Passing Extreme Intelligent Driving Test: New ONVO L60 Returns at Full Strength

In a dim karst cave, the new ONVO L60 navigated through jagged rock formations in an almost pitch-black environment and successfully completed the crossing. In the view of William Li, founder and CEO of Nio, the demonstration showcased at the ONVO L60 launch event is an extreme stress test of its proprietary intelligent driving architecture, which took over 10 years and huge funds to develop.

This demonstration of technical capability coincides with a critical turning point in the Chinese electric vehicle market. Li believes the market has entered a "stock era", where replacement demand is beginning to dominate. "Currently, about 85% of buyers come from repeat purchases or trading in existing vehicles, among which many customers are migrating from traditional fuel car brands like BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Audi".

In this increasingly mature market landscape, the newly launched ONVO L60 directly targets the core of the family SUV market — a segment currently defined by the Tesla Model Y.

ONVO's strategy is based on a philosophy described by Li as "building the foundation of a 150-story skyscraper", rather than quickly constructing a 10-story building. This long-termism is evident in their vertically integrated tech stack. Li explained that the new ONVO L60's ability to handle low-light cave environments stems from its self-developed "world model" and reinforcement learning algorithms, supported by key computing power from the proprietary Shenji NX9031 chip.

Developing this chip involved a 600-person engineering team. Li believes that self-developed design can achieve optimizations incomparable to general solutions. He particularly emphasized the advantage in memory bandwidth — which is crucial for running large AI models — as well as multi-modal signal processing (ISP) capabilities, which enhance performance under extreme lighting conditions.

The new ONVO L60 is priced lower than the Model Y but boasts stronger product capabilities, including a global 900V high-voltage architecture. Nio Senior Vice President Shen Fei pointed out that although some consumers maintain "brand preference" for Tesla due to its brand heritage, ONVO aims to convert them through tangible benefits: lower purchase price, better interior configuration, and unique battery swap advantages.

Unlike the ultra-fast charging solutions promoted by competitors like BYD, battery swapping remains the cornerstone of Nio's infrastructure strategy. Li emphasized that swapping and charging are not mutually exclusive. However, he believes swapping offers unique advantages beyond mere speed. It achieves separation of vehicle and battery, helping to solve the mismatch between battery and body lifespan, and transforms swap stations into distributed grid energy storage assets — a 7 GWh storage network that has already participated in grid peak shaving balance. It is worth noting that Nio recently participated in formulating Singapore's national standard for passenger car battery swapping.

But Li also revealed that the rise in supply chain costs, especially the significant increase in the price of automotive-grade storage chips, has led to an approximate 15,000 RMB increase in the cost base per new ONVO L60.

Furthermore, launching a new brand in today's noisy market is much more difficult than when Nio first appeared ten years ago. Li admitted that although the high-spec version of the new ONVO L60 initially had strong orders, building ONVO's brand awareness remains a challenge.

Ultimately, massive investments in intelligent driving chips, battery swap infrastructure, and R&D are providing ONVO and Nio with key bargaining chips to participate in the next round of competition. From the current situation, this also helps ONVO establish a hit product philosophy and helps Nio continue moving forward in the cruel marathon of the global automotive industry.