ams OSRAM, global leader in innovative light and sensor solutions, announced today that its OSIRE™ E3731i intelligent RGB LED, based on the Open System Protocol (OSP), has been successfully integrated into the NIO ES9 — NIO’s brand-new smart electric executive flagship SUV. This marks the first deployment of the ams OSRAM OSIRE™ E3731i within the NIO lineup, delivering an immersive and personalized dynamic lighting experience inside the cabin.

Automotive interior lighting is evolving beyond simple ambient accents toward intelligent, interactive systems, driven by the growing consumer demand for immersive cockpit experiences. As a pioneer and a leading company in the global smart electric vehicle market, NIO has consistently placed user experience at the heart of its vision, continually pushing the boundaries of cabin interaction in its flagship models.

On April 9, 2026, the NIO ES9 was officially launched and opened for pre-order. Available in three trim levels: Executive Luxury, Executive Signature, and Horizon Edition, the vehicle carries a pre-sale price ranging from 528,000 to 658,000 RMB, as well as a starting price of 420,000 RMB under the Battery-as-a-Service (BaaS) subscription plan. The company has officially described the ES9 as "the culmination of NIO’s eleven years of systemic innovation" and "the pioneer of the intelligent electric executive flagship SUV segment." NIO founder, chairman, and CEO William Li stated that the ES9 is set to usher in the era of battery electric vehicles for executive flagship SUVs.

Regarding the interior experience, the NIO ES9 deeply integrates a sense of luxury with an immersive atmosphere. The vehicle features a six-layer wraparound ambient lighting design, with a total light strip length of 10,404 millimeters. These design choices place greater demands on dynamic lighting effects, color consistency, and system integration. Traditional LIN bus architectures struggle to support large-scale dynamic lighting effects due to bandwidth and node limitations. To address this, NIO partnered with ams OSRAM to introduce the OSIRE™ E3731i intelligent RGB LED based on the Open System Protocol, creating a premium cabin atmosphere that is both technologically sophisticated and warmly inviting.

The OSIRE™ E3731i integrates R/G/B LEDs and an embedded driver IC into a single package. Each chip comes with factory-calibrated color and brightness data, as well as an integrated temperature sensor. An external microcontroller can independently address and control each LED within a daisy-chain topology via OSP, while reading back real-time temperature values to optimize the color algorithms. The product has received AEC-Q102-003 automotive-grade certification and complies with patent requirements in all automotive manufacturing countries. In the NIO ES9, the OSIRE™ E3731i delivers three perceptible tangible upgrades for the user:

• Precise, uniform color throughout the cabin: Nearly one hundred LEDs are distributed around the instrument panel and door panels. The factory-calibrated data built into each chip eliminates the need for individual LED calibration after the vehicle rolls off the assembly line, ensuring a high degree of color consistency across all zones and significantly improving mass-production uniformity.
• Lighting that moves with the music: When music is playing, the ambient lighting adjusts its color and brightness in response to the melody and rhythm, creating an immersive "music visualization" experience. The high bandwidth of the OSP allows the main controller to update the state of more than 200 LEDs within 10 milliseconds, ensuring smooth dynamic lighting effects with minimal latency.
• Driving scene synchronization and personalized presets: The ambient lighting automatically adjusts in sync with the cabin's atmosphere mode, displaying animations such as flowing and breathing light effects. Users can set their preferred ambient theme to match their mood, and all settings support continuous OTA updates.

None of the above would be possible without ams OSRAM's Open System Protocol, a connectivity solution developed specifically for high-density lighting systems. Built on a CAN-FD physical layer, it requires only two differential bus lines to connect up to 1,000 LEDs in series, significantly reducing wiring harnesses and the number of controllers. More importantly, OSP is available free of charge to all automotive, LED, lighting system, and microcontroller manufacturers, and has entered the ISO international standardization process (project number: ISO 26341-1). This open architecture gives NIO both supply chain flexibility and technological autonomy, freeing hardware selection and software-defined lighting from the constraints of proprietary protocols. This enables the NIO ES9 to deliver a cabin experience where dynamic ambient lighting flows through the cabin while the speaker lighting seamlessly unites sound and illumination.

In fact, the partnership between NIO and ams OSRAM has gradually expanded from exterior lighting to intelligent interior lighting. The ams OSRAM EVIYOS™ HD 25 intelligent multi-pixel LED has previously been adopted across several NIO models, and the successful integration of the OSIRE™ E3731i further strengthens the two companies' collaborative innovation in smart automotive lighting. Going forward, ams OSRAM will continue to drive the adoption of the Open System Protocol and intelligent RGB LED technology, working alongside Chinese new energy vehicle manufacturers to explore new possibilities for light-based interaction within smart cockpits, and together shaping a new ecosystem for intelligent lighting.

(Photo credit: ams OSRAM)

TrendForce 2025 Global Automotive LED Market- Lighting and Display Product Trend
Release Date:
1. PDF (196 Pages)- 30 June 2025
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