Recently, NIO held a 100kWh-battery sharing meeting. Although the topic was the battery sharing meeting, many heavy news was revealed at the meeting. According to Qin Lihong, co-founder and president of NIO, there will be several important announcements at the NIO Day event to be held on January 9, 2021:
- It will release its first sedan.
2. Released batteries with a capacity of up to 150kWh.
3. Release the NT2.0 autonomous driving platform and the second-gen power swapping station.
01
First, let’s interpret the upcoming sedan. In fact, the true identity of NIO’s first sedan is not a secret. As early as last year at the Shanghai Auto Show, the NIO brand had released the sedan ET Concept. At that time, the unique and beautiful styling attracted a large number of consumers’ attention. The new sedan going to be released soon, nearly 2 years later, is a brand-new model based on the ET Concept.
The only suspense now is how similar the new car is to the concept car.
It is reported that the new car may be named NIO ET7, positioned in a mid-size coupe, and the car will also be equipped with a series of new technologies, including the new lidar. In the smart-car part, the new car will also be equipped with the NT2.0 autonomous driving platform, which is believed to bring a better smart experience.
After the listing of NIO ET7, it will form a direct competitive relationship with Tesla Model 3, Xpeng P7, Polestar 2, and BYD HAN. According to NIO’s current positioning and price system, in order to maintain the luxury attributes of the product, ET7’s price strategy will most likely choose to stay at the high end of the competing product series, which is equivalent to the price of Polestar 2 (priced at 418,000yuan) and obviously higher than the Tesla Model 3 and Xpeng P7.
In order to widen the gap between NIO’s product and competing products, ET7 is likely to be equipped with the upcoming high-capacity battery-a new battery of 150kwh.
02
What is the concept of a 150kwh battery?
Regarding the key data directly related to battery capacity, which is directly related to battery life, many car companies have adopted a shy response. For example, when Tesla released the Model 3, it did not use kWh to indicate its battery pack capacity, but just gives a charging speed: In the case of 240V, 30A, it can travel 30 miles (about 48.28 kilometers) by charging one hour. This leaves us with a more mysterious question: How large is the battery capacity of Model 3?
Later, still powerful netizens slowly lifted the veil of Tesla: Tesla Model 3 long battery life version battery is about 80 kWh, standard version is about 50 kWh, and medium battery life version is about 66 kWh.
The 150kwh battery that NIO will launch on January 9th will contain 150 kWh of electricity when fully charged, which is exactly three times the power of the Tesla Model 3 standard version. In fact, the 70-kWh battery is now the high standard for pure electric vehicles. The Xpeng P7, which has achieved an excellent range of 706 kilometers before, is equipped with only 81 kWh of electricity.
The Tesla Model 3 standard version given by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has a cruising range of 468 kilometers. If the NIO ET7 carries a 150kwh battery pack, it will not be a problem to double the battery life of the Tesla Model 3 standard version, except for the additional weight of the battery, that is, the cruising range can be as high as 900 kilometers.
03
At the same time, Qin Lihong also revealed that next year’s NIO Day will also release NT2.0 autopilot platform, models equipped with lidar and second-gen power swapping station.
As for NIO’s second-gen swapping power station, the news currently revealed is that its construction cost and power swapping capacity have been greatly improved on the existing basis, or even doubled. With the launch of the second-generation power swapping station, NIO will speed up the layout of power swapping stations to alleviate the current shortage of battery swapping resources.
Regarding the next-gen autopilot technology platform NT2.0 autopilot platform, one of the big highlights is the use of on-board lidar for autopilot tracking.
Compared with the current mainstream millimeter-wave radar, Lidar has obvious advantages: it greatly improves the detection ability and is not easily affected by the weather. Previously, people thought that because of the high cost of lidar, it was not practical to equip cars, but as a group of technology giants such as Huawei began to focus on the field of smart cars, this phenomenon began to change.
Related: Huawei release car-level lidar jointly with ARCFOX
Prior to this, people have noticed that the NIO ES8 equipped with lidar is in the road test, which means that NIO has taken the lead in the field of autopilot in the field of lidar equipment.
NIO’s “luck” has been good in 2020. Since April this year, NIO’s delivery volume has been rising. In October and November, the average monthly delivery volume exceeded the value of 5,000 vehicles. Through several important announcements at the coming NIO Day event, we see that NIO is more powerful in technology and strength. We believe that NIO’s “good luck” will continue in 2021.
