Nio to deliver cars in Norway in September

Nio will start delivering vehicles in Norway in September as the first step of its globalization campaign, said the Chinese electric startup on Thursday.

It will start to take orders when an app is launched in July for local customers. The first showroom in the Nordic country is scheduled to open in downtown Oslo, its capital city, in September. It will open another four in 2022.

William Li, Nio founder and CEO, said the first model will be its flagship ES8 SUV, and the second will be the ET7 sedan, which will be available in 2022.

The vehicles will be made at Nio's plant in Hefei, Anhui province. The 100,000th Nio vehicle rolled off the assembly line in the plant late last month.

Electric cars are popular in Norway, which was the first country to see such vehicles to overtake gasoline ones, said Marius Hayler, general manager of Nio Norway.

In 2020, electric car sales in Norway totaled 76,789 units, accounting for over 54 percent of total vehicle sales in the country.

Li said Nio vehicles will be available in five European countries by 2022. He said the company has been discussing possibilities of entering the United States, but it has not worked out a definitive plan.

Nio is the most popular Chinese electric car startup. It sold 20,060 vehicles in the first quarter this year, soaring 422.7 percent from the same period last year and growing 15.6 percent from the fourth quarter 2020.

The carmaker expected its deliveries to grow by 5 to 10 percent to 21,000 to 22,000 units in the second quarter.