Insights on the Breakthrough Logic of the Stock Era from the Launch of the New Onvo L60

After the official launch of the new Onvo L60 on June 11, attention from the entire automotive industry quickly focused on this mid-size SUV tech flagship with a starting price of 202,800 yuan. Subsequently, during a media face-to-face event held in Hefei on June 12, Nio founder Li Bin and Nio Senior Vice President Shen Fei had an in-depth exchange.

Currently, sales lead costs in the entire automotive industry are rising, with the cost per valid lead even climbing to the range of 300 to 500 yuan, making conversion efficiency the lifeline for major car manufacturers. Against this industry backdrop, how do new brands break through? How do Nio, Onvo, and the soon-to-be-delivered Firefly support the brand matrix of the entire group? Through this interview with a huge amount of information, we can see the underlying technical foundation and commercial logic hidden behind the new Onvo L60. 

Currently, the competition in new energy vehicles has officially entered the deep water area which tests the systematic engineering capabilities of car manufacturers extremely, moving away from the early stage 'comparison of three-electric parameters' and simple 'material stacking games'. Facing the universal pain point of excessive weight in new energy vehicles, lightweighting is no longer just an environmental slogan, but the ultimate touchstone for car manufacturers' comprehensive R&D capabilities. Li Bin frankly stated in the exchange that lightweighting can truly bring user benefits, including improving overall vehicle handling, safety, structural durability, and long-term life, which is also the core reason why Onvo and Nio persist in lightweighting.

However, the realization of lightweighting is not easy; it first tests the courage of enterprises to make choices within cost boundaries. If one pursues ultra-long range, large capacity lithium iron phosphate batteries are undoubtedly a shortcut to reduce costs, but Onvo showed great restraint in battery selection. To achieve 740 kilometers of range on the 85 kWh long-range version without significantly increasing weight, Onvo decisively chose ternary lithium batteries with higher energy density and lighter weight. This decision made the 85 kWh ternary lithium battery reduce more than 100 kilograms compared to lithium iron phosphate batteries of the same capacity, but the price is that the enterprise must bear a huge additional cost. This choice is not cutting corners, but value prioritization based on user experience. The deeper difficulty lies in the collaboration of technology and engineering.

Li Bin pointed out that lightweighting involves not only replacing traditional fuses with intelligent fuses, but also requires comprehensive support for the vehicle's high and low voltage architecture, which is a systemic engineering project with a high technical threshold. The lightweight coefficient of the new Onvo L60 white body reached an astonishing 2.22, which not only benefits from the positive returns of the global 900V high-voltage architecture, but also relies on refined engineering capabilities under the premise of ensuring safe structures, avoiding 'transitional materials' with no safety benefits. In the eyes of the media, this approach of building underlying architectures regardless of cost is establishing an invisible moat for Onvo that is difficult to copy in the short term.

This obsession with the underlying foundation is also deeply reflected in Onvo L60's intelligent layout. At the launch event, a video of the new Onvo L60 crossing extremely narrow caves triggering intelligent driving drew widespread attention both domestically and internationally, with even overseas netizens comparing it with Tesla's FSD. Facing the competition of intelligent driving routes, Li Bin gave an extremely clear technical breakdown. He revealed that the baseline of the new Onvo L60's intelligent driving has actually been aligned with Nio ES9, adopting the latest version of Nio World Model.

Demonstrating powerful image processing capabilities and a sense of security in extremely dim cave environments is mainly supported by Nio's fully independently developed Shengji NX9031 chip and massive computing power investment. Currently, many brands in the industry choose to let external companies outsource the definition of intelligent driving chips, but Nio has formed a Shengji team of more than 600 people, completing a closed-loop design capability from front-end to back-end. The direct advantage brought by this fully independent R&D is multi-dimensional: not only has the memory bandwidth reached twice that of industry competitors, greatly improving model operation speed, but its powerful multi-modal signal processing capability (ISP) can still maintain extremely high clarity and resolution in extremely dark or extremely bright light environments. In addition, the millisecond-level chip heat switching capability is fully prepared for future L3, L4 level autonomous driving. To support the data closed loop of the world model and reinforcement learning, Nio's investment in intelligent driving computing power has increased several times compared to last year, and will continue to increase computing power operations in the second half of this year.

Just as Li Bin made that analogy, if the short-term goal is to build a 10-story building, people can move in quickly, but to build a 100-story high-rise in the future, you must spend a long time to solidify the foundation capable of supporting 150 stories. Onvo, with a price of just over 200,000, directly rolled down Nio's chip, operating system, and data closed-loop capabilities accumulated over many years. This 'dimensionality reduction attack' will undoubtedly seize huge user mindshare in the key period of intelligent driving popularization.

Beyond intelligence, the debate on the route of the energy supplement system has always been another major focus of the new energy vehicle industry. With the frequent release of flash charging technologies in the industry, the outside world once believed this would impact Nio's prideful battery swapping mode. However, Li Bin and Shen Fei completely broke this oppositional thinking in the exchange. Li Bin clearly stated that supercharging, flash charging, and battery swapping have never been opposed. Nio is very happy to see industry investment in infrastructure, but the multi-dimensional strategic value possessed by battery swapping cannot be replaced by simple fast charging. From the user experience perspective, after fast charging technology reaches a certain rate, its marginal benefit will decrease significantly, while the convenience of battery swapping without getting off the vehicle remains the industry benchmark. The more core business logic lies in 'vehicle-electricity decoupling'. Separating the life of the car and the battery, and operating and extending the life of each battery through intelligent charging strategies within battery swapping stations can increase battery life by at least 1.5 years, which fundamentally dispels users' deep concerns about long-term battery attenuation when purchasing pure electric models.

Shen Fei also confirmed that the penetration rate of Onvo battery leasing plans is already more than 90% currently, fully showing that users made very rational choices when facing real car purchase costs. In addition, from a macro energy strategy perspective, the more than 3,900 battery swapping stations built by Nio are equivalent to a natural distributed energy storage facility with a capacity as high as 7GWh. With the proportion of new energy power generation continuing to climb, these battery swapping stations have begun to participate in grid response and peak shaving, showing extremely high energy utilization efficiency. Nio not only promotes battery swapping standardization domestically but has even participated in the formulation of national passenger car battery swapping standards in countries such as Singapore. Standing from the media's perspective, the battery swapping network has completely evolved from an early 'service tag' of Nio to a heavy-asset 'energy barrier'. With the addition of more peers and giants such as CATL, Onvo sits on China's most mature pure electric supplement network as soon as it appears. This systemic advantage that wins at the starting line is something any new entrant is hard to catch up with.

All technical reserves and infrastructure investments must ultimately face the most direct test in the fierce market fight. The current Chinese car market has irreversibly entered the stock era. Li Bin quoted the latest market data pointing out that fuel vehicle sales dropped year-on-year by more than 40%, meaning the proportion of true new purchases in the entire market is decreasing sharply, and increased purchase, repeat purchase, and exchange purchase have become the absolute mainstream. In such an environment, users' car purchase decision logic is undergoing a qualitative change. In the past, due to imperfect infrastructure, users often struggled with extended range or plug-in hybrid routes when exchanging; and today, with the improvement of supplement networks and the highlight of pure electric technology experience advantages, fuel vehicle users prefer to directly choose intelligent pure electric cars when exchanging. Onvo brand's user portrait accurately confirms this trend. Shen Fei revealed when sharing data that among Onvo's current user group, 35% come from the transformation of BBA and traditional luxury brands, another 30% from joint venture fuel car owners, and another 10% belong to Nio community's increased and repeated purchases and other new energy peers' transformation. This means 85% of sales come from the strong harvesting of the stock market. Onvo's average selling price in the first quarter reached 240,000 yuan, even higher than some traditional luxury brands, thoroughly confirming its positioning as a 'high-quality brand for families'.

When facing the extremely competitive 200,000-level SUV market, the new Onvo L60 will directly engage in a head-on fight with the hegemon Tesla Model Y in this field. Facing the brand worship of Tesla by some consumers, Shen Fei and Li Bin showed strong product confidence. From the product dimension, under the condition that the new Onvo L60 is similar in size to the Model Y, it provides a leapfrog comfort and technology experience. At a price of just over 200,000, L60 not only provides comfort configurations such as refrigerators, TV screens, and big sofas, but the rear row can even fit a 52-liter freezer, perfectly solving the pain points of home users in sun protection, storage, entertainment, and seating comfort.

More killer is its pricing strategy, the whole vehicle purchase is 60,000 to 70,000 yuan cheaper than the Model Y, if adopting the battery leasing model, the purchase threshold is further significantly reduced. Compared to Tesla FSD's high buyout fee of 64,000 yuan in China, Onvo saves users more than 100,000 yuan of real money while providing equal or even better intelligent driving experience in specific scenarios. 'Luxury trim plus large space, plus smarter, plus battery swapping', this is Li Bin's exquisite summary of the new Onvo L60's core competitiveness.

Through this in-depth exchange, it is not difficult to discover that the Nio Group is completing the refined cutting and dimensionality reduction attack on different circle target markets through the '3:6:1' brand matrix. The Nio brand continues to hold the high-end market, serving high-net-worth people with full-scenario technology experience and unique emotional resonance; the upcoming Firefly brand focuses on high-end boutique and ultimate safety in the small car market of more than 100,000; and Onvo, in the core belly, bears the responsibility of mass monetizing the group's underlying technology and providing high-quality tech flagship for the broadest mainstream families. Li Bin frankly admitted that building a new brand is much more difficult than imagined. Currently, Onvo's brand awareness may be equivalent to Nio 6 years ago. Gaining resonance in this era of extremely scarce attention is by no means easy. But in the eyes of industry media, Onvo is not a 'start from zero' new force. Relying on Nio's ten-year grinding system capability, the new Onvo L60 is more like a dimension-raising war initiated by the Nio Group to the mainstream red ocean market after completing the deep water area technical hibernation.

In this long marathon of the automotive industry, evaluating a company's strategic vision over a ten-year cycle is far more real and cruel than using a quarter's sales figures. The launch of the new Onvo L60 marks that Nio officially opens the full-scale harvesting of the basic market of the stock fuel vehicle market in a true sense, which will also become a business sample with extremely high observation value in the development history of China's intelligent electric vehicles this year.