NIO, a growing Chinese electric vehicle maker, announced a new plan to open up battery swap stations and technology to other electric automakers. Over the years I have been covering electric vehicles, I’ve seen several companies attempt to add value to EVs by using swappable battery packs.
The idea is that if charging takes longer than refueling a tank of gas, we could just swap a battery pack for a fully charged one.
A startup called Better Place built its entire business model around it and went bankrupt. Tesla rolled out its own battery swapping technology back in 2014, but it only built one battery-swapping station and quickly killed the project. It’s why we were a bit skeptical when NIO, a Chinese EV manufacturer, launched its own battery-swapping scheme with its first electric vehicles back in 2018. But the automaker has defied the odds, and the program has been quite successful as we previously reported when they completed 500,000 battery swaps last year. Today, NIO announced at its Power Day in Shanghai that it has now completed“more than 2.9 million swaps,” which shows a strong ramp-up over the last year as the automaker’s customer fleet is growing.
That’s with 301 NIO Power Swap stations deployed in China.$NIO Inc.(NIO)$
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