From CleanTechnica, August 31:
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....
....MORE
