Ten Years After Winning the Formula E Championship: What Will Drive NIO Further?

Original innovation is the foundation of technological progress.

On June 28, NIO posted on Weibo to commemorate the 10th anniversary of its Formula E team winning the Drivers’ Championship.

Let’s rewind to the summer of 2015. In the final round of Formula E’s inaugural season, Nelson Piquet Jr. clinched the Drivers’ Championship title for the China Racing team (as NIO was then known). This was not only a historic first for NIO, but also the first time a Chinese team had claimed victory in a top-tier FIA championship event.

Back then, NIO was just a fledgling startup, and no one could have predicted how far it would go. Ten years later, the Formula E trophy remains, and the spirit of motorsport still runs deep in NIO’s DNA.

What many people don’t know is that as early as 2010, NIO’s founder and chairman William Li began sponsoring China’s university Formula Student teams. This year marks the 11th year of NIO’s support for this competition. For many young automotive engineering students, it’s more than just building a car that can run—it’s a hands-on training ground where textbook theory is transformed into real track performance. Some participants go on to become professional racers; others stay in the industry and become key players behind the scenes of China’s smart EV revolution.

From Formula E to the Nürburgring, and now to NIO’s major advances in smart EV technology in recent years, the company has steadily built a visible path of original innovation over the past decade.

Since 2017, NIO has developed signature design elements like the X-Bar front fascia, an in-car smart fragrance system, the AQUILA Super Sensing System, the ADAM central computing platform delivering 1016 TOPS, the SkyOS operating system, and more recently, its self-developed Shenji chipset. In total, NIO has amassed over 100 original technologies and nearly 10,000 patents.

Battery swapping is NIO’s bet for a longer-term future, but it’s the in-house development — from the chassis and autonomous driving to the operating system — that has been its true source of confidence, proven time and again over the past decade.