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Originally Posted by Dadhawk
I like the Nio design language infinitely more than Tesla's, and they do seem to have thought through alternative battery charging/swapping scenarios a little further. In practice, as mentioned in the video, the battery swapping has to be expensive to maintain, and I would want to see the lease agreement around swapped batteries (to do the swap I believe you have to participate in their lease agreement which is about $150 US).
Have they started selling in the US, or announced when they will? Their nio.com website is relatively useless, containing mostly marketing blurbs and stock photos of beautiful people doing beautiful things.
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There is a huge 27.5% tariff on imported cars from China, and these are models that are built there like the Buick Envision and Volvo S90, but are not even Chinese manufactures. I don't know if Nio has plans to sell cars here or invest in a factory, but they would likely need to do that to be competitive.
If Toyota is offering a $15k hydrogen gas card to gain early adopters then offering a battery swap option seems like an equally necessary investment to gain early adopters. In time, batteries will out number vehicles on the road. Tesla has already said that they plan to move much of their material harvesting to in-house battery recycling, but the industry is already buying used batteries for grid storage and home storage. Alternatively, gathering used batteries from old cars to wrecked cars can be done to use for swapping. People are already doing used battery swaps to upgrade their P75D to a P85D. Like selling a used iPhone back to Apple or a third party manufacture, maybe old cars might be sold back to battery reclaimers and vehicle refurbishers. Even if the range on the battery is only 70%, for many people, 175 miles from a once 250 mile battery is still plenty of range until their next swap. Obviously, 70% charge performance from something like a 500 mile battery (350 miles) is definitely enough. There could be a tier pricing system for the swap or a monthly prescription or whatever a company would need to do to incentivize buyers, while recuperating their initial expenses.