For the first time since Nio Inc. began assembling its battery-swap alliance more than two years ago, founder and chief executive officer William Li has publicly downgraded the strategic importance of bringing other automakers into the network.
“In the short term, we will not treat whether third-party companies use our battery swap network as a priority — it is not our strategic focus,” Li told a media roundtable on Wednesday, the day after Onvo unveiled the L80 SUV in Beijing.
The shift lands as no alliance partner has released a vehicle compatible with Nio‘s stations, while rival CATL — Nio‘s main battery supplier, investor, and competitor in the swap-network race — has signed deals with several Chinese brands, including some that overlap with Nio‘s own alliance.
GAC unveiled the new CATL-swap-compatible N60 at the Beijing Auto Show that opened last week.
According to the company’s founder, while Nio remains open to outside participation, its internal stance has solidified.
“Over the past one to two years, we’ve clarified internally that whether third-party companies join our battery swap network is not a strategic priority for us,” he said.
Nio Inc.‘s chief noted the company’s near-term focus is on expanding its own swap network, improving the user experience for its own customers, developing long-life batteries, and selling its own vehicles.
“We don’t have short-term targets for the number of partners,” Li stated. “Our core business priority is to enhance user experience through the battery swap network and sell our own vehicles well.”
As of Wednesday morning, Nio operated 3,812 battery swap stations in China, having provided over 109 million battery swaps since 2018.
The company set a 2026 full-year target that calls for more than 1,000 new stations and a total exceeding 4,600 by year-end.
Li drew on the cloud services industry as a reference point for the network’s future.
“In the long term, this will be an open network, drawing on experience from the cloud services industry,” he said. “So in the short term — or for some time — we won’t treat whether third-party automakers adopt our battery swap technology or network as a top priority.”
The Alliance
The comments come more than two years after Nio began assembling its swap alliance.
Changan Automobile became the first signatory in November 2023, followed by Geely, Lotus, Chery, JAC, GAC, FAW Group, and Jidu — the Geely-Baidu joint venture that has since fallen into financial difficulty.
Li said on Wednesday that automakers have signed framework cooperation agreements, though their progress varies.
As EV reported in December 2025, no mass-produced battery-swappable vehicle from any alliance partner has reached the market.
GAC‘s battery system integration team said in January 2025 that it had completed technical alignments with Nio‘s system but was still awaiting internal approval for model development.
Chery‘s Exeed brand had targeted a mid-2025 launch for its first swap-compatible models, but no vehicles have materialized.
Meanwhile, CATL‘s rival Choco-Swap network — designed for cross-brand compatibility from day one — has moved faster.
GAC became one of the first automakers to adopt the system, debuting the technology in its Aion S sedan.
CATL‘s network reached 1,470 stations across 99 cities as of late April and is targeting 4,000 integrated charge-swap stations by year-end.
Nio and CATL remain closely tied despite the parallel networks.
The two companies signed a five-year strategic cooperation agreement in January and have formed joint ventures for battery leasing, recycling, and cascade utilization.
CATL invested up to 2.5 billion yuan ($365.6 million) in Nio Power in March 2025.
Last week, the battery giant called Nio an “irreplaceable and important strategic partner”.
Fifth-Gen Stations
Onvo‘s brand chief Shen Fei — a Nio veteran who previously oversaw the company’s energy arm — said at the roundtable that the fifth-generation battery swap station will begin deployment in the third quarter.
The timeline tracks with the last delay — Li had initially said in December 2025 that all stations deployed from Q2 2026 onward would be fifth-generation units.
In March, the company revised that to July or August.
Shen said the new stations are already compatible with three battery packs — one each for Nio, Onvo, and Firefly.
He added that the entry barrier for third-party automakers is not high, but that they would need to adopt one of these packs and plan accordingly for system integration.
“Other manufacturers can choose to adopt one of these battery packs, provided they have clearly considered how to use and manage them,” Shen added.
The fifth-generation stations will be the first in Nio‘s network to support all three of its brands.
Current fourth-generation stations support Nio and Onvo vehicles but not Firefly‘s 42.1 kWh battery pack.
Nio‘s co-founder and President Lihong Qin described the new generation last August as “the ultimate goal of our battery swap strategy.”
As EV reported earlier this month, Nio is back-loading its rollout to the fourth quarter, with roughly 450 of the planned stations expected to open in the last three months of the year alone — nearly half the full-year target in a single quarter.
