NextEV is a well-funded China-based electric vehicle startup selling an hypercar and developing mass-market electric vehicles. The company established an important presence in California where it recruited a lot of engineers from Tesla and other automakers.
In 2016, the company unveiled its called brand ‘NIO’ and the first vehicle under the brand, the ‘NIO EP9’, an all-electric hypercar.
Chinese tech giant Baidu has confirmed having led a financing round in the electric vehicle startup NIO, formerly known as NextEV. The news comes just after the company unveiled its ‘EVE’ concept, an all-electric and autonomous vehicle.
The round of investment is reportedly worth up to $600 million, which would make NIO one of the most, if not the most, well-financed electric vehicle startups today.
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The ‘NIO EP9’, an all-electric supercar which has been dubbed the “fastest electric car in the world”, set two new records last week at the Circuit of the Americas Race Track in Austin, Texas. The company made the announcement today along with the confirmation of a US debut next month following its world launch in London last year.
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Today, electric car startup NextEV launched a new brand ‘NIO’ and its first electric car ‘NIO EP9’ at the Saatchi Gallery in London. The company is claiming that the ‘NIO EP9’ is the “fastest electric car in the world” after releasing lap records of the vehicle beating EV records in Nürburgring and at Circuit Paul Ricard in France over the past few weeks.
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After a concept drawing of the car leaked last month, we now get our first look at the real thing. NextEV’s upcoming all-electric 1 MW supercar was spotted today on the Nürburgring racetrack in Germany.
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Jamie Carlson, a veteran firmware engineer and early member of the Tesla Autopilot team, made the headlines last year when he left Tesla to join Apple on ‘Special Projects’ at a time when we were just learning of the scale of the Cupertino company’s ambitions in the auto industry.
Electrek has now learned that Carlson left Apple earlier this month after just over a year at the company. He is staying in the electric vehicle industry by joining NextEV as Senior Director of Advanced Technologies.
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Another electric car startup from China has officially come to California, with NextEV opening an office in San Jose. The firm joins a growing list of Chinese EV startups making their way to the West coast of the US.
While NextEV has not formally shown any cars, but we recently reported on a leaked image of a NextEV supercar concept testing in the UK. It is rumored to have Rimac-like performance, with 1360hp, a top speed of over 186mph and a 0-60 time of under 3 seconds, and will be formally revealed in November. It makes sense that NextEV would be interested in sportscars, as the company is also known for their Formula E team. Their driver Nelson Piquet Jr. won the inaugural Formula E championship in 2014-2015.
You might know NextEV for its team in the all-electric Formula E championship, but that’s only a glimpse of what the electric vehicle company has been working on. The China- and California-based automaker, known to be well-funded by Chinese tech tycoons, is working on EV programs from a low-volume all-electric supercar to a mass-produced more affordable passenger car.
Now the first image of NextEV’s upcoming all-electric supercar has leaked and Electrek has been able to confirm its veracity and a few specifications.
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It looks like the Tesla Model X, the first all-electric SUV, is a popular vehicle to benchmark or reserve-engineer. Ford paid a ~$55,000 premium to own and likely reverse-engineer the vehicle, while Audi was among the firsts to import the vehicle in Europe, which caused a problem when the German automaker realized it couldn’t charge the vehicle with the European standard.
Now it looks like another competitor is using the vehicle, but this time right in Tesla’s backyard.
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When we wrote our profile of Tesla’s team of “hardcore engineers” working on the Autopilot, we briefly mentioned Kurt Thywissen, an early member of the team and Senior Engineering Manager of UI & Autopilot Software. Thywissen was one of the software engineers working on the popular P2P client Kazaa who left to create Skype. He joined Tesla’s team in 2013 after leaving a director role at Skype.
Chinese-backed electric vehicle startups, like Faraday Future and Atieva, have been poaching an impressive number of employees from Tesla and they made engineers with EV or autonomous driving experience extremely in demand in Silicon Valley – with the help of other companies in the field like Apple, Bosch, Baidu, Google and more.
But now there’s a new thorn in the side of Tesla’s recruitment and retention effort, NEXTEV, and Thywissen is their latest hire.
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Chinese electric-car startup NextEV announced that it signed a strategic partnership agreement with the Nanjing Municipal Government in China, to build a 3 billion RMB ($465 million) factory in the region. The young company, which came out of stealth mode just last year, is said to have already raised close to $1 billion.
The company appears to have a similar approach as Tesla’s high-end car to mass-market vehicle strategy. NextEV says it will launch an electric vehicle with supercar-like performance by the end of the year, which will be followed by a mass-market vehicle they plan to offer for about $50,000 in China. The startup already developed electric race car for the Formula E (see picture above).
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NextEV, a Chinese electric-car startup, announced the hiring of former Cisco and Motorola CTO Padmasree Warrior as the company’s new U.S. CEO and head of development for software and user experience.
The company is based in both Shanghai, China and San Jose, California, where it operates an R&D center and U.S. headquarters.
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Chinese startup NextEV raised about half of the $1 billion it seeks ahead of launching its electric vehicle lineup according to Bloomberg. Last month we wrote about NextEV coming out of stealth to reveal its plan to “disrupt” the electric vehicle market with yet another electric supercar and today we learn that the company is extremely well-funded by big-name VC firms: Sequoia Capital and Joy Capital.
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In a report today, Reuters unveiled a new effort from Chinese internet entrepreneurs to bring to market an electric supercar: the NextEV. Chinese tech companies have been vocal lately about jumping in the electric vehicle industry, with companies such as Xiaomi and Alibaba announcing their intention to enter the market.
But the industry seems to have a focus on “supercars”. LeTV, a Chinese tech company offering a Netflix-like service, recently announced its intention to build an all-electric supercar and they are also reportedly heavily financing 2 other electric supercar projects.
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