Pre-order deposits for the Onvo L80 SUV have outpaced the L90’s debut period, executives revealed on Wednesday during a media roundtable.
Speaking less than 24 hours after the five-seat SUV was unveiled at the Beijing Auto Show — with a pre-sale price starting from 245,800 yuan ($35,900) — Nio‘s founder and CEO William Li and Onvo brand chief Shen Fei both described the overnight order intake as better than expected.
Onvo‘s brand chief Fei Shen acknowledged that the L80’s deposit volume in the first hours was running slightly ahead of the L90’s during the same period.
“Compared with the ’90’ model during the same period, our order volume might be slightly better,” Shen stated. “But I think this is likely because the initial deposit has been lowered.”
Li added that the company’s product competitiveness was actually the main reason for the higher orders.
“If we say that the orders are better than the ’90’ during the same period and attribute that entirely to the lower deposit, that explanation isn’t quite accurate,” the company’s CEO noted. “It’s also due to our product competitiveness.”
Launch Timelines
The founder added context about the L80’s compressed marketing timeline.
When Onvo launched the L90 last year, the model had a warm-up period stretching from the Shanghai Auto Show in late April to its product and technology launch on July 10 — more than two months.
The L80, by contrast, has a far shorter pre-launch window.
“As a result, yesterday’s pre-order deposit performance exceeded both our team’s expectations and our internal forecasts,” Li said. “At the same time, because the warm-up period was short, we remain very confident about continued growth in deposits going forward.”
The company’s chief added that deposits continued flowing in even after the event ended.
“Looking at the data this morning, even overnight there were still many additional deposits coming in,” he noted.
Starting May 1, the company plans to increase its promotional efforts.
The L80 is the third model in Onvo‘s lineup and was priced to undercut Tesla’s Model Y in China by 17,700 yuan.
The final price is expected to be slightly lower than the pre-sale figure, in line with previous Nio launches.
Official launch and first deliveries are set for May 15 — the brand’s second anniversary and World Family Day.
Low Awareness
Despite the early order momentum, Li returned to a theme he has raised repeatedly in recent weeks: Onvo‘s lack of brand recognition.
“From our analysis this morning, we also identified an issue: many users are still outside our previous core audience, and the proportion of such new users is relatively low,” Li said. “This shows that Onvo‘s biggest problem right now is low awareness — many people simply don’t know about Onvo.”
He framed the problem as both a constraint and an opportunity.
“In fact, once people become aware of Onvo, our conversion rate is very high,” he said. “From awareness to final purchase, our conversion rate ranks among the top in the industry.”
According to Li, internal research confirmed this pattern across multiple comparison methodologies.
“We’ve conducted extensive research, and across different comparisons and value perspectives,” the CEO explained, and “Onvo‘s overall conversion rate from awareness to purchase is extremely strong — one of the best in the industry.”
Last week, Li compared the brand’s current visibility to Nio‘s own recognition levels in late 2019 to early 2020 — a period when the parent company nearly ran out of cash before being rescued by a roughly $1 billion investment led by the Hefei municipal government.
“This is both a positive and a challenge,” Li said. “So we really need to rely on everyone here to help promote and spread the word.
Expectations for the L80
The early deposit figures come as Nio‘s management has placed significant expectations on the L80 as a growth driver for the second quarter.
At an internal meeting earlier this month, Li called the L80 “a revolutionary product” for the 200,000-yuan-plus large five-seat SUV market and predicted it would boost L90 and L60 sales, “just as L90 previously boosted L60.”
The model is a five-seat version of the Onvo L90 three-row SUV, sharing most of its components with the six-seat model.
Executives have described the L80 as targeting “unmet needs” in the five-seat SUV segment, arguing that existing large five-seat SUVs have failed to deliver on their promise of practicality.
Co-founder and President Qin Lihong dismissed concerns last week that the L80 would cannibalize sales of an upcoming five-seat ES8 variant, pointing to the more than 100,000-yuan price gap between the two models.
Brand chief Shen Fei told reporters at the same briefing that production capacity would not be a bottleneck: “L80 production is no problem, place your orders freely.”
Onvo has surpassed 140,000 cumulative deliveries across the L60 and L90 since it began sales in September 2024.
The brand started 2026 with its two worst delivery months since launch, before a rebound in March helped Nio Group deliver 83,465 vehicles in the first quarter — up 98.3% year over year.
