The race to reinvent the car industry

After a day’s work, you are not quite ready to go home. Perhaps you fancy catching a film. You could head to the cinema. Instead, you retreat into your car. A few taps on the touchscreen dashboard and the vehicle turns into a multimedia cocoon. Light trickles down the interior surfaces like a waterfall. Speakers ooze surround-sound. Augmented-reality glasses make a screen appear in front of your eyes.

This immersive experience is at the core of what Nio, a Chinese electric-vehicle (EV) company, laid out as the future of the car at a launch party last month in Berlin. The firm wants its high-end evs to be a “second living room”. Forget horsepower, acceleration and design—Nio emphasises the two dozen high-resolution cameras and transistors (of which there are 68bn, about four times as many as in the latest iPhone) in their vehicles. “We have a supercomputer in our cars,” boasts Nio’s boss, William Li.