Electric vehicles (EVs) might be getting faster at charging, but there's still one refueling method in China that makes plugging in feel as outdated as feeding your horse some oats. We're talking about Nio's battery swapping tech. Pull in, wait about three minutes, and leave with a fully-charged pack. It's kind of like going to a car wash, but it gives your car a fresh battery instead of making it squeaky clean.
How popular is it getting, you ask? Well, Nio's recent statistics point out that during China's recent May Day travel rush, it completed over 1 million battery swaps in a single week. Nio was able to perform 1,031,469 separate battery-swapping sessions between April 30 and May 6—or about 147,350 swaps per day. That's an average of 270 swaps across its 3,839 battery swapping stations, or right around 40 per-site, per-day.
View Price on AmazonThe actual highest day of use was May 1 where Nio swapped out 170,585 batteries. This was a huge number of swaps, but still didn't quite beat the automaker's record of 177,627 in a single day (which Nio says was set on February 22nd during the height of China's Spring Festival travel rush). Even more impressive was the amount of power delivered via the stations. From May 1 until May 5, Nio says that it provided 15.4 gigawatt-hours of energy, which it claims was around 16.3% of all energy delivered to EVs in China over the same period of time.
Battery swapping has several notable advantages over charging. One is speed. While even the quickest charging stop in the U.S. takes around 20 minutes, and most EVs require more like 30-40, an automated battery-pack swap can take just a few minutes. The batteries are charged slowly on site, reducing the location's power needs. And the framework enables different battery packs for different use cases. For example, when they embark on a road trip, Nio owners can pay extra for a bigger pack with more range.
As cool as it is, battery swapping does come with some unique challenges. Automakers have to invest in a bunch of spare batteries to store at the site. And interoperability is an issue; Nio's stations only work with its Nio and Onvo brands. For this to take off industry-wide and become the new default form of EV charging, you'd need to have battery packs that were swappable between manufacturers. (Nio is working with Chinese battery giant CATL on battery-swapping standards.)
Source: insideevs.com
