Nio breaks single-day battery swap service record for the fifth consecutive day

On February 22 — the sixth day of the 2026 Chinese New Year — Nio reached 177,627 daily battery swaps, setting a new all-time high, the Chinese electric vehicle (EV) maker announced Monday. This marks the sixth time this month the service has broken its historical record and the fifth consecutive day of setting a new daily record 

Other recent records include: 

February 15: 146,649 battery swaps. 

February 18: 158,290 battery swaps. 

February 19: 165,898 battery swaps. 

February 20: 170,305 battery swaps. 

February 21: 175,976 battery swap. 

A station at Longhushan Service Area on the G60 Shanghai-Kunming Expressway completed 191 services on February 22, marking the highest single-day total. A station at the Xianshan Service Area on the G42 Shanghai-Chengdu Expressway completed 182 services. A station at the Jiangdu Service Area on the G2 Beijing-Shanghai Expressway completed 176 services. 

Official data indicates that currently, a swap is completed on average in less than 0.5 seconds, a level of efficiency that stands out particularly against the backdrop of the peak travel periods for both returning home and heading back after the Spring Festival. 

February 15-23 marked China's 2026 Spring Festival holiday period, a peak travel season. On February 15 — the first day of China's 2026 Spring Festival holiday — Nio delivered 146,649 battery swap services in a single day, setting the first record of the month. 

Supporting this massive service capability is Nio’s charging and swapping network. To date, Nio has built over 8,600 charging and battery swapping stations across China, including over 3,700 battery swapping stations and over 1,000 highway battery swapping stations. This network covers 550 Chinese cities and connects to the highways of 16 major urban clusters. 

A Nio battery swap station in China

Amid the record-breaking swap service figures, founder, chairman, and CEO Nio William Li issued a statement, once again systematically elaborating on the advantages of the battery swap model in terms of environmental protection and resource recycling. 

Li mentioned the “Interim Measures for the Management of Recycling and Comprehensive Utilization of Waste Power Batteries for New Energy Vehicles” jointly issued by six government departments. He emphasized that the most noteworthy point in this policy is that the regulation on “integrated scrapping of vehicle and battery” explicitly does not apply to battery-swappable models. 

Li stated that the swap model decouples the different lifespans of batteries and vehicles, thereby solving the common industry problem where EV battery life is shorter than vehicle body life. 

From the perspective of recycling efficiency, having enterprises uniformly manage battery recycling can significantly improve efficiency and reduce resource waste. 

This means that when a Nio vehicle reaches its scrappage standard, the owner only needs to hand over the body to a qualified dismantling company, while the battery, whose ownership belongs to the enterprise, will be uniformly recycled and tested by Nio. 

Batteries with remaining capacity value can be reassembled for echelon utilization scenarios such as energy storage; those with severe degradation will undergo professional dismantling to extract precious metals. 

According to Nio, the 100 million swaps have saved users a total of over 83.41 million hours of charging time, averaging more than 88 hours per person; compared to fuel vehicles, they have cumulatively reduced vehicle usage costs by over 26.3 billion yuan, averaging savings of over 27,000 yuan per person. 

The rapid scaling of swap operations coincides with Nio’s efforts to open its proprietary technology to the broader industry. By establishing standard protocols for battery packs and station interfaces, the company seeks to transition its capital-intensive network into a shared utility for multiple manufacturers. 

This strategy aims to improve station profitability while reducing range anxiety for a wider demographic of electric vehicle users. As the Spring Festival return rush continues, the performance of these automated stations remains a critical litmus test for the viability of battery swapping over ultra-fast charging. 

Will the seamless handling of nearly 180,000 daily swaps finally convince skeptics that swapping is the definitive solution for long-distance travel?