Smart electric vehicle manufacturer Nio has opened a new 1,500m2 Innovation Centre in Berlin, Germany. The facility was established in response to the demand for software that is central to the user experience, and will be used by the company to develop new technologies and undertake localization, testing and validation in Europe.
Five teams will be housed at the Innovation Centre: Digital Systems, Digital Development, Digital Cockpit, Autonomous Driving (AD) and Power. As of July 2023, the company had more than 10,000 R&D employees across three continents, with most working on software development. Following the establishment of the new facility, Nio will be able to bolster its workforce with new talent.
The Berlin Innovation Centre will be critical in developing the OEM’s user-experience-defined vehicles, with regular over-the-air (OTA) updates required to deliver new functions and features throughout a vehicle’s service life. The Berlin-based team will be tasked with the development of technology that meets the needs of European users.
“Nio’s user-experience-defined vehicles are much more than software-defined vehicles,” said Mark Zhou, executive vice president and chairman of the product committee at Nio. “We design our digital architecture to be able to apply very quickly the new maturing technologies such as chipsets, sensors, algorithms, training models, cloud, connectivity, safety and security.”
These changes ensure that a vehicle is regularly updated with new features and via OTA updates to its smart system.
“With Nio’s smart systems and our Berlin Innovation Centre, our premium electric vehicles will get smarter not only in Europe but also globally,” said Hui Zhang, vice president of Nio Europe. “With our new Berlin location, Nio will attract world-class software developers and engineers for the future of user-experience-defined vehicles.”
For more on connectivity, click here.
