Nio said on Monday it had carried out the 200,000th battery swap in Europe, as the opening of new stations on the continent faces a sharp slowdown.
The Shanghai-based electric carmaker reached the 100,000 mark in September 2024, some 607 days after its first swap in January 2022. To reach the second 100,000 swaps, it needed 269 days.
With expansion of the network and a larger customer base, volumes doubled in less than nine months.
Nio has pursued an ambitious plan to replicate in Europe the battery swap model it developed in China, where drivers can exchange depleted packs for fully charged ones within minutes.
The company currently runs 60 stations across six European countries, most of them in Norway and Germany.
The 60th location opened nearly four months ago, in late April, while the 59th one was inaugurated last December.
Growth in the network, however, has slowed markedly.
Nio expanded to 30 stations by November 2023 and added 20 more in just eight months, bringing the total to 50 by July 2024.
Since then, only 10 new stations have opened over more than a year — an average of fewer than one per month.
In a statement on Monday, Nio said 74% of its European users “now choose the speed and ease of changing batteries” and reported that its stations have delivered over 11.29 million kWh.
The most used facility this year has been in Bryn, Oslo, with 12,574 swaps. The company said that in 2025 it has performed one swap every 2.84 minutes during opening hours.
Yet the European expansion has stalled.
As exclusively reported by EV in April, Nio Power — the group’s energy arm — has been hit by investment cuts, leading to a sharp slowdown in rollout plans.
According to a person familiar with the matter, the Power unit in Europe has been reduced to five active staff, two of them on long-term sick leave. Only three new projects are progressing, all linked to binding contracts.
Nio has signed contracts for 170 sites across Europe, but many are now described by people familiar with the plans as “barely usable” because Firefly will need more urban locations, while existing sites have been designed for long-distance highway travel.
Reuters reported in April that battery giant CATL was in talks to take a controlling stake in Nio Power. Days earlier, Fei Shen, head of the division, had stepped down to lead Onvo.
Nio’s founder and chief executive William Li dismissed the report in a private chat with owners, telling them: “Don’t believe or spread rumors.”
The two companies have nonetheless deepened their cooperation, agreeing to jointly develop a “battery swapping network for passenger vehicles.” Firefly’s future models will adopt CATL’s swap standards, though its first vehicle will still rely on Nio’s own next-generation stations.
Shen has since said that Nio is working on larger urban “hubs” with more flexible capacity.
The company has also filed a patent for modular, expandable stations that can be attached to existing sites to increase storage.
