Nio gearing up for European launch later in 2021

Rapidly growing Chinese EV manufacturer Nio remains on track for a European launch in the second half of this year – and it will soon make a decision about which models the region will get first.

Speaking exclusively to Autocar, the brand’s Europe vice-president, Hui Zhang, confirmed it remains confident of its viability in Europe.

“We fully believe that, in Europe, the awareness of environmental protection and sustainability is much bigger for the consumer compared with on any other continent in the world,” he said.

Nio is enjoying considerable growth in its home market, where it posted record sales each month in 2020, despite the Covid-19 pandemic, largely as a result of its mostly digital ‘O2O’ (online-to-offline) retail model in the region.

Zhang said: “Our Nio app has more than 1.4 million downloads and more than 200,000 daily active users. We had done the base work already. We just needed to organise and activate things a bit differently to the period before the pandemic. I’m not saying we benefited from the pandemic, but we could leverage the O2O business model during the period.”

Whether the company will look to develop a physical dealer-led model in Europe hasn’t yet been confirmed.

Zhang said Nio’s research shows that “two-thirds of customers in Europe won’t buy a car before test driving” and that although some 88,000 cars have been sold through Nio’s retail app in China, “we’re fully aware the customer still needs to touch, smell, see and test drive the car, especially in the European market”. Nio already has an operational presence in Europe, with an engineering centre in Oxford and a global design centre in Munich, and Zhang pointed to the brand’s continued promotional and press output in Europe as a sign of its continued intention to sell cars in the market.

However, it remains to be seen which of its four electric production cars will be the first to arrive. The closely related ES6 and Nio ES8 SUVs have been on the market for longer, but Zhang was keen to point out that the EC6, launched last year, is already the best-selling car in China’s SUV-coupé segment, outselling even the BMW X4.