Nio has just inaugurated its first 3rd generation battery swap station, allowing you to take advantage of even faster charging, in two minutes and thirty seconds. At the same time, the Chinese company is releasing new information about its ultra-fast 500 kW terminal, which will be a major blow to Tesla and European competition.
If until then autonomy was an important aspect to consider when buying an electric car, that is no longer the case today. Because the network of charging stations is growing more and more, also in France, while they are becoming more and more powerful. So now it makes more sense to have a small battery, which also makes it possible reduce the price of the car and consumption.
Charge even faster
Nio has understood this well and has been developing its battery exchange stations for some time now. These, which we recently had the opportunity to test, have the shape of a box in which the car can park independently. The battery is removed by a robot and replaced with a 90% charged battery, all within minutes.
If the Chinese company, which already markets certain models in Europe, is already the 3rd generation of its change battery, these are now almost operational. As advertised on the site It’s homethe first has just been installed in the city of Haikou, China, near the Shangri-La hotel.
However, it won’t actually be in service until April. Visible on the video published by the manufacturer on Weibothis new station reduces the time it takes to replace the battery by 20%, for a time of four minutes. However, the information is not clear on this point as some claim the operation takes only two and a half minutes, compared to five for the previous version. This would result in a time saving of 50%.
But that’s not all, because the number of available batteries is also increasing. It goes from 13 to 21, increase the number of possible swaps by 30% per day, a total of 408. The battery charging capacity is shown at 62.5 kW, to avoid drawing too much from the grid.
Ultra fast charging
Now also 3rd generation stations are equipped with a LiDAR sensor and two NVIDIA Orin X chips, allowing the car to enter the box more quickly without driver intervention. For this, the vehicles of the brand are equipped with the same sensor, as well as four chips, for a total power of 1,016 TOPSagainst 508 TOPS for the previous station.
These stations are starting to develop in the Old Continent and should become more and more numerous, while Nio has received support from the European Union. Something to thrill Tesla, especially since the manufacturer also provides new information about its ultra-fast terminals. These show a power of 500 kW (660 amps and 800 volts)compared to only 250 kW for Superchargers.
And it’s not the V4 that will change anything, it will display an unchanged value. Nio sockets deliver no less than 660 amps and can charge an electric car in just 12 minutes. For example, the ES7 can find 400 CLTC kilometers of autonomy, or about 340 WLTP kilometers, in 20 minutes with the 100 kWh battery. These terminals are equipped with an in-house developed, liquid-cooled cable that makes this possibleachieve such great power while reducing weight.
A technology reminiscent of that of NASA, with which an electric car can be charged in just five minutes. But for now, no model can collect that much power, even the Kia EV6 and other Porsche Taycan do not yet feature an 800 volt system. We will probably have to wait for the emergence of CATL’s Qilin CTP 3.0 battery, which will be installed on production cars such as the Zeekr 001 and Zeekr 009.
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