Li Auto Deleted The ES9 Video, NIO Hits Two June Milestones & The Bear Case Questions Worth Asking

**Obi** (0:04)
If you want to be a part of the conversation before it happens here on YouTube, click that link in the description to join the free Courtside Financial Discord. Before we get into today's stories, I want to share something with you guys. I wrote a book. It's a full length novel. It's called Dial Tone, A Modern Salesman's Story. It's a novel for anyone who's quietly wondering if there's more. The e-book is available for pre-order on Amazon right now. The hard copy drops on June 12th. That's just five days from now. Link is in the description. Li Auto just got caught using a manipulated chassis comparison video to make the NIO ES9 look bad. They deleted it. The ES9 is on track to hit 10,000 deliveries this month. NIO's total deliveries expected to top 40,000 in June. And my Discord is asking the honest questions about NIO's long-term innovation engine that every investor needs to hear. The job report doubled expectations and killed rate cut hopes. NIO stock is down 5.8% on the week. And I want to explain exactly why that's a macro story and not a NIO story. Sunday, June 7th. Let's get into it. I'm Obi. This is Courtside Financial.
Let me start with the story that's all over Chinese automotive social media right now. Li Auto recently updated its flagship SUV, the L9 Livis, and priced it at 509,800 yuan, directly competing with the NIO ES9 at 498,000 yuan.
Normal competitive territory. What happened next was not normal. Li Auto posted a chassis comparison video on their official platform showing the Li L9 Livis versus the NIO ES9.
The video was architected and intentionally designed to make the ES9 look inferior, showing the ES9 chassis performing poorly in a suspension test. NIO's VP of branding and communication, Ma Lin went public on Weibo with appointed challenge. He said the ES9 in the video appeared to exhibit the same body oscillation in standard mode as it did in ultra soft mode, which is physically impossible given the vehicle's design specifications. Ultra soft mode is a suspension setting with the lowest intensity. Standard mode should perform completely differently. If what was shown in the video is accurate, something is wrong with the test conditions, the vehicle configuration, or the video itself. Ma Lin called on Li Auto to verify the video's authenticity, disclosed the testing conditions, and clarified the suspension settings used. Li Auto deleted the video.
They didn't respond. They didn't push back. They deleted it. This isn't the first time Li Auto seemingly ran some sort of smear campaign. In 2025, Li Auto released a collision test video that a competitor said was a self-defined non-standard scenario. There was also a PR dispute between Li Auto and Anvo, where Li Auto implied that Anvo hired trolls to smear their products. The pattern is a company under sales pressure reaching for competitive tactics that keep backfiring publicly. Li Auto's year-over-year sales have been falling for most of the past 12 months. The updated L9 Livis launch was received with mixed investor sentiment. Their Hong Kong shares fell significantly after the reveal. A company that's winning doesn't need to manufacture evidence against another competitor. The deleted video tells you more about Li Auto's situation than any earnings report ever could. Meanwhile, NIO's VP posted a guessing contest. Predict the exact date in June the ES9 hits its 10,000th delivery and win an iPhone 17
That's the confidence of a team that knows the product can speak for itself. Two milestones dropping in the same month and they're both significant. NIO President Qin Lihong confirmed on WeChat that this week the All-New ES8 will complete its 120th delivery in June. At the same time, the ES9 will hit its 10,000th delivery in its first full month of production. These two numbers together will test the most important story about NIO's current positioning. The ES9 didn't cannibalize the ES8.
Both products are growing simultaneously and irrespectively of each other.
Two different buyers, two different price points, two different milestones in the same month. ES8 at 406,800 yuan, the proven premium SUV that's been number one in the category for five consecutive months. ES9 at 498,000 yuan, the new executive flagship that built a 16 to 17 week delivery queue in its first weeks. Both firing simultaneously. And NIO total June deliveries are expected to top 40,000 units. That puts Q2 guidance of 110,000 to 115,000 within reach. The math is tight, but the momentum is real. June 11th, the Anvo L60 deliveries begin mid to late June. The Gen 5 Swap Stations launch. This month is executing on every front simultaneously. I want to share a conversation that happened in the Courtside Financial Discord this week, literally today, because it raises the honest questions that every NIO investor needs to sit with. Not the bull case, just real question. My community raised this concern. Shout out to Capo, but NIO's current momentum is real. The ES9 is ramping, the ES8 is still winning. The L80 is finding volume, but the Chinese EV market launches a flashy new product virtually every month. NIO's currently running on a few demand engines, and if those engines slow down without new ones behind them, the Q3 and Q4 story gets ugly fast. But beneath all of that, the deeper concern is R&D. A large part of NIO's reduction in R&D spend has been achieved by creating subsidiaries like the chip business and the battery business, whose R&D activities don't directly show up on NIO's consolidated book. That makes the headline number look better, but if the underlying investment and innovation is genuinely declining, rather than being restructured, the technology superiority of the ES8, the ES9 and the L80 could all be a one-off rather than a durable competitive advantage. My honest take and Capo's honest take in the Discord. I don't want profitability to be achieved by weakening the long-term innovation engine. That's not a trade worth making. William Lee built this company on the belief that technology is the moment that stops being true, the premium positioning unravels. Now here's where NIO's strategy looks more conservative than its peers, and whether that's right or wrong, that's the real question that we need to answer, and only time will answer. But let's look at Xpeng for a second. Xpeng is burning over 5 billion yuan per quarter, chasing physical AI, humanoid robots, a flying car, and level 4 autonomy simultaneously. If these bets hit, Xpeng is easily a 10x company.