Nio ES6 battery swapping from Beijing to Shanghai

“She says you need a Chinese name.”

At a desk in Beijing Airport, our fixer carefully converts my personal details into Mandarin, filling in an intimidatingly complex form. Within moments, I am handed an opportunity for which millions would happily surrender their front teeth: picking my own name.

Words: Tom Harrison // Photography: Rowan Horncastle
This feature originally appeared in the October 2019 issue of Top Gear magazine.

Nio ES6 and China’s EV market

We have come to China to take an unfamiliar electric car on a very long journey. Nio is one of nearly 500 EV makers registered in the country. The company has existed for five years, while the ES6 is just its second proper production car. You may know the EP9, which retained the Nürburgring EV lap record for more than two years before Volkswagen’s ID.R demolished it, or perhaps Nio’s reasonably successful Formula E squad. More likely, you do not: despite maintaining a London office, Nio sells no cars in Britain - or, for that matter, anywhere outside China.

So it is easy to miss just how substantial Nio has become. It is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, its chief executive William Li is a serial entrepreneur with a string of successful businesses behind him, and the company employs more than 9,000 people. That is three times Ferrari’s workforce. It is also pursuing some notably smart and intriguing ideas at home. Not primarily through the cars themselves, at least not yet: the ES6 is an electric SUV in the same general mould as the Audi e-tron, Mercedes EQC and Jaguar I-Pace. The interesting part is the ecosystem built around it, particularly the way it is charged. Hence Rowan and I are standing in this poorly lit office, having demonstrated that we can see and distinguish red from green, applying for temporary Chinese driving licences. If you ever travel to China, this is something you should make every effort to avoid.

China is the world’s largest market for ‘NEVs’, or ‘new energy vehicles’ - a category covering full EVs and PHEVs. It bought about 1.2 million last year, more than half of the worldwide total, against approximately 360,000 in the US and a paltry 60,000 or so in the UK. This year, the forecast is 1.6 million, despite the government cutting subsidies that had enabled manufacturers to offer their products more cheaply. The idea is to rationalise the sector by eliminating ‘inferior’ businesses. Nio is not one of them, although it has faced plenty of difficulties: a $390 million loss during the first quarter of 2019, abandoned plans for its own factory - JAC, another Chinese company, currently builds its cars - and a delayed new model.

Driving Beijing to Shanghai without recharging

Potentially crucial to, and perhaps helping to secure, the firm’s future is its network of 123 ‘Power Swap’ stations. Located in major cities and along three of China’s busiest motorways, they should, combined with the ES6’s claimed 260-mile range - around 200 miles in real-world use - let us cover the roughly 800 miles between Beijing and Shanghai without recharging even once.

That is rather unfortunate. Driving in China is such a nightmare that I would welcome a longer pause than the five or six minutes needed to exchange the ES6’s battery for a charged replacement. Still, Beijing traffic is virtually motionless as we depart, following a night in a hotel that might just as easily have been in Birmingham. Never have I been more pleased to encounter a traffic jam.

The stationary traffic does at least allow us to watch the hordes of scooters flowing past on both sides. In most places, this volume of two-wheelers would bring with it a deafening two-stroke din. Here, however, many are electric, and therefore completely silent. Operating any internal-combustion-engined motorcycle in China can be prohibitively costly; until very recently, electric versions did not even require a driving licence.

The buses are much the same. Diesel clatter is largely absent because the overwhelming majority are electric, or at least hybrid. Shenzhen, a city with around 18 million residents, is said to have more electric buses than New York, Los Angeles, Toronto and Chicago possess conventional buses. Put together.

Even so, a dense layer of smog sits above the city once the traffic begins moving and we tackle the maze of lanes, which local drivers appear to disregard entirely. Strange, given the sheer scale of surveillance. Cameras positioned every few metres monitor offences - speeding, failing to wear a seatbelt and stopping where you should not - then issue fines automatically. They flash as cars drive below, lighting up their numberplates and terrifying the Europeans nearby.

Chinese motorway service areas differ little from British ones: ample parking, dubious food and its accompanying odours, plus plenty of junk. You may spot one or two EV chargers, although most are concentrated in large cities. Britain has just over 9,000 public EV chargers; China has more than 400,000. From June 2018 to May 2019, the average addition was 11,000 each month.

At a growing number of service areas, there are Nio’s small silver pods. Picture Apple opening a store in the middle of a traditional Middle Eastern souk and you get an idea of how incongruous these structures appear among the existing facilities. We pull up and climb out into stifling heat. Beijing had been warm and humid - each time I exited the car, my glasses steamed over - yet this is on an entirely different level.

A man comes out of the pod, where he has been escaping the heat. Taking our keys, he installs Nio-branded covers for the steering wheel and seats, then reverses the car accurately up the ramp and into position. Then comes the unusual bit. He gets out, vanishes into a small side room, and our ES6 rises into the air. Its nearly empty battery is unbolted and exchanged for a fully charged unit. Once the car is lowered back on to its wheels, the man reappears, gets in, drives it from the pod and returns the key to me. In comfortably under ten minutes, we have a fully charged EV - and two astonished Englishmen.

