Nio’s CEO took advantage of the Chinese New Year holiday to assess the company’s battery swap station network and found some deficiencies. As a result, the objectives for 2023 were more than doubled.
At the end of last year, Nio had installed 1,305 battery swap stations in China, as well as 2,281 fast-charging sites, totaling 13,368 charging points. Although less publicized, this network remains an important selling point for Nio, which continues to promote its BaaS (Battery as a Service) business model. In this model, the customer leases the battery instead of buying it in exchange for access to services, including battery swapping.
The growth of this network indicates that the manufacturer has halted its investments. Since the beginning of the year, only 8 battery swap stations and 53 charging stations have been inaugurated, a slower pace than usual and clearly insufficient to achieve the goal of deploying 400 stations in 2023.
The reason is that Nio is waiting for the deployment of its new generation of stations, which offer greater battery capacity and faster charging. The first units will be deployed starting in April, accompanied by 500 kW fast charging stations.
9 months for 1,000 stations
After this period, the deployment rate should accelerate significantly. Indeed, William Li announced that the objective was now to add 1,000 stations in 2023. 600 of them will be located in urban environments, with a focus on Tier 3 (70 cities) and Tier 4 (90 cities) cities.
The large Tier 1 and 2 cities are already well covered by the 1,305 stations in service. 400 new stations will be installed on highways or near interchanges, either to increase the density of the current coverage or to cover new routes.
This represents 2.5 times more than what was planned. This acceleration is explained by a recent trip by the founder of the Chinese automaker. Accustomed to using his brand’s battery swapping network, he recently traveled to different regions of the country to meet with customers. It turns out that the network is satisfactory but still has significant uncovered areas, while some stations can become saturated during periods of intense travel, such as the Lunar New Year celebrations. During these traditional holidays, Nio exceeded the threshold of 60,000 swaps per day several times.
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