NIO Day 2020 - Technical Review (Battery, Autonomous…)
Mr William Li, CEO of NIO, at the NIO Day 2020 (January, 9th)
The NIO Day is the equivalent of the Tesla Battery Day. With a unique Chinese style, NIO revealed its new Premium Smart Electric car, the ET7, which gathers all the most advanced technologies in terms of EV, Connectivity and ADAS.
The NIO Day was organised into 2 parts: the first one was about the Chinese culture and NIO users in general; the second part was the technical presentation and the new ET7 car. Key elements are:
New 150 kWh Battery with Solid-State and Silicon-composite Anode (360 Wh/kg)
Swapping Battery possibility
Dual Motors (Permanent Magnet Motor + Induction Motor)
High connectivity: personal assistant AI, 5G, UWB, Wifi 6, Bluetooth 5.2, V2X….
Autonomous driving system based on very accurate 8MP cameras, LiDAR and SuperComputer of 1.016 TOPS
1- NIO - a Chinese OEM
Fig. 1- NIO Life: a strong community
If you come from a traditional OEM, you may find the Tesla Battery-day and Elon Musk’s presentation a bit “disruptive”, but that is nothing comparable to the NIO show and presentation…
NIO is a Chinese OEM which makes its way to think and its philosophy very different from a Volkswagen or a GM.
It is important to understand the Chinese culture: even if NIO presents its community as whole group, at the same time they focus on individual people (employees, customers). They are also completely embedded in the Chinese culture and identity. The 1st part of the event dealt with some of Chinese life aspects including food, sport, traditions, nature but also funny mascot or popular pop-band and singers.
Even on YouTube you could feel the atmosphere created by cheerful Chinese people in the audience.
Then, the focus moved to NIO-community, showing for example volunteers taking their own free time to promote NIO and EVs in showrooms and other events. A part of the event was dedicated to the 2020 review, which included NIO involvement to fight against the coronavirus and to support people during lockdown. NIO projected a mini “Chinese-drama” based on the pandemic, during which some families were separated and how NIO employees and users helped each other.
After 1h of “non-technical” show, Mr William Li (NIO CEO) came on stage: no tie, no suit, no “cool-Californian T-shirt”. Just a “long-sleeve T-shirt”, fashion because very simple. After thanking the NIO customers and employees, Mr Li encouraged Chinese people to support local restaurants, local shops, local businesses… Understand what you want here…
2- 2020 NIO achievements and ambitions
Fig. 2- New NIO Power Swap Station 2.0
NIO is mainly known in the West because it promotes the Battery swapping technology, but its customers, business model and achievement are little known outside of China.
Mr Li started the NIO technical assessment by presenting the main NIO achievements summarised as follow:
The global mileage cumulated by users is 1.4 billion km (1 billion km in 2020 alone)
In 2020, NIO counted 43,000 new users and 75,000 cumulative deliveries
Fig. 3- NIO user charging options in addition of the Battery swapping: home chargers (left); Fast chargers (right)
When it comes to EV charging, users get several options: Home-chargers, Fast-chargers or Battery swapping for a fully-charged Battery within a few minutes:
Today, 66% of NIO users have a Power-home charger. NIO aims at deploying over 30,000 20 kW DC chargers nationwide
Today, NIO cars can use any of 285,000 Fast Chargers all across China (Fig. 3)
NIO infrastructure includes 177 Battery Swap Stations that have performed 1,490,000 Battery-swaps in total (which is roughly 1 fully charged-Battery swapped in every 12s)
NIO detailed an upgraded swapping station, the Power Swap Station 2.0, which can now accommodate 13 batteries (Fig. 2) for a daily swap capacity up to 312 swaps. NIO aims at installing 500 new Power Swap Stations by the end of 2021.
3- Green credit? NIO of course…
FIg. 4- Blue Point system plan: the NIO green competitor advantage
NIO is launching, in collaboration with official Chinese institutions (Shanghai mainly), a new program called “Blue Point”. It is very a strategic collaboration between NIO and both “China Classification Society Certification Company” and “Shanghai Environment and Energy Exchange”. The principle is to cumulate points via an App that certify your emission reductions and trade carbon credits.
This sounds like a major “competitor advantage” for NIO compared to any of its Western competitors…
4- New Battery and ET7 Platform
Fig. 5- NIO Battery Technologies: Solid-State, Silicon Anode, low-Cobalt Cathode
In 2020, NIO has launched a new 100 kWh Battery and they are already announcing a 150 kWh Battery through impressive material and process innovation:
In-Situ Solidification Hybrid Electrolyte (Solid-State Battery Technology), which on its own improve the Energy density by about 50%
Inorganic Pre-Lithium Si/C Composite Anode (Silicon-doped Anode)
Nano-Coating and Nickel-Ultrarich Cathode reducing the usage of Cobalt
NIO says that these technologies are boosting the energy density while maintaining the Battery-Life time. NIO announced a density energy of 360 Wh/kg. This means that a 150 kWh Battery would weight for the cells-only about 420 kg.
Fig. 6 - NIO ET7 Electric Vehicle Platform and Battery
Such a 150 kWh Battery is announced to be 1000+ km range (!) and should be available in Q4 2022. The New ET7 powertrain is 480 kW and 850 Nm (for comparison a Polestar 2 is 300 kW and 660 Nm) and makes the 0 to 100 km/h in 3.9s. Its drag coefficient is 0.23 The ET7 platform is a Dual-Motors:
Permanent Magnet Motor of 180 kW at the front
Induction Motor of 300kW at the rear
For lightweighting and safety reason, the platform is based on an ultralight strength aluminium body offering 37,100N.m/deg Torsional Stiffness which earns the vehicle 5-star Safety Standards (C-NCAP and Euro NCAP)
5- Connectivity and Interior
Fig. 7- NOMI, your NIO-robot companion
The NIO ET7 was thought and designed to be the ultimate Vehicle: the interior is designed to be both cosy and a joyful second living room.
In the interior, a 1.9 m2 laminated glass roof offers a bright light, but protects you from up to 99.9% of UV light. Most interior materials are natural and NIO is very proud of the usage of a lot of renewable soft and luxurious material, offering a “nature and green experience”. The invisible smart vents offer a very clean design while the cabin-air is constantly purified. Everything is made to help you to relax and feel cosy.
At the same time, the interior offers you the best of connectivity with a large 12.8” Center display, while a small and cute robot named NOMI assists you. NOMI the world 1st in-car AI including voiceprint recognition.
The sound system consists in 23 speakers and offers for the 1st time a 7.1.4 immersive sound system. With 5G, UWB, Wifi 6, Bluetooth 5.2, V2X… the NIO ET7 is definitely a high-tech EV.
6- Towards more assisted and autonomous driving
Fig. 8 - 11x 8MP Cameras are used by AQUILA, the autonomous driving system of NIO
NIO seems to be determined to redefine the standard of Premium Smart Vehicle, including not only assisted driving but also the best of the technology towards autonomous driving.
The name of their system is NAD (NIO Autonomous Driving). It can be active on Expressway, within Urban environment, in parking lots. It also completely manages the battery swap.
NIO presented their technology from localisation to perception algorithms which means the sensors and the computing system. The NIO technology relies on a sensing system called AQUILA which gathers 33 high performance sensors:
11x 8MP Cameras, 1st mass produced 8MP High Resolution AD Camera (for comparison, Tesla uses 1.2 MP technology)
1x Ultralong Range High Resolution LiDAR with Ultrawide FOV of 120° @1.550nm: this high resolution is equivalent, according to NIO, to 300 laser beams
5x Millimeter Wave Radars
12x Ultrasonic sensors
2x High-precision positioning units
1x V2X
1x ADMS
AQUILA is able to recognise more complex objects (like a dog) over a longer distance than existing competitors. NIO highlights that the earlier you can identify danger, the safer the car is. With so many cameras covering long distance, reducing blind spots, increasing the vision in dark environment, NIO’s car is able to detect:
Vehicles over 680m away (while NIO says that 1.2 MP-Camera used by Tesla are limited to 229m)
Traffic cones over 260m away (compared to 87m for the 1.2 MP-Camera)
People over 223m away (compared to 74m for the 1.2 MP-Camera)
Fig. 9- ADAM, the NIO Super Computer @1.016 TOPS for autonomous driving functions
So many sensors generate big data and here big data means 8 GB per second (that would be equivalent to downloading 2 4K-standard movies each second). The algorithms to interpret so many data needs a Super computer called here ADAM and which is by far the most powerful mobile computing platform in a commercial vehicle. ADAM can post-process 6.4 Giga per second thanks to 48 CPU Cores and has a computational speed of 1.016 TOPS (Tera Operations Per Second). As a comparison, to enter the Top500 Super Computers in the world in 1995 was only 1 TOPS!
Mr Li insisted that this computational power overpast 7 Tesla computers.
Conclusion
NIO is definitively an alien in the OEMs landscape and does not hesitate to push the boundaries of existing technologies to adapt them in their most luxurious sedan. The ET7 puts very high expectations and is very clearly on paper a serious competitor (at least on the Chinese market) to Tesla and the potential future Lucid Motors.
If you believe such a car will be unreliable, please notice that, in addition of all these technologies, NIO offers:
Lifetime Free Warranty
Livetime Free Connectivity
Lifetime Power Swap Benefits
Lifetime Free Roadside RescuePrice
+ Free Power Home.
Talking about price, the ET7 will be sold at:
450,000 RMB (before Subsidies) for the 70kWh Battery pack
500,000 RMB (before Subsidies) for the 100kWh Battery pack
(Tesla Model 3 is about 350,000 RMB)
Source: 2020 Nio Day, NIO YouTube Channel
