The first Dutch Nio battery swap station will open in the south of the country within a month

No Amsterdam, Rotterdam or Utrecht. Nio will open the first battery swap station in the Netherlands on December 1st in Tilburg.

When we drove the Nio ET7 last month, the Chinese manufacturer announced that it would open the first Dutch interchange station “in the middle of the country”. That’s not happening right now.

First battery changing station in the Netherlands

It is striking that Nio sets up the first battery changing station in Tilburg. Most new (Chinese) car manufacturers start in the Randstad or in the center of the country.

Until further notice, you can only access it with the ET7 power changing station rightly. Not because the ET7 is the only Nio car with a swappable battery pack. No, the ET7 is currently the only Nio model you can subscribe to in the Netherlands. It is not yet possible to buy an ET7.

But what exactly is such a changing station (battery changing station) and what can you do with it? The principle means that you take your car to an automated workshop and have your battery pack changed there in just a few minutes. Not only with a full battery pack, but also with a larger or smaller one if you need more or less capacity.

How the Nio Power Swap Station works

In addition, such an exchange station can store peak electricity when more is generated than consumed and feed it back into the grid at a later point in time. In China, the manufacturer has started an experiment with this idea.

Autovisie was in Norway in early 2022 to change a battery at Europe’s first battery swap station. The test car was not the ET7, but the ES8, a large electric SUV from the brand. Sjors ten Tije explains in the video below how exactly the battery swap works and why this can put Nio in a unique position.