(Photo source: Nio App)
The next Nio Day, Nio's most important annual event, will be held in Suzhou, a city located about 100 kilometers west of Shanghai, according to information on the company's app.
Nio launched the selection process of cities to host Nio Day 2021 on June 4. On July 3, Hefei, Suzhou, and Xi'an were nominated by the Nio Day 2021 organizing committee.
For the past three weeks, these three cities were displayed on the home page of the Nio App so that users could get to know them.
From July 23 at 7:00 Beijing Time to July 24 at 23:00 was the time Nio allowed users to vote.
The initial voting results showed that Suzhou received 50% of the votes, with 31,771,620 votes, and became the city that will host Nio Day 2021. The date of the event will be decided later this year.
Xi'an received 27% of the votes, and Hefei, where Nio's factory is located, received 23% of the votes.
Nio's final tally showed that Suzhou received 49.3 percent of the vote, or 30,971,620 votes.
In the voting, Nio App users were not given one vote per person, but were counted based on the number of Nio Points they held, which Nio calls "N".
The more Nio Points users hold, the more say they have in deciding major Nio events. For example, the author of this article has 42 Nio Points, so his one vote is counted as 42 votes.
During the voting period, Nio suspended the issuance of new Nio Points to users, and they will be issued on July 25.
Nio usually holds Nio Day at the end of the year or at the beginning of the next year to launch its latest models and technologies. At this year's Nio Day 2020 on January 9, Nio unveiled its first flagship sedan, the Nio ET7.
The host city for Nio Day 2020 was Chengdu, which was chosen by Nio users through such a vote and was the first time Nio used a bid system to decide the location of the event.
This is somewhat similar to the bidding for the Olympics by major cities around the world, with the difference that the applicants for the Nio Day host city are local Nio users.
Back to the latest winner, Suzhou, this is its second Nio Day bid, having been beaten out by Chengdu in last year's competition.
The city is close to Shanghai and is easily accessible by car and public transport for users in Zhejiang and Jiangsu, where Nio has a large number of users.
Data from the local statistics bureau shows that Suzhou's resident population was about 12.75 million by the end of 2020.
By comparison, Shanghai has a population of 24.87 million and New York has about 8.34 million.
Here are views of Suzhou from the Nio App:
