Recharging beyond refueling. This was a motto William Li presented at the NIO Day 2022. The NIO CEO and founder meant that his company aims to make charging more convenient than putting fuel in a tank, which is quite challenging. NIO presented two ways to achieve that: the 500-kW Power Charger and the Power Swap 3.0, its third-generation battery-swapping station.
The rumors that NIO would introduce Power Swap 3.0 suggested it would store 22 battery packs. First-generation stations held 5 and offered 120 battery swaps per day, while second-generation units had 13 battery packs and a daily capacity of 312 swaps. In other words, the stations could perform 24 swaps per stored battery pack, which would make Power Swap 3.0 units perform 528 replacements. It was not quite like that.
These third-generation stations can store 21 battery packs. Curiously, their “productivity” is lower: 408 swaps per day, or a bit more than 19 swaps per stored battery pack. It must have to do with the charging capacity of these new stations.
The Power Swap 3.0 has an improved battery pack replacement speed, thanks to what the company calls three-shift synced swap mode. NIO states it is 20% faster than what a Power Swap 2.0 station can deliver. NIO said the previous generation swap station could do its job in 3 minutes, so we’re talking about 2 minutes and 24 seconds.
Other companies working with battery swapping just make you drive through their swapping stations. Curiously, Power Swap 3.0 still forces drivers to back up inside the station, but it tackled that with technology. NIO vehicles have LiDARs not only in their newer cars: the Power Swap 3.0 also has LiDARs (two of them) and two NVIDIA Orin X chips. That gives the station a computing power of 508 TOPS. That makes it smarter than a Tesla Model 3 and its 144 TOPS, but still behind the ET7, which counts on 1,056 TOPS, thanks to its four NVIDIA DRIVE Orin chips.
NIO is pretty proud of its battery-swapping expertise. It currently offers 40,000 battery pack replacements per day, which helped it achieve 15 million swaps since it sold its first cars. According to the company, more than 50% of users prefer this solution to give their cars more juice. The rest of the customers probably bought their cars with the battery packs, which prevents them from using this solution: only those on Battery as a Service (BaaS) can swap them.
Li told the audience that NIO bought back an ES6 with more than 450,000 kilometers (279,617 miles). It performed 1,300 battery swaps until now, and the Chinese company was proud to see how it was good as new. Sadly, it did not present the car or show anything to prove how it endured that much mileage and so many replacement operations.
NIO’s other solution for customers that can’t swap their battery packs is the Power Charger with a speed of 500 kW. According to Li, an ES7 connected to this charger for 20 minutes could recover 400 km (249 mi) of range in only 20 minutes. Just like Tesla’s 1-MW charger for the Semi, NIO’s supercharger has liquid-cooled cables that are 50% lighter than cables without the same solution. Too bad that this reduces the lifespan of a battery pack.
NIO’s third-generation battery swapping station was officially released, with faster battery swapping, stronger service capabilities, smarter battery swapping, and more efficient station-network interaction. In March 2023, full-scale deployment will begin.#NIO$NIOpic.twitter.com/osFNEUTZaU
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