NIO Houses are behind the EV maker’s success

I’ve followed NIO since its birth in 2014 as NextEV. (I attended an EV Formula One race in Beijing in 2015 in which NextEV TCR had a car in the race. I still have the gimme cap!) The Chinese name, 蔚来汽车, has not changed but NextEV changed the English name to NIO in 2016. 蔚来 translates as “blue sky coming.”

When I read that NIO is staying focused on the China market as other EV makers in China are looking to export their way out of a domestic sales slump, I started thinking about those early NIO days, including visiting a NIO House in Shanghai and interviewing my long time friend Jack Cheng, one of the NIO co-founders, for a ChinaEV blog. (I didn’t interview him at the NIO House….)

While NIO’s sales grew steadily, like many EV startups it wasn’t profitable. Well, in 2025 that changed. In the fourth quarter of 2025, NIO turned a profit. For the full year, It turned a net loss on sales that were up 46.9% in 2025 to 326,028 units. , but the loss shrank by one-third compared to the previous year.

I decided to see if NIO had achieved this while sticking to its original concept, which was, Jack told me in 2017, that “nothing is more important than the user.” The other EV startups might be successful too, he said. “But they are too focused on the technology. They aren’t focused on how to make the user happy and make a joyful life. It is easy to say but it is very hard to do.”

Did NIO stick with its focus on how to make the user happy as the path to profitability? I asked Jack, who moved on in 2019 and became CEO then chairman of M Mobility. It did, he said.  “NIO still perseveres with joyful lifestyle for UX/UI,” he said.

There is even a NIO Life line of products, “the original lifestyle brand to shape a joyful lifestyle.”

NIO House as data hub

NIO Houses have persevered, as well. Indeed, they are central to NIO’s continued success. There are now 171 worldwide. Once limited to owners of a NIO vehicle, they are now open to all as community spaces. The EV maker moved away from the high-tech feel of the early NIO Houses and began to open some in historic buildings. Each NIO House includes a café, a library, conference rooms, smaller meeting spaces, a living-room like lounge and even childcare.

Opening the NIO Houses to the general public was a master stroke in this age of AI. Now, its vehicle design can draw on insights gained from how people use the NIO houses because you know that they are gathering tons of data about visitors’ habits, likes, dislikes, etc. Indeed, Jack said that NIO’s user experience and user interface technologies “are evolving with AI data driven by expanded customer communities.”

Focus on the high end segment

NIO offers three brands: NIO, the premium flagship brand; ONVO, aimed at families; and Firefly, a “lifestyle mobility brand: targeting young consumers. In 2025, NIO brand sold 178,806 units; ONVO sold 107,808 and Firefly sold 39,414 units.

It’s likely that the NIO brand’s sales and percentage of overall sales will continue to grow. The NIO ES8 full-sized premium SUV accounted for 32% of deliveries in the fourth quarter of 2025, up from single digits earlier in the year. That boosted the EV maker’s average selling price per vehicle to 253,000 yuan (US $37,337 at current exchange rates) in Q4 versus 221,000 yuan in Q3.

The ES8 goes for around the equivalent of $59,000 in China, including the battery. NIO also offers a Battery-as-a-Subscription plan, which drops the starting price by around $10,500. In April, at the Beijing Auto Show aka Auto China, NIO debuted the ES9, a larger more luxurious and technologically advanced SUV aimed at executives. The full launch was in May, with a starting price of around $72,000. This focus on the high-end segment – different from its competitors in China — should allow NIO to continue to thrive, Jack told me.

I was pleased to see my friend Tu Le, in one of his publications, said NIO is “heating up.” Timely!

To return to NIO Houses, they turned out to be a brilliant idea, especially with the advent of AI. I always wondered if they would be successful. I guess my question has been answered.