Onvo has opened public test drives of its third-generation L60 SUV, days before its official launch in China.
Test drives began over the weekend at Onvo stores across China, where display cars have already arrived. The brand will hold the launch on June 11.
The move follows a now-familiar sequence at Nio, which has used early showroom placement and pre-launch test drives to build momentum across its recent model debuts.
The family-oriented brand opened pre-orders for the updated L60 on May 29, the first day of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area International Auto Show in Shenzhen.
Deliveries are set to begin on June 11, the same day as the launch.
A Familiar Nio Playbook
The launch cadence mirrors the one Nio ran for its ES9 flagship weeks earlier.
For the new SUV, Nio shipped display vehicles to stores nationwide on the day of its pre-launch event, opened test drives on May 11, then launched and began deliveries together on May 27.
The same approach extended to the third-generation ES8, for which roughly 300 showrooms received display units before the pre-launch event.
What’s New on the L60
The headline change is hardware. The refreshed L60 adds a rooftop high-precision LiDAR sensor, reversing Onvo‘s earlier plan to keep the model on a camera-only system.
In January, Onvo chief Shen Fei said only the larger L90 would gain LiDAR, with the L60 staying pure-vision. The position shifted in March, when a regulatory filing confirmed a LiDAR-equipped L60 was in development.
The new car also carries the in-house Shenji NX9031 smart-driving chip, which first reached an Onvo model with the revamped L90 launched in April.
Other updates include a larger standard battery, dual high-resolution screens and exterior styling revisions, among them a reworked front fascia and a watchtower-style sensor layout on the roof.
With the L60’s launch, every Onvo model will carry the group’s flagship intelligence stack, pairing the NX9031 chip with the NIO World Model and the SkyOS Tianshu operating system.
A Higher Price
Onvo has signaled the refreshed L60 will sell for nearly 20,000 yuan more than the outgoing model.
The current generation starts at 149,800 yuan with Nio‘s Battery-as-a-Service subscription and 206,900 yuan with the battery included, positioning it as a direct rival to the Tesla Model Y in China.
A near-20,000-yuan increase would lift the battery-included starting price toward 227,000 yuan. The variant pairing LiDAR with the Shenji chip is expected to cost more than 10,000 yuan above the pure-vision version.
To seed early demand, Onvo is offering buyers who place a 1,000-yuan deposit a 3,000-yuan deduction at purchase, provided they lock in their order by July 31.
Reviving a Fading Model
Deliveries of the model fell sharply through early 2026. Onvo handed over 1,981 L60s in January, down 67 percent year-over-year, then 1,664 in February, a 59 percent drop.
The decline narrowed as spring arrived. March deliveries recovered to 3,517 units, down 27%, with April steady at 3,284 units, down 25%.
Across the first four months of 2026, Onvo delivered 10,446 L60s, against 19,181 over the same span in 2025, a fall of about 45%.
The trajectory has improved even so. The year-over-year decline has narrowed every month since January, and volumes have roughly doubled from the February low.
The L60 sold 64,423 units across 2025, peaking at 6,400 in June and 6,281 in May.
As retail demand for the aging model softened, the current L60 leaned on fleet and government channels in recent months, including police and municipal deployments.
The refreshed generation is central to Onvo‘s second-half recovery.
The brand delivered 12,029 vehicles in May, more than double April’s tally, lifted by the new L80 and the refreshed L90.
The figures accounted for nearly a third of Nio Inc.‘s deliveries for the month, as the sub-brand passed 150,000 cumulative units about two years after launch.
Onvo is betting that putting the LiDAR-equipped, higher-priced L60 in buyers’ hands will justify the increase and rebuild interest in its debut model.
Nio founder and CEO Officer William Li has recently said that Onvo is expected to eventually account for 55% of group sales, the largest share of its three brands.
