When the stock hit $1.19 and everyone wrote our obituary, I invested my own money and told my team: we are not dying. We will find a way. Six months later, we secured $1 billion from Hefei. Persistence is not optional in this business.
Battery swap is our unfair advantage. Drive in, robot swaps your battery in three minutes, drive out with a full charge. No waiting. No range anxiety. No other company has 2,300 stations doing this.
Our first vehicle was the EP9 supercar. It broke the Nürburgring EV record. People said — why is a startup building a supercar? Because credibility in automotive is earned on the track, not in a press release.
Battery-as-a-Service means you can buy a NIO car without the battery and save $15,000. Then you subscribe to the battery monthly. Your car gets cheaper, and every year we can upgrade your battery to a newer, better one.
They call me the Elon Musk of China. I understand the comparison, but NIO is not Tesla China. We are building something distinctly Chinese — community-driven, service-obsessed, and user-first in a way Tesla has never been.
China's EV market has 200 brands fighting for customers. Most will die. The ones that survive will need something more than a good car — they'll need an ecosystem. That's what NIO House, NIO Life, and battery swap build. Not just a car company — a lifestyle.