William Li, founder and chairman of Nio, shares the features of the et7 sedan at a launch event on January 9, 2021 in Chengdu, China.
Evelyn Cheng | CNBC
BEIJING – Chinese electric car start-up Nio released its first sedan with self-driving technology features on Saturday that the company says outperforms Tesla’s.
Pre-subsidy pricing for the et7 sedan starts at 448,000 yuan ($ 69,000) with a 70-kilowatt-per-hour battery. If customers pay for battery services based on a monthly subscription fee of 980 yuan, the vehicle will cost 378,000 yuan.
Shipments are slated to begin in the first quarter of 2022, company founder and chairman William Li said at a launch event in Chengdu, China. Pre-orders started on Saturday.
Nio unveiled its first sedan, the et7, on January 9, 2021.
Evelyn Cheng | CNBC
Nio’s et7 sedan can work with the company’s new autonomous driving system, which offers a camera resolution of 8 megapixels (versus 1.2 megapixels for Tesla) and Nvidia processor chips that offer processing power greater than that of seven self-driving ones Tesla computers, according to Li.
The autonomous driving system costs 680 yuan a month, Li said.
According to the company’s website, Tesla’s China-made Model Y is set to begin deliveries as early as April at a price of 339,900 yuan.
The et7 claims a range of 1,000 kilometers. That’s more than the 706-kilometer range of Xpeng’s P7 sedan, which the company claimed last year was the longest for any electric car in China.
According to the company, the new sedan from Nio has a laminated all-glass roof, heated seats in both rows and 23 loudspeakers.
While other Chinese electric vehicle manufacturers have seen strong demand for their recently launched sedans, Nio only has SUVs in the market. The company showed a prototype sedan at the Shanghai Auto Show in April 2019, but ran into financial difficulties later that year.
According to the company, Nio’s et7 sedan has a laminated all-glass roof, heated seats in both rows and 23 speakers.
Evelyn Cheng | CNBC
After Nio received around $ 1 billion from government-sponsored investors in early 2020, Nio’s New York-listed shares rebounded and ended the year well over 1,000% higher. The start-up plans to enter Europe in the second half of the year.
According to Nio, deliveries for 2020 have more than doubled compared to the previous year to 43,728 vehicles.
This made the automaker the top performer among other Chinese electric car start-ups listed in New York.
But Nio’s deliveries lag behind BYD, a Chinese auto and battery company backed by American billionaire Warren Buffett and Elon Musk’s Tesla.
Comments are closed.