Nio Power Swap stations in use

We will repeat the process five more times before reaching Shanghai. A swap costs 180 RMB, about £21, paid through Nio’s impressive, all-encompassing app. Although the procedure itself is fully automated, every station has staff around the clock. Each pod holds no more than five batteries, sufficient for as many as 70 customers per day. This attendant says he has completed more than 20 swaps in two days, proving that the technology is no gimmick. Drivers genuinely use it: roughly 50 per cent of all Nio owners have tried it.

At the following swap station, a couple of hours farther down the road, we meet Wang Hao. He arrives to replace the battery in his ES8 while our ES6 is lifted into the air. He explains that he regularly travels from Beijing to Shanghai and back, and traded an Audi Q7 for the Nio because it is considerably greener. In one literal respect, too: EVs and hybrids receive green numberplates in China, while ordinary ICE cars carry blue ones.

Numberplates sit at the heart of NEV success here. To cut congestion and improve the dreadful air quality in major cities, China restricts how many plates those cities may issue to residents. Before buying a car, you must show that you have a numberplate. Securing one for an EV or hybrid is far simpler and less costly than obtaining one for a conventional internal-combustion-engined vehicle. There are also restrictions that prohibit ICE cars from particular places at certain times, making electric ownership more attractive still. That is why Wang chose his Nio: it means he can drive into Shanghai whenever he likes.

NEV sales in China are rising year on year, yet new-car sales overall are generally declining, as they have been for roughly the past year. In an attempt to reverse that, some cities are raising their supply of available numberplates by up to 60 per cent. Traffic, shmaffic.

Wang’s enthusiasm suggests that we should finally consider the ES6 itself, having now spent several hours inside it. It resembles his ES8, except it has five seats rather than seven. It is an Audi e-tron-rivalling SUV that costs less than half as much as a Tesla Model X in China. Our range-topping Premier Edition is equivalent to around £58,000, while prices begin at about £42,000. Unsurprisingly, it shares certain traits with Tesla’s Californian offering.

Its door handles extend to greet you, there is no power button - simply press the brake pedal and drive - and naturally there is a large portrait-format touchscreen. Nio has gone beyond Tesla with its ‘Nomi’ voice assistant, though. Its small swivelling head, mounted atop the dashboard, turns towards you when you speak and can show dozens of different expressions. Naturally, it all operates in Mandarin and cannot be changed to English.

The cabin feels and looks unexpectedly polished, and the powertrain is similarly impressive. The ES6 is four-wheel drive and offered with either a 70 or 84kWh battery. Ours has the smaller pack: 536bhp and four-wheel drive deliver 0–62mph in 4.6 seconds. Acceleration arrives with an EV’s familiar force and in near silence, apart from a faint whine and artificial UFO-style sounds below 20mph, intended to stop smartphone-fixated pedestrians wandering into your route.

Fed up with the featureless motorway - China has the world’s largest motorway network - we leave it to find something more engaging. The roads we discover are inhabited almost exclusively by maniacs. Yet occasional empty sections reveal that the ES6 is not especially suited to unruly driving. Its softness makes it comfortable enough in town, but produces slack body control on motorways and rural roads, where it bounces along with little elegance. Markets have different priorities; if the ES6 reached Europe, this would need addressing.

We stop for the night in one of those ‘small’ Chinese cities unknown beyond the country’s borders, despite having more people than the whole of Greater London. Then we continue south towards the Yangtze River. After several more battery exchanges at steadily smarter service areas, we arrive in Shanghai, having driven an electric car around 800 miles in no more time than the same trip would require in a petrol car.

Shanghai is more modern and more westernised than the capital, and its wealth is more plainly on display. That makes the ‘Nio House’ a more natural fit. These venues are the company’s dealers and, effectively, its clubhouses. Existing owners can relax there, with a coffee shop, library, children’s play space and even rentable office accommodation, while prospective buyers can purchase cars.

Here, we pause to consider the journey. Battery swapping is unquestionably a solution. It is possible to imagine such a scheme functioning in Europe, reducing pressure on conventional charging infrastructure as increasing numbers of people choose, or are compelled, to exchange their ordinary cars for EVs or plug-ins. The haulage sector would welcome it, as would EV doubters unwilling to deal with charging’s perceived complications. That is part of the reason Nio created this network: the battery-swap process resembles refuelling more than charging. It is somehow less daunting.

Nio Power chief Shen Fei says batteries could be effectively standardised and leased separately from the vehicles using them. That could make EV ownership more affordable for almost everyone, substantially reducing the purchase price of the cars while helping turn battery swapping into a practical option for the many rather than the few.

It would only require some cross-border, cross-company co-operation - the sort of arrangement that might have allowed me to retain Tom Harrison when I landed at Beijing Airport and use my existing International Driver Permit. ‘Wheel Fire’, signing out.