In the 137-year long development history of the global automobile industry, the mysterious and distant East has given birth to such a "unique" car maker: He has no interest in making money. What he likes to do most is to "stick" with users who have bought their own cars, listen to them sing, take photos with them, and give them red envelopes;

He has no feeling about spending big money. Whenever there is a budget application in the company in the name of "improving user experience", he has never been stingy with more than "100 million".

On the contrary, he is a bit stingy when it comes to spending small amounts of money. For example, at a business banquet, when there are too many dishes to eat, he will feel sad and regret:

It would be great if this money could be spent on users.

He doesn't care much about "losing hundreds or tens of thousands on selling a car" and always regards "loss is actually another form of investment" as a standard answer when faced with questions.

In the first half of this year, the company lost a total of 10.8 billion and sold 54,561 vehicles. The average loss per vehicle was nearly 200,000, which is equivalent to 2.4 times the per capita disposable income of Shanghai's urban residents in 2022 (84,000 yuan).

Source: NIO Hong Kong Stock Exchange Announcement

However, even though the bad news far outweighed the good news, he still maintained the same ability to control his emotions as before. He was rarely like other Chinese car manufacturers, who would either brag and glare at the people around him when nothing happened, or kill 10 close comrades who had eaten bran with him within a year.

The evaluations of those who have worked with him, whether internal subordinates or external stakeholders, are unprecedentedly consistent:A good person.

In fact, it is difficult for you to connect this "good man" with his identity as a "businessman". A more appropriate identity label is: philanthropist.

That's right, he is Li Bin, the founder, chairman, CEO, and CTO of Weilai.

Now, this man who has done all the good deeds in the car manufacturing industry has shined the light of righteousness on a new industry:cell phone.

At the NIOIN 2023 Innovation and Technology Day, Weilai officially released its first mobile phone NIOPhone. The new phone has three versions, priced at 6,499 yuan for the performance version, 6,899 yuan for the flagship version, and 7,499 yuan for the EPedition version.

The starting price is far ahead of the one next door, a full 500 yuan cheaper.

Use the phone for one minute and be happy for 60 seconds

Unlike mobile phone manufacturers like Huawei that want every Chinese to have access to 5G, as a smart electric car manufacturer, NIO only wants to make mobile phones for one thing: to make car owners happy.

In Li Bin’s words: NIOPhone is a mobile phone designed for NIO car owners.

This was the original intention set by the team when the company was establishing the mobile phone business more than a year ago. It is also the most concise and powerful response to the question "Why does NIO build mobile phones?"

Based on the common sense that "Nio car owners are very noble in society", a mobile phone designed for Weilai car owners must be "top-notch".

This kind of "highest respect" is mainly reflected in eight words:The hardware is hard enough and the software is clean enough.

In terms of hardware, NIOPhone comes standard with Qualcomm's second-generation Snapdragon 8 leading version chip, with a maximum optional 16GB+1T combination; it comes standard with a 2K resolution 6.81-inch OLED curved screen that supports 120Hz refresh rate;

It comes standard with a 5200mAh battery that supports 66W wired fast charging and 50W wireless fast charging, and can support 10W wireless reverse charging; it comes standard with a 50-megapixel main camera, ultra-wide-angle and periscope telephoto; it supports large-area ultrasonic fingerprints, 3D fingerprint recognition, and IP68 waterproofing.

This pile of hardware is indeed qualified to qualify as an Android flagship, but it will be launched at this point in 2023, which is a bit of a loss of time. After being far ahead and being bombarded by the iPhone 15, everyone is tired and tired.

Hardware is obviously not the selling point of NIOPhone, software is barely.

NIOPhone is equipped with SkyUI developed by NIO, with zero system advertisements and zero commercial pre-installation, except for its own NIO APP.

How clean is the NIOPhone system? It’s so clean that I, an iPhone user for thousands of years, felt a little excited after a short trial. After all, most of the reasons for rejecting Android phones over the years stem from a deep hatred of complicated advertisements.

The lack of advertising is essentially the biggest and only attraction of NIOPhone to non-Nio car owners.

As for why it is so laborious to make the mobile phone system double zero, Li Bin’s high EQ answer is:His wife was “driven crazy” by a certain domestic mobile phone advertisement.

Of course, the answer to the low (true) emotional (positive) quotient is: Weilai doesn’t make money with this phone at all, so it doesn’t care about the advertising revenue.

