How much would you pay to not have to scrape snow and ice off your car’s windshield in the morning? It’s freezing cold. Your car is partially buried in a fresh coat of powder and while that fuels excitement for a day on the mountain, the immediate hassle(s) caused by all that snow spells out misery. At least that’s how I feel about clearing snow off of my car in the morning. Aside from the obvious visibility and the need to clear the windshield, letting snow sit on your car presents a handful of other problems to the maintenance of the vehicle itself as well as hazards on the road for other drivers. But mostly, I just hate standing in the freezing cold with a scraper while allowing the car to heat up.
Starting next year, some people with about $112,000 to drop on a new car and the means to get their hands on the latest EV from Chinese automaker NIO can allow their car to do all this for them. To be clear, the new ET9 is marketed as an executive’s car, so the intended customer base is the kind of person who’s more likely to have a driver doing all this for them. But the automaker made headlines at its winter testing when it showed off an innovative suspension system. A video with the car covered in white stuff showed the ET9 as it shook off all of the snow like a wet dog.
The suspension system is called SkyRide, which is the world’s first integrated hydraulic fully active suspension that can adjust stiffness, dampening, and ride height with four wheels that can be controlled independently. The intelligent suspension system allows the car to stay level on uneven or rough terrain, which is basically an expensive way to make sure you enjoy the smoothest ride possible from that backseat.
Or yeah, you can avoid having to dig your car out of all that snow it was buried in overnight.
Photo: NIO
