On May 27, 2026, NIO made a significant announcement: basketball icon Yao Ming has been appointed as the Chief Experience Officer for its technologically advanced flagship SUV, the NIO ES9. The launch event for the ES9 kicked off at 7:30 PM on the same day. The NIO ES9 is set to unveil a new iteration of the NIO World Model and introduce three pioneering technologies: China's first intelligent assisted driving system that directly controls the steering wheel and pedals, the industry's inaugural comprehensive three-tier training framework encompassing a world model, supervised fine-tuning, and closed-loop reinforcement learning, and the first intelligent assisted driving system developed by an automaker that can accurately identify overhead road signs.
