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NIO Discusses Licensing Battery Swap Technology to Other Carmakers

One of the main issues with battery swapping is establishing a common standard for all cars. Ample has tried to tackle that by offering a model with small battery modules that can be swapped. NIO deals with a single battery pack that has to fit all of its cars. Now, it is discussing licensing this model to other car companies.
NIO Power Swap Station 2.0 18 photos
Photo: NIO
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The Financial Times interviewed NIO’s European president. Hui Zhang was the one who revealed the Chinese carmaker is having these discussions not only with Chinese automakers but also with foreign companies.

If these conversations proceed, NIO will allow cars made by these other manufacturers to use its Power Swap stations. The Chinese company plans to have 1,000 of them abroad and 4,000 in China by the middle of the decade. The Financial Times articles brought some interesting facts about them.

Each of these stations manages 13 battery packs and has a dedicated grid connection of 650 MW. That would be equivalent to a small power station and would be necessary to charge all the battery packs simultaneously. We suppose they charge them slowly, which could help extend the lifespan of these battery packs: fast charging constantly damages them.

The current 700 Power Swap stations serve 180,000 vehicles NIO has sold since it started selling them. Theoretically, 5,000 stations could help 1.3 million EVs with the battery swapping system. However, that is not as linear: in places with fewer NIO vehicles, the stations will not work as much as those in which NIO has large sales numbers. The good thing is that NIO’s battery swapping stations can be moved to other locations.

According to NIO, the idea with swappable batteries was to lower the price of electric vehicles: battery packs account for one-third of these costs. The risk of issues with them also makes EVs depreciate. If they could just pay to use these battery packs, the automaker is the one bearing these costs, not regular customers. That will preserve the value of these used EVs.

As the Financial Times rightfully points out, the central issue is that any company licensing the battery swapping tech will have to build its cars over NIO’s architecture. That’s a requirement to make them compatible with the stations. Although it could save them billions in development costs, it also puts NIO as the supplier of very vital components.

More than that, the companies that license this tech will help NIO establish the standard for battery swapping. NIO once told me that the possibility to share its battery swapping tech with other carmakers required a solid commitment to it as well as “large scale synergies among different manufacturers.”

The reason is pretty clear. For NIO, introducing any changes to the format it has already established for its cars could make them unable to use their own stations. For other carmakers, it may be necessary to feel that they contributed to this standard in any way.

A more convenient electric mobility could benefit from a universal standard for battery swapping. If it were widespread, battery packs could be much smaller, with ranges of not more than 200 kilometers (124 miles): enough for daily driving and convenient to swap after every two hours of driving. Making long-distance trips as convenient as those with combustion-engined cars is the last step to making EV adoption stronger than it is today. We can only wish NIO good luck in these talks.
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About the author: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo
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Motoring writer since 1998, Gustavo wants to write relevant stories about cars and their shift to a sustainable future.
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