EVs and charging go hand in hand. While most of the focus is on rolling out thousands of DC fast chargers every year, there is another company using a solution that many said would never work. It’s called EV battery swapping and over the weekend, Nio, a Chinese start-up, opened its 1,200th battery swap station.
Battery swapping is like changing over a bottle for the barbeque but for EV batteries. Nio has been persisting with the battery swap technology in its home market of China. Now, Nio has been able to hit a new milestone with its battery swap stations according to reports on Nio’s official social media channel.
The pace of the battery swap stations in its home market is incredible. Last November, Nio had just 600 stations in China. A year later, it’s doubled that to 1,200.
For some context, Australia has less than 400 DC fast charging sites as of November 2022, although it should be noted one company, Janus, is designing heavy duty truck conversions that feature battery swap technologies.
Nio’s EVs are designed to have battery swaps and the whole process can be done in under 7 minutes. This was demonstrated by YouTuber Bjørn Nyland, in Norway, where Nio has also started to roll its battery swap stations out too. Bjørn did a battery swap test on the Nio ES8 SUV with a 100 kWh battery pack.
The company has recently announced its arrival in other left-hand drive European markets such as Germany.
To date, the company has provided over 14 million battery swap services and currently averages 30,000 battery swaps a day according to their social media posts.
With the battery swap station rollout continuing, Nio plans on having more than 4,000 battery swap stations by the end of 2025. At least 1,000 of these will be in international markets outside of China.
It’s great to see innovation in charging technologies just as we are seeing in improved battery technologies such as CATL’s new Qilin batteries seen in the Zeekr 009 MPV with 800 km of range.
Battery swapping isn’t just a proof of concept, it’s done today and at scale. With brands like Nio using these technologies and expanding into international markets, it can only be good for those looking at making the switch.
Riz is the founder of carloop based in Melbourne, specialising in Australian EV data, insight reports and trends. He is a mechanical engineer who spent the first 7 years of his career building transport infrastructure before starting carloop. He has a passion for cars, particularly EVs and wants to help reduce transport emissions in Australia. He currently drives a red Tesla Model 3.