Nio said this will be the largest user base for city smart driving in China. All of its NT 2.0 platform-based models support NOP+.

Nio's (NYSE: NIO) NOP+ (Navigate on Pilot Plus) driver assist feature will be available to nearly 230,000 vehicles starting in 10 days, at a time when competition in the smart-driving space is intensifying.

The NOP+ feature available in urban areas will begin deliveries to all Nio vehicles based on the NT 2.0 platform on April 30, the electric vehicle (EV) maker's founder, chairman, and CEO, William Li, announced at an event today.

This will be the largest user base for city smart driving in China, Li said, whose keynote slides showed that Nio's NT 2.0 platform cars had delivered 228,935 units as of the end of March.

NOP+ is NIO's ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance System) feature built on its NT 2.0 platform. Its predecessor was NOP, which realized pilot-assisted driving on highways.

To date, NOP+ is available in 726, or 99 percent, of China's cities, Li said.

NOP+ has been validated on about 1.21 million kilometers of roads, including 850,000 kilometers of urban roads and 360,000 kilometers of highways and urban expressways.

Nio's goal is for the feature to contribute 80 percent of all driving time by 2025 for NOP+-enabled vehicle owners, Li said.

"At that 80 percent, using NOP+ becomes a user habit, showing us that the feature is truly useful," Li said.

Another goal of Nio is to make smart driving 10 times safer than human driving by 2025, Li said, adding that for the company the figure is currently 6.26 times.

In terms of smart driving development, Nio's goal is to free up users' energy and reduce driving accidents, Li said.

Nio's highway-only NOP feature, available from October 2020, allows pilot-assisted driving on highways, including entering and exiting ramps and changing lanes automatically.

The company calls the smart driving feature with additional coverage of urban areas NOP+ and began recruiting testers in February 2023 for a beta version of the feature.

On July 1 last year, Nio announced that NOP+ came out of beta and started accepting subscriptions at RMB 380 per month ($52).

On September 21, 2023, the EV maker announced at the Nio IN 2023 event that NOP+'s coverage was officially extended from highways to urban roads, providing users with a point-to-point smart driving experience with full-domain access.

The vast majority of Nio owners do not yet have to pay for NOP+, as new owners in the past year have received at least one year of free access.

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