NIO’s “bad reviews” trend

When the spotlight of the stage finally fell on Li Bin, he looked around the audience and calmly announced that the delivery of NIO ES8 had begun. Perhaps he would have recalled the night when NIO was just founded three and a half years ago.

On November 25, 2014, NIO was officially established.

Its birth attracted 56 investors including Ma Huateng, Li Xiang, Liu Qiangdong and Lei Jun. It can be said that it was born with a silver spoon in its mouth.

In this regard, Zhang Zetian once revealed:

When Li Bin came to Liu Qiangdong to discuss investing in NIO, Liu Qiangdong only considered it for a dozen seconds, which shows that NIO is very popular in the investment field.

Li Bin has been immersed in the automotive industry for 18 years. He has invested in and founded more than 30 companies related to the automotive industry. He has successfully pushed Yiche (Yiche was listed on the New York Stock Exchange on November 17, 2010) and Yixin (Yixin Group was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on November 16, 2017) into the capital market.

He witnessed the emergence of Tesla as the first listed pure electric vehicle company, and hopes to open up the pure electric vehicle market in China like Musk did.

The year NIO was founded, the electric car manufacturing storm had already spread from across the ocean to China. Car companies such as Audi, Mercedes-Benz, Cadillac, and BMW have successively entered the electric car market, and Internet giants such as Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent have also set their sights on cars, and the race is full of smoke.

It is conceivable how difficult it is for NIO to snatch market share from these strong rivals, but the electric car trend has allowed NIO to outperform people's imagination.

Young people with a tiger in their hearts can always keenly capture the entrance to the cracks in the times.

Li Bin of NIO, He Xiaopeng of Alibaba, Li Xiang of Autohome, and Shen Hui of Geely Auto are jointly leading the next new force in car-making movement in China's Internet industry.

In the blink of an eye, it is 2018 and China’s new car-making forces have risen comprehensively.

For the first time, the Chinese brand NIO appeared on the sales ranking of high-end mid-to-large SUVs and above. In the sales ranking of luxury SUVs priced above 400,000 yuan, NIO ES8 ranked second with 11,465 units, surpassing Tesla.

With the continuous infusion of real money from investors, in September 2018, NIO officially landed on the New York Stock Exchange (stock code NIO), becoming the world's second pure electric vehicle listed company after Tesla.

Li Bin, founder of NIO

Li Bin was gradually described by the media as the Chinese version of "Musk" and was likely to become the "godfather" leading the electric car trend, but public opinion did not develop as expected.

In theory, the seats of the NIO ES8 are wrapped in Nappa leather, the car is equipped with a HEPA sports air filter, the body is made of aerospace-grade aluminum alloy, it has a dual-motor 650-horsepower intelligent four-wheel drive, a total power of 480 kilowatts, a maximum output total torque of 840 N·m, and it can accelerate from 0 to 100 kilometers in just 4.4 seconds. It is sincere in both configuration and performance.

But the problem is that after the mass delivery of NIO ES8, public opinion took a sharp turn for the worse.

Consumers and car reviewers have upgraded their diss to the ES8 to a mocking mode:

Problems such as unexplained black screen, charging failure, NOMI having fun in the middle of the night, system freeze, serious distortion of reversing image, inaccurate remaining charging time, inaccurate cruising range, stopping at Chang'an Avenue for upgrades, etc. have repeatedly put NIO at the forefront of public opinion.

A Weilai ES8 owner on Chang'an Avenue upgraded his car, causing the vehicle to be inoperable for more than an hour

There was even a rumor of layoffs at NIO on a certain social platform at the end of 2018, showing signs of operational fatigue.

NIO, which reached the top in "concept" and "vision", finally lost the hearts of the people when it came to "blending" its past promises.

Public criticism is actually a temporary problem that new car-making companies will inevitably encounter.

As a representative of new forces in car manufacturing, no matter how good NIO's laboratory data looks, various new problems will naturally arise after road tests due to differences in subjective factors such as preferences and habits among tens of thousands of car owners. Once a failure occurs, it will be infinitely magnified as a typical case.

However, judging from the current trend of giving NIO “bad reviews” online, many people are putting the blame for the electric vehicle industry on NIO.

First of all, battery limitations mean that pure electric vehicles are limited to a means of transportation, and are far from being as convenient as fuel vehicles.

The construction of domestic charging facilities is still in its infancy, and the current fast-charging batteries of electric vehicles generally have high losses, so electric vehicles are best used for commuting, and battery life is obviously a shortcoming.

Some people argue that Tesla’s battery life is pretty good?

You should know that Tesla once had a tragic accident in which three people died within a week. All of them were traffic accidents caused by violent collisions that led to "thermal runaway" of the batteries.

▲ Image from autoblog

Tesla Model 3's battery has an unrivaled energy density of 300Wh/kg, which ostensibly improves battery life but greatly reduces safety.

External force impact can damage the battery separator, leading to a short circuit. The heat generated during the short circuit can cause thermal runaway of the battery and quickly raise the temperature to over 300°C.

▲ Tesla battery pack after fire

Secondly, most of the domestic claims that electric vehicles can achieve 10-minute fast charging are just marketing gimmicks.

