Nio's swap stations handled 1.19 million battery swaps in China's National Day week

A driver who pulled into the swap station at the Rizhao service area on the G15 Shenyang-Haikou Expressway on its busiest holiday day was one of 211 ^[3]. No Nio highway station had a higher daily peak, CnEVPost reported ^[3]. Electrek describes a swap as three to five minutes from pulling in to leaving with a full battery ^[24]. At that pace, 211 swaps add up to between about 10.5 and 17.6 hours of swapping in one day ^[16].

The average station was far less busy. Spread across 4,168 stations and seven days, the holiday total works out to about 41 swaps per station per day ^[17]. On October 5, the record day, that rose only to about 44 ^[18]. The network's peak day ran 7.8% above the week's daily average ^[19], while Rizhao's peak was roughly five times the per-station norm ^[15].

Load per station is also rising. Over May's Labor Day holiday, 3,839 stations completed 1,031,469 swaps in seven days ^[7], or about 38.4 per station per day ^[20]. Between the two holidays the station count grew 8.6% and swap volume grew 15.6% ^[21]. Each station handled about 6.5% more swaps a day ^[22].

According to Electrek, Nio claims battery swapping, not ever-faster charging, is the right solution for road-trip travelers ^[11]. The network Nio runs is split between the two. It operates 5,399 charging stations with 31,091 charging points, more sites than its swap network ^{[10] [1]}. Charging made up about 42% of the 2,071,582 energy services Nio provided over the holiday ^{[9] [23]}. Most drivers still steer into the swap bay themselves. Navigate-on-swap, which drives the car into the station and completes the swap, accounted for 24.7% of September swap orders at stations that had it ^[13].

In our view the holiday figures settle the throughput question for a closed fleet and leave the economics open. The reports do not include station costs or battery inventory. For an operator choosing between swap bays and faster chargers, two questions sort the options. The first is whether it controls the battery in every car that will arrive. The second is whether demand spreads evenly or piles onto a few highway stops on a few days.

An operator that controls the pack and faces piled-up demand should plan to the Rizhao figure ^[3], and we think a three-to-five-minute swap helps most at sites like that. One that controls the pack with even demand can plan to something like the 41-a-day average ^[17], and the choice then rests on cost. Without control of the pack, the model is Nio's charging side, an open network where vehicles from outside the Nio group took 86.69% of the electricity delivered ^[10].