There are several reasons why NIO's sub-brands may hit the sweet spot even if their luxury brand, NIO, hasn't hit the home run yet. If the NIO brand costs a little too much, there are a lot of ways to produce a great car and yet still cut 10's of thousands off of the bottom line:
BaaS saves you 10K, along with one motor instead of the standard 2 motors/AWD on all NIO's. That's close to 20K dollars off, and remove the expensive ADAS system AND cut down on the most powerful computer in any production vehicle (1016 TOPS- trillion operations per second), and you still have an incredible luxury car for 25K-30K off the top of a NIO. Call it an Onvo (I preferred Alps), and they could sell like hotcakes!
NIO has spent a lot of money on R & D, and that stuff pays off in the long run. The lower end mass market sub-brand, Firefly, will also benefit from all of the R & D spending, along with the iconic battery swapping since around 94-95% of all Chinese in the big cities live in apartment buildings where BaaS will be greeted with open arms because they can't install home chargers and nobody wants to WAIT for a charger so they can WAIT for their car to charge.
The Onvo will be introduced next month, and start sales in the 3rd quarter, while the lower mass market, Firefly, will start selling in the first half of 2025.
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