Woxiao is one of the first APPs

A little estimation can verify the correctness of this answer: As of the first half of this year, NIO's cumulative delivery volume was 352,623 units. Optimistic estimates suggest that each car owner supports 2 units, and NIOPhone shipments are only over 700,000 units, accounting for only 3.77% of the single-month market in July this year (18.552 million units). If calculated based on 148 million units shipped in the first seven months of this year, NIOPhone's market share is only 0.47%.

It is obviously a wiser approach for Weilai to give up the installed advertising revenue brought by this market share and become a clean stream in the current Android ecosystem.

The flagship hardware configuration, coupled with NIO's self-developed Android system, which is the only pure and unlimited version in the industry, allows NIO Phone to meet the imagination of many NIO car owners for a backup phone. You can easily find NIO car owners who have ordered two or more NIOPhones at the NIOIN 2023 Innovation and Technology Day, but it is difficult to find NIO car owners who have not bought a single NIOPhone.

In my opinion, Weilai has arranged all aspects of NIOPhone very well, but it is a little slack on two major things:

First, the difference in improvement between the functions provided by the mobile phone and the functions implemented by the existing NIO APP is not obvious. According to feedback from fellow NIO car owners, NIO APP for iPhone now also supports checking vehicle status. After getting close to the car, Bluetooth can also actively connect to the vehicle and quickly unlock it. The main problem with the current APP is that the first-time success rate of the summoning function connected to the vehicle is not high. In addition, I have not seen a more differentiated experience on NIOPhone.

Second, the display of nobility is not enough. If the condition of "enter the frame number and verify it before purchasing a NIOPhone" can be added, the wave of NIO car owners posting orders in WeChat Moments will surely be a hundred times greater than it is now.

It is impossible that Li Bin, who graduated from Peking University with a degree in sociology, does not understand such a simple art of handling human nature, but the fact that he did not do this shows that he is really kind.

First there was NIO and then there was Phone. Spend money just for car control.

The identity of NIOPhone as a mobile phone has been said. Let’s talk about its other identity, a useful car key.

How is it easy to use? In three steps:

First, realize the basic function: a qualified car key. Based on ultra-wideband wireless communication technology (UWB), NIOPhone can accurately sense distance and automatically unlock and lock. For car owners who own multiple NIOs, NIOPhone is a "traceless and sensorless unlocking machine". You can unlock whichever one you approach, and it's so easy to use that you want to applaud on the spot. Moreover, within 48 hours when the phone is out of battery, you can still use the NFC car key to open the car door.

Secondly, one-click integrated car control: NIO has added a physical button on the upper left side of the NIOPhone body. Press it when outside the car to quickly check the vehicle status, and when you are close to the vehicle, you can perform the vehicle summoning function; press it when inside the car, and the phone will intelligently identify the current seat and automatically switch control of the seat and air conditioning to that seat within 2 seconds.

After the driver gets in the car, he just puts the NIOPhone in gear and drives away. There is no need to worry about teaching the passenger seat how to adjust it, whether the air conditioning temperature is suitable, and whether the wind direction is satisfactory. He can just hand the NIOPhone to the passenger and that's it.

Finally, NIOLink’s panoramic interconnection capabilities are used to achieve unified operation of multi-terminal accounts and seamless information relay. For example, after setting the navigation route on your mobile phone, it will automatically switch to car navigation when you get in the car, without the need for secondary input;

Copy the address text from WeChat or Dianping on the mobile phone, and the car will automatically synchronize it, and you can start navigation with a tap;

Open an online video conference on your mobile phone. After getting in the car, the conference will automatically flow to the large screen of the car. According to the user's needs, use the in-car microphone, camera, or mobile phone camera. It is a bit regrettable that when using the camera in the car as the video source, beautification is not supported for the time being, which is a heavy blow to the workers who get up early for the "unkempt" morning meeting.

Some people will say that the functions of NIOPhone are highly overlapping with those of the existing cockpit intelligent voice assistant NOMI. It is better to design a mobile phone base in the position of NOMI, and put NIOPhone on it after getting in the car and treat it as NOMI.

In fact, this approach is not ingenious, but doing so will waste NIO’s hard work in developing the “Sky Window”.

What is "Sky Window"? To put it simply, it is to project the mobile phone screen onto the right half of the large car screen to form a "second interface". Moreover, the car screen and the mobile phone support the parallel operation of dual applications, that is, the co-driver can swipe the Little Red Book on the car screen and reply to WeChat messages on the mobile phone screen without interfering with each other.

