Nio's latest NOP+ could be used outside of Greater China, further demonstrating its algorithm's ability to adapt to different traffic rules and driving scenarios, Morgan Stanley said.
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Nio (NYSE: NIO) said its NOP+ (Navigate on Pilot Plus) feature is now available for use on virtually all roads nationwide in China, a day after a similar development was announced by local peer Xpeng (NYSE: XPEV).
Harry Wong, the electric vehicle (EV) maker's head of smart driving products and experiences, announced the development in a March 1 post on the Nio App, calling the mode Unlimited Mode.
Wong announced that Nio began recruiting a group of 100 people to join NOP+'s Unlimited Mode as pioneer testers.
With Unlimited Mode activated, NOP+ can be used on virtually any road in China, with the exception of a few roads with special control measures, Wong said.
"In particular, the scope of 'nationwide' here refers to all administrative regions in the Chinese mainland, Macau and Hong Kong special administrative regions, and Taiwan province," he said.
"Per the company, its latest NOP+ could be used outside of Greater China, further demonstrating its algorithm's ability to adapt to different traffic rules and driving scenarios," Morgan Stanley analyst Tim Hsiao's team said in a research note yesterday.
NOP+ is Nio's ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance System), which was initially available only on highways.
At the first Nio IN 2023 Innovation Day event held on September 21, 2023, Nio announced that NOP+'s coverage had officially expanded from highways to urban roads, providing users with a full-scenario point-to-point intelligent driving experience.
Nio is relying on what it calls "group intelligence" to enable NOP+ to cover a rapidly growing number of milage in China, reaching 651,640 kilometers at the end of January, double the number announced at the end of December.
Group intelligence has maintained its rapid growth over the past four months, with NOP+ now covering 83 percent of the main roads in China's county-level cities with coverage of no less than 90 percent of the roads, Wong said.
In the fourth quarter of last year Nio launched an engineering test to use the Unlimited Mode as a complement to the group intelligence validation mode, he said.
Next week, Nio's vice president of smart driving research and development, Ren Shaoqing, will announce more information about NOP+, according to Wong.
Among the information to be announced is that even without relying on Unlimited Mode, the validation mileage of group intelligence still allows NOP+ to achieve nationwide availability, Wong said.
A day before Wong announced the development, Xpeng announced on February 29 that its XNGP (Xpeng Navigation Guided Pilot) feature became available on all roads in China in unlimited XNGP mode.
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