NIO sets battery-swap record as network expansion gains momentum

The Chinese EV maker completed 183,469 automated pack exchanges on October 1, a public holiday in China, while its energy infrastructure reached 4,158 sites nationwide 

A NIO battery swap station

NIO completed a record 183,469 battery swaps on October 1, the first day of China’s National Day holiday, the company said on Friday.

Across the NIO, Onvo and Firefly brands, that volume equates to one car leaving a swap station every 0.47 seconds, NIO said in a post on its app.

The figure is 4.3% above the previous record of 175,976, set on February 21 during the Lunar New Year holiday.

It is also 7.6% above the 170,585 swaps NIO recorded on May 1, the first day of the May Day holiday.

NIO’s swap peaks have fallen on national holidays, when owners drive long distances to other cities and rely on highway stations.

“For long-distance driving, swapping is the first choice,” the company said in Friday’s post.

The busiest station on the day was on the G15 Shenyang–Haikou highway at the Rizhao service area in Shandong province, with 211 swaps.

In total, the network averaged about 44 swaps per station on the day.

NIO’s live network map showed 4,158 battery swap stations in China on Friday, including 1,070 on highways.

The map showed 5,355 charging stations with 30,863 charging piles, for a total of 9,513 sites.

Cumulative swaps stood at 126,406,667, and charging sessions at 99.9 million.

The swap count reached 100 million on February 6, so the network has added about 26.4 million swaps since then, an average of about 111,000 a day.

The 183,469 swaps completed on October 1 were 65% above the network’s daily average since February 6.

NIO has also connected 1,772,128 third-party charging piles, and drivers of other brands account for 86.66% of the energy delivered by its own chargers, according to the map.

It said battery swapping “has become a mainstream solution” for recharging new energy vehicles in China and “an important driver” of its sales growth.

The record highlights the scale of demand across NIO’s expanding energy network and the role of battery swapping in supporting sales growth.

NIO has added 482 swap stations this year, from 3,676 at the end of 2025, based on the map’s count.

NIO is targeting 1,000 new swap stations in 2026, with 518 planned for the fourth quarter.

Delivering that plan would lift Nio’s fourth-quarter rollout to about 5.8 new stations a day through December 31, more than three times its pace in the first nine months.

NIO opened 19 stations on September 30, the eve of the holiday, its second-biggest day of the year, and added 94 in September, its highest monthly figure of 2026.

“For this year, we still plan to build 1,000 new power swap stations,” Chief Financial Officer Stanley Qu said on the second-quarter earnings call on September 1.

“We expect all the newly built infrastructure will be sponsored or funded by our Power Up partners,” he added.

NIO is pairing that faster rollout with partner-backed investment in its charging and swapping network.

The record comes days after NIO said Geely Holding Group will take a 30% stake in NIO Power, its charging and swapping unit, in a deal valuing the business at about 16 billion yuan ($2.4 billion).

NIO is targeting 10,000 swap stations by 2030, a plan that implies adding about 1,400 stations a year and would significantly expand the reach of its energy network.

NIO’s best expansion year was 2023, when it added 1,011 stations, and the company has invested more than 20 billion yuan ($3.0 billion) in charging and swapping.