As Nio celebrates 75,000 sales it has launched its first autonomous-capable vehicle, the ET7 sedan, with a 150-kWh "production-ready" solid-state battery pack and the second version of its automated battery-swap station, which could effectively top you up in a matter of minutes.
The ET7 is a four-door sedan priced around the US$70,000 mark. Peak power is 480 kW (643 hp), split between a 180-kW (241-hp) motor driving the front wheels and a 300-kW (402-hp) unit at the rear. Peak torque is 850 Nm (627 lb-ft), and acceleration will be very quick at 3.9 seconds from 0-100 km/h (0-62 mph).
The windscreen and rear window host some of the car's 33 environmental sensors which can generate up to 8 GB of data every second, to be fed through four Nvidia Drive Orin processors to enable autonomous driving with data-crunching capabilities seven times greater than Tesla's current-gen in-house FSD computers.
The ET7 will launch with 70- and 100-kWh battery pack options, and by the end of 2022, there'll also be a whopping-big 150-kWh pack using a high-density solid-state technology that Nio says is production-ready. With an impressive energy density of 360 Wh/kg (the current Tesla Model 3 battery offers around 260 Wh/kg), this beast of a thing will give the ET7 an outrageous range over 1,000 km (621 miles) on a charge, says the company.
Nio doesn't appear to be making this battery itself, which means that the solid-state pack will likely to be available to other manufacturers that work with the same supplier.
Range per charge may be less of an issue for Nio drivers than others anyway; the company also launched the second version of its Power Swap Station. It's claimed that cars will drive themselves into these small boxes, and as you sit there, the entire battery pack will be automatically dropped out from under the car and replaced with a fresh one. The Power Swap 2.0 box, says Nio, will charge and swap as many as 312 batteries a day, running a diagnostic on each vehicle to identify faults early.
The ET7 will go on sale complete with battery, or there will be pay less up front and subscribe to a "Battery as a Service" (BaaS) model that enables a battery out at any of 500 Power Swap stations planned to be built across China by the end of 2021. BaaS versions will start around US$58,000, and may prove attractive not just to long-haul travellers, but also to people that might live in apartments or other places with nowhere to charge.
The ET7 is available for pre-order now, with deliveries starting in early 2022. At this stage it's only available in China.
Source: Nio