Niu is a Chinese startup founded in 2014 that released its first electric scooter one year later. Its President, Hu Yilin, a former chief technology officer at China’s largest Internet search-engine, called his company Niu, after the Chinese word for buffalo. As “Our ancestors worked on the backs of buffaloes,” he says. Niu has an R&D center in Beijing and a factory in Changzhou.
In spring 2016, Niu launched its M1, a high-tech luxury e-scooter, that comes loaded with features such as remote
monitoring of battery levels and anti-theft location services.
Challenge
Niu was looking for GNSS performance, product quality and support, as well as for a long time partner for its e-scooters. u-blox provided the ideal solution, with its MAX-7Q embedded in the latest model.
U-Blox Solutions
u-blox was involved from the very beginning of the product design and could therefore support Niu in the most qualitative way to reach the best performance. Issues such as debugging were quickly overcome thanks to a good relationship with Niu and a reliable technical support from u-blox.
u-blox helped to shorten the customer design process and therefore fasten the time to market. “We needed a high performance and reliable GNSS solution for our e-scooters. The u-blox standalone GNSS module, MAX-7Q, was therefore the right choice. In addition, we value u-blox’s reliability as a partner,” explains Niu President, Hu Yilin.
Embedded in Niu’s e-scooters, u-blox MAX-7Q belongs to the MAX-7 series of standalone GNSS modules, built on
the exceptional performance of the u-blox 7 multi-GNSS (GPS, GLONASS, QZSS and SBAS) engine. The MAX-7 series
delivers high sensitivity and minimal acquisition times in the ultra compact MAX form factor. The MAX-7 series provides maximum sensitivity while maintaining low system power.
The collaboration with Niu is expected to continue with the advent of new technologies.
