Nio CEO calls for standardisation

Nio founder William Li said China’s electric-vehicle industry is wasting “hundreds of millions of yuan” on individual models and should standardise batteries and chips. (cnevpost.com) Li made the remarks on April 11 at the Intelligent Electric Vehicle Development Forum in Beijing, part of the China EV100 event running April 11-12. He said common battery-cell formats and fewer chip variants could unlock more than 100 billion yuan, about $14.5 billion, in industry-wide savings. (chinaev100.com; carnewschina.com) His argument was simple: carmakers keep launching new models so quickly that suppliers expand for short-lived demand spikes, then sit on underused capacity when sales cool. Li said that mismatch now makes “several hundred million yuan” in waste per model common across the sector. (carnewschina.com; cnevpost.com) He focused on the parts that dominate an electric car’s bill of materials. Li said batteries and semiconductors account for more than half of vehicle cost, and he argued that China could improve supply flexibility if the domestic market converged on four or five standard battery-cell sizes. (cnevpost.com) Li also used Nio’s own vehicles to show how much variety has crept into the system. He said the company’s ES9 uses more than 1,000 semiconductor part numbers and over 4,000 individual chips, and that Nio is trying to cut its internal chip varieties to about 400. (carnewschina.com; cnevpost.com) The timing is tied to margins as China’s electric-vehicle market gets more crowded and price competition keeps squeezing returns. At the same forum, Li said the industry faces a pattern of “increasing volume without increasing revenue, increasing revenue without increasing profit.” (carnewschina.com) Nio has more room than most to make that case because it has just posted stronger numbers. The company reported its first non-GAAP operating profit in the fourth quarter of 2025, with 124,807 deliveries in the quarter, 18.1% vehicle margin, and 45.9 billion yuan in cash and equivalents at year-end. (nio.com) Li also said Nio’s first-quarter 2026 deliveries rose 98.3% from a year earlier to 83,465 vehicles, even as he pushed for fewer bespoke parts across the industry. That puts his standardisation pitch alongside Nio’s own expansion, not in place of it. (carnewschina.com) Nio has already been moving in that direction on batteries. In March 2025, it signed a strategic partnership with Contemporary Amperex Technology, known as CATL, to build a battery-swapping network and work on unified battery standards and national standards for swapping technology in China. (nio.com) Li’s latest message was narrower than a call for identical cars. He said the savings would come from making core components more interchangeable, so the next sales spike does not leave the industry paying for another round of stranded capacity. (cnevpost.com; carnewschina.com)