Asia Tech Wire (July 30) -- William Li, founder and CEO of Chinese electric car maker Nio Inc. (9866.HK), recently said the company is not in the driverless taxi or robotaxi business.

The layout of tech companies such as Tesla and Baidu in recent times has once again brought robotaxi to the center of industry and public attention.

He Xiaopeng, chairman of Nio's Chinese counterpart Xpeng, has followed the lead of automotive executives such as Tesla CEO Elon Musk and others in publicizing his bullishness on robotaxi.

However, Li said in an interview that for robotaxi, Nio will not follow this trend, choosing instead to stick to its own development path.

He pointed out that Nio has been thinking deeply about assisted driving technology since 2017, believing that its core value lies in improving driving safety and reducing traffic accidents.

The real significance of self-driving technology is not to replace ride-hailing drivers, but to reduce driver fatigue and improve road safety through technological means, Li said.

Although not optimistic about robotaxi, Nio has not reduced its investment and layout in the field of intelligent driving and automatic driving.

In 2023, Nio reported a net loss of 20.72 billion yuan and R&D investment of 13.43 billion yuan.

The company also recently released a new generation of NIO Phone, automotive operating system SkyOS, and other products.

In addition, Li also announced at the launch event the successful tape-out of NX9031, which Nio called "the world's first 5nm automotive-grade chip (N5A) for autonomous driving."