Is the Swanky Nio ET9 We Drove China’s S-Class Sport-Utility Sedan?

We just spent a week with Chinese EV startup Nio, driving products that bracket its range: The compact Firefly EV, aimed squarely at Mini, the family crossover Onvo L60, perhaps China’s strongest Tesla Model Y competitor, and now the flagship ET9, a giant-slaying “land jet” with an SUV-like ride height, aimed squarely at the often chauffeur-driven Mercedes S-Class and BMW 7 Series.

All week we were struck by similarities between Nio and Tesla. Both have spent a great deal of capital assuaging buyers’ range and charging anxiety—Tesla with its Supercharger network and Nio with Power Swap battery-swapping stations and chargers. Both companies place strong emphasis on the digital realm with their engineering workforces heavily skewed toward software development, each favors a centralized computing electrical architecture, and both companies design and build their own AC induction and permanent-magnet electric motors.

Nio was founded in 2014, six years after Elon Musk became Tesla CEO as the Roadster went on sale. Its first product, the ES8 large luxury SUV, arrived in 2018, followed closely by a string of upscale sedans, wagons, and SUVs. Has this young company learned to walk well enough to try running with the executive sedan big dogs?

Gravitas

Dimensionally, the ET9 has presence, splitting the length difference between the ultimate Benz and BMW sedans on a wheelbase about an inch and a half longer. It’s also way wider and taller than both, and the wheel centers remain upright as the wheels turn, just like on a Rolls-Royce (and Volkswagen GTI).

Nio head of design Kris Tomasson left BMW to join Nio as one of the 12 original employees. He describes the unconventional ET9 as “a car I always wanted to do. I wanted to take the best [aspects] of SUVs—command seating position, maximum interior volume—and put them into a more sedanlike profile.”

He also notes that his team’s unsolicited design led to the ET9’s development—there had been no product-planning mandate for it. The grille-less nose, fastback (not hatchback) shape, and higher ride height separate the ET9 from the establishment players, but will they separate rich people from six-figure money?

See All 31 Photos31

Trailblazing Technology

Flagships give manufacturers an opportunity to show off and boast, and the ET9 affords many such opportunities, most of which pay off where it counts most: comfort, convenience, and safety.

• World-first cloud-connected electrohydraulic active air suspension: Hailing from Boston-based ClearMotion (in which Nio is invested), SkyRide suspends the vehicle weight on air springs, integrating a high-speed hydraulic pump at each corner that can lift each wheel up over a bump or press it down into a hole through 4 inches of travel very quickly—especially when traversing roads previously mapped to the cloud by other Nio vehicles.

• World-first 925V electrical architecture capable of 600-kW or 765A charging: OK, it’s only 1 volt more than Lucid, and granted, there is currently no place to charge at 600 kW or 765A, but the ET9 is well future-proofed.

• World-class AQUILA ADAS sensing suite: One ultralong-range high-precision lidar, two wide-field-of-view side lidars, one 4D imaging radar, seven 8-megapixel plus four 3-megapixel cameras, 12 ultrasonic sensors, one V2X route-synergy sensing unit, one high-precision inertial vehicle positioning unit, plus driver monitoring and capacitive steering-wheel sensing.

• World-class ADAM centralized computing cluster: Communication, cabin, driving, and vehicle control domains are centralized, running a SkyOS full-vehicle operating system on two Shenji NX9031 chips designed and manufactured by Nio, not by Nvidia or Qualcomm. The various vehicle sensors report to zone controllers that connect to ADAM.

• Safety-certified steer-by-wire: Nio and a consortium of Chinese manufacturers interested in offering steer-by-wire developed a certification program to ensure triple-layer redundancy. They are:
• First layer: Having two of everything
• Second layer: The components and programming of the different pieces in layer one are produced by different suppliers and by different teams to reduce likelihood of similar failure
• Third layer: The vehicle is programmed to yaw the car using the brakes if all of the above fails.

• World-first W-pin stator winding: Much like Lucid’s woven stator-winding method, Nio’s shaping of the wire allows it to be rolled up and inserted into the stator housing, matching the copper density of hairpin windings while requiring 95 percent less welding. And by using 12 wires, Nio achieves three phases plus a neutral, so the stator can serve as the inductor, simplifying the charging hardware. It’s fed by an in-house designed and built 1,200V silicon-carbide power module that boasts 1,315 kW/L power density.

See All 31 Photos31

Confident Power

Flagships aren’t about railgun acceleration, but if the owner’s power and position provoke a pursuit, they may need to be agile and quick enough to evade. The Nio ET9 fits a 456-hp permanent-magnet motor at the rear spinning 12.65:1 gearing and a 241-hp AC induction unit in front with 10.18:1 drive, combining for 697 hp. Both motors package their drive reduction and differentials concentrically, as Lucid does.

In a 5,250-pound car, Nio reckons that’s good for a 3.8-second blast to 62 mph, which aligns with our experience. And it’s exceptionally good at wafting away from a stop with g-loading that wouldn’t spill a drink resting on the rear tray table.

Creature Comforts

Naturally, the whole interior is swathed in stitched, quilted, and ambiently lit splendor. The 16-point massage system is notable for offering Chinese, Swedish, and Thai-style massages including hot stone. And in use, they do indeed feel more like stones or human knuckles than they do pulsating air bladders.

There’s a safe behind the rear armrest and a slide-out drawer that can be cooled or heated to between 28 and 131 degrees. Naturally, there are screens aplenty—most of them OLED high-resolution, high-contrast, cinema-color jobs—though the de rigueur cross-car front screen is quite thin—just tall enough to give the front passenger vital information like karaoke lyrics.

Note that you can’t even see the vents. They’re just below that cross-car screen, with the Coandă effect keeping the air attached to the curved surface so it flows horizontally out. They’re aimable via the screen, and there’s an oscillating option, but mostly the intention is that they feel like central air—not a fan blowing on anybody.

The central infotainment and rear screens all support Dolby Vision with Atmos, and the suspension can contribute 4D Sensurround realism to certain movies while parked.

See All 31 Photos31

Nio Lyra 8.2.4.8 Sound

This 2,800-watt 35-speaker system boasts a world-first rear center-channel speaker, as rear ears are too far away from the center dash speaker. The system employs eight channels, two subwoofers, four Dolby Atmos pillar-mounted surround speakers, and eight headrest speakers (which contribute most of the active-noise-cancellation sound programming in addition to music). The sound clearly rivals that of any other high-end automotive system we’ve sampled.

Stiff and Safe

Nio claims its 90-ish percent aluminum structure, which employs megacastings front and rear, ultra-high-strength steel where it’s best suited, and a magnesium cross-car beam, has a torsional rigidity of 52,600 Nm/degree. That bests the current S Class’ claimed 40,500. And a rare safety feature enabled by the active suspension is its ability to instantly elevate the rear or side of the vehicle in advance of a collision.

Battery, Charging, and Range

The ET9 gets a 100-kWh battery pack, which is good for 404 miles of CLTC (the highly optimistic Chinese test cycle) range. Heaven knows how quickly it will charge if and when the 600-kW charging it supports becomes available; presumably 10 minutes or less.

But like every other Nio, it can swap a depleted battery for a charged one in as little as 3 minutes, using Nio’s network of 3,275 Power Swap stations. Nio also offers buyers the option of battery-as-a-service leasing, which discounts the purchase price by $17,920 in exchange for a $179 monthly battery lease payment.

See All 31 Photos31

So How Does the ET9 Ride and Drive?

We drove it for a day and were shuttled in the back for the rest of the week, which was quite a treat—especially after we learned enough Chinese to control our massaging seats. The suspension does an admirable job of smoothing out imperfections, but they’re never completely erased, and there’s room to improve the sound isolation (or cancelation) when hitting bumps.

SkyRide is particularly great at managing bridge transitions, most of which it can anticipate thanks to cloud connectivity, so it goes up on its tiptoes just ahead of the transition, absorbs it, then settles down. Quick steering, acceleration, or braking inputs result in very little roll, pitch, or dive.

The steer-by-wire system seems easier to acclimate to than the Tesla Cybertruck’s partly because its ratio is slightly slower (ranging from 6:1 to 14:1 versus CT’s 5:1–12:1), and because the wheel seems to turn farther at low speeds (240 degrees lock to lock). Here, as with the CT, steering the rear wheels up to 8.3 degrees gives this big car a tight 35.8-foot turn circle, allowing U-turns in just three lanes and greatly reducing the stress of navigating through tight parking garages.

It seemed exceptionally easy to drive the ET9 as a chauffeur would, executing martini-slosh-proof acceleration and braking, as our chauffeur for the rest of the week, Tiny, continually demonstrated while we took advantage of the 16-point massage, the seven sunshades, and the G650-jet-inspired overhead console that subdivides the panoramic roof (designer Tomasson also did a stint at Gulfstream).

ADAS Impressions Limited

Nio Assisted Driving (NAD) and Navigate on Pilot Plus (NOP+) are a subscription service costing $95 and $53 per month, but a serious crash involving a vehicle navigating on an ADAS system the week before our trip had everybody pausing their level-two-plus systems, so our ET9 basically just had cruise control with lane change functionality. So AQUILA’s lidars and cameras were mostly along for the ride with us.

See All 31 Photos31

What Does All This Flagship Gear Cost?

Battery lessees can get into a Nio ET9 for as little as $92,400 or pay $110,320 for a black or white car with batteries Included. Five colors cost $1,400, while Midnight Ceramic Blue (which gets 60 hours of hand polishing) costs $4,200.

Beyond those choices, there are some extra-cost wheels and brake caliper colors, but everything else is pretty much included. With the price of an analogous Mercedes EQS or BMW i7 spanning from about $145,000–$185,000, the ET9’s value proposition should seem irreproachable in China and might even tolerate quite a bit of tariff inflation, but U.S. sales prospects are exceedingly slim.

Might Americans Ever Get Any of This?

Probably not. But Nio holds no exclusive rights to SkyRide, and we’re eager for this American technology to hit our highways with another OEM. And a technological alliance between Nio and McLaren’s holding company could put some other Nio technology in American hands that can swing a McLaren budget. Otherwise, we have to hope local OEMs are buying, tearing down, and reverse-engineering the ET9’s coolest stuff.