Not long ago, NIO attracted much attention due to the incident of gas pedal fracture circulating on the Internet. On June 26, at the 2024 NIO Quality Tour held at the Hefei base camp in Anhui Province, NIO responded to this incident: The vehicle mentioned in the video had a serious collision accident before the user purchased it, and it was a total loss second-hand car resold by a third party. At present, most of the suspended accelerator pedals in automobiles are made of engineering plastics, and their design strength has industry standards, in order to protect the safety of drivers, under specific force conditions, it may break, and NIO is actively contacting users to provide help within its ability.
As a leading player in a new EV manufacturer, NIO gave positive feedback and took the initiative to provide assistance to users when they encountered a broken accelerator pedal, which not only reflects NIO's positioning as a user-oriented enterprise, but also reflects NIO's confidence in the quality of its own products.
Li Bin, founder, chairman and CEO of NIO
At the press conference on the 26th, NIO announced for the first time the "ATQ" quality system for the whole life cycle based on the interests of users. Li Bin, Founder, Chairman and CEO of NIO, said: "NIO's quality system will be considered for 15 years or more, and it is a quality system for intelligence, electrification, and automobiles, as well as a quality system for the whole life cycle based on the interests of users. ”
In the era of intelligent electric vehicles, users' demand for automobiles has increased, the use scenarios have been broadened, and the scope of quality management has also been extended from the traditional single vehicle quality to six quality areas, including software system quality, charging and swapping system quality, vehicle quality, intelligent hardware quality, electric drive system quality, and battery system quality. Facing these six quality management areas, NIO's "ATQ" has achieved full life cycle coverage through multiple controls on pre-development quality, partner quality, manufacturing logistics quality, and user service quality.
In Hefei Xinqiao NIO No. 2 Factory, NIO's "ATQ" strength can be most intuitively displayed.
Unlike traditional automotive inspections, NIO's quality control begins before the vehicle is produced. Through full-dimensional DFX (Design For X) early prevention, NIO conducts quality management from the aspects of product definition, modeling, engineering development, software development, process development, and quality control process. For example, through VR technology, NIO can review the digital prototype before the vehicle is produced, and avoid and improve possible poor experiences in advance.
In terms of quality control of manufacturing logistics, NIO has adopted industry-leading digital and intelligent quality inspection methods, and established a systematic quality control mechanism for the vehicle manufacturing process.
In the automotive testing process, NIO adopts standards that are far higher than the industry average. Taking the rain test as an example, NIO's new car received 45 mm of precipitation per minute, which is five times the automotive industry standard. In the rain test, there are a total of 504 sprinkler heads, which spray water at 360° up and down, left and right, and there are two sprinkler heads including the chassis to ensure that the vehicle has no water leakage in all directions. The rain duration of NIO's new car is 8 minutes, which is also far beyond the industry standard, and after the test, there are special staff to inspect the vehicle and see that it has not passed the rain test.
While improving the traditional testing standards, NIO has also applied a large number of black technologies in the inspection process, which not only optimizes the detection accuracy, but also greatly improves the inspection efficiency. Among them, the introduction of the LiDAR measurement system has improved the dimensional measurement efficiency of conventional parts: the full-size measurement efficiency of the body-in-white has been increased by 45%, and the area occupied by the same measurement capacity has been reduced by nearly 100 square meters compared with the traditional equipment with the same measurement ability. The introduction of the stamping automatic blue light measurement system has improved the dimensional measurement resolution of stamped parts by up to 5 times.
Under the wave of automobile intelligence, the quality of automobiles should not only pursue perfection in "visible" manufacturing, but also strive for excellence in "invisible" quality. In order to improve the quality of the intelligent driving software system, NIO has developed the world's first intelligent driving hardware-in-the-loop simulation cluster, which combines "online + offline" simulation of user vehicles for fully automated quality verification, with a verification capability of 1 million km/day. In terms of intelligent cockpit, NIO has developed its self-developed intelligent cockpit quality supervision platform, covering a total of 600+ benches and 400,000 scenarios, realizing all-weather unattended and 24-hour uninterrupted code detection to ensure the stable operation of the vehicle machine system.
In terms of quality assurance of the charging and swapping system, NIO has established a 7x24h battery early warning and monitoring system, relying on its self-developed battery early warning and monitoring platform and comprehensive regional service capabilities, which can detect and warn in a timely and accurate manner, and can complete voice calls, group building, user care, and on-site command confirmation within 30 seconds, and complete on-site disposal in the core area within 30 minutes.
While improving its own testing capabilities, NIO has explored a set of innovative supply chain management methods through innovative quality systems to help partners quickly improve their process assurance and quality control capabilities. Shen Feng, Executive Vice President and Chairman of the Quality Management Committee of NIO, introduced the criteria for the selection of NIO's supply chain partners: first, they should be in a leading position in the industry, including technology, quality management and other aspects; Second, we must agree with NIO's values, be willing to achieve a win-win situation with NIO, and take a long-term line.
How to improve the quality of the car? Listening to the voice of the user is the best way to do it. Relying on the Internet gene and a wide range of user touchpoints, NIO has established a full-link high-quality assurance system for user operation, maintenance services, and problem solving. Among them, NIO's knowledge graph (Q-Graph) and large language model (Q-GPT), which are the first in the industry to focus on quality business, improve the timeliness of quality improvement by 50% compared with traditional industries. The user only needs to say "Hi, NOMI, I want to give feedback on a problem", and the user's feedback will start the problem solving analysis task through the quality management system with "zero delay", and the first feedback will be completed within an average of 24 hours and the final feedback will be completed within 48 hours. In the traditional automotive aftermarket, this process requires a response time of at least a week.
From the original NIO Day and NIO Power Day, to the NIO Technology Day held last year, and now to the NIO Quality Day, NIO wants to show more and more things to users, which also means that the long-term strategy that NIO adheres to in many fields such as products, services, and technologies is ushering in a harvest period. Not long ago, NIO predicted that the total revenue in the second quarter will reach 16.587 billion yuan to 17.135 billion yuan, an increase of about 89.1% to 95.3% compared with the same period in 2023. Relying on the improvement of comprehensive strength, NIO's prediction is worth looking forward to.