Lotus and Nio join forces to promote interchangeable battery technology. The final push to electric?

Electric vehicles with interchangeable batteries seem to have become a great idea that has ended up stagnating beyond small motorcycles or cars. However, after a lot of work behind The commitment of the Chinese firm Nio to this type of promising technology that could theoretically solve two major concerns of drivers about electric cars, the slow charging and the useful life of the batteries, seems to be finally bearing interesting fruits.. At least in their country of origin.

Joint development with Lotus for a new interchangeable battery standard

So much so that it has even caught the attention of Lotus itself, who could adopt this technology for its future electric cars. This has been confirmed after the signing of a collaboration agreement to jointly develop electric vehicles that are compatible with battery exchange. The ultimate goal is to create a unified standard for interchangeable batteries, in addition to promoting other objectives when it comes to charging.. Battery exchange technology, as we mentioned, allows you to quickly recover autonomy in addition to being used to easily change it when its useful life begins to falter or even to change it for one with better characteristics in the future.

There are already stations in Europe too

Things for Nio are very serious. China alone already has 2,404 battery exchange stations, 790 located on highways that connect large cities, to which are added some 3,776 charging stations throughout the country with an infrastructure approach inspired by Tesla’s Supercharger network. But China is not the only country where Nio has battery exchange stations, since The Chinese manufacturer has already begun its expansion across Europe with a new network that already has more than 30 locations.

These battery exchange stations look a lot like a car wash. And once the car is left inside, an automatic procedure begins, activated through a mobile application that performs the battery change process in just a few minutes.

This ease of recovering the autonomy of electric vehicles has ended up attracting the attention of Lotus, especially now that this type of zero-emission cars already represent 63% of its deliveries in 2023 with models such as the Lotus Eletre or the Emeya. However, it is not yet clear which models would implement this technology first or in which markets.

“Our cooperation with Nio to share charging and sharing resources between us will allow our users to experience the track genes and top performance of Lotus while enjoying the services of Nio’s charging and sharing network throughout China,” said Qingfeng. Feng, CEO of Group Lotus.

It remains to be seen what all this will translate into in Europe. That Nio already has a small network brings closer the idea of this concept being applied in Europealthough for that, as with the case of Lotus, it will surely need new partners in the form of European manufacturers to make it a reality and for it to really become a standard.