news

Author: Cui Liwen

Editor: Yang Jing

Editor: He Zengrong

"you say,NIOIs there a future? "

After many years of establishment, the protagonist of today's article has undoubtedly been in the vortex of criticism for a long time, and some misunderstandings seem to have reached a deep-rooted level. Everyone is always willing to label it as a "burning money to build cars", and after going around in circles, it is only labeled as a "user enterprise".

Last September, in order to eliminate the above-mentioned stereotypes and to break the above-mentioned unfair prejudices, this new car manufacturer held its first "Innovation Technology Day".

At that time, Li Bin, standing in the center of the stage, displayed NIO’s trump cards and vision.

For example, after investing sufficient manpower, material and financial resources, intelligent driving, smart cockpit, smart energy, panoramic interconnection, vehicle-wide operating system, vehicle engineering, chips and on-board intelligent hardware, battery systems, electric drive and high-voltage systems, intelligent manufacturing, artificial intelligence, and global digital operations have become the 12 specific sectors that this new car-making company will focus on.

For example, after much anticipation, the first generation of NIO Phone was officially launched on its official APP store at a price range of 6,499 yuan to 7,499 yuan.

However, it is a bit embarrassing that for many onlookers, after all the painstaking operations, Li Bin is more like drawing a "pie in the sky" that cannot be realized for the time being. His persistence in entering the smartphone market has even made him be labeled as "not doing his job properly".

Anyway, the first "Innovation Technology Day" did not completely reverse NIO's reputation in the industry.

Little did we know that more than 300 days later, this past weekend, with the successful holding of the second "NIO IN" with AI as the main theme at the Shanghai World Expo Center, this new car-making force finally received the expected feedback. The fundamental reason behind this is that the 12 sectors mentioned above have gradually borne fruit.

First of all, the most encouraging thing is definitely the successful tape-out of NIO's Shenji NX9031.

As the industry's first high-end intelligent driving chip manufactured using 5nm automotive-grade process, both the chip itself and the underlying software have been independently designed and has more than 50 billion transistors. Whether in terms of comprehensive capabilities or execution efficiency, a self-developed chip can achieve the performance of four current industry flagship chips.

Of course, in addition to the "core", there must also be a "soul".

At the second NIO IN, Li Bin announced the full release of SkyOS, the vehicle-wide operating system that NIO spent four years developing and invested more than 23,000 man-months to build an intelligent vehicle foundation for AI.

As we all know, the automotive industry has entered the AI ​​era, and smart electric vehicles have evolved into AI intelligent entities, which need to have overall perception, thinking and control execution capabilities.

After further careful investigation, we learned that SkyOS, as an AI-oriented vehicle-wide operating system, has seven major characteristics: high bandwidth, low latency, large computing power and heterogeneous hardware, cross-domain integration, flexible and continuous evolution, high reliability, and information security.

SkyOS connects intelligent hardware, computing platforms, communications and energy systems at the bottom layer to achieve unified management and coordination of global applications such as vehicle connectivity, vehicle control, intelligent driving, digital cockpits, and mobile applications, building true global intelligence for the entire vehicle in the AI ​​era.

With the Digi-Core NX9031 and SkyOS, NIO has already built the key technology foundation for smart electric vehicles.

Furthermore, the new Banyan 3 intelligent system, built on the core underlying capabilities of AI, also came to the fore at the second NIO IN. The first version of this system is expected to be pushed to users in late August.

In addition, NIO also released China's first smart driving world model NWM.

It is reported that NWM is a multivariate autoregressive generative embodied driving model that can fully understand data, has long-term time series deduction and decision-making capabilities, can deduce 216 possible scenarios within 100 milliseconds, and find the optimal decision.

On the other hand, NIO’s intelligent driving technology architecture NADArch2.0 was also officially announced.

The algorithm layer is upgraded to an end-to-end architecture that introduces a world model, generating driving decisions directly from raw sensor data and reducing information loss in traditional solutions.

Based on its intelligent driving function, it will be pushed to vehicles in phases in the second half of this year.

At the end of the second NIO IN, as a direct argument that Li Bin was "not doing his job properly", NIO Phone also released a new generation of products under the principle of increasing quantity without increasing price.

Specifically, it comes standard with the third-generation Snapdragon 8 flagship processor, with up to 16GB+1T memory and storage options. It is equipped with a 6.82-inch 2K resolution screen customized by Samsung for NIO, and a 510PPI 120Hz high refresh screen.

What is particularly worth sharing is that in addition to being available on the NIO official APP store, the second-generation NIO Phone will also be sold on external channels such as JD.com and Douyin for the first time.

What is very subtle is that compared with the controversy caused by the release of the first generation, Li Bin doesn't seem to be criticized as badly this time.

After all, with so many "heavyweights" as a foil, the second-generation NIO Phone is more like a "supporting role". Moreover, since making mobile phones has always been Li Bin's obsession, we should respect the choice of this "helmsman".

Having personally participated in the entire event, I would like to talk about my thoughts in the following section.

"The biggest reason why the second NIO IN was able to receive a certain degree of praise is definitely, as mentioned above, due to the fact that the content it offered was heavy enough, and NIO proved its technical foundation with practical actions. But what people often overlook is that the sales volume of this new car manufacturer has been improving in the first half of this year, and it has steadily stood on the stage of delivering 20,000 vehicles per month."

In other words, as the main business of selling cars becomes more reliable, what you say, what you do and how you do it all become reasonable and natural.

In fact, shortly after the press conference, a core media interview was held as usual. Qin Lihong also talked about the recovery of Weilai's sales.

All in all, it is still a victory for adhering to long-termism.

He then brought up an interesting topic, "We recently conducted a survey and found that more than 30% of the existing BBA gasoline car users have already decided on their next car and are ready to embrace new energy. This is a huge topic and opportunity for us. When BBA users turn to new energy, which brand will be their first choice?"

Then, he added: "I think the characteristic of high-end brands is that they don't have a one-trick pony. The hardware must be strong enough, the software must be strong too, the experience must be good, the service must be good, and the style must be good. The style, attitude, and every aspect of the entire company are very comprehensive requirements. I am very confident that NIO will become a relatively important brand in the trend of high-end users switching from oil to electricity."

Li Bin took the microphone and said directly: "BBA's next car is Weilai, here comes the slogan."

Instantly, applause broke out at the scene.

During the two-hour interview, Li Bin, who was in high spirits, completely let go and started a crazy output mode, with many impressive quotes.

From the original intention of SkyOS Tianshu and the challenges it overcame, to why a certain competitor released a weekly sales chart with Weilai, to the fact that Robotaxi's business model is doomed to fail, and that replacing online car-hailing drivers is not exciting at all...

When faced with tricky questions, he can respond with a series of highly dense answers.

At this point, as the article draws to a close, I would like to mention that “Since NIO set sail, we can feel how ambitious its vision is. If all of it is realized, it will definitely leave a very strong mark in the history of China’s automobile industry.”

But behind the beautiful ideals, there is often the harsh reality. Considering the harsh environment and competition difficulty faced by this new car-making company, the resources and energy required to complete each task one by one are far beyond imagination.

In short, the road ahead is long and difficult, and Li Bin’s extreme stress test is far from over. As bystanders, let’s take a look at what is going on.