70% of NIO Buyers Now Renting the Battery – CleanTechnica

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NIO has been running this battery swapping experiment for several years, and it’s been an interesting ongoing exploration of how much people prefer pack swapping to fast charging, how attached people are (or are not) to their EV’s batteries, and what makes the most financial sense. But it’s now going into even more directions, and customers like it.

NIO had already been offering a “battery as a service” (BaaS) option whereby people could buy a NIO car but just rent/lease the battery in the car. That could drop the upfront price of a NIO by up to about $10,000. However, starting March 14, the company started offering a modification to that — if the NIO owner decided at some point that they wanted to own their battery pack, they could buy it out from NIO and the amount they had paid in renting the battery (or batteries, to be accurate for most of their cases) would go toward their purchase.

Since providing this option, NIO says that more than 70% of its vehicle buyers have chosen the battery leasing option! Nio cofounder and president Qin Lihong provided this interesting nugget of info today the Chengdu Motor Show.

Naturally, some of those NIO buyers — maybe even most of them — will never decide to buy out the battery in their car. However, just given consumers the choice was enough to get more of them to lease their cars’ batteries. The problem, which I’m sure many of you are already asking about, is that we don’t know how many were leasing the batteries before! However, the point of the statement was that a lot more people are, and +70% is a pretty stunning percentage showing what consumers now prefer.

Another side of this: No one else is offering this, as far as I’m aware. If far more than half of NIO’s buyers prefer this option, one would think that many other EV buyers would like the same option! I sure wouldn’t mind it. As long as NIO has set itself apart in this way, one would think that would help to pull in sales. Of course, NIO is also in the unique position of leading for several years on battery swapping, a service that is also unique in the industry.

At this point, I think I’ve solidly moved on from the question of whether EV battery swapping will have a place in the future or not, and I’m convinced it will. I think it will become more common to offer this service and offer flexible battery leasing. Maybe not in the US, where someone would have to open the market, residential density is much lower, and we are more obsessed with personal ownership. But in other markets, I see this growing. Even in the US, if NIO decided one day to enter the market, I’d bet on it succeeding with this 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 is the case. Nonetheless, I think it’s useful enough, and NIO’s stats seem to prove that. What do you think?