The concept of battery swapping was often bandied about a decade ago. It was quickly deemed too complicated, mainstream automakers largely ignored it, and the whole idea faltered. Oh, except for in China, where the concept is going gangbusters.
It’s all thanks to Nio, the Chinese EV manufacturer first established in 2014. It’s been a long road to legitimacy for the upstart company. In the last decade, it has attracted big name investors, dodged bankruptcy, and gone multinational. In all that time, it’s been quietly working away on a concept that most of its rivals thought pointless and irrelevant.
The numbers don’t lie, however. Nio’s battery swapping service isn’t just an idea or some dinky pilot program. This month saw Nio open its 2,500th battery swap station, and it isn’t stopping there. These things are out there, operational, and serving the public on a daily basis.
Big Battery Business
Starting in 2018, it took Nio four long years to install its first 1,000 swap stations. As reported by Car News China, though, the company has gotten much faster, delivering the second thousand in just 15 months. Another 9 months after that it added five hundred more.
This isn’t a “build it and they will come” scenario, either. On Nio’s live tracking website, the company has already recorded over 49.5 million battery swaps across its sprawling network. At the time of this writing, swaps were occurring at a rate of almost a hundred every minute. Back-of-the-envelope maths suggests the company should cross the 50 million swap threshold in the next week or two.
Battery swapping sounds wild if you’ve never seen it before, but it’s been routine for Nio owners for years.
Nio has done battery swapping the right way. For one, it made it quick, easy, and automatic. Drivers simply have to pull into a battery swap station, at which point the task is handled automatically by robot. The car’s battery is plucked out from below, and a new fully-charged battery is swapped in, all in under five minutes. The company’s latest fourth-generation stations get that down to under 2.5 minutes, and it’s all activated by a simple tap on the car’s infotainment screen. Swaps typically cost around $8 to $15 USD, including the electricity charges.
Concerns around battery quality or damage don’t really matter, either. Nio’s battery swap stations check the state of each battery when they are dropped off empty for charging. Besides, even if you did get stuck with a poorly-performing battery, you could simply drive back to the swap station and get another one. Nor do customers have to worry about their vehicle’s battery aging over time. They’re forever swapping the battery out, with newer batteries continually introduced into the network.
The company also allows owners to buy a vehicle and rent a battery under its “Battery as a Service” model. This has the side effect of reducing the cost of entry when purchasing a Nio vehicle, as the battery is paid for on a month-by-month basis instead of purchasing the whole thing up front. This can knock 70,000 RMB ($9,640 USD) off the purchase price of a car. In exchange, users pay a monthly rental of 728 RMB ($100 USD) for a 75 kWh battery pack, or a higher fee of 1,680 RMB ($230 USD) for a larger 100 kWh battery.
Battery swapping kind of changes the game for EVs. No more does a taxi driver have to wait half an hour to recharge in between fares. Instead, they can swap a battery and get straight back out there. Or, indeed even swap with a passenger in tow, as this great video from @blondieinchina demonstrates:
As a company, Nio is going hard on nailing the charging experience, even outside battery swapping. The company has developed ultra-fast chargers, capable of delivering up to 640 kW at peak power. It’s intended for vehicles like the Nio ET9, which can charge at rates up to 600 kW. The special high-powered charge stations are paired with what Nio says is the industry’s lightest water-cooled charging cable, weighing in at just 5.3 pounds.
Nio even offers an incredibly unique personal service where you can call an assistant to charge your car for you. Through a Nio app, you request a charge for your EV. Someone comes out, picks up your car, and drives it to a charger or swap station. They then return the car to you fully charged.
Too busy to recharge your car? You can click a button and Nio will send someone to do it for you.
These are all big achievements for an automaker that is still very new to the industry. The company’s first mass-produced vehicle only rolled off the production line in 2018. Nio built its 500,000th vehicle in May this year. It’s delivering on the order of 20,000 vehicles a month, but has a long way to go to reach the scale of other big players in the EV space.
Why Haven’t I Heard Of This?
If you’re not across Nio’s accomplishments, it’s because thus far, they’ve largely happened within China. The country remains Nio’s biggest market, and home to the majority of its battery swap stations. 2,456 are installed across the length and breadth of China.
In contrast, just over 50 swap stations have been installed across Europe. 16 of those battery swap stations are installed in EV-loving Norway, with a further 17 in Germany. Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands host swap stations as well, as the company steadily builds out its network. Since opening its first station in 2022, Nio owners have completed over 63,000 swaps in Europe. It’s not nothing, but it’s a drop in the ocean compared to what’s going on in China.
On July 15th, the 50th Power Swap Station in Europe officially opens in Norway. This latest Power Swap Station, located in Oslo, is a significant landmark in our commitment to developing a European infrastructure that supports smooth travel for every NIO user.
Since opening the… pic.twitter.com/Q4N0GZL4Ej
— NIO (@NIOGlobal) July 16, 2024
Nio does plan to come to the US, in due time. A timetable of 2025 was floated a while back, but it’s not a firm commitment. As for battery swapping stations, well… it appears that’s not really on the cards just yet.
There’s also one big question that always looms over any conversation about battery swapping. What about cross-compatibility? Indeed, one of the reasons battery swapping has never taken off in the West is because different automakers use completely different battery designs. Nio has, by and large, simply ignored this problem. It just set about building its own vehicles with interchangeable batteries, expanding its swap station network all the while.
That’s not to say Nio is playing on its own, though. It’s signed alliance agreements with Changan, Geely, JAC, GAC, and Chery and others regarding cooperation around battery swapping and charging infrastructure—and Lotus, too! None of these other automakers yet sell vehicles with compatible batteries. However, GAC has announced its upcoming second-gen Aion V crossover, and it’s believed at least one variant will offer battery swapping. Hopes are that other automakers will soon follow suit.
Nio has proven that battery swapping can work, and it’s already built the swap stations to boot. All other automakers need to do is jump on board and redesign their vehicles to suit.
Can It Reach The West?
Nio seems to have established battery swapping in China through sheer bloody-mindedness. Progress in Europe is slower, with the company recently revising a target of 120 stations down to 80 by the end of this year. That’s no surprise, given that things like government permits and planning approvals can move much more slowly in the West.
Whether it can make battery swapping work overseas comes down to simple numbers. While there are a great many Nio vehicles being sold in China, there are fewer reaching foreign shores. Without the install base, it’s hard to run a battery-swapping network on a profitable and sustainable basis. Nio needs to sell a lot of vehicles to justify the investment, and it ideally needs other automakers to jump on board and do the same.
On July 15th, the 50th Power Swap Station in Europe officially opens in Norway. This latest Power Swap Station, located in Oslo, is a significant landmark in our commitment to developing a European infrastructure that supports smooth travel for every NIO user.
Since opening the… pic.twitter.com/Q4N0GZL4Ej
— NIO (@NIOGlobal) July 16, 2024
Nio is pushing into Europe, but things are moving slowly compared to its efforts at home.
It’s the same chicken-and-egg infrastructure problem that EV charging has faced in general. If there is a huge network of battery swap stations up and running, people will be more likely to buy a suitable EV. The problem is that without the cars to support the infrastructure, there’s no business case to build out the network. It all rests on Nio and other automakers making big sales in Europe of swap-compatible vehicles.
Ultimately, time will tell us whether Nio can pull this off. Until then? EV battery swaps will remain a lovely curio for tourists in China, and a great boon to local Nio owners.
The post How Chinese Automaker Nio Lets You Swap Your EV’s Battery in 2.5 Minutes Instead Of Having To Wait At A Charger appeared first on The Autopian.
