As the only local Chinese electric car brand with a foothold in the premium market, Nio has strong technological capabilities, and the company is not shy about showing them off.
Nio has built its first global technology showroom in China's tallest building, the Shanghai Tower, to showcase its technology reserves to the public.
Shanghai Tower is a landmark skyscraper in Shanghai, with 127 floors above ground and 5 floors below ground, and a total height of 632 meters.
The building was opened on July 28, 2018, and it has underground parking for up to 2,000 vehicles.
Nio's technology showroom, which is based on the original Nio House upgrade, showcases the vehicle materials of the ET7, as well as the technological details of NAD, the latest autonomous driving technology that the sedan is equipped with, the Nio Aquila super-sense system, and the Nio Adam supercomputing platform.
The all-aluminum body of the Nio ES8 is shown here, which the company says is the first independently developed and mass-produced lightweight product of this kind in China, with 96.4 percent aluminum content.
Nio selected 561 patented inventions from over 4,200 patents and created a Nio patent wall in the exhibition hall, covering vehicle manufacturing and design, battery swap and charging technology, autonomous driving technology, digital cockpit technology and connected vehicle technology.
Nio Power Cloud-related technologies are also on display, allowing visitors to see how vehicles, battery swap stations, charging piles and cloud servers work together.
Nio said the technology showroom took about three months from concept design in April this year to final exhibition.
According to Xia Qinghua, assistant vice president and general manager of Nio Shanghai, Nio has invested more than RMB 40 billion ($6.2 billion) in R&D since its establishment. In the next few years, Nio will also maintain an annual R&D investment of at least RMB 5 billion.
