NIO announces electric flagship car ET7, with next-generation self-driving chip, battery can be separated | TechNews Technology News
January 10, 2021
Image Source:NIO
NIO today announced the new electric flagship sedan ET7, which is fully focused on the autonomous driving system. It is equipped with 33 different types of sensors and is equipped with Nvidia’s new generation car chip Orin. It also provides two battery solutions for consumers. You can choose to buy out or rent.
Weilai Automobile (NIO), known as China‘s Tesla, held NIO Day today and announced the new electric flagship sedan ET7. It is their first large sedan, and it is really big.
▲The length and wheelbase are amazing. You can imagine how spacious the car is.
The computing power reaches 7 times Tesla
In addition to the appearance, the most eye-catching feature of ET7 is the use of Nvidia’s latest car chip Orin. This is the first appearance of this new chip. If the data is as powerful as the official claim, then ET7 has the current commercially available electric car The most powerful computer in the world, but before introducing the computer, let’s take a look at its image sensing system.
The various image sensing systems on the ET7 are called Aquila. There are 33 sensors in total, including 11 8 million pixel camera lenses, 1 long-range LiDAR, 5 millimeter wave radars, 12 ultrasonic radars, and 2 high-speed radars. Fine locator. This huge sensor can generate up to 8GB of image data per second. Of course, it needs to be supported by powerful enough computing power to allow the computer to make correct driving judgments.
▲The roof of ET7 has a watchtower design to create a more all-round digital vision.
To digest such a huge amount of data quickly, not only the chip itself must be powerful, but NIO also designed a set of high-speed data distribution architecture, which can dynamically allocate 32GB of data per second to four computing cores. These four chips make up What Weilai calls the “ADAM” self-driving computer.
ADAM has 48 A78 cores, 256 Tensor Cores, 8,096 CUDA cores, and a total computing power of up to 1,016 TOPS. “This makes ET7’s computing power more than 7 Tesla FSD computing power combined.” Wei Lai CEO Li Bin said at the presentation. It is proud to announce that the war of high-end smart electric vehicles is not only more than horsepower, but also more than computing power. ET7 is very confident in leading the autonomous driving battlefield.
▲The Weilai ADAM trip computer has four Nvidia Orin chips, the top two are the main control, the bottom left is the backup chip, and the bottom right is dedicated to personalized training.
The NIO ET7 comes standard with very complete safety and assisted driving functions, but to fully utilize the computing power of the new platform, car owners must purchase the monthly subscription-based NAD (Nio Autonomus Drive) service. The monthly fee is RMB 680. Including the automatic driving of some roads, automatic parking and calling in parking lots, etc., but it has not been stated whether the automatic driving they provide can reach Level 3 or higher.
Battery buyout or monthly rent optional
Weilai also brought a unique battery separation purchase mechanism this time. Car owners can choose to buy out the battery or rent the battery. Taking a 100 Kwh battery pack as an example, choosing to rent will reduce the price by 130,000 yuan (about NT$550,000). ), but a monthly fee of 1,480 yuan (about NT$6,300) is required.
▲Pre-orders for the founding version of ET7 are currently open, and the battery buy-out price of the vehicle is 526,000 yuan.
Under the battery rental scheme, the price of a new ET7 car can be reduced to 390,000 yuan, which is almost half the price of Model S. Another advantage of renting a battery is that you don’t have to worry about battery life degradation when you want to sell the vehicle later.
In conjunction with the battery rental program, NIO also released the second-generation replacement station. The battery capacity of each station is increased, allowing more cars to be replaced. At the same time, the replacement procedure is improved, shortening the replacement time, which can be about 5 minutes. carry out.
The large car market is difficult
Weilai released its flagship sedan for the first time this time. It can be said that it came from the benchmark Model S, but in terms of sales volume, even the Model S is difficult to sell. In the current electric car market, SUVs are the absolute king, followed by low-priced electric cars, and then Model 3 medium-sized RVs. Large luxury cars are more like the firepower display of a car factory, and can be said to be a benchmark for declaring taste.
▲The ET7 looks like a Tesla inside, but has more driving instruments and the automatic driving assistant NOMI in front.
This time, the price of ET7 directly drops to the level of Model 3, which is really a last resort. Observing the announcement of Wei Lai carefully, not only the price has dropped significantly, but also various safety assistance functions that are standard on the whole car series, such as heating and massage for the front and rear seats, 5G connection plus in-car WiFi 6, 23 in-car speakers, head-up display and With 7 airbags and intelligent vehicle chassis control, plus a lifetime warranty, lifetime charging discounts, lifetime free roadside assistance, lifetime free offsite charging, lifetime free vehicle networking services, this actually reveals a dangerous message: Wei I’m really anxious.
From the perspective of cost performance, the competitiveness of ET7 is too high. It has a battery life of more than 600 kilometers, a zero-hundred acceleration of less than 4 seconds, full safety protection, and looks good interior and design, and it is now the number one car in 2022. The car will be delivered in season. It seems that Weilai is betting their future on this car.
