NIO battery swap network hits 100 million swaps worldwide, expands across Europe

NIO has turned battery swapping from a niche experiment into a network measured in the hundreds of millions. On February 6, 2026, the Chinese automaker said it had completed 100 million cumulative battery swaps worldwide, with 3,790 Power Swap Stations deployed and 1,020 of them along major highways in China.

That scale matters because NIO is not just selling a faster way to “refuel” an EV. It is building a parallel system that can cut a stop to a few minutes, reduce range anxiety and shift part of the charging burden off the driver. In China, NIO said its expressway network linked 18 backbone expressways and 14 city clusters, with nearly 1,000 swap stations along expressways and coverage in more than 700 cities. The company also said its fifth-generation Power Swap Stations will go live in 2026.

Europe is now the clearest test of whether that model can travel. NIO’s Europe chargemap listed 61 Power Swap Stations, 27 charging stations with 64 charging points and 1.2 million third-party chargers integrated across more than 10 markets, including Germany, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Belgium and Austria. NIO said it had more than 600,000 third-party chargers integrated in those countries alone.

The expansion has been steady, if uneven. NIO began deploying swap stations in Europe in 2021, reached 30 stations across five European markets by November 30, 2023 and said it had more than 2,200 stations worldwide at that point, with nearly 33 million cumulative swaps. On June 13, 2024, it launched Power Swap Station 4.0, saying the system supported automated swapping for multiple brands and vehicle models. By later 2024, NIO said its stations in Sweden had been approved for frequency regulation services, and on September 25, 2024, it said the technology was helping with energy storage and grid stability in Europe.

For the United States, where EV policy has largely treated faster charging as the main answer to adoption, NIO’s model is a reminder that speed is only part of the problem. Battery swapping depends on compatible vehicles, standardized packs and a dense station network, all of which raise infrastructure costs and make broad rollout harder than putting up more plugs. It also asks drivers to accept a different relationship with the battery itself, which may be the biggest barrier of all.

Still, the case NIO is making is hard to ignore: in both China and Europe, the company is proving that EV infrastructure does not have to revolve around waiting longer at a charger. It can also mean exchanging the battery in minutes and treating the station as part refueling point, part grid asset, part utility infrastructure.