New Battery Powers EV for 1,000 Kilometers
A Chinese electric vehicle company says it has created a battery that can power a car for 1,000 kilometers with just one charge.
Electric car maker Nio, which is based in Shanghai, says it will begin mass production of its new Ultra Long Range battery in April 2024.
On December 17, Nio CEO William Li demonstrated the new battery's capacity by driving an all-electric ET7 car for 1,044 kilometers, at an average speed of 84 kilometers per hour. The journey between the cities of Shanghai and Xiamen was livestreamed, and took 14 hours.
Li said the battery still had 3% of its 150 kilowatt-hour capacity at the end of the journey.
Nio says an ET7 car traveled for 1,145 kilometers in another test, but that was not livestreamed.
Nio has an unusual method of charging its vehicles. Instead of connecting the car to a power outlet and waiting for the battery to charge, it encourages drivers to just swap an empty battery for a charged one.
Nio has an expanding network of more than 2,000 Power Swap Stations — including several in Europe — where customers can get their batteries swapped. And swapping batteries only takes three minutes, which is similar to the amount of time it takes to refill a gasoline-powered car.
Another advantage is that people who already own a Nio electric vehicle don't need to buy a new car to use the new Ultra Long Range battery. They can simply have their old battery swapped for the newer model.
The batteries themselves are quite expensive to buy — around $41,000 — but instead of buying them, customers can pay for a subscription service to use batteries in the Nio network.
Earlier in 2023, Toyota also announced that it had developed a battery with a 1,200 kilometer range that could charge in 10 minutes. It expects to begin mass production of the battery by 2027.
