This electric luxury car lets you snooze while it zooms

The cars drew steady crowds this weekend here at SXSW Interactive, which once again invited technologists from major automakers and brash startups alike to lay out their roadmaps for the future of mobility.

Tucked inside a low-slung downtown building that the Chinese-funded company had taken over for the festival, Eve presented a vision of mobility that turns the dreaded commute into a dreamy knitting or TV-watching escape.

A few feet away sat the sleek EP9, which had only recently set an autonomous car speed record at the nearby Circuit of the Americas, lapping the Formula One circuit at a driverless top speed of 160 mph.

“Today’s cars are the (Internet equivalent) of the dial-up modem,” says NIO’s US CEO Padmasree Warrior. “The true next generation vehicle will come fully from the digital side.”

Warrior would seem well positioned to help NIO execute on a software-driving-hardware approach. The Indian-born engineer has served as chief technology officer at Cisco and sits on Microsoft’s board.

Warrior reports to NIO chairman William Li, the man behind Chinese online car sales company Bitauto.

But NIO is charging into an increasingly crowded space. Traditional automakers are rising to the electric and connected-car challenge by beefing up engineering staffs or partnering with tech companies, such as Waymo and Fiat Chrysler, and Uber and Volvo.

Start-ups such as Faraday Future and Lucid have promised their own high-tech electric vehicles in the coming years. And Tesla, of course, has helped popularize the idea of a luxury electric vehicle, and hopes to broaden its market with the release of the US$30,000-and-up Model 3 this summer.

San Jose-headquartered NIO, until recently known as NextEV, plans to have Eve — which is just a prototype at this point — ready for consumers by 2020. Pricing has not been announced.