Kyle from Out of Spec Reviews drove the NIO ET9 for a day in Beijing, beginning with evening traffic runs in the back seat and returning early the next morning for a solo drive through empty streets. The ET9 is NIO's flagship luxury sedan, priced at around $100,000 in China. It competes against the BMW 7 Series, Mercedes-Benz S-Class, and Audi A8. The entire electrical architecture, covering ECUs, software, motors, and inverters, was developed in-house by NIO. The 102 kWh long-range battery pack operates at 925 volts. DC fast charging peaks at close to 600 kW. Battery swap via NIO's station network takes about 3 minutes. The car is not sold in Europe or North America.
The Horizon trim on the test car is NIO's two-tone configuration, riding on large monoblock alloy wheels. The rear seat is the designed focus: dual screens let rear passengers monitor the active suspension's real-time power consumption, which peaked around 1,400 watts during hard cornering. The suspension has no mechanical sway bars. It neutralizes body roll hydraulically, cancels road noise to the point where Kyle misjudged highway speed by a significant margin, and includes a bounce mode for unsticking the car from soft terrain. Rear seat amenities include a fridge with selectable temperature modes, 100-watt USB-C ports, 50-watt wireless charging with cooling, and a baby mode that uses the suspension to simulate rocking motion.
Kyle's criticisms were specific. The steer-by-wire actuators are slower to respond than the Cybertruck's implementation: working the steering wheel rapidly produced a lag before the front wheels followed. In normal driving it felt natural and precise, and the slower ratio means the average driver would never notice. The suspension, despite its sophistication, let initial speed bump impacts through the cabin before the system caught up. Kyle expected the lidar and camera suite to scan ahead and preload the wheels. That predictive capability may need further tuning. There is no one-pedal driving mode, which Kyle noted is a pattern across several Chinese EVs. On the positive side: the sound system received strong marks, the infotainment platform runs a settings library that could take two weeks to explore fully, and the in-cabin software feels instantly responsive.
Bottom line: This is a car that makes a credible engineering argument against the German flagships on nearly every axis except one: you cannot buy it outside China. If you work in product development at a European automaker, Kyle's advice, stated directly, is to go drive one.