This automatic battery swap station has your EV ready to go in under 5 minutes

When Nio boasts of being able to recharge its cars in just five minutes, it’s not a question of ultra-fast charging technology, but simply of replacing a vehicle’s empty battery with another, fully charged one. The idea is for drivers to park in a dedicated place in a battery swap station. The operation is then fully automatic. Basically, the ground opens under the car and a machine comes to recover the old, empty battery before replacing it with another one charged to 100%. This takes less than five minutes. The old battery is then recharged and fitted to another vehicle at a later date. For motorists, there is no faster solution today.

Obviously, only Nio models are compatible with this system. To be able to use it, drivers need to subscribe to a battery-leasing service. Several packages are available depending on the type of battery used. For the moment, a few stations are available in Norway and Germany, ahead of a much larger deployment planned for next year. Nio hopes to launch more than 4,000 battery swap stations around the world by 2025. Although the concept is still new in Europe, in China, a thousand battery exchange stations of this type have already been installed, mainly near expressways.

Although it is much more sophisticated and 100% automatic, these recharging stations are similar to the concept of removable batteries for electric scooters, whose first dedicated stations were also recently launched in Europe.

However, Nio’s activities in Europe are still limited, with the only model available being the ES 8, an electric SUV. Other models, including an electric sedan, are expected to be available in 2023.