The ET7, the flagship sedan from Chinese electric smart vehicle company NIO, secured a maximum five-star rating in the latest Euro NCAP safety tests.
Now available in Europe, ET7 scored 91% in the Adult Occupant category, 87% for Child Occupant category, 73% for Vulnerable Road Users and 95% for Safety Assist. This follows a similar five-star result for its ES8 SUV last year. The ET7 also secured a further five-star rating in the latest Green NCAP results, the highest possible score under the latest sustainable rating scheme. The high-performance flagship sedan was awarded near maximum marks for energy efficiency, emissions, and low energy consumption.
“With all active and safety features as standard, NIO’s ET7 was designed to offer its users, wherever they are in the world, the highest levels of safety,” says Danilo Teobaldi, Vice President of Vehicle Engineering, NIO, “Providing users with peace of mind is crucial for the user experience. From the outset, we wanted to go beyond achieving test results and through our R&D find solutions to go further. If it improves safety, it is worth doing.”
Founded in 1997, The European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP) is an independent crash-test safety body, which assesses and scores the safety of new cars. It created a five-star safety rating system to help users compare vehicles more easily and to identify the safest choice for their needs.
Crucial to the five-star rating in NCAP’s most stringent tests was the use of innovative material applications and high-strength structural design, including front crash longitudinal beams that resulted in high scores. Designed in accordance with Chinese and European five-star safety standards, the ET7 is amongst the first car in the world to use a large amount of hot-stamping steel. 44.4% of the upper body comes from hot-stamping steel including a 2-meter ultra-long body section and 1-meter-long section for the roof rails. The strong aluminum-silicon-coated hot-stamped steel’s composite structure ensures a torsional stiffness of up to 37,100 newton meter per degree (Nm/deg).
In addition to innovative body materials, the body’s structural design is also the key to ET7’s five-star achievement. For the front-end structure, ET7 adopts a trapezoidal front crash beam design. On both sides of the crash beam, two auxiliary beams are independently welded. The overall width of the crash beam is 1533mm and the overall height is 252mm. It covers 77% of the vehicle width (excluding the wings), a value much higher in terms of individual width and overall coverage than those of other vehicles in the same class.
ET7 adopts a one-piece B-pillar reinforced plate aluminum-silicon coated hot forming. This structure enables the peak pressure force of the body carrying a 600kg mass battery pack to reach more than 115kN, to meet the IIHS GOOD requirement five-star requirement. In the 25% small offset collision and side collision test, the integrity of the body structure and the safety of the occupants in the vehicle is maintained, maximizing the safety of the whole vehicle.
ET7 cabin remains stable in frontal mobile progressive deformable barrier test. All critical portion of driver and passenger were well protected. In full-width rigid barrier crash test, NIO ET7 provides good protection for all critical regions of 6 and 10 years old child dummies, and therefore received the highest score possible in this test.
The ET7 is equipped with seven airbags as standard, of which the Far-Side Center Airbag (FCA) is one of the first to be fitted as standard for Chinese medium and large cars. In vehicle crash testing, FCA protects front-seat occupants from secondary injuries.
The ET7’s array of driver assistance features also contributed to the strong result achieved. These include its Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) system that reacts to pedestrians, bicycles, and other vehicles, Driver Fatigue Detection System, Lane Departure Warning (LDW), Lane Keeping Assist (LKA) and Emergency Lane Keeping (ELK). Other features such as speed limit recognition and subsequent driver warning, and its ability to quickly intervene in an emergency, contributed to ET7 scoring 95% for Safety Assist, NIO’s highest result to date.
Alongside the impressive safety score, NIO ET7 achieved near maximum scores for energy efficiency, emissions and energy consumption in the latest Green NCAP tests. Green NCAP is an independent initiative which promotes the development of cars which are clean, energy efficient and not harmful to the environment. Based on the new toughened rating announced in June 2022, the NIO ET7 was commended for its high overall efficiency, absence of polluting exhaust gas emissions and relatively low greenhouse gas emissions – giving it a weighted overall index of 9.6 out of 10 and a maximum five stars.
By category, the NIO ET7 scored 10/10 in the Clean Air Index, 9.6 out of 10 in the Greenhouse Gas Index (GHG) and 9.4 out of 10 in the Energy Efficiency Index. In the laboratory WLTC+ test, the ET7 matched its declared range.
