Shanghai-based electric-car maker Nio has achieved a cumulative milestone of 30 million battery-swap services, according to a news report published by CnEVPost on October 9. The 30 million battery-swap milestone has come soon after the company had reported achieving 20 million battery swaps just six months ago.
Citing Nio, the report said that the new milestone means that the company averaged more than 60,000 battery swaps per day, with an average of one vehicle getting a fully charged battery from a battery swap station every 1.4 seconds.
It can be recalled that Nio had completed setting up its first battery-swap station in Shenzhen, China, in May 2018.
The news report further stated that the electric-vehicle maker currently has a network of close to 1,940 battery swap stations in China, of which 574 are located along highways. The company plans to add another 1,000 new battery-swap stations in China in 2023, bringing its network to a total of 2,300 swap stations by the end of 2023.
Citing Nio’s co-founder and president, Qin Lihong, the company aims to boost its EV sales on the back of its aggressive infrastructure goals and views its swap stations as brand showrooms in less-developed cities.
It is known that while Nio used to initially offer free battery swaps to its EV owners to build user habits, it rolled back the benefit once swap services scaled up over the past few quarters.
A dense battery-swap network can not only address range anxiety among the EV drivers, it can also significantly reduce the cost of EV ownership as vehicles would not necessarily need the expensive, long-range batteries.
