My Nio Experience in China

Pics or it didnt happen

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Great observations. As someone who used to live in Shenzhen, China during Chinese EV boom, I can think of some reasons for NIO.

1) NIO keeps premium brand image and price tag. A brand-new NIO car costs about￥CNY 390,000 ($CAD 79,000) on average. Public ad is not an efficient approach to reach its potential customer. It's same logic why you don't see Ferrari ads out on the street.

2) NIO drives its sales through words-of-mouth and insider community, which almost make it like a religion. Next time with you're in China, download a NIO app and check out insider events around you on the app. Or go to a NIO House (it's not a dealer, it's NIO owned community hub space) in tier-1 cities, or if possible attend a NIO Day .

2) NIO is one of the few EV manufacturer who makes only EV vehicles, limits its offerings (attractions) to the markets.

3) NIO remains independent car maker, not a part of any automobile/electronic giants, limits its budget to massively spam people's daily life.

Thanks man, it's nice to hear this info rather than the same repeated stock manipulation talk. Appreciate you posting.

Agree with this and I had almost the same experience. I’m in Shenzhen weekly and it’s the same story. Little presence. One in ten vehicles and staff generally not giving a shit in-store. The market in China is saturated with an intense price war. Nio needs to expand overseas and they need to give people a reason to own it. Perhaps give them out to celebs or have more people driving them on the roads.

Just want to mention Yangtze delta and zhujiang delta in the south are most developed provinces in China. And Nio may have more presence there as it’s targeting premium market. Just like fashion brands need to conquer New York first. Next time when I visit Shanghai and vicinity province, I’ll observe NIO’s presence. If NIO focus on quality like Toyota and Honda, then they will do better in the future.

I own a NIO ES7(EL7) and have some NIO stocks. In my mind, NIO took too many resources in marketing in previous years, but not take enough effect as others did. May be their team not good enough at team management, that’s why they have low effective.

Since last year they focus on EBU, they reduce many cost at marketing, that’s why you felt they weak sense of existence. Another reason is, Chengdu is in middle area, NIO more popular in east and east southern area of China because of high price.

As a technical leader in a SaaS company, I think NIO did well in China SNS such as RedNote and Bilibili, but can’t build customer recognition successfully and lacks of efficiency. They should did better in previous 3-5 years.

If you go to the wealthier cities you won’t go a few minutes without seeing a Nio. For example Shanghai Nio cars are everywhere

I posted the other day that NIO needed more social media presence, to have one or two famous Tech YouTubers review their cars, and some people thought I was asking too much of NIO.

I’ll always cite the Xiaomi and how widely known it is despite not selling in the west, it’s how it’s garnered 80.000 orders in less than 2 months because people saw MKBHD review it!

Ford CEO has one already.

NIO needs to have someone famous in Germany, France, UK and the US review their cars.

It will indirectly influence the Chinese folk to buy because it’ll be “cool” to own a NIO.

I’m still down for this slow, organic increase in notoriety but when you’ve got shorts, competitors making false claims against you, I think you should okay offence.

I couldn't notice it whenever I drove by one. It's just a grey looking small box kind of a building. It's not very eye-catching at all, and roads in tier 1 cities are big, like many roads are like 8, 10 lanes wide. So, it's extra hard to notice. Forget about battery swap stations, it's even hard to notice a petrol station. However, I could just bring up the map from the screen to search for all battery swap stations or just ask Nomi directly. There's many stations but Chinese tier 1 cities are huge. So, it's still not easy to saturate the cities with swap stations.

NIO feels so much like an alternate-universe version of Polestar but with 2-10 times as much branding and financial commitment from the parent company. Slightly better (1.2x) product than the competition, which would succeed given 3X the promotion from the parent company, but instead gets 1.15 X and therefore likely to fail in spite of being an objectively better total package.

Just had a quick chat with one of my friend who worked in EV industry in China, some additional insights:

The premium segment of EV market is actually the minority in China. NIO's average price tag is set at CNY￥390,000 which is about 50k more than that of BMW in China.

NIO cheapest car is ET5T is priced at CNY￥ 290k and China sold 2M NEV(New Energy Vehicle）cars with price tag above 300k in 2024. This number looks big but it's only 15% of the total NEV sales. Therefore you don't see many NIO cars out there as they didn't even have any product fitting the 85% mass market. Onvo and Firefly are set up exactly for the mass market.