Asian Tech Press -- Three new electric vehicle models with self-driving platform, including the electric sedan ET7, are planned for launch next year, Nio founder and CEO William Li said Thursday.

On Thursday morning CST, the Shanghai-based EV maker released its earnings result for Q1 FY2021. The financial results show that the total deliveries of Nio's ES8, ES6 and EC6 models during the quarter were 21,896 units, generating revenue of 7.91 billion yuan ($1.22 billion).

Together with other revenues, Nio's total revenue for the quarter was 8.45 billion yuan ($1.30 billion), up 127.2% year-over-year from the second quarter of last year and 5.8% sequentially from the first quarter of this year.

In terms of earnings, Nio's consolidated gross margin reached 18.6%, with a gross margin of 20.3% for the complete vehicle. Spending on technology development reached 880 million yuan ($135.89 million) in the quarter, up 28.7% sequentially from the first quarter of this year.

In addition, Nio also stated that three new EV models based on the NT2.0 autonomous driving technology platform, including the ET7, will begin delivery in 2022. Of these three models, one will definitely be lower in price than all existing vehicles and will be the lowest priced model under Nio's brand.

To accelerate the implementation of new technologies for new product deliveries, Nio plans to invest a total of 5 billion yuan ($772.09 million) in R&D this year and recruit at least 300 more self-driving R&D staff by the end of the year, doubling the number of R&D teams across the company.

In an earnings conference call held by Nio's management, Li said that Nio, a luxury brand, will launch a new brand for the mass market, and that he expects this brand to offer better products and services at a lower price than Tesla.

For the new brand, Li likened the relationship between Nio brand and it to that of Audi and Volkswagen, or Lexus and Toyota.

(US$1 = 6.4759 yuan)