With a R&D team of thousands of people, why is NIO’s intelligent driving progress two steps behind the industry?

Sometimes, what is more regrettable than having no ability is that "a good cook cannot cook without rice." The smart driving ability of Weilai, which we talked about a few days ago, is an example.

When talking about this issue, my friends also find it incredible, because in their impression, NIO has never been the last one. But judging from the current development progress of NIO Intelligent Driving and the test results of the media, it is already quite far away from the first echelon.

As for the reasons, we have mentioned them in the previous article. Generally speaking, one is the strategic issue, and the other is "tight money". However, if we dig deeper, in fact, NIO's "slow" intelligent driving is not only caused by the conflict of priorities between NIO's battery swap strategy and the development of intelligent driving.

In the past few years, although the car industry has been shouting the slogan of "intelligent driving", most of them are just loud voices, and there are not many who really have "advanced thinking" in this field. After all, consumers' demand for intelligent driving was also very general before, and most car companies thought that just keeping up with the trend would be fine. If others do it, I will do it too. Whether leading or not will not have a big impact on sales. At that time, "NIO, Xiaopeng and Li Auto" were actually the same. However, unlike Xiaopeng and Ideal, NIO has always focused on battery replacement, and naturally the degree of attention and investment in intelligent driving is also weaker, which we have mentioned before.

This directly led to the fact that while Xiaopeng and Ideal were able to quickly make progress in terms of intelligence, NIO has been catching up slowly at the original pace.

Of course, it is understandable that we cannot treat everyone equally. As we said before, there are always priorities. So, even if the pace is slower, as long as we keep moving forward, we will not fall too far behind. But the fact is that some media have found after testing that the current intelligent driving capabilities of NIO are actually stagnant.

After doing relevant tests, the media said that the pace of NIO AD was actually normal before 2.6.5, but from this point of view, it was directly stagnant until 3.0.0. Xiaomi and Zeekr can rush day and night to get a demo version of parking space to parking space to compete for user recognition, but it is really puzzling that NIO AD, with more than 1,000 people, can't get it.

In other words, NIO's intelligent driving can no longer be said to be slow-paced. Perhaps only the word "no money" can explain the embarrassment of its lack of evolution for more than half a year.

Although NIO is trying hard to explain that it just wants to "play the long game" and pave the way first, Ren Shaoqing, vice president of NIO's intelligent driving research and development, has already configured a flywheel similar to Momenta in NIO's intelligent driving architecture. Based on the principle of long-term planning, the overall performance of intelligent driving is iterated using the data collected from mass production. But in fact, NIO's presence in the field of intelligent driving has always been relatively low.

It is undeniable that Ren Shaoqing has a rich idea. He once explained it in a related interview, saying that NIO started planning from the chip. Two of the four chips are for functions, one is for group intelligence and personalized training, and one is for redundancy.

The group intelligence here is equivalent to the function of each car taking on the road verification of NIO's intelligent driving. User vehicles collect information on every road they travel on, and then return to iterate on the overall intelligent driving capabilities through distributed training and crowdsourcing map building. With more and more stock cars in the market and a wider distribution of users, NIO's intelligent driving will be familiar with every road and eventually be able to "drive across the country."

Unfortunately, today’s smart car consumers do not have the patience to stay with NIO for the long term.

Now, the strength of intelligent driving capabilities has determined everyone's car purchase decisions. Whoever is more advanced has more opportunities to win the favor of users. However, "lack of money" is a huge obstacle in front of "NIO's leading intelligent driving".

What's worse is that it's not so easy to shake this mountain. Although Li Bin has good financing capabilities, capital always looks at prospects and benefits. In other words, if Weilai wants to become rich, it needs to speak with market value. As early as the first half of this year, the capital market had data analysis, and the current market value of Weilai is only half of the total financing amount (more than 115 billion yuan), and Li Bin himself has 8.5% of the shares and 38.5% of the voting rights. In other words, how many rounds of financing Weilai can carry out next and how much the core equity can be diluted are all unknown.

NIO has thought of ways to deal with this situation. In June 2023 and March 2024, NIO used BaaS (battery swap) services to "cut prices in disguise", such as unbinding BaaS and BaaS limited-time benefits during the car purchase stage. However, in terms of specific results, this disguised promotion did not lead to a sharp increase in sales.

In May this year, NIO launched its second brand, Ledao, which directly competes with Tesla Model Y. NIO's purpose is very clear, which is to achieve a breakthrough in sales. Compared with the main brand, it is undoubtedly easier to reduce prices and configurations on Ledao to achieve a balance between configuration advantages.

Again, the idea is good, but high-end brands also need leading intelligent driving to support them, which is where NIO is currently powerless. Even though Ledao gave up four Nvidia Orin X chips and adjusted to a single Orin X chip, it claimed to be able to achieve the city NOA function without a laser radar. But it is still difficult for people to have confidence in it. The main brand is like this, so how good can the intelligent driving of the second brand be?

Now, the only thing that is gratifying is that the sales of NIO's main brand have improved, and it has recently demonstrated new achievements in intelligent driving. If the funding problem can be solved, NIO may still have a future in intelligent driving.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.