EV without a battery: Chinese EV brand launches battery leasing program

Chinese car maker Nio has begun selling electric cars without a battery.

Instead, owners can buy the basic EV at a lower price and choose their battery capacity or lease a battery depending on their requirements.

The innovative battery leasing formula is designed to make EVs more affordable – batteries are the most expensive component in an electric car – and allow owners to upgrade their batteries as required.

Nio says owners will save 70,000 RMB (about $14,000) by buying the car without a battery.

They can then lease a 70kWh battery for 980 RMB a month – about $200 per month.

Those quick with their maths will realise they will have paid the same amount within about six years of leasing a battery.

However, whereas batteries degrade over time, leasing one means you can always swap for a newer one at no cost. Similar to swapping your rusty old BBQ gas bottle for a new one, you can theoretically offload the older battery for something newer.

Nio says as well as sidestepping the issues of battery degradation its world-first battery leasing program will help with EV resale values longer term, potentially allowing owners to add newer tech down the track.

The so-called Battery as a Service (BaaS) would allow people to hire a smaller and more affordable battery when they’re driving around town then upgrade to a larger battery for longer journeys.

In China Nio already has a network of 143 battery swap stations and claims to have completed more than 800,000 battery swaps to date. Battery swaps are claimed to take three minutes.

As for the issues of selling an electric car without the all important battery pack, Nio says it “has achieved the homologation for vehicles to be sold without the battery and the first BaaS user has already completed the purchase process including finance, car insurance and vehicle registration”.

Don’t expect the battery swap tech to arrive in Australia too soon.

For starters, Nio has not announced any plans to sell cars in Australia.

And Australia’s huge land mass and tiny take up of EVs create obvious challenges with establishing a battery swap network.

Still, it’s an interesting model that will no doubt be watched keenly by other brands, particularly those competing in China, which buys more cars and more EVs than any other country.

Of course Nio isn’t the first one to utilise battery swap technology.

In the early days of EVs Renault teamed with failed company Better Place to create a battery swap system.

But the project proved expensive and cumbersome and subsequently flopped, with Renault reverting to built-in batteries as with all other electric car manufacturers.

As for Nio the company, it describes itself as a “premium EV manufacturer” and currently sells three models – the EC6, ES6 and ES8.

Nio also has some runs on the board. It won the first Formula E championship in 2015 and set a spectacular lap record at the Nurburgring track with its EP9 supercar prototype.