Nio will install battery swapping at EnBW charge hubs in Germany

The Chinese EV startup Nio has found a strong partner overseas. German energy company EnBW will have Nio equip its fast-charging hubs with Nio battery swapping stations. There is also talk of cooperating in energy management.

To start with, Nio will equip 20 EnBW “Hypernetz” sites in Germany, namely in Herleshausen in Hesse and Großburgwedel in Lower Saxony, so EnBW. Nio adds they would add more locations in future.

A Nio battery swap station has about the size of two garages and can exchange up to 312 batteries per day. Simultaneously, up to 13 batteries are charged at 40kW to 80kW on site, a power that protects the grid and batteries, explains EnBW.

Nio has successfully worked this battery as a service model in China and says its ‘Power Swap Stations’ (PSS) network now exceeds 1,000 stations that have provided over ten million battery swaps. Worldwide, Nio says it has 1,200 hubs open to date.

This includes some in Europe, where the company only launched with an event in Berlin this October. Customers on the continent can order the ET7 and ET5 and the EL7, with Nio adding countries. Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden have made a start, and therefore, the EnBW hubs are not the first PSS Nio has opened.

Nio launched the first Germany battery swap station at the Sortimo charging park on the A8 motorway between Munich and Stuttgart. The second location is at the Seed&Greet charging park in Hilden, also known to readers as a vast Tesla Supercharger hub. And Nio customers can also do a battery swap near the Kurfürstendamm shopping mile in Berlin.

By the end of next year, Nio plans to open up to 120 battery exchange stations across Europe. By 2025, there are to be 1,000 of these stations outside China.

Only Nio customers having subscribed (essentially rented or leased) a Nio EV have access to this BaaS model. The plan announced when launching in Europe was to make subscriptions the only business model in Europe. Subsequently, though, Nio said many potential customers indicated that they would prefer to buy the vehicle, so the company added the purchase option for the new markets.

cnevpost.com, nio.com (in German)