Nio sub-brand Onvo will launch a 6-7 seater SUV next

Earlier this week, Nio's first sub-brand (of two planned so far) made its official debut in China with its first model, the L60. In the meantime, Nio founder and CEO William Li and Onvo president Alan Ai held a Q&A session with interested people, which revealed some interesting details about the future.

Onvo's next model will be a larger, 6-7 seat SUV. Sedans (plural) are coming after that to meet the needs of even more families - Onvo is positioned as a family-centric car maker. The brand is expected to launch overseas by the end of this year, most likely in Europe first.

For the L60, its very competitive price, thousands less than that of Tesla's Model Y with which it competes directly, was achieved through a combination of factors including only having a single motor in all versions, only using one Nvidia Orin X driving chip (compared to four on some Nio models), removing LiDAR, and reducing the size of the base battery pack.

It stands to reason that a similar strategy will be employed for the second model as well. Nio is also working on a different sub-brand currently codenamed Firefly, and when asked about why the company is going this route, Li said the purpose is to reach different customers with different needs - not unlike what a group like VW does with its spread of brands from Skoda at the low-end to Bentley at the high-end.

Li also revealed that a second generation Nio Phone is coming before the end of this year - the first model got its launch in 2023, so it looks like the car maker will go with a traditional one per year launch strategy that's employed by most dedicated smartphone makers.

Source (in Chinese)