Nio Opens First New European Battery Swap Station in More Than a Year

Nio has opened a new battery swap station in Germany, its first new site in Europe in more than 13 months.

The third-generation facility brings the automaker’s European total back to 61 locations after a Danish station closed in late 2025.

New German station restores Nio’s European network to 61 locations

Located in Staufenberg-Lutterberg, northeast of Kassel, the station opened on October 26 beside the A7 highway, which links Hanover and Frankfurt. It is Nio’s 22nd station in Germany and its 61st in Europe, and the company said in a LinkedIn post that the location fills a gap on a major north-south corridor used by travelers heading between Germany and Scandinavia.

Open every day from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., the site sits roughly 130 kilometers (81 miles) north of Nio’s Reiskirchen station and about 160 kilometers (99 miles) south of its Hanover-Großburgwedel location, according to Eletric Vehicles.

The third-generation unit can hold up to 21 batteries and perform as many as 408 swaps per day. It cannot serve vehicles from Nio’s Firefly sub-brand, which use a smaller 42.1-kWh battery pack. In China, meanwhile, Nio is already deploying fifth-generation stations.

Before this, Nio had not opened a European station since September 4, 2025, when a Hamburg site went live. The German opening also comes five months after a senior executive told owners at a May meeting that Nio would not build new swap stations or charging infrastructure in Europe, according to an attendee.

Nio’s Norwegian unit pushed back against that coverage in a June 10 statement, saying Europe remained a central part of the company’s global strategy. It listed a new swap station in the Oslo West and Bærum area among its Norwegian plans, although it gave no date and the site has not been announced as open.

Europe’s network remains far below Nio’s earlier expansion ambitions

Nio began its European battery swap rollout in Norway in January 2022. Expansion accelerated through 2023 and 2024 as stations opened across Germany, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark and Belgium, and 2024 was its busiest year, with 25 openings.

Growth slowed sharply in 2025. Nio opened its 60th European station in Sankt Augustin in April and its 61st