Nio gets about 92 percent of its parts from local production and 8 percent from imports, Shen Feng, Nio executive vice president and chairman of the global quality committee, said at an event in Nanjing on September 16.

Although Nio is a young car company, it already has about 1,000 suppliers, he said.

Nio's vehicle manufacturing plant is in Hefei, and basically 70 percent of its materials and partners come from within a 600-kilometer radius of Hefei.

This includes a number of global suppliers, many of whom produce locally in China, he said.

Shen Feng believes that traditional car companies used to focus on hardware iteration such as styling engineering design, powertrain and automatic chassis, and the time cycle is relatively long, but now under the trend of smart cars, adding software and chips, so the whole iteration of thinking will become very different.

Nio ES8, for example, went on sale in June 2018, and the software has been iterating since October 2018. From the earliest version 1.0 now to version 6.5, the software is updated almost every 1-2 months. Each update adds some new features and new experiences to further enhance the user experience.

For the new relationship between car companies and suppliers, Shen Feng believes in collaboration and innovation with suppliers, while hoping that partners can enter the development process as soon as possible, do quality control and maintain production consistency.