Nio and Geely join forces on battery swapping
The Chinese electric car manufacturer Nio has gained another major partner for its battery swapping business. Geely will now be cooperating with Nio on multifaceted aspects of battery swapping. This comes shortly after Nio agreed on a battery swapping partnership with Chinese automotive giant Changan.
According to Geely and the holding company behind it, ZGH, Geely and Nio want to develop battery swapping standards for both the passenger cars and commercial vehicle sectors and corresponding models. The two companies want to co-develop battery swapping standards, accelerate the development and promotion of battery swapping technology and expand the operational scale of battery swapping to “users with different needs”.
The potential for effective second-life applications is likely to be enhanced by the two companies’ intention to establish an efficient battery asset management mechanism, and they say their combined efforts should enable a unified battery swapping operation. Perhaps most notably, the two companies are committed to developing vehicles with swappable batteries compatible with each other’s systems.
Nio currently has around 2,100 battery swap stations in China – also known as power swap stations, or PSS for short. Until a recent deal with Changan, Nio’s vehicles have used this expensive infrastructure exclusively. The battery swap concept is integrated into all Nio models. Pack variants currently have 75 kWh (mainly with LFP cells) and 100 kWh (exclusively NCM cells). A semi-solid-state variant with 150 kWh and the same dimensions has been on the market since July after some delays, although not yet on a large scale.
Keeping company with the upper echelons of both Geely and Nio at the ceremony for the partnership agreement was Jack Liu, CEO of the Yiyi Power division. Yiyi Power already operates its own battery swapping system in several cities in China. Geely noted that Yiyi Power has years of experience providing battery swapping for commercial vehicles. It is now looking to expand its presence in more cities without specifying which regions this is intended for.
Nio now has battery-swapping agreements with two of China’s largest automotive companies. Nio’s recent agreement with Changan is potentially enormous: according to the China Passenger Car Association (CPCA), Changan is China’s third-largest car manufacturer this year, behind BYD and FAW-Volkswagen, but ahead of Geely and SAIC-Volkswagen. That said, most of Changan’s sales are conventional combustion vehicles, with only just under 300,000 of the more than 1.1 million Changan vehicles sold this year as new energy vehicles.
Geely, on the other hand, is deeply embedded in electric vehicle life cycles and is most notably very involved with Europe’s electric vehicle markets in numerous and quite fundamental ways, including ownership of Volvo and Polestar and an almost 10 per cent stake in Daimler, among many other activities.
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