For better or worse, sports superstars often set what’s fashionable or cool in our society. That’s especially the case when it comes to cars. So, it struck me and I definitely took note when I saw that basketball legend Yao Ming, an absolute superstar in China, just took delivery of a new NIO ES9. If you’re thinking, “hey, hasn’t the ES9 been on the market for a while?,”that is indeed the case, and that actually makes the story a little more interesting. Yao Ming was eager to get the new vehicle ASAP and be one of the first to have it, so he locked in an order just a few minutes after ordering launched. However, being a few minutes behind the first people to place an order meant that he had to wait two months for his vehicle to arrive. The NIO ES9 is about to reach 20,000 deliveries, and yet wait times for the high-end trims of the ES8 are 13 to 14 weeks! That’s about three months. The lowest trim has a 3–4 week waitlist. You can see the picture above in which Xia Qinghua, general manager of Nio’s Shanghai regional office, is handing the ES9 over to Yao Ming, but Yao also posted to the NIO app, writing: “After a long two-month wait, I finally got my ES9 today.” The ES9 is, of course, a true luxury vehicle. It has a starting price of 498,000 yuan ($73,777). Or you can get the vehicle for 390,000 yuan ($57,777) with a battery leasing plan. Deliveries of the ES9 started on May 28, and the 10,000th unit was delivered on June 26.
