70% of NIO Consumers Now Renting the Battery – CleanTechnica – Uplaza

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

NIO had already been providing a “battery as a service” (BaaS) choice whereby individuals may purchase a NIO automobile however simply hire/lease the battery within the automobile. That might drop the upfront value of a NIO by as much as about $10,000. Nevertheless, 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 needed to personal their battery pack, they might purchase it out from NIO and the quantity they’d 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 car consumers have chosen the battery leasing choice! Nio cofounder and president Qin Lihong supplied this attention-grabbing nugget of information in the present day the Chengdu Motor Present.

Naturally, a few of these NIO consumers — possibly even most of them — won’t ever resolve to purchase out the battery of their automobile. Nevertheless, simply given customers the selection was sufficient to get extra of them to lease their vehicles’ batteries. The issue, which I’m certain lots of you’re already asking about, is that we don’t know what number of had been leasing the batteries earlier than! Nevertheless, the purpose of the assertion was that much more persons are, and +70% is a reasonably gorgeous proportion displaying 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 consumers want this feature, one would assume that many different EV consumers would love the identical choice! I certain wouldn’t thoughts it. So long as NIO has set itself aside on this means, one would assume that may assist to tug 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 trade.

At this level, I believe I’ve solidly moved on from the query of whether or not EV battery swapping may have a spot sooner or later or not, and I’m satisfied it should. I believe it should change into extra frequent to supply this service and provide versatile battery leasing. Possibly not within the US, the place somebody must open the market, residential density is far decrease, and we’re extra obsessive about private possession. However in different markets, I see this rising. Even within the US, if NIO determined at some point 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 believe it’s helpful sufficient, and NIO’s stats appear to show that. What do you assume?