Take the small electric vehicles commonly seen in our lives as an example: a certain brand of electric vehicle has a range of 100km/14 kWh. If we want to charge 70 kWh in 10 minutes, then the power of the charging pile will need to be 70 times 6=420KW, 420KW/220V (mains voltage) = 1909A, and the ordinary household electricity meter is 45A.

If high voltage is used: 420000W/380V (high voltage voltage) = 1105A. What kind of material does the battery of this car have to be made of to withstand such a large current without exploding? This does not include the energy loss of charging.

Car owners have complained online about NIO's inaccurate remaining charging time. This is because current battery fast-charging technology makes it difficult to ensure that mass-produced cars can be charged accurately to the minute and second, and this is not just a problem for NIO alone.

What's more, NIO's charging technology is considered conscientious in the industry. At home, there are "home charging piles", and when you go out, there are "third-party charging piles" and NIO's "one-click charging" service (charging on behalf of customers).

There are also many voices questioning NIO’s prices (average price is around RMB 440,000), but these people ignore the fact that NIO has a lot of added value besides the car itself.

Image source: Autohome

A domestic brand called Zhidou has a maximum power of 24 horsepower. You have to press the accelerator to the bottom to feel the car moving. There is only a plastic center console in the car, which is covered with rough plastic skin left over from various processing. The asking price is 108,800 yuan.

After deducting the national and local subsidies, the price is more than halved. For this car alone, 2.5 billion yuan was taken from the national treasury, and each car was subsidized 110,000 yuan. (Data source: "Uncle Gen Talks about Cars")

Zhidou

NIO's cars are definitely several levels ahead of other products on the market. Secondly, it sells more than just cars. User services, electric formula, car owner circles, etc. are all important parts of NIO's empire building.

NIO is an asset-light, operations-focused company, more like a community.

NIO has hundreds of partners and many service centers in third- and fourth-tier cities.

It connects all car-related problems to the APP, and orders the owner's traffic, charging, repairs, maintenance, insurance, and transportation... In the words of Weilai President Qin Lihong:

"Apart from traffic police tickets, we hope that users will come to us for all their needs."

As of November 2018, NIO already has 18 battery swap stations. In addition to battery swap stations, NIO has also built a mobile charging fleet, which can charge an ES8 to a range of 100 kilometers in 10 minutes.

The design cost of NIO Day every year is tens of millions of RMB. Car owners are invited to fly, stay in five-star hotels, listen to Imagine Dragons concerts, and open NIO Houses in the most expensive locations...

NIO HOUSE also provides car owners with a variety of services such as lounges, reception areas, meeting rooms, work areas, open kitchens, children's entertainment areas, etc., and even a members-only point-based payment cafe.

All of these together make up NIO's superb user experience throughout the entire life cycle of the vehicle, which is what Li Bin calls "an emotional experience that touches the user's heart."

The concept of "blue sky is coming" has repeatedly appeared in NIO's publicity, which has also attracted doubts from many netizens.

Some netizens dug up an experiment from a US scientific research institute to refute this:

In the video, an electric car travels 90,000 miles and produces 31 tons of carbon dioxide (this number is based on its production emissions, electricity consumption calculated based on the US mixed fuel, and the energy required for final scrapping), while the Mercedes-Benz CDI A160 only produces 34 tons of carbon dioxide emissions in the same distance of its service life. (Based on its production, diesel consumption and final scrapping) They also studied Tesla and found that it will produce about 44 tons of carbon dioxide emissions, only 5 tons less than the Audi A7, which is similar to it. An electric car only emits 3 to 5 tons less carbon dioxide in its entire service life, but its battery manufacturing and power generation emissions are far greater than traditional fuel vehicles.

It has to be admitted that the current high requirements for batteries in electric vehicles cause more pollution in the production process than burning gasoline. However, electric vehicles have become an unstoppable development trend, and future technological changes will definitely optimize the pollution of power generation and battery production.

Moreover, the above problems are not just NIO’s problems, but the weak points of the entire pure electric vehicle manufacturing industry.

After so many years of development, traditional car companies have gradually mastered the performance evaluation of internal combustion engines, and new car manufacturers will sooner or later have to face it.

For a long time, domestic Internet car manufacturing was ridiculed as "PPT" car manufacturing, and some media even sarcastically said:

"The financing of new car companies depends on whose PPT is more powerful and has the coolest effect. Making a good PPT is equivalent to learning half of how to build a car, and at least making back half of the money."

However, Li Bin spent 3 and a half years in such an environment to fulfill his promise of mass production and delivery of ES8, which is worthy of admiration.

NIO’s “bad reviews” trend

In NIO's prospectus, Li Bin mentioned Tesla 13 times. He is determined to make Tesla's cars better than its and its services better than its. Judging from NIO's current influence on China's electric vehicle industry, its promotion of China's electric vehicle industry is definitely worthy of recognition.

Taking a step back, foreign research on electric vehicle technology is advancing by leaps and bounds. If we still mobilize a large number of troops to attack NIO based on these inherent prejudices, and Li Bin continues to break through the mixed waves of public opinion, the promotion of China's pure electric vehicle manufacturing technology will only be delayed again and again.

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.