Nio began recruiting an additional 20,000 pioneer testers for NOP+, which will be the final user experience event before the feature is pushed out to all car owners.

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Nio (NYSE: NIO) has begun recruiting the latest batch of beta testers for the NOP+ (Navigate on Pilot Plus) feature, as the assisted driving feature will soon be available to all car owners.

The electric vehicle (EV) maker today began recruiting an additional 20,000 pioneer testers for NOP+, which will be the last user experience before the feature is rolled out to all vehicle owners, its vice president of smart driving research and development, Shaoqing Ren, announced today.

Prior to the start of the Chinese New Year holiday in mid-February, Nio opened up the urban area NOP+ experience to 1,000 new pioneer users, Ren wrote in an article posted to the Nio App.

Over the past month, 43 percent of the mileage driven by these testers was with NOP+ on. As a comparison, during the Chinese New Year holiday, the percentage was 24 percent among all Nio owners, according to Ren.

As of today, NOP+ has 1.08 million kilometers of available road miles, including 725,815 kilometers of urban road coverage.

Nio's stores in China began opening up user experience with NOP+ on March 8, and as of today, this is available in nearly 300 stores, Ren said.

Separately, Harry Wong, Nio's head of smart driving products and experiences, listed the requirements for candidates to participate in the new round of experiences in another Nio App article.

Applicants whose vehicles are equipped with the Banyan system, have accumulated more than 1,000 kilometers of NOP+ usage, and have provided multiple feedbacks in the last six months will be prioritized, according to Wong's article.

Banyan is the system used in Nio's NT 2.0 platform based models, its older NT 1.0 platform based models use a system called Aspen.

The deadline for the application is March 25.

Wong emphasized in his article that NOP+ is still an assisted driving function, not autonomous driving, and that drivers need to be responsible for safety.

Meanwhile, owners who participate in the new round of testing will get access to NOMI GPT's experiential features.

Nio began recruiting beta testers for the next generation of large model-based NOMI GPT on March 11, with the first batch of 600 recruits.

With the large model technology, NOMI can be better integrated with the car experience, Nio previously said.

Alongside road validation for regular NOP+, Nio is also validating an Unlimited Mode aimed at making assisted driving features available on all roads.

Wong announced the Unlimited Mode for NOP+ on March 1 and recruited the first 100 pioneer users for the feature.

Nio says NOP+ assisted driving feature coverage expands to 726 cities