and consolidated its mobility portfolio into a newly formed group.
In October last year, the Abu Dhabi-based investment fund reached a non-binding agreement to fully acquire McLaren’s automotive business from Bahrain’s sovereign wealth fund Mumtalakat
“McLaren Automotive will benefit from CYVN’s strategic investment in NIO, to deliver access to visionary technologies and electrification, in addition to three years of stealth-mode development from the team at Forseven,” the newly formed group said in a statement at the time.
Abu Dhabi’s sovereign fund is Nio’s largest shareholder, holding a 21.7% stake acquired through two transactions totaling $2.94 billion in 2023.
Nick Collins, CEO of Forseven and a former Jaguar Land Rover executive, now leads McLaren Group Holdings as chief executive.
In February, Nio Technology (Anhui) Co., a wholly owned unit of Nio, signed a technology licensing deal with Forseven Ltd., granting a global, non-exclusive license to use Nio’s EV platforms, software, and intellectual property for research, manufacturing, and sales of Forseven-branded vehicles.
According to a Hong Kong stock-exchange filing, the agreement also covers after-sales service and includes both current and future Nio-developed technologies.
Collins said in a new interview released last month that the company is not in a hurry to launch a fully electric model.
“Frankly the world’s changing at very different paces with different regulatory environments,” Collins told TheDrive in September.
“China’s moving rapidly towards EVs, and the U.S. isn’t. Europe and U.K. are currently in different spaces. And let’s see if those spaces they’re currently in hold the test of time as well. Unmistakably, internal combustion is going to play the majority role of this brand for a really long period of time,” he stated.
“Could I envision an EV at some point? Yes. Are we in a hurry to do one? No,” Collins concluded.
