Nio aims to complete the validation of 250,000 kilometers of NOP+ urban pilot routes by the end of the year, more than quadrupling the initial target announced in September.
(Image credit: Nio)
Nio (NYSE: NIO) has significantly increased its target for urban road coverage of its ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance System) software, NOP+ (Navigate on Pilot Plus), moving its previously announced timeline forward.
The company is confident that it will complete the validation of 250,000 kilometers of NOP+ urban pilot routes across 200 cities by the end of the year, Nio's vice president of intelligent driving research and development, Ren Shaoqing, announced today.
By the second quarter of 2024, Nio will complete 400,000 kilometers of NOP+ urban pilot routes validated in more than 230 cities, Ren said in a post on the Nio App.
This means that NOP+ urban pilot routes will cover 96 percent of Nio's users' resident cities, he said.
The latest target expands the planned mileage coverage by the end of the year to more than four times the original, but cautiously maintains the target for the second quarter of next year.
Speaking at the first Nio IN 2023 Innovation Day event on September 21, Ren said Nio was aiming for 60,000 kilometers of NOP+ urban pilot-assisted driving coverage in the fourth quarter.
In the first quarter of 2024, that number would rise to 200,000 kilometers, and by the second quarter of 2024 it would reach 400,000 kilometers, Ren said in September.
Nio announced at the September event that NOP+ coverage had officially expanded from highways to urban roads, providing users with a point-to-point smart driving experience with full-area access.
Unlike its major peers, including Xpeng (NYSE: XPEV) and Li Auto (NASDAQ: LI), which planned to advance the feature's coverage by city, Nio chose to advance the effort by road mileage.
Nio began allowing users to submit wish lists in late September in order to prioritize routes for pilot-assisted driving services.
Nio's next-generation static-aware network, NAD Lane 2.0, senses intersection information in real time, eliminating the need to rely on high-definition maps, Ren said at the Nio In event in September.
NAD (Nio Autonomous Driving) has reached 38,100 POPS of distributed computing power for its fleet of group intelligence systems, which will help NOP+ not rely on HD maps and be able to evolve in real time, he said at the time.
Over the past two months, Nio has received more than 30,000 user-wish routes, and they have become an important reference for the company to conduct route openings, Ren said today.
Ren unveiled specific progress on Nio's validation of NOP+ urban area pilot routes:
As of June 30, Nio completed validation of 807 kilometers of urban pilot routes in Shanghai.
As of September 27, the cumulative total of routes validated in Shanghai and Beijing reached 6,457 kilometers.
As of November 19, Nio completed the validation of a total of 34,477 km of routes in 17 cities.
As of November 29, Nio had completed the verification of 124,343 km of routes in 75 cities.
As of December 12, a total of 195,270 kilometers of routes have been validated in 134 cities.
The hyperscale distributed computing power from the smart hardware that comes standard on models based on the NT 2.0 platform has helped Nio increase NOP+ available road coverage in Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities, and has helped the feature expand to underdeveloped counties and townships, according to Ren.
It has also helped Nio make NOP+ available more quickly in areas that are harder for regular test vehicles to reach in a short period of time, according to Ren.
As the group intelligence system continues to operate and the mileage coverage of users and the test fleet grows, the number of miles and cities covered by NOP+ urban pilot routes will grow further, he said.
Nio will push the Banyan 2.3.0 system to all eligible vehicles in China, which will provide a full-area piloting experience that offers pilot driving on highways, urban roads and between battery swap stations, Ren said.
Nio to extend NOP+ coverage to urban areas, targets 60,000 km available by Q4
