How many stations exist right now
Nio, a Chinese electric car maker, swaps a car battery for a freshly charged one at a roadside station, instead of a driver waiting for a battery to charge through a cable. Nio counts 4,006 of these battery swap stations open in China as of August 2026, the trade site CnEVPost reported when the network reached its 4,000th station, up from 2,432 stations in June 2024. Nio separately stated in February 2026 that the network had reached 24 countries and regions worldwide. That worldwide count is 6 months older than the China count above it and covers a different area, so the 2 figures are never added together in this article.
Highway coverage keeps growing
The June 2024 count comes from source 2 and the February 2026 count comes from source 1. This chart cites source 3, the source for the most recent and largest bar.
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| June 2024 | 804 |
| February 2026 | 1,020 |
| August 2026 | 1,049 |
Along Chinese highways specifically, Nio counted 804 swap stations in June 2024, 1,020 in February 2026, and 1,049 by August 2026, now connecting 550 cities across the country.
How long a swap actually takes
The 2.4 minute figure converts the 144 second newest station swap time stated by source 2. The 3 minute figure is the whole network average stated by source 1. The 42 minute figure is the average paid public fast charging stop found by source 5.
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| Newest station swap | 2.4 |
| Network average swap | 3 |
| Paid fast charge average | 42 |
On the newest station design, launched in 2024, a battery swap takes 144 seconds, Nio stated at launch, calling it 22% faster than the previous station generation. CarNewsChina, a trade outlet, measured the same station generation independently in 2026 and reported the identical time, written as 2 minutes and 24 seconds. Across the whole network, including older and slower stations still running, Nio states the average swap takes 3 minutes. The United States Department of Energy, drawing on about 2.4 million paid and free charging events recorded from 2020 to 2023, found that a paid public fast charging stop, where a driver plugs a cable into a high powered charger and pays to fill the battery, averages 42 minutes, and that a free fast charging stop averages 78 minutes. That study covers public fast charging in general in the United States, not any 1 car model and not a Chinese dataset, and excludes the Tesla Supercharger network, so the comparison shows how each system typically performs in the country it is best documented in, not the same driver measured twice. The 42 minute average is about 17.5 times as long as the 144 second swap on the newest station, and about 14 times as long as the 3 minute network average, both figures reached by dividing 1 sourced number by the other.
120 million swaps, and a number that is not a swap time
Nio counts 120 million battery swaps completed across the network in total as of August 2026, up from 100 million just 6 months earlier in February 2026. A widely shared headline claims a swap happens somewhere on the network in under half a second. Read past that headline, the outlet that wrote it explains the half second figure is the total swap count recorded on 1 day divided by the seconds in that day, a rate describing how often a swap happens somewhere across the whole network, not how long any single swap takes. As of the same August 2026 count, 80.1% of the people who use Nio vehicles live or work within 3 kilometres of a swap station, the company says.