The only way is Nio

The Chinese EV maker is building its brand by using a wide-reaching, innovative approach that goes far, far beyond cars. James Attwood asks if it will catch on here

- James Attwood

Your wallet or smartphone is likely to be stuffed with various loyalty cards and apps, giving you rewards for buying everything from groceries to coffee. But Chinese firm Nio is extending that concept to cars.

Granted, in this connected age, every car firm has an app - but usually they offer sales information or give access to controls or features for your car. Nio's app, by contrast, is as much about building loyalty as selling cars.

Tesla's Elon Musk may have bought up Twitter, but Nio has essentially started its own social media network - and it's apparently working. Nio's car sales are currently numbered in the hundreds of thousands, but the brand claims that its app has 2.3 million registered users, with around 240,000 active each day. In total, they have shared 20 million posts.

For an insight into how it works, Autocar has headed to a campsite deep in the vast Chinese wilderness. Okay, a campsite about 30 minutes outside of downtown Shanghai. Still, sat around a blazing campfire under a night sky, it feels like the wilderness, so long as you ignore the regular roar from the trucks thundering past on the major highway a few metres away.

Camping has surged in popularity in China in recent years, a result of a population increasingly based in vast, sprawling mega-cities eager to find a bit of freedom and fresh air. And we're here to meet a group of eager campers who all share something in common: they're all Nio fans.