Electric vehicle maker Nio said it reached 80 million cumulative battery swaps in China early on Saturday, seven years after completing its first swap in Shenzhen.
The milestone comes 110 days after the company reported 70 million swaps on April 1, maintaining the same pace as the previous 10 million milestone.
The Shanghai-based carmaker averaged around 90,900 battery swaps per day over the period and has provided “around 97,000” per day so far in July.
As of Saturday, the company operates 3,405 battery swap stations and more than 26,750 chargers across China.
Nio launched its first battery swap station on May 20, 2018. The 1,000th station came in July 2022, followed by the 2,000th in October 2023 and the 3,000th in January.
However, the company added just 384 new stations in the first half of the year — equivalent to 21.3% of the lower end and 19.2% of the upper end of its 2024 target.
With 50% of the year elapsed, Nio has completed only about one-fifth of its annual goal.
To meet even the lower bound of its revised target, the company would need to add an average of 54 stations per week in the second half of the year, or 62 per week to reach the 2,000-station goal. In the first half, it added just 15 per week on average.
Nio ended its “reverse battery swap” incentive program on July 15, according to a notice sent to users and reported by local outlet IT Home.
In the United Arab Emirates, where Nio launched its first battery swap station in February, the company recently said 15% of local users have used the service. Additional stations are planned.
Battery swaps in the UAE cost AED 119 ($32.40) for a 100 kWh pack and AED 99 ($27) for the 75 kWh version.
Nio’s fourth-generation swap station features six ultrawide field-of-view LiDAR sensors and four Nvidia Orin X chips, with a combined computing power of 1,016 TOPS.
The system completes a swap in 144 seconds, 22% faster than the previous generation, and can perform up to 480 swaps per day with 23 battery slots.
In Europe, Nio has deployed 60 swap stations across five markets, but only 10 new sites have been added in the past 12 months.
