What the holiday week produced
China's National Day break runs from October 1 to 7 and is the heaviest travel week of the year. Nio's swap network handled 1,192,221 battery swaps in that window. Charging and swapping together produced 2,071,582 services across three brands, Nio, Onvo and Firefly, from 9,567 sites. The daily average for swaps came in 22% higher than in the same holiday last year.
Two records fell. October 1 opened with 183,469 swaps, and October 5, the return-travel peak, beat it with 183,664. Nio says the peak rate worked out to one completed swap every 0.47 seconds across the network. Divide 183,664 swaps into 86,400 seconds and you get exactly that, so the figure holds.
More swaps per station than in May
The comparison with the May Labor Day holiday says more than the headline. Nio then operated 3,839 swap stations and logged 1,031,469 swaps in seven days, or 269 per station. By October the network had grown 8.6% to 4,168 stations, and per-station throughput grew too, to 286 swaps, about 6.5% more. The added capacity is being used, not left standing.
Highway traffic and the busiest single site
Nio runs 1,073 highway swap stations reaching more than 550 cities, and 250 of them set daily records during the holiday. Highway charging and swap facilities dispensed 24.83 million kWh, up 30.8% year on year. That accounted for 13.7% of all electricity delivered at highway services nationwide, which puts the national total at roughly 181 million kWh for the week.
The busiest location was the Rizhao service area on the G15 Shenyang-Haikou Expressway in Shandong, with a daily peak of 211 swaps. At one station that is one swap every 409 seconds, close to seven minutes. The 0.47-second figure describes the whole network at once, not a single bay. Nio also claims its highway stations saved drivers 309,124 hours of waiting for energy.
Long-distance driving
203,581 users relied entirely on swapping during their holiday trips. 197,684 of them drove more than 1,000 km over the week, up 65.1% year on year, and 127,542 covered more than 500 km in a single day, up 74.6%. The three brands together covered over 714 million km. Swap orders in county towns rose 144.2% against the preceding period, with stations now covering more than 1,300 districts and counties.
Swapping sells time on long trips, not battery cost. At the other end of the market, small LFP city cars have no use for the model at all. The Suzuki e-Sky with its 26 kWh BYD LFP pack starts at JPY 2.12 million and never leaves the city.
Nio's charging network stays open to other brands: 5,399 stations, 31,091 points, with 86.69% of delivered electricity going to vehicles outside the Nio group. Cumulative charging sessions passed 100 million on October 3.
Geely takes 30% of Nio Power
On September 28, Geely agreed to take a 30% stake in Nio Power. It pays with its entire equity interest in Yiyi Power, which handles battery swap operations for commercial fleets, plus CNY 640 million in cash, roughly €80 million. Two of China's swap operators now sit under one ownership structure. Nio completed its Silk Road swap route on September 26, a 3,605 km line from Xi'an to Horgos with 33 stations along it.
What Europe has instead
Europe's public charging rollout is driven by regulation and by several competing operators rather than one company's station count. AFIR requires fast-charging pools of at least 400 kW every 60 km along the TEN-T core network, with at least one 150 kW point, by the end of 2025, rising to 600 kW per pool by the end of 2027. On the operator side, BP Pulse agreed to install ultra-fast charging at more than 30 Roadchef motorway sites in the UK from 2027, and France's Vierzon truck hub opened with 50 sites targeted by 2028.
Our own supercharger database tracks 483 locations across Europe. Nio operates 1,073 highway swap stations in China alone.
For a European buyer the practical question is not swap versus plug. It is what a kWh costs. Our charging cost calculator converts a tariff into EUR per 100 km, and the cheapest-superchargers list shows where prices sit lowest in the network we monitor.
Nio's holiday figures cover mainland China only. The report gives no equivalent number for the company's European swap sites, and the company's stated target for 2026 remains 100 scenic routes with charging and swap coverage.
Source: https://cnevpost.com/2026/10/09/nio-1-2-million-battery-swaps-7-day-holiday/