NIO’s Qin Lihong: the range-extender dividend is fading, pure electric will soon pass 50 per cent

In the first half of 2026 China’s car market advanced through pressure and change at once. Domestic passenger-vehicle registrations fell about 20 per cent year on year even as nearly 500 new models launched. The mismatch compressed the hot-selling window of any single model, and the industry’s average net margin had already fallen to 1.5 per cent, about RMB 3,000 of profit on a RMB 200,000 car. In this shift NIO is worth watching.

In July NIO, across NIO, Onvo and Firefly, delivered nearly 36,000 vehicles, up 71 per cent year on year, with a sales mix of 4 to 2 to 1 and Onvo the fastest-growing brand. Average transaction prices held high, RMB 443,000 for NIO, RMB 245,000 for Onvo and RMB 120,000 for Firefly in June. NIO’s Beijing sales reached 10,232 in the first half, close to BMW’s roughly 11,000, and Qin expects to overtake one of the BBA brands in Beijing for the full year.

Qin rejects “sales-volume supremacy.” A car company is a business, and what matters is revenue and margin, revenue being volume times average price. With the industry’s average margin at just 1.5 per cent, he notes Audi’s average transaction price is about RMB 250,000, only RMB 10,000 above Onvo and well above Cadillac and Volvo, so Onvo is itself a premium household brand. Weighted by the 4 to 2 to 1 mix, NIO’s group average price sits above RMB 300,000 against an industry average below RMB 200,000.

On the structural shift, Qin is blunt. In the large three-row SUV segment, the pure-electric to range-extender sales ratio moved from 1 to 23 in the first quarter of last year to 1.06 to 1 this June, a reversal in just 15 months, and he expects the “1” on the range-extender side to keep shrinking. He sees three forces at work.

First, space. Range-extender layouts pack engine, fuel tank, battery, motor and exhaust into the floor, eating cabin room, while high-voltage pure-electric platforms free up a front trunk, Onvo’s L90 ships a 240L front trunk and NIO’s ES8 and ES9 about 200L, plus a deep rear-well storage pit that range-extender architecture simply cannot match.

Second, charging. Public charging points in 2025 were more than five times the 2020 count, and NIO’s battery-swap network changed the refuelling experience. NIO users average only about 60km a day, so a weekly charge suffices for most. Third, real-world economics: oil and electricity can cost up to 8 to 1, and many range-extender owners rarely use the tank. One owner told Qin he drove from Miyun to Shenzhen in a single trip; Li Bin’s own Xinjiang test found about 90 per cent of charging bays occupied by range-extender vehicles whose small batteries needed topping up daily.

Qin also addressed the “four pillars” label, Tesla, Li Auto, Xiaomi and Onvo, in the RMB 200,000 to 300,000 family market. He thinks pure electricisation there will arrive fast: Tesla and Onvo are already pure electric, Xiaomi’s volume in the band comes from pure-electric SU7 and YU7, and Li Auto’s main seller there is the pure-electric i6. From May, pure electric became China’s largest powertrain form with over 40 per cent share, and choosing a pure-electric car is now mainstream, not a brave niche.

Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original Leiphone interview. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience. The full original (in Chinese) is at https://www.leiphone.com/latest/index/id/4762.