Author: Bai Ge
“NIO Power has achieved the convenience of charging more than refueling in 88.88% of scenes.”
At this year’s NIO Power Day, Qin Lihong, CEO of NIO, proudly announced to the public.
“Making charging more convenient than refueling” is the goal proposed by NIO Power in 2018 when NIO began to build a “rechargeable, interchangeable, and upgradable” energy service system.
Four years have passed, what has NIO achieved?
Let’s take a look at a set of official data. As of July 6, NIO has built:
- 1011 battery swapping stations;
- 1681 charging stations;
- 9603 charging piles;
- Connected to more than 520,000 third-party charging piles.
Among them, NIO’s battery swapping stations include 256 high-speed battery swapping stations, which have established a high-speed battery swapping network connecting five vertical and three horizontal cities in the four major urban circles.
Based on different user driving scenarios, NIO Power has built a full-scene charging network, and has provided users with over 10 million battery swapping services and more than 820,000 one-click charging services.
Of course, the ultimate goal has not yet been fully achieved. In order to provide users with better charging services, NIO has also proposed more “small goals.” By 2025:
- A total of 4000 battery swapping stations will be built globally, with more than 3000 in China;
- The coverage rate of charging areas will reach 90%;
- High-speed battery swapping networks connecting nine vertical and nine horizontal cities and 19 major city clusters will be established;
- A total of 168 Power Up Plan destination charging routes will be built worldwide.
In terms of products, NIO also announced that it will soon launch a 500kW super-fast charging pile and a third-generation battery swapping station with an 800V architecture.
It is worth noting that Qin Lihong stated that NIO’s third-generation battery swapping station, 800V high-voltage platform battery pack, and supporting battery swapping system will be open to the entire industry.
NIO’s battery swapping stations will have higher compatibility, and NIO may build exclusive battery swapping stations for other brands in the future.
“The owners of electric vehicles nationwide are one family.” Combining the trend of NIO Power’s opening up battery swapping stations to the entire industry, it is not difficult to see that the NIO Power system is beginning to move towards the entire industry.
However, whether other automakers will accept and use NIO’s battery swapping system is also the foundation for NIO Power to truly achieve openness.
NIO Power: Building a full-scene charging service
NIO Power was born under the logic of building a service system around users.NIO offers four types of convenient charging methods, called “Convenient Charging,” which include home charging, battery swapping, one-click charging, and en-route charging based on the user’s charging needs.
As of July 6, 2022, NIO user charging data shows that:
- 52.3% comes from battery swapping;
- 24.2% comes from home charging;
- 0.9% comes from one-click charging;
- 11.4% comes from en-route charging.
Regarding the two most common use cases, Qin Lihong, the CEO of NIO, claims that home charging is the best charging method, while battery swapping is the fastest way to replenish energy.
For home charging, users simply need to plug in the charging gun upon exiting the car, and then unplug it when they are ready to go. The entire process takes less than a minute.
As of July 6, 2022, NIO has installed 127,528 home chargers for users, a year-on-year increase of up to 69.22%.
In terms of speed and efficiency, battery swapping is faster.
NIO has divided its construction of battery swapping stations into two regions:
- The first is the “electric area house” in the city;
- The second is the intercity high-speed battery swapping network.
The “electric area house” refers to homes or office locations within 3 kilometers of the battery swapping station.
NIO matches a battery swapping station within three kilometers of the users’ current location.
NIO believes that users living or working in the “electric area house” can easily replace their batteries at the nearest battery swapping station, which is more convenient than driving a gasoline car to a nearby gas station.
As of July 6, the nationwide coverage of “electric area house” has reached 62.1%, compared to only 29% last year.
To meet the charging needs of NIO users during long-distance travel, NIO has jointly built 256 high-speed battery swapping stations, connecting the five vertical and three horizontal major city clusters across the country:
- Five verticals: G1 Beijing-Harbin Expressway, G2 Beijing-Shanghai Expressway, G4 Beijing-Hong Kong-Macau Expressway, G5 Beijing-Kunming Expressway, and G15 Shenyang-Haikou Expressway;
- Three horizontals: G30 Lianyungang-Khorgas Expressway, G50 Shanghai-Chongqing Expressway, G60 Shanghai-Kunming Expressway;
- Four major city clusters: the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei city cluster, the Yangtze River Delta city cluster, the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area city cluster, and the Chengdu-Chongqing city cluster.
As of July 4, NIO has completed 10 million battery swapping services, including 1.7 million high-speed battery swapping services.# Power Up Plan: NIO’s Strategy for Destination Charging
After successfully addressing the two major concerns of EV users, NIO has given a lot of thought to its users’ charging needs, especially when traveling to specific destinations.
