• William Li said some models pack batteries up to 120 kWh weighing 700 to 800 kg, and 1.2 times the weight does 2.07 times the damage to roads.
  • Nio's battery packs typically weigh 400 to 500 kg, a constraint Li concedes means accepting smaller battery capacity and shorter range.

Nio Inc's (NYSE: NIO) founder, chairman and CEO William Li has once again warned about the trend of increasingly heavy Chinese cars, saying the race for battery capacity is shifting the cost onto public roads.

"Some cars are packed with 120-kWh batteries weighing 700 to 800 kilograms. The weight doesn't matter much to the car itself, but has anyone calculated the impact on the roads?" Li said at the auto industry night forum of the 2026 World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, Zhejiang province, on Thursday.

"At 1.2 times the weight, the damage to the road is 2.07 times," he said, according to a Yicai report on Friday. The conclusion derives from the "fourth-power law" in road engineering, which holds that a vehicle's damage to pavement is proportional to the fourth power of its axle load — 1.2 to the fourth power is roughly 2.07.

Li shared the stage at the forum with Eric Li, chairman of Zhejiang Geely Holding Group, in their first public dialogue since the two sides reached a comprehensive strategic partnership on charging and battery swapping on September 28. The discussion centered on power battery lifespan and energy replenishment strategies.

Li said the weight issue directly shapes Nio's technology trade-offs. Nio's battery packs generally weigh 400 to 500 kilograms, and the lighter weight means the company must accept the constraints of smaller battery capacity and shorter driving range, while continuing to seek solutions within those limits.

"Will we be rewarded for doing this? I don't know," he said.

This is not the first time Li has spoken out on vehicle weight. On July 6, 2025, he said in a livestream that the industry is blindly expanding battery capacity, noting that "the heavier the car, the greater the damage to the roads, which is why many countries levy taxes based on vehicle weight." The remarks became a trending topic on Chinese social media at the time.

During this year's Beijing Auto Show, Li said Nio operates an approval system for weight targets on every model, under which every additional 1 kilogram requires his personal sign-off.

In May this year, he told Yicai in an interview that "if China's more than 300 million vehicles all become heavy vehicles, the roads will be crushed," and called for national-level restrictions on vehicle weight.

"Without national-level guidance, the industry will descend into disorderly competition," he said at the time.

In a June interview, Li also said it is relatively easy to cut a smart EV's weight from 2 tons to 1.9 tons, but the cost of each additional kilogram removed rises steeply — in the final sprint of development, shaving 1 kilogram costs about 1,000 yuan ($149).

Vehicle weight has become a common problem across China's auto industry. Data from China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology show the average curb weight of new passenger cars in China reached 1,704 kilograms in 2024, up nearly 400 kilograms from 1,312 kilograms in 2012.

In the first 4 months of 2026, the average curb weight of passenger NEVs had already reached 1,939.3 kilograms, Yicai noted.

Regulators are also catching up. An EV energy consumption limit standard that took effect on January 1, 2026 is the world's first mandatory standard capping EV electricity consumption, and for the first time ties the consumption limits to curb weight, with stricter thresholds for models above 2,710 kilograms.

The standard is about 11% tighter than the previous recommended version. For a model weighing around 2 tons, electricity consumption must not exceed 15.1 kWh per 100 kilometers (62.137 miles); after technical upgrades, an EV's driving range rises by about 7% on average with battery capacity unchanged.

Chinese regulators have begun studying a tax system reform based on vehicle weight, Yicai reported.

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