The company says that it looks like an accident that was likely not because of the vehicle.
Chinese Electric Car Falls from Third Floor killing 2 People. Nio says its electric car fall killed two people. The car fell from the third floor of its headquarters office in Shanghai. One of the people who died was from the staff while the other person was from a partner company. The crash incident took place on Wednesday and the dying personnel was inside the vehicle when it fell over. Nio immediately began the investigation with assistance from government officials. The company has a showroom on the third floor that was previously described as a car park or a testing facility.
The company issued a statement saying that our company is working in collaboration with the public security department for investigating the incident and analyze the situation at the accident scene. Based on the initial analyses, the company says that it looks like an accident that was likely not because of the vehicle. The company expressed its condolences to the families of the deceased and the company is doing everything it can to help the families.
Nio’s Statement
Nio released this statement on Weibo, a Chinese search engine, attracting more than 1000 comments in just half an hour. This made the company take it down to avoid any further negative comments. Public sentiment got negative on the point where Nio mentioned: “not related to the vehicles itself”. It attracted many negative comments on social media.
One of the comments stated that these words are the perfect representation of how the cold blood of capitalistic companies works. While another said that the accident happened while they were testing a new vehicle and now the company is trying to cover it up. Then how can the company say that it was not related to the vehicle? Another angered comment was that it should be left for the security services to decide whether it was an accident or not.
After these negative comments, Nio published another revised statement which, however, still referred to the crash as an incident but was not caused by the vehicle to remove the emphasis on the vehicle and save its face. The comments on social media changed from anger to RIP.
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Market Domination
Nio is a leading company in the electric car arena in China and is dominating the industry. The company addressed the customer’s concerns about frequent charging by introducing an interchangeable battery in their vehicles, putting a lot of its model at the stake. Nio is a direct competitor of US-based Electric car maker, Tesla which has a gigantic manufacturing facility in Shanghai itself. Founded by the Chinese business tycoon William Li in 2014, the company rose to fame in no time making it the most successful electric car startup in the country.
Last year, Nio delivered 91,429 cars which was more than 109% of what it produced in 2020. In the first five months of 2022, the company has managed to produce 37,866 cars that are 12% more than the same period of 2021. Tesla topped up the EV market in China until April before the Covid-19 lockdowns froze Shanghai’s supply chain.