Chinese electric startup NIO unveils Tesla competitor with 5G tech

Chinese electric vehicle startup NIO has just unveiled their new electric car, the new NIO ET7 being a fully autonomous, massive battery beast that can take on Tesla.

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NIO has been referred to as "the Tesla of China" where it has been selling electric SUVs in the Chinese market for a while now, but at NIO Day 2020 in Chengdu, China yesterday -- the company unveiled their new NIO ET7 vehicle which has a list of great features, power, and technology.

We're looking at a 480 kW dual motor drivetrain with a battery pack that scales up to 150 kWh, with up to 621 miles (1000km). You'll probably never get close to it, but you should get upwards of that -- so expect around 500 miles of driving on a single charge in the NIO ET7.

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As for technology Qualcomm provides its 3rd Generation Qualcomm Snapdragon Automotive Cockpit Platform and its Snapdragon Automotive 5G Platform, which NIO uses in the ET7 to provide 5G, C-V2X, Bluetooth 5.0, Wi-Fi 6, and UWB -- for all your high-bandwidth, and low-latency needs in your car.

NIO's inclusion of Qualcomm's 3rd Generation Snapdragon Automotive Cockpit Platform means you get high-performance computing literally at your finger tips, with great graphics, media, computer vision, and more.

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But the real computing magic is the self-driving technology, with NIO offering standard features that are powered by their autonomous driving technology for improved safety -- but will charge separately for other autonomous driving features, which NIO will offer ET7 drivers as a subscription.

NVIDIA powers the NIO ET7 and its autonomous driving capabilities with its NVIDIA DRIVE Orin supercomputer -- packing 4 x NVIDIA Drive Orin for a total of 68 billion transistors, 8096 CUDA cores, 256 3rd Gen Tensor Cores and 48 A78 CPU Cores.

"NIO has built up the NAD full stack autonomous driving capability including perception algorithms, localization, control strategy and platform software. NIO Aquila Super Sensing features 33 high-performance sensing units, including 11 8MP high-resolution cameras, 1 ultralong-range high-resolution LiDAR, 5 millimeter wave radars, 12 ultrasonic sensors, 2 high-precision positioning units, V2X and ADMS. Aquila can generate 8GB data per second. NIO Adam features 4 NVIDIA Orin SoCs with a total computing power of 1,016 TOPS".

• It's beginning to make much more sense, isn't it... NVIDIA's huge $40 billion acquisition of ARM in September 2019.

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The starting price of the NIO ET7 is at around $69,000 -- with the company offering it under their Battery-as-a-Service (BaaS) model that will make the car cheaper, and provide you with a monthly cost for the battery pack. We are looking at a delivery of ET7 electric vehicles starting in Q1 2022.

Read all about the new NIO ET7 electric car here, and here.