In 2020, NIO officially announced the Power Up Plan at the Beijing Auto Show, which is a network of destination charging stations installed along popular travel routes that enable users to recharge their EVs without disrupting their travel plans.
To put it simply, the Power Up Plan provides 20kW DC charging stations for EV users at their popular travel destinations across the country. As of July 6, 2022, NIO has built a total of 31 Power Up Plan charging routes and aims to deploy more than 30,000 destination charging stations nationwide.
In addition, NIO has launched a new feature on its official app called Charging Journey, which claims to be the world’s first user-generated electric vehicle travel guide.
Finally, there is the One-Click Charging service, in which users can request NIO’s charging team through their mobile phones to charge their EVs at their location.
According to Qin Lihong, One-Click Charging is already serving 54 brands.
From home charging stations to battery swapping stations, to destination charging and One-Click Charging, NIO has made EV charging more convenient than refuelling for its users in 88.88% of scenarios, thanks to its self-developed energy cloud.
Building an Impregnable Fortress Behind Full-Scenario Charging
Constructing charging facilities such as charging stations and battery swapping stations is just the foundation. NIO’s software capabilities of maximizing the value of each charging resource are equally important.
At the 2021 Power Day event, NIO officially announced its self-developed cloud service platform, NIO Power Cloud.
This is the brain behind NIO Power’s service network and an unbreakable fortress behind NIO Power’s charging network. NIO Power Cloud provides four major capabilities for the construction of NIO’s charging facilities:
1) Smart Site Selection
Based on spatial big data, including user charging demand, service capacity, and load status of each charging facility, NIO Power Cloud can recommend site locations for battery swapping stations through the simulation system, Athena, which improves location selection efficiency and assists in decision-making for new charging facilities.
2) Intelligent Operation and MaintenanceThe rapid growth in user retention and electric charging facilities has been placing increasingly high demands on the operational capabilities of NIO Power equipment. With its self-developed high-performance electric charging network physical system, NIO can read the operational status of its own built-in charging facilities in real-time, and utilize digital twin technology to achieve remote visual monitoring of the operating status of its battery swap stations, making it easier for backend operational personnel to grasp equipment status.
For example, regarding battery status, Shen Fei, Vice President of NIO Power Management, said that the battery, charging pile, and battery swap station within the NIO Power system can all use deep learning algorithms to detect in real-time whether they are in a good or perfect state, or in a general state.
At this NIO Power Day, NIO revealed the details of its battery quantities in its battery swap stations for the first time. The data shows that among NIO’s national battery swap stations, there are 3821 long-range batteries with 5140 standard-range batteries, for a total of 8961 batteries – on average, each station has nine batteries.
Shen Fei believes that every piece of data in charging and swapping facilities can be traced down to each station from city to city when combined with NIO’s digital twin of the battery swap station, creating a complete “smart operation and maintenance.”
The so-called digital twin swapping station is modeled by NIO in the digital space based on the data parameters of the actual swapping station, enabling a perfect reproduction. Its functions mainly include two aspects:
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First, online training. Previously, specialist training may have been done during idle times at a swapping station, but now it can be explained completely within the digital model, even problem reproduction is more vivid within the digital model.
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Second, true unmanned operation: compared to the operating specialist, all of the battery swapping station data can be obtained online, meaning that more experienced engineers can remotely dispatch and locate faults more accurately and in real-time.
Shen Fei said that intelligent route recommendation is also embodied in data such as the vehicle’s battery capacity, the SOC capacity when departing, electric charging service coverage, and driving behavior. Therefore, NIO’s energy cloud can combine the charging pile data across the network, real-time road conditions, vehicle range, and user charging strategies, to perform personalized driving route planning and recommended charging resources along the way.
At the same time, by integrating NIO Power’s fully-scenario energy supplementation, NIO’s energy cloud will consider battery swap stations, mobile charging trucks, one-click electric charging, and other energy supplementation methods, and can also plan routes in zero or low-pile areas, truly making electric vehicles worry-free for long-distance travel.
This is NIO’s unique advantage.It is reported that the charging map within the NIO app and the independent app “Jiadian” available to all new energy vehicle owners have become popular electric travel planning platforms among users.
4) Grid Interaction
It is understood that each electric vehicle carries several tens or even hundreds of kWh of energy storage and has the characteristic of easy time and space interchangeability. Through off-peak charging and V2G grid interaction to achieve low charging and high discharge, it can play a role in grid regulation.
