The "Analysis on NIO's Layout in Electrification, Connectivity, Intelligence and Sharing" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

Because of burning money and suffering a huge loss, many people thought NIO would soon go out of business. NIO however recovered from troughs again in late 2023, by virtue of its strong financing capacity, battery swap cooperation with Changan and Geely, and release of ET9 and many innovative technologies. In eight years, NIO closed more than 20 funding rounds and raised over RMB100 billion. Wherein, the biggest support came from Anhui, the hometown of NIO's CEO Li Bin.

Hefei, capital of Anhui, is known as 'The Best Venture Capital City'. In 2020, Hefei invested RMB7 billion to save NIO. In 2021, NIO and the People's Government of Hefei City signed an agreement to deepen cooperation. Both parties agreed to jointly plan and construct the Xinqiao Intelligent Electric Vehicle Industrial Park to build a world-class intelligent electric vehicle industrial cluster with a complete industry chain. At present, the park has successfully attracted hundreds of related companies.

• With capital and support from all parties, NIO has left no stone unturned in investing in new technologies and R&D.
• NIO has made extensive investments in intelligent electric vehicles. For example, XPT LIMITED, NIO's company responsible for electrification, has established NIO Drive Technology Holdings (Anhui) Co., Ltd.
• NIO Drive Technology Holdings (Anhui) Co., Ltd. invested and established Hefei NIO Industrial Investment Center Partnership (Limited Partnership).

Hefei NIO Industrial Investment Center Partnership (Limited Partnership) has invested in automotive electronics industry chain companies such as Hefei MONE IC, Suzhou Enkris Semiconductor, SINPRO, BeBest, and INGIN Automotive Technology.

With tens of billions of yuan invested in R&D each year, NIO has begun to produce a range of industry-leading results. This article highlights nine of them.

Self-develop an operating system, no longer needing AUTOSAR and QNX

According to the information provided by AI-Drive, NIO has replaced AUTOSAR with its in-house developed operating system SkyOS, and QNX with its own microkernel. SkyOS features NIO's self-developed hypervisor, and NT3.0 platform can enable cockpit-driving integration. SkyOS encapsulates subsystems of each in-vehicle operating system such as multimedia, graphics, integrated computing and security into more than 1,000 atomic capabilities, which can combine with each other and can be flexibly utilized by various development departments at the same level within NIO.

Self-develop intelligent driving chip Shenji NX9031

Tesla was the first one to self-develop intelligent driving chips. NIO, Xpeng and Li Auto follow suit. NIO's self-developed autonomous driving chip, called Shenji NX9031, features the following: 5nm process; over 50 billion transistors; LPDDR5X storage; 32-core CPU (large and small cores configuration); HDR ISP, with a width of 26 bits and pixel processing power of 6.5 GPixel/s; ASIL-D functional safety level.

Fully chassis-by-wire and VMC intelligent computing platform

NIO ET9's 'SkyRide Intelligent Chassis System' integrates the three core hardware systems for the first time: steer-by-wire, rear-wheel steering and fully active suspension. Brake-by-wire already has many application cases, but there are very few application cases of steel-by-wire. NIO ET9 uses steel-by-wire, brake-by-wire, and active suspension simultaneously, and SkyRide integrates most hardware, which is the first in the world.

Integrated hydraulic fully active suspension

NIO and ClearMotion jointly developed an active suspension electric drive unit. Unlike the pneumatic suspension of Mercedes-Benz or Porsche, it features higher integration and smaller size. Each damper is highly integrated with an independent electro-hydraulic pump, and the brushless DC motor make quick responses, completing information processing, calculation and response within 1 millisecond. Also the suspension supports a wide height adjustment range (travel) from +40mm (up) to -50mm (down), 1,000 torque adjustments per second, and independent control of the four wheels, meeting driving needs in multiple scenarios.

The world's first 925V continuous wave winding motor with hepta safety redundancy

Motors of NIO ET9 released in December are SiC motors customized for 900V, with the 180kW inductive asynchronous motor in the front and the 340kW permanent magnet synchronous motor in the rear. The front 180kW inductive asynchronous motor, with its weight reduced to 69kg and power density of 2.6kW/kg, boasts the highest power density in the industry.

46105 large cylindrical battery and 150kWh battery pack

To realize global 900V high-voltage architecture, full-stack self-development capabilities from battery cell to battery pack are needed. NIO independently developed 46105 large cylindrical battery cells and battery packs for 900V. The energy density per cell is 292Wh/kg; the capacity of the whole pack is 120kWh; the charging efficiency of the battery pack for ultra-fast charging and battery swapping is 5C. The battery parameters disclosed also include: 1.6mΩ internal resistance per cell; 5C high-voltage ultra-fast charging capability that enables a range of 255km with a 5-minute charge.

NOMI capable of active prediction and association

NIO's voice assistant NOMI has been wakened up more than 1 billion times in total. Recently, NOMI added NOMI Association, NOMI Listen, NOMI See-and-Speak, and NOMI Notes. For example, under the "NOMI association" function, NOMI can make associations according to what the user says, add words to complete the sentence, and display it in the recognition box, providing prompts when the user can't think of what to say.

Self-developed NIO PHONE

NIO is China's first OEM to launch phone products. Development of NIO PHONE is one of NIO's most disapproved innovative directions. Li Bin said that it will take three years to know strategic importance of developing mobile phones, and when mobile phone giants such as Huawei and Xiaomi sell ever more cars, everyone will know the significance of self-developing mobile phones. However the problem is that Li Bin himself does not use NIO Phone; on the other hand, in addition to mobile phones, Huawei and Xiaomi also have a huge range of smart home products and consumer electronics, which are difficult for latecomers like NIO to copy.

NIO's charging and battery swap system

In December 2023, NIO officially released its 4th-generation battery swap station, which is equipped with 4 NVIDIA Orin X SoCs (2 for the previous generation), and 6 ultra-wide-angle LIDARs (2 for the previous generation), with the whole station's computing power up to 1016TOPS. It is compatible with multi-specification battery packs, and supports multi-brand sharing for battery swap.

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