NIO Will Show Two New EVs and 3rd-Generation Battery Swapping Station on NIO Day 2022

However, it seems that the company had precisely that in mind when it decided to present two new cars and its third-generation Power Swap station on NIO Day 2022: fans and investors will treat these things as gifts.

When asked about the main attractions at the event, William Li said two new vehicles would be presented, but added that they would be a surprise. Rumor has it that one of them should be the ET5 Station Wagon we talked about on November 24. CNEVPost stated that one of the other possibilities is the new generation of the ES8 or the EC7, an SUV coupe.

If you are wondering about the company’s new flagship, we should not see it there. The six-figure sedan is supposed to be presented only in 2024 to compete with the Mercedes-Benz EQS and the Lucid Air. The presentation will take a while because NIO wants to sell it worldwide. Before it is able to do so, it has to expand into more markets.

Ironically, NIO’s main presentation will be the Power Swap 3.0 station, as it should be called. The new system represents a pretty significant change when compared to previous versions of the Power Swap.

The first generation could store only five battery packs, which limited the number of vehicles it could serve per day to 120 battery pack swaps. Power Swap 2.0 stations represented a major improvement: they stored up to 13 battery packs and could make 312 swaps daily. With the scale that NIO wants to have, that would soon be insufficient.

CNEVPost states that three patents published in China in November anticipated that the new Power Stations would store 22 battery packs. Considering each battery pack it stores represents 24 swaps per day, we are talking about 528 battery pack replacements for each station.

NIO currently has over 1,200 Power Swap stations in China (1,263 on December 12). According to CNEVPost, 200 of them are from the first generation. As the company started using the Power Swap 2.0 units on April 15, 2021, all other 1,000 stations can make 312 swaps per day. That means that NIO can perform 336,000 swaps daily in its home country: 24,000 from first-generation stations and 312,000 from second-generation units.

The Chinese carmaker celebrated on December 12 the production of its 300,000th car, an ET5. Each of these cars could swap its battery pack once a day, and NIO would still have spare capacity to switch it more than once a day in some vehicles. That’s a pretty comfortable situation, especially considering that most of them will not do that every day. If NIO replaced all Power Swap stations for third-generation units, that would mean a capacity of 633,600 swaps per day.