70% of NIO Buyers Now Renting the Battery

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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 desire pack swapping to quick charging, how connected persons are (or usually are not) to their EV’s batteries, and what makes essentially the most monetary sense. Nevertheless it’s now going into much more instructions, and prospects prefer it.

NIO had already been providing a “battery as a service” (BaaS) possibility whereby folks may purchase a NIO automotive however simply hire/lease the battery within the automotive. That might drop the upfront worth 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 may purchase it out from NIO and the quantity they’d paid in renting the battery (or batteriesto 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 patrons have chosen the battery leasing possibility! Nio cofounder and president Qin Lihong supplied this fascinating nugget of information right now the Chengdu Motor Present.

Naturally, a few of these NIO patrons — possibly even most of them — won’t ever resolve to purchase out the battery of their automotive. Nevertheless, simply given customers the selection was sufficient to get extra of them to lease their vehicles’ batteries. The issue, which I’m certain a lot of you might be 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 exhibiting what customers now desire.

One other facet of this: Nobody else is providing this, so far as I’m conscious. If excess of half of NIO’s patrons desire this feature, one would suppose that many different EV patrons would really like the identical possibility! I certain wouldn’t thoughts it. So long as NIO has set itself aside on this method, one would suppose 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 business.

At this level, I believe 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 should. I believe it should grow to be extra frequent to supply this service and supply 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 sooner or later to enter the market, I’d wager 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 suppose?