Nio, a Chinese EV car maker, has just completed a battery challenge with its mass-produced ET7 sedan, driving for 1,044 km on a single charge.
The Nio ET7 arrived at its destination with a 3% state of charge, or 36 km of range, according to stats shared by the company.
This makes the Nio ET7 the longest range vehicle in the world thanks to its swappable high density 150 kWh semi-solid state battery pack which the company has been working on.
All of this was achieved in just over 14 hours of driving with Nio’s founder and chairman, William Li, driving the car for the majority of the trip. Nio’s vice president Shen Fei was also in the car and drove part of the way.
Nio is best known for its battery swap technology and operates over 2,000 battery swap stations across China and Europe. According to the timeline shared by Nio, Li left a Nio battery swap station in Shanghai at 6:32 am with the car arriving – with the same battery – at its destination at 8:33 pm.
Given it’s winter, the temperatures during the testing were quite low which isn’t optimum for range testing.
Regardless, the car drove for extended periods with an average consumption of 132 Wh/km at an average speed of 84 km/hr.
On the back of this milestone, Nio’s shared a post on its weibo page. The translated version of what the company shared said:
“Today, we have witnessed that the range of smart pure electric vehicles has entered the era of one thousand kilometers. #Weilai ran 1044 kilometers on one battery. The 150kWh battery life challenge was completed, with a final score of 1044 kilometers!
“There has been a nationwide cold wave in recent days. When we set off from the Shanghai World Expo Center battery swapping station at 6:32 in the morning, the temperature was minus 2 degrees. The team did not expect the actual battery life to exceed 1,000 kilometers today. What exceeded everyone’s expectations was that ET7 and 150kWh battery pack.”
Another key innovation being showcased by Li and the team on this trip is Nio’s autonomous driving suite which includes Nio pilot plus.
Some 957 km of the 1,044 km trip was done using Nio’s pilot plus feature, which is similar to Tesla’s highway autopilot suite.
The star here is the 150 kWh battery pack which has an energy density of 360 Wh/kg. It’s one of the highest-density mass-produced batteries for EVs and has been supplied by Beijing WeLion New Energy Technology.
For comparison, a Nickel-Manganese-Cobalt (NMC) battery pack used in traditional long-range cars have a typical energy density of around 270 Wh/kg. Lithium-Iron-Phosphate (LFP) batteries which are used in most of the popular models in Australia are around 150 Wh/kg.
This is a great achievement for EV development as it showcases battery technology in mass-produced EVs and gives a glimpse of what’s to come in more mass-market electric cars in the coming years.
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.