The creators of world’s fastest electric supercar & Nurburgring lap record holder EP9, NIO , have officially launched the 7-seat electric SUV, the ES8. At the official launching ceremony, NIO revealed the price of ES8 and presented many spectacular features, for example its swappable battery service system and NOMI artificial intelligence system. The Founder Edition will be the first 10,000 ES8 vehicles, and the actual price is RMB 548,000 and under 2017 Beijing government subsidy standard will be RMB 475,400. NIO also offers battery renting service, which will shrink the price by another RMB 100,000.
However this service necessitates users to pay RMB 1,280 per month. That elaborates that the buyer just wishes to pay RMB 375,400 for the Founder Edition. However, all of the first 10,000 vehicles have been sold out. The price of the standard ES8 is RMB 448,000 and will be reduced to RMB 375,400 following the government subsidy. The price will be RMB 275,400 with its battery renting service.
The ES8 is a 7-seat high-performance electric SUV with an adaptive air suspension, all-aluminum body & chassis .It is powered by two electric motors with 326 hp and 420 Nm each, one for the front wheel and one for the rear. As per William Li, founder and CEO of NIO, the ES8 can attain the speed of 100km per hour in just 4.4 seconds. With a joint output of 650 hp and 850 Nm, the ES8 is the strongest China-produced car ever!
The ES8 can go 355Km in a single charge; but that’s achieved when driving at average 60km/h speed. Nevertheless the real life top-speed is 180 km/h and this it can do for 30 minutes until the battery runs out. Additionally the top speed is 200 km/h but it can only do this for 1 kilometer with a special boost. The ES8 needs 8 hours for a full charge on 220V and one hour for 80% charging on a fast charger. The hi-tech interior has big touch screen in the center, digital instrument panel, smart mirror, and air vents that visually widen over the whole width of the dashboard.
NIO Pilot, an additional highlight at the ceremony, is asserted to be the most advanced driving assistance system in all mass-production models with a sum of 23 hardware, counting 1 trifocal front-facing camera, 4 surround exterior cameras, 5 millimeter wave radars, 12 ultrasonic sensors and 1 driver monitoring camera. And ES8 is the first mass-production model to be prepared with the autonomous driving chip Mobileye EyeQ4.
NOMI, an artificially-intelligent digital companion well-defined as “Know me”, can be able to learn the significance and information of the passengers to meet their desires. Based on the powerful on-board computing capability and cloud computing capability, NOMI makes a new interaction mode among human and vehicle.NIO ,at the ceremony, also released NIO Power service system. The new SUV has a swappable battery pack, which can be swapped within 3 minutes. The company also revealed NIO Mobile, a recharging vehicle, and ten-minute recharging can make the vehicle run a further of 100km. By 2020, NIO will set up 1,100 battery swapping stations and start on 1,200 battery recharging vehicles.
NIO was integrated in Shanghai back in 2014.It has the financial support of automotive websites Bitauto and Autohome, and furthermore Internet giants Tencent and Baidu too. It is one of dozens of EV startups that have came into sight in China in the past few years.
