NIO Responds to Claims that Car Navigation Interface Displays Advertisements

A NIO car owner posted on Weibo on Wednesday that there were advertisements on the navigation interface of his car, which practically blocked the screen and could affect safe driving. According to the photo uploaded by NIO Inc., the content is the promotion of a brand owned by the car company.

In response, NIO said that it attaches great importance to user experience and will never carry out advertising business through its car screens. The company said that the new brand displayed on the screen is a sub-brand of NIO, which aims to protect environment. The company expects to share the information about the new brand with its users, so it created a prompt that could appear on the car display.

NIO Inc. also released the same content on its official Weibo account yesterday afternoon.

Subsequently, the netizen edited his post and said, “Correction: it’s not a pop-up ad! It has to be clicked on the notice bar before viewing it. If I have misled you, I’m sorry.”

He also mentioned, “Personally, I think there should be no advertisements in the car displays. If a car company wants to promote advertisements, it can send them through its mobile applications.”

According to the car owner, NIO Inc. had already withdrawn the advertisement yesterday afternoon.

Regarding NIO‘s apparent advertising practice, some netizens commented, “This is dangerous. How can people drive safely when the navigation system is suddenly covered by advertisements?”

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Some support NIO saying, “It’s not a pop-up advertisement, but in the app store notification bar, so it won’t show if you don’t click on it.”

Other netizens chimed in: “What car owners really care about is: what is the content review process of notifications, which are necessary and which may disturb car owners. We should thank the people paying attention to this matter, which actually helped us to supervise NIO‘s actions on the platform.”