70% of NIO Patrons Renting the Battery

Join each day information updates from CleanTechnica on e-mail. Or observe us on Google Information!

NIO has been working this battery swapping experiment for a number of years, and it’s been an fascinating ongoing exploration of how a lot folks want pack swapping to quick charging, how connected individuals are (or are usually not) to their EV’s batteries, and what makes essentially the most monetary sense. Nevertheless it’s now going into much more instructions, and clients prefer it.

NIO had already been providing a “battery as a service” (BaaS) choice whereby folks might purchase a NIO automobile however simply lease/lease the battery within the automobile. That might drop the upfront worth of a NIO by as much as about $10,000. Nonetheless, beginning March 14, the corporate began providing a modification to that — if the NIO proprietor determined in some unspecified time in the future that they wished to personal their battery pack, they might purchase it out from NIO and the quantity that they had paid in renting the battery (or batteries, to be correct for many of their instances) would go towards their buy.

Since offering this feature, NIO says that greater than 70% of its automobile patrons have chosen the battery leasing choice! Nio cofounder and president Qin Lihong supplied this fascinating nugget of information immediately the Chengdu Motor Present.

Naturally, a few of these NIO patrons — possibly even most of them — won’t ever determine to purchase out the battery of their automobile. Nonetheless, simply given customers the selection was sufficient to get extra of them to lease their automobiles’ batteries. The issue, which I’m positive lots of you might be already asking about, is that we don’t know what number of have been leasing the batteries earlier than! Nonetheless, the purpose of the assertion was that much more individuals are, and +70% is a fairly beautiful proportion exhibiting what customers now want.

One other aspect of this: Nobody else is providing this, so far as I’m conscious. If excess of half of NIO’s patrons want this feature, one would suppose that many different EV patrons would love the identical choice! I positive wouldn’t thoughts it. So long as NIO has set itself aside on this manner, one would suppose that might assist to drag in gross sales. After all, NIO can also be within the distinctive place of main for a number of years on battery swapping, a service that can also be distinctive within the business.

At this level, I feel I’ve solidly moved on from the query of whether or not EV battery swapping can have a spot sooner or later or not, and I’m satisfied it’ll. I feel it’ll turn into extra widespread to supply this service and supply versatile battery leasing. Possibly not within the US, the place somebody must open the market, residential density is way decrease, and we’re extra obsessive about private possession. However in different markets, I see this rising. Even within the US, if NIO determined sooner or later to enter the market, I’d guess on it succeeding with this right here too.

The counter argument is that batteries are getting cheaper and cheaper, and the utility of battery leasing and swapping is lessened as that’s the case. Nonetheless, I feel it’s helpful sufficient, and NIO’s stats appear to show that. What do you suppose?