In early June 2020, NIO initiated a pilot activity of “reverse exchange” in which users could exchange the high-capacity battery on their vehicle for a low-capacity battery at the exchange station and receive reward points.
As of now, over 5,000 users in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region have participated, and the total consumption of clean energy has exceeded 5 million kWh.
Shen Fei stated: “NIO is the first car company in the country to organize a large-scale user response to grid demand.”
In addition to reverse exchange, Shen Fei also stated that NIO’s grid interaction thinking has gone deeper, even to the edge of promotion and practice.
For example, the second-generation exchange station is essentially a 1,300 kWh energy storage device, and each exchange station can play a role in regulating the grid. Every NIO vehicle is like a generator, and home charging users are like small electric plant managers.
Undoubtedly, NIO’s ability to provide users with a rich electric charging experience in just four years cannot be achieved without its self-developed “soft power” behind it. And NIO’s journey of charging continues.
Will exchange stations be opened up to the entire industry? NIO is making waves
How to achieve faster and more convenient power replenishment has always been a difficult problem for the development of the electric vehicle industry.
Although NIO Power has achieved convenient charging in 88.88% of scenarios, this is only for the use of NIO’s nearly 200,000 users.
Comparatively, the latest data shows that the number of electric vehicles in the domestic market has exceeded 10 million units.
This also means that the market demand for energy replenishment network infrastructure is gradually increasing. Whoever can complete large-scale energy replenishment infrastructure construction faster will occupy a core competitive advantage in the energy replenishment field.
At present, the players in the entire exchange operation service market can be roughly divided into two categories of four schools:
Two categories: One represents the original manufacturer, and the other represents a third-party operation service provider;
Four schools: Car company factions represented by NIO and Geely; independent operation service enterprises represented by Odyssey; power battery enterprises represented by CATL; and energy supply enterprises represented by Sinopec and PetroChina.
In fact, players in the energy replenishment market have not focused solely on one car company or platform, but want to extend their services to the entire industry and occupy the industry’s leading position.# NIO Power Day 2022
At the NIO Power Day 2022 event, NIO officially announced the launch of the third-generation swap station with an 800V architecture, which will be open to the entire industry.
This also means that NIO Power is officially becoming more open, which will inevitably have a huge impact on the entire industry.
As an independent automaker, what advantages will NIO have when opening its swap station to the entire industry, when facing the entry of power battery giant CATL and Aulton, who has been deeply involved in the swap field for decades?
From the perspective of the product, NIO announced that it will launch a 500kW supercharger, which includes basic data such as 650A high current, liquid-cooled charging cable, and global adaptability.
Among the fast charging stations commonly seen in the market, Tesla’s 250kW fast charging speed is relatively fast, which can meet the speed of 120 kilometers of charging and travel in 10 minutes.
However, NIO’s 500kW charging power is twice that of Tesla, which means that the mileage added by NIO’s 10-minute charging may exceed 200 kilometers, which is already enough to meet daily commuting needs, making the charging experience closer to refueling a gasoline car.
In terms of energy supplement network construction, by 2025, NIO is still constantly expanding its own power network system construction:
- 4,000 swap stations have been built worldwide, over 3,000 in China;
- The coverage rate of the electric zone building reaches 90%;
- Connecting the high-speed swap network of nine north-south and nine east-west car routes and 19 big cities;
- A total of 168 Power Up Plan destination charging routes have been built worldwide;
At present, NIO has achieved that it is more convenient to charge than refuel in 88.88% of scenarios. By 2025, with the more perfect construction of its power swap and energy supplement network, the energy supplement methods provided by it will become more convenient for users.
It’s worth mentioning that Qin Lihong said that over 80% of the charging volume of NIO’s charging stations serves non-NIO brands at present.
As Qin Lihong said, all electric vehicle owners in the country are a family, and they only need more convenient energy supplement services. Car owners often don’t care which brand the charging stations or swap stations belong to.
Therefore, in the context of all manufacturers transitioning to electrification, the advantages of NIO Power are gradually increasing. Besides technology, the quantity of swap stations laid out is also the foundation of NIO’s confidence.
However, it is undeniable that whether it is a swap station or a charging station, it involves the core technology of batteries, and it is difficult to achieve compatibility with multiple battery models.
If other automakers want to use NIO’s battery pack, it is not an easy task. Although NIO’s energy supplement network construction has already taken shape, this road to openness will inevitably not be smooth.
This article is a translation by ChatGPT of a Chinese report from 42HOW. If you have any questions about it, please email bd@42how.com.