The Factory Secrets Helping Chinese EV Startup Nio Offer High Tech For Less Money

During the week of Auto Shanghai 2025, we visited Nio, driving examples from across the private new-energy-vehicle startup’s range, including the compact Firefly EV, the family crossover Onvo L60, and the Maybach-challenging Nio ET9. On the final day of our trip, we visited the greenfield plant that makes the latter two: Nio’s Factory 2 in Hefei, China, which is located on the 4.4-square-mile NeoPark. That’s not a typo—it’s the official name of the government-owned EV-manufacturing campus that incorporates 10 supplier factories and leaves room for future expansion of the factory’s footprint. The 284-acre Factory 2 employs 2,500 people and myriad robots capable of cranking out a vehicle per minute. That would be 300,000 on two shifts; last year 120,000 cars were produced on one shift. F2 secures roughly half its power needs from the 53 GWh of solar energy it collects. A sponge system of landscaping collects rainwater for use in the plant, and a heat-pump HVAC system helps earn the factory a LEED Gold environmental rating.

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Nio House Delivery Center

Our tour began in the giant round Nio House gathering-space/showroom/delivery center, which connects via a bridge to the Factory. (Roughly 5,000 buyers living in the Hefei region choose to take delivery of their Nio and Onvo products at the Factory 2 Nio House, during which they can schedule a factory tour (as can any Nio owner any time).

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Painted Body Bank

All Nio/Onvo/Firefly models are built to order, with the promise of delivery within two weeks in most cases. It’s more efficient to build and paint bodies in batches—especially in a factory that can build 3.5 million different combinations among its five models (the Nio ET5, ET5 Touring, ES8, ET9, and Onvo L60). Located at the end of the bridge from the Nio House is a vertical storage area where 246 painted bodies can be banked. There is also vertical storage for 250 freshly framed bodies-in-white and another 250 that are primed and ready for paint.

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Near 100-Percent Robotic Operation

Humans mostly oversee robots and perform quality audits at Factory 2. Some 140 robots handle all painting, for example. Human eyes and gloved hands are needed to debur door stampings—checking and filing down any rough edges before placing doors in a rack, sometimes manually moving said rack and then registering its QR code so automatic-guided vehicles (AGVs) can transport the rack of doors to the line when it’s needed.

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Automatic-Guided Final Assembly

Rather than a fixed assembly line, off of which it’s difficult to pull a single vehicle in need of rework, the cars move through Nio’s 1.6-million-square-foot final-assembly area on their own AGVs, allowing any car to peel off for extra inspections or rework, or, for example, when attempting to test-run preproduction models down the line.

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Assembly Islands

Another innovation at F2 is the notion of AGV-fed assembly islands for subassemblies like instrument panels and tailgates.

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Autonomous Drive-Away

All models produced at Nio’s Factory 2 possess sufficient sensing and ADAS software to drive themselves off the assembly line and out to the test-drive track. Nio’s Factory 2 doesn’t seem to miss any modern-assembly tricks and no doubt contributes to the low bottom-line pricing Nio is able to offer.