Nio Inc.‘s founder and CEO William Li told staff in mid-April that the Onvo L80 and the Nio ES9 were the company’s two most important launches of the second quarter.
The ES9 delivered on its promise despite being considerably more expensive.
Nio‘s flagship SUV generated more than $600 million in revenue in June alone. The L80, however, has had a much weaker start.
The Shanghai-based EV maker opened pre-orders for the five-seat SUV on April 28 and launched the model on May 15 — coinciding with the sub-brand’s anniversary and World Family Day.
The L80 entered the market at 242,800 yuan ($35,700) — 3,000 yuan below its pre-sale price and maintaining a 17,700-yuan undercut versus Tesla‘s Model Y in China, with which Onvo’s debut L60 directly competes.
Under Nio‘s Battery-as-a-Service programme, the entry price drops to 156,800 yuan ($23,000).
The five-seat SUV shares most of its components with the six-seat L90, a configuration executives have described as targeting unmet needs in the five-seat SUV segment.
Deliveries for the model began on May 16. Onvo delivered 5,949 units of the L80 until the end of the month, an average of 2,380 vehicles per week.
Despite having roughly twice as many selling days as the launch window, however, insurance registration data published on Wednesday shows the five-seat SUV recorded 4,086 units in June.
The figures represent a 31.3% decline month over month.
Additionally, June’s 4,086 units spread across a full four-plus weeks translates to roughly 950 units per week — which suggests that the weekly run rate fell by approximately 61%.
Momentum Fades
When the L80 was unveiled at the Beijing Auto Show on April 28, Onvo brand chief Shen Fei told reporters that deposit volumes in the first hours were running slightly ahead of the L90’s comparable launch window — a period that had itself set strong pre-order benchmarks in summer 2025.
Management attributed the early momentum to product competitiveness rather than the lower deposit threshold alone.
The June figures suggest that initial enthusiasm has not yet translated into sustained retail demand at the pace the company anticipated.
Brand awareness remains a structural constraint for Onvo.
The company’s founder William Li has repeatedly acknowledged the problem, comparing the sub-brand’s recognition levels to those of the main Nio brand in late 2019 — a period when the parent company nearly ran out of cash.
Five-Seat ES8
The insurance registration data published by China’s Passenger Car Association (CPCA) came just 24 hours before the launch of the five-seat variant of the Nio ES8 — which replaces the former ES7 as Nio’s flagship five-seat SUV.
Nio‘s co-founder and president Qin Lihong has previously dismissed concerns that the L80 would cannibalize sales of an upcoming five-seat ES8 variant and vice-versa.
He emphasized the “more than 100,000 yuan” of price difference between the L80 and the upcoming five-seat ES8, suggesting that the two should be complementary rather than competing.
Decline Extends to L90
The L80 was not the only Onvo model to lose ground in June.
The L90 three-row SUV recorded 3,457 units, down 14.7% from 4,052 in May.
The L90 had received a significant product update in late April, when Onvo launched a refreshed version equipped with a LiDAR-equipped variant for the first time — marking a reversal of the sub-brand’s original vision-only sensor strategy.
Customer deliveries of the 2026 L90 began on May 9.
June’s result means the L90 posted its weakest monthly performance since March, when the model recorded 3,356 units before the refreshed version reached the market.
The L90’s trajectory mirrors a pattern seen across Onvo‘s lineup: a post-launch or post-refresh surge driven by backlog clearing, followed by a sharper normalisation in the months that follow.
The original L90 peaked at 11,722 units in October 2025, three months after launch, before declining to 4,105 by December.
L60 Rebounds
In contrast to the L80 and L90, the L60 delivered a strong recovery in June — after recording 4,196 insurance registrations, its best monthly result since December 2025.
The rebound was driven by the launch of the refreshed 2026 L60, which carries a substantially upgraded specification, including a LiDAR-equipped variant and Nio‘s proprietary Shenji NX9031 chip.
By the end of June, Onvo‘s full lineup offered LiDAR-equipped variants across all three models — aligning the brand’s sensor strategy with the main Nio brand’s standard-LiDAR approach.
Across all three models, Onvo recorded 11,739 insurance registrations in June — down 2.4% from 12,024 in May, as the L60’s strong rebound was not sufficient to offset the combined declines of the L80 and L90.
Onvo had surpassed 150,000 cumulative deliveries in May — approximately two years after the brand’s introduction — and contributed 31.9% of Nio Group’s 37,705 global deliveries that month.
William Li has recently stated the sub-brand is expected to eventually account for 55% of total group volume under a long-term 35-55-10 brand mix with the main Nio brand at 35% and Firefly at 10%.
