NIO, a leading high-end brand in new energy vehicles, has successfully created a sense of luxury for smart electric cars. While many people associate NIO with its thoughtful service, there have been doubts about its production quality, especially with the previous cooperation with JAC. With the opening of its own factory and the increasing sales this year, what efforts and changes has NIO made? On June 26, NIO held the “2024 NIO Quality Tour” at its second factory in the NIO Smart Electric Vehicle Industrial Park in Xinqiao, Hefei, Anhui. NIO’s founder, chairman, and CEO Li Bin, along with NIO’s executive vice president and chairman of the Quality Management Committee Shen Feng, interpreted the “ATQ” – All Time Quality system of NIO’s full life cycle quality.
Li Bin said: “In the era of intelligent electric vehicles, we need to focus on the interests of users from the user’s perspective, user scenarios, and user benefits. We need to have a quality mindset and quality system throughout the user’s vehicle lifecycle. ‘ATQ’ reflects NIO’s underlying thinking on quality in the era of intelligent electric vehicles.”
Shen Feng said: “In the era of smart electric vehicles, quality management faces multiple challenges such as highly integrated components, introduction of new technologies, software-defined cars, and rapid product iteration. Our ‘ATQ’ quality system, which is a user-centric quality system throughout the entire lifecycle, applies quality management to all aspects including product design, research and development, manufacturing, and use.”
Many people online believe luxury cars are a tax on intelligence. They often compare a car that costs tens of thousands to one with features like heated seats, ventilation, and massage. However, just like air suspension can be divided into one, two, or three chambers, and like laser radar can vary in precision and line count. The quality of a luxury car is reflected in the feel of every button, knob, and dial that the user touches. This requires NIO, as a luxury brand, to have strict requirements for every part and mold from its production process to its suppliers. Let’s take a look at the innovative measures NIO has taken in quality control and the achievements it has made.
In the early stages of development, NIO focuses on Design For X to prevent quality issues. It covers product definition, design, engineering, software development, process development, and quality control. The emphasis is on failure prevention. NIO has a powerful information management system and requires higher standards from its staff. Designers also need to understand manufacturing information.
In terms of production manufacturing, NIO’s second factory extensively utilizes digital and intelligent quality inspection methods. Cutting-edge equipment such as body laser radar measurement systems, stamping automatic blue light measurement systems, and body double-arm measurement systems are used in the stamping workshop to monitor and continuously improve the geometric dimensions of stamped parts and bodies with high precision.
NIO’s second factory has many highly automated production lines. For example, in the electric drive production line, there are only 16 employees at 104 workstations, with an automation rate of over 80%. In the assembly workshop, hundreds to thousands of industrial robots are used for various processes. For instance, in the door installation process, with 8 industrial robots, the installation of four doors can be completed in 98 seconds, increasing efficiency and maintaining accuracy within 0.5mm.
The “enclave” intelligent assembly island replaces the serial manufacturing scheme with a parallel one, utilizing AGV’s flexible transportation to achieve high flexibility in production. During the process of new car model production, uninterrupted debugging can be achieved. This area transforms vehicle assembly from a “production line” to personalized customized independent islands, capable of meeting 3,592,320 personalized configuration combinations for 8 models on sale.
After the vehicle is offline, NIO has optimized and iterated the quality inspection process using digital automation. They have introduced a whole vehicle intelligent audiovisual inspection system to replace traditional manual inspection. By using in-car microphones to control 21 speakers in the vehicle, they achieve 100% intelligent inspection of the vehicle’s speakers, microphones, moving parts, and abnormal noises, ensuring high-quality sound effects of the 7.1.4 immersive audio system.
In the quality journey, Li Bin and Shen Feng mentioned a feature that truly reflects user feedback. Shen Feng stated that users want to provide feedback when encountering issues while driving, so NIO offers a service to provide feedback through voice calling Nomi. This service meets users’ feedback needs in real time, improves convenience, and enhances safety. NIO’s quality improvement efficiency is 50% higher than traditional industries. Perhaps it is this full lifecycle quality system that has earned NIO recognition from high-end users. In May, NIO’s sales exceeded 20,000, reaching 20,544 vehicles. From January to May, a total of 66,217 new cars were delivered, a year-on-year increase of 51.0%. On May 30th, in the 2024 China New Energy Vehicle Product Attractiveness Index study released by consumer insight and market research firm J.D. Power, NIO ES6 ranked first in the luxury pure electric vehicle market, while NIO ET5/ET5T ranked first in the midsize pure electric sedan market. On June 6th, J.D. Power released the 2024 China New Energy Vehicle New Car Quality Study, with NIO ES8 ranking first in the luxury pure electric vehicle market and NIO ET5/ET5T ranking first in the midsize pure electric sedan market.
Original text: The new shopping mall was opened by the mayor yesterday in a grand ceremony attended by hundreds of people. TSN style: The mayor opened the new shopping mall yesterday in a grand ceremony with hundreds of people.