NIO, Tesla of China, has swanky clubhouse for car owners: Tour, Photos

Buy a car and get into a swanky club.Reuters

• Chinese electric-car startup Nio, which has been touted as the Tesla of China, went public in the US last month.
• The company is competing with Tesla in China, where the American automaker generated $2 billion in sales last year.
• Nio is trying to win over customers with perks like its exclusive clubhouses for customers known as Nio Houses, which are a cross between a co-working space, a cafe, a daycare center, and an event space.
• I recently a got a look inside the Nio House in the heart of Beijing. It was a calm, inviting space that would be a great place to stop by for a breather before or after a long day at work.

Chinese electric-car startup Nio, which has been touted as the Tesla of China, went public in the US last month. The company raised $1 billion from the offering, falling short of the $1.8 billion target it had set.

While the company held its initial public offering in the US, NIO’s main target market is in China, where it is attempting to beat out Tesla to become the country’s top electric vehicle manufacturer. Last year, Tesla generated $2 billion in sales, double what it made in 2016.

But Nio officially launched its $67,000 ES8 electric SUV last December and began shipping it to customers in June. It’s officially game on.

Tesla has a nearly five-year headstart in China, but NIO is hoping that it can steal a page out of Apple’s playbook to win over wealthy Chinese consumers. Namely, it wants to center its company and its cars around the tech industry idea of “user experience.”

“If we believe the car itself is a user touchpoint — one of many touchpoints a company can provide with its users — I think the mobile internet would be the applicable business model in the auto industry,” CEO William Li told Business Insider this past spring.

A major part of that strategy is offering its customers numerous perks to get them hooked on the company. The biggest perk they’ve come up with yet is a network of swanky clubhouses called NIO Houses so that NIO drivers home away from home wherever they take their cars.

I recently got a look inside the company’s NIO House in the heart of Beijing. Here’s what it was like: