Nio Completes 1.19 Million Battery Swaps in a Seven-Day Holiday

Nio's 4,168 battery swap stations completed 1,192,221 swaps between Oct. 1 and Oct. 7, the company said in a holiday report on Oct. 9, with the daily average up 22 percent from a year earlier. Its daily record now stands at 183,664 swaps, set on Oct. 5.

A Nio swap station in Oslo, Norway. The holiday figures below are for China.

The records, and how thin the margin is

CnEVPost reported that Nio set a record of 183,469 swaps on Oct. 1, then beat it with 183,664 on Oct. 5, the return-travel peak. The second record is 195 swaps above the first, a margin of about 0.1 percent. Nio said that at peak a vehicle left a station every 0.47 seconds on average, which matches 183,664 swaps spread across 86,400 seconds.

1. May 1 (Labor Day)171K swaps
2. Feb. 22 (Spring Festival)178K swaps
3. Oct. 1 (National Day)183K swaps
4. Oct. 5 (return peak)184K swaps

Source: CnEVPost, Oct. 9, 2026, citing Nio's holiday report

Per-station load barely moved

The denominator is stations. CnEVPost's Labor Day comparison counts 3,839 stations and 1,031,469 swaps over seven days, which works out to about 38.4 swaps per station per day. The National Day figures of 4,168 stations and 1,192,221 swaps give about 40.9, a rise of roughly 6 percent. The network grew 8.6 percent in stations between the two holidays, so most of the extra volume came from more sites, not from busier ones.

The busiest single station was at Rizhao service area on the G15 expressway, with 211 swaps in one day, per CnEVPost. Of Nio's 4,168 stations, 1,073 are on highways across more than 550 cities, and 250 of those set daily records.

Holiday	Stations	Swaps (7 days)
Labor Day, May 1	3,839	1,031,469
National Day, Oct. 1 to 7	4,168	1,192,221

A highway-share figure that does not reconcile

Nio's highway stations supplied more than 24.83 million kilowatt-hours, up 30.8 percent from a year earlier, which the report puts at 13.7 percent of the nationwide highway total. ChinaEVHome, relaying the Nio Power report, also cites a national figure from China's National Energy Administration of 163 million kilowatt-hours of highway charging volume for the holiday.

Divide 24.83 by 163 and the share is 15.2 percent, not 13.7. Neither outlet explains the gap. It may be a different national denominator or a different time window; the sources do not say. The 13.7 percent is Nio's figure, and the NEA number is as ChinaEVHome reported it.

What a swap is up against

A swap trades a depleted pack for a charged one without the driver waiting for electrons. Neither outlet gives a per-swap duration, so the 0.47-second figure is a throughput across the network, not a time at one station. For comparison, Mitsubishi's ASX VR-e accepts 134 kW DC charging, an arithmetic floor of about 18 minutes for 10 to 80 percent, and that vehicle's range is still unpublished.

Nio's charging network is broader than its swap network: 5,399 charging stations with 31,091 points, and 86.69 percent of electricity delivered went to vehicles from other makers. Capital is flowing to other high-utilisation fleets too, such as Parallel Systems' $100 million Series C for driverless freight rail.

The next test is Nio's own: whether it adds stations faster than traffic, since utilisation per station rose only 6 percent between the last two holidays. Nio has set a target of 100 scenic routes with charging and swap coverage by the end of 2026, and the Nio Power report counts 92 Power Journey routes so far.