Three models, range up to a thousand kilometres, price from 1.2 million crowns. Tesla’s Chinese competitor has started sales in Germany and offers an unusual service: Those who don’t want to wait at the charger while traveling can replace an empty battery with a charged one. The whole event is said to last no longer than “your favorite song”.
It’s Thursday 6 October and a giant semi-trailer is heading towards the largest alternative fuel station in Europe. The crane then lays out several panels from its interior, from which the workers assemble a large “garage” in a few hours. Then representatives of Nio’s automaker and regional politicians arrive to cut the ribbon. And this is all. The first traction battery quick-change station for electric cars in Germany is going into operation.
The automaker calls the replaceable battery boxes Power Swap Station, PSS for short. And it will build them all over Europe, just like the American Tesla is building its own network of chargers. It is certainly no coincidence that the first PSS in Germany was born in the immediate vicinity of Tesla compressors: it is located in the town of Zusmarshausen, near the A8 motorway that connects Stuttgart and Munich.
Nio wants to gradually expand throughout Europe, although Czechia is still missing from the published list. However, sales of all three models on offer have already started in Germany: The large streamlined ET7 sedan and the EL7 SUV will cost 1.8 million crowns. The smallest ET5 sedan starts at 1.2 million, the price in all cases is indicated without the traction battery. Here the automaker wants to rent cars to car owners, the price for the service varies from 4,140 to 7,080 kroner per month, depending on the size of the batteries.
However, Nio does not force car buyers to rent batteries, anyone who wants to can buy one with the car. In that case they will pay 300,000 to half a million crowns more, but will lose once and for all the ability to recharge by replacing the existing dead battery with a charged one at the PSS station.
This service should be the automaker’s trump card against the competition, which offers nothing like it. Even the fastest charging is no match for the time the car spends at the switching station: the automaker had originally stated that the entire event “will be over by the time your favorite song finishes.” Now he specified the time, it should be exactly five minutes.
For the driver himself, changing the battery is a less stressful experience than going to the car wash. He doesn’t have to worry about not being able to enter the pit properly. All you have to do is press the self-parking button in the car and the car will drive itself to a predetermined place, down to the millimetre. The robots then remove the original battery from the frame and screw in a new one.
While this is an amazing service from Nio, PSS is not an original idea. Israeli entrepreneur Shai Agassi dreamed up a similar project even before the advent of electromobility, hoping that more automakers would get excited about his idea. Renault eventually joined him, but that was the end of it. The first trading box was opened by the Better Place company in 2008 near Tel Aviv, it went bankrupt five years later. The reason for its failure is an ill-conceived expansion at a time when electromobility was still in its infancy.
Agassi’s bankruptcy undoubtedly influenced automakers in deciding whether the shared-battery project had a future. Even Renault did not try to resurrect it, even if it was ahead of other manufacturers.
However, time has passed and Nio doesn’t plan on sharing his refill boxes with anyone else. So in the end, exceptionality can be the right key to success.
