NIO's Onvo pushes end-to-end steering and pedal control to its fleet over the air

NIO’s volume brand Onvo rolled out its Coconut 3.1.0 software update to more than 170,000 vehicles, introducing what Chinese media reports describe as the country’s first assisted-driving system to output steering-angle and pedal-control signals directly from the driving model, end to end. NIO has not published an English-language announcement.

The direct-control capability reaches 2026-model Max+ and Ultra+ trims, which carry NIO’s in-house Shenji NX9031 chip and lidar, and integrates the company’s NWM world model. The update also covers more than 160,000 vehicles on the older NVIDIA Orin platform — 2024 L60s, 2025 L90s and L60s, and 2026 Pro trims — with a feature set spanning assisted driving, cockpit, chassis intelligence and voice control.

Most driving stacks translate a model’s trajectory decisions through an intermediate motion-control layer before anything reaches the actuators; collapsing that layer trades a well-understood safety boundary for responsiveness and architectural simplicity. Whether regulators and the accident record validate the trade is now a question running live on public roads.