As far as my actual experience is concerned, the "Sky Window" function is far more ostentatious than practical. Because most people's attention can only be focused on a single object at a time. If you browse Xiaohongshu on your mobile phone, you will not be able to distract yourself from reading WeChat on the car screen. If you are watching a video on Station B while the car is in the car, it will be difficult to pay attention to Dianping on the phone. Moreover, as soon as the car moves, for the sake of safety, the video will stop playing, which makes it useless to project it on the mobile phone screen on the car screen.

At the same time, the large screen in NIO's car is configured in a vertical screen configuration, and there is no co-pilot screen. The driver and co-driver share a central vertical screen. Half of the area is used to provide navigation for the driver, and half of the area is used for the co-pilot to read the Little Red Book. You have to lean forward and get close to the screen to see it clearly. After the early adopter period, it is difficult to maintain this kind of experience.

Therefore, the most appropriate use scenario I can think of for this function is to actively enhance the relationship with your partner. The driver projects WeChat on the right half of the car screen for the co-driver to check in real time. The main purpose is to establish a relationship without secrets. Use the left half of the car screen by yourself to focus on navigation and listening to music.

However, the only logical flaw in this scenario is that there is a high probability that the main driver will not only have a NIOPhone, and there is a high probability that the NIOPhone will not be used as the main phone.

Because even Li Bin himself does not regard NIOPhone as the main machine in his daily work and life.

In an exclusive interview with the media after the meeting, Li Bin's iPhone slipped from the back pocket of his jeans and fell to the ground. He was very clever and smoothed things over: "It was smashed on the ground and I just changed it to a NIO Phone." Everyone burst into laughter. The venue was filled with a happy atmosphere. For a while, it was difficult to tell whether this was Li Bin's super-fast "on-the-spot reaction" or a "deliberate move" to promote the NIO Phone.

To sum up, you should not think of NIOPhone as a serious mobile phone, but as a car key with mobile phone functions. In this way, you will feel that it is "actually not bad". After all, if you buy a luxury brand car key, it will cost the same.

Of course, if you can open up the world, sublimate your thinking, and think of NIOPhone as a bracelet that has been personally blessed by the leader of the NIO Sect, and can open doors, listen to music, and chat on WeChat, then you will instantly feel that it is "worth the money."

write at the end

After NIOPhone, Li Bin revealed that the development of the second generation NIOPhone has begun.Weilai headphones will be launched in the future, but there will be no NIO watches and NIO tablets for the time being.

In the eyes of most people, this is tantamount to once again confirming NIO’s nature of “not doing its job properly”. Because they believe that building cars is what Weilai should do, and money should be spent on developing cars, not mobile phones and headphones.

Such a view actually greatly underestimates NIO’s structure.

No matter when the company was founded, whether it was the difficult years of being in the ICU, or the happy hours of walking into the KTV, Li Bin’s original intention has not changed, which is to build Weilai into a company that satisfies users. A more straightforward way of saying it is “to be stupidly nice to users.”

The purpose of building cars is to make NIO users more satisfied with their travels. The purpose of making mobile phones is to make NIO users more satisfied when using NIO cars. In the mobile phone industry, there are many categories such as imaging flagships, gaming flagships, office flagships, emotional flagships, etc., but NIOPhone is the user flagship.

Therefore, even after NIOPhone was released, four words kept coming to my ears: What are you doing again? At this stage, Li Bin doesn't care. As long as users buy it up, it will be over.

Just like the two NIO car owners I met at the scene who had placed orders for NIO Phone said: The hardware of this phone is actually just like this. We mainly liked the interconnection between it and the car, and we were willing to support NIO, so we bought it.

This is the emotional experience that Li Bin said that Weilai is pursuing: "It's hard to explain clearly, just like drinking, if it feels right, it's right."

However, I still have a few complaints about the NIO Phone. Since it is a mobile phone specially built for NIO users, why is NIO’s traditional performance: battery replacement BaaS not retained? Cars can be separated from electricity, and mobile phones can also be separated from electromechanics. Only in this way can flexible energy replenishment be truly realized:Rechargeable, replaceable, and upgradeable.

You know, Nokia, which has been nailed to the pillar of shame, made a mobile phone that supports battery replacement as early as 1992.