At the Nio Day event on January 9, 2021, Nio will unveil its first sedan, 150kWh battery, NT2.0 autonomous driving platform, and second-generation battery swap station, Nio co-founder and president Qin Lihong said on December 22 at the 100kWh battery sharing session, according to Autohome.com.cn.
This is not the first time we have seen the talk about the 150kWh battery. On October 30, at Nio's top user club, EP Club, Nio founder William Li Bin said that Nio was working on a 150kWh battery pack that will give its cars a range of more than 900km.
This means that even compared to fuel-efficient Japanese hybrids, Nio will be able to get more mileage from one battery cell than these hybrids can get from one tank of gas.
If the 150kWh battery pack is put into use, it would effectively more than double an ES6's range of 430km.
Nio is currently offering 70kWh and 84kWh battery packs, and it is expected to start offering 100kWh battery packs at the end of November when the maximum range of the Nio vehicles will increase even further.
There is no clear information as to whether the first Nio sedan is the previously announced Nio ET or not.
Announced at the Shanghai Auto Show in April 2019, the Nio ET is positioned as a midsize sedan and is expected to be named the ET7 when it is in production.
The car's main competitors in China after its launch will be the Tesla Model 3, BYD Han EV, and Xpeng P7.
In addition, there are reports that Qin also mentioned that Nio will announce its plans of using LIDAR at Nio Day and Nio's solution is more powerful than what is currently being discussed in the Chinese auto industry.
He also mentioned the capacity ramp-up plan for the 100 kWh battery pack: 1,500 units are expected to be released to the market in December, more than 3,000 units in January, no estimated figures are available for February due to the Chinese New Year, and the number will stabilize at more than 4,000 units in March and beyond.
As for the second-generation battery swap station, Nio has previously revealed that it will cost less to build than the current model and will hold more batteries, or even double the number.
With the launch of the second generation battery swap station, Nio will accelerate the layout of battery swap stations to alleviate the problem of shortage of resources for battery replacement.
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