Nio is testing a retail robot inside its battery swap stations that sells drinks, snacks and everyday items to drivers while their cars are being serviced, according to videos shared online by Chinese auto bloggers.
“NIO’s retail robot at its battery swap stations is now being tested,” auto blogger Arthur Shen wrote on X on Saturday, sharing a clip from a station.
Shen said the products come from NIO Life, Nio’s lifestyle brand.
EV found no announcement of the trial on Nio’s website or its official news channels, and the company has not said how many stations are involved or when the pilot began.
The video, filmed from inside a car parked in the swap bay, shows a white and navy robot carrying “NIO Power” branding, with a tray-like arm, standing next to a refrigerated cabinet stocked with drinks and packaged snacks.
A sign on the station wall says “Power-up retail trial operation” while listing three categories, “refreshing drinks,” “flavored snacks” and “daily essentials,” above a QR code.
A Patent Built for the Swap Bay
The setup closely matches a patent Nio was granted in 2024. A Nio unit filed a Chinese application on October 10, 2023, for an “automatic vending method” and system for battery swap stations, and it was granted in March 2024, according to Google Patents.
The patent describes a system that takes an order from the driver’s phone or car, tracks the progress of the swap and times the preparation and delivery of goods so they arrive before the swap ends. The delivery point can be the window at the driver’s seat, and the system can send a command to open the window or prompt the driver.
It explains the reasoning in its background section. For safety, occupants stay seated in the car during a swap, which “somewhat limits the achievement of the occupant’s autonomous shopping needs,” according to Google Patents’ machine translation.
The filing argues that “simply transplanting” a vending machine into a station splits the experience. It also allows orders to be placed automatically based on past purchases, cut off orders at a preset point in the swap and use a robotic arm to clear goods that are not collected.
Google Patents lists the patent’s current assignee as a Wuhan-based Nio energy equipment company, following a transfer.
Nio’s own marketing stresses that drivers stay in the car. “A swap takes only three minutes, fully automatic, with no need to get out of the car,” its NIO Power website says.
‘Buy a Cup of Coffee’ in Three Minutes
A second blogger, Shuishuixiong Tongxue, who is verified on Weibo as an original video creator, posted separately about what he called a new format at Nio’s swap stations.
“In the three minutes it takes to get a full battery, you can also buy a cup of coffee or other snacks,” he wrote, adding that it was “only a trial operation.”
“This robot is a bit ugly, but otherwise there’s nothing wrong with it,” he said.
In a follow-up post labeled an “unmanned retail pilot,” he said he suspected the idea came from the Nio Power team.
Not the First Retail Test
Nio has tried selling at a swap station before. In June 2024, Chinese outlet Jiemian reported that the swap station at Minshen Tea City in Shanghai was taking coffee orders during swaps from June 15 to June 21 that year, citing a Nio insider.
Coffee was made by a machine and pushed out by a robotic arm, while station staff handed over bottled drinks, the report said.
Nio has also sold space in its stations. In November 2025, it began showing Coca-Cola ads at 32 swap stations in Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou and Chengdu, its first third-party advertising at the sites.
A Bigger Network to Monetize
The trial would add a consumer sales channel to a network that has grown by more than 500 stations this year.
Nio operated 4,230 battery swap stations in China as of Saturday, 1,077 of them on highways, according to its website. Including 5,539 charging stations with 31,969 chargers, its network totals 9,769 sites.
The site’s live counters showed more than 129.7 million cumulative swaps and more than 102 million charging sessions on Saturday.
The company ended 2025 with 3,676 swap stations and has targeted more than 1,000 additions this year. Reaching that goal would require roughly 450 more in the last two months of 2026, in line with the 450 fifth-generation stations Nio said in April it planned to open in the fourth quarter alone.
The pace has picked up. Nio opened 19 swap stations on September 30, its second-biggest day of the year, and has said it will build 3,000 more by 2028.
Usage peaked over China’s National Day holiday. Nio completed 183,664 swaps on October 5, its single-day record, equal to one car every 0.47 seconds across its Nio, Onvo and Firefly brands, the company said.
Nio has also been shifting station ownership to partners. Under its Power Up Partner program, local state-owned platforms and financial institutions hold the assets while Nio operates them, and more than 800 swap stations had been jointly built that way by August, about a fifth of the network, the company said at the time.
In June, it enlisted partners for 500 more.
Competition is growing too. CATL, the battery maker, ended 2025 with more than 1,000 Choco Swap stations for passenger cars and has targeted more than 3,000 by the end of this year.
Nio began operating its fifth-generation swap station in August, after repeated delays. The 4,000th station in China, in Quanzhou, Fujian, was the first able to serve all three brands, including Firefly’s smaller battery.
Geely Buys Into Nio Power
The pilot comes a month after Nio brought an outside investor into the swap business.
Under definitive agreements announced on September 28, a Geely Holding Group subsidiary will contribute its battery-swap unit for commercial vehicles, Yiyi Internet Technology, plus 640 million yuan ($96.3 million) in cash for 30.0% of NIO Power, according to Nio’s filing.
The deal values NIO Power at about 16 billion yuan ($2.41 billion) after the investment. Nio China will keep 63.6%, and Geely’s stake could fall to no less than 20% if operational milestones are missed. Closing is subject to regulatory clearances.
The deal failed to lift Nio’s shares, which pared early gains that day.
Nio does not break out revenue from NIO Life. Its “other sales” line, which includes parts, accessories, after-sales services and used cars, was 3.08 billion yuan ($463.4 million) in the second quarter, up 7.2% from a year earlier.
That was about 9.6% of total revenue of 32.14 billion yuan ($4.84 billion). Nio attributed the annual increase mainly to higher sales of parts, accessories and after-sales services as its user base grew.
Shares at a 19-Month Low
Nio’s US-listed shares closed 3.3% lower at $3.21 on Friday, their lowest close since April 8, 2025, as a selloff in US technology stocks hit Chinese EV makers.
The stock is down 37.1% this year from $5.10 at the end of 2025.
JPMorgan cut its Nio target to $3.70 from $4.50 on October 26 and kept a ‘Neutral’ rating, according to Price Target, EV‘s sister publication that archives Wall Street analyst research on the EV, AI and semiconductor industries.
CLSA lowered its Hong Kong target to HK$29 ($3.70) from HK$55 on October 23 with an ‘Outperform’ rating, while Goldman Sachs upgraded Nio to ‘Buy’ with a $7 target on October 9, Price Target shows.
Nio reports October deliveries on Sunday, November 1, in line with its usual schedule, and has yet to announce a date for its third-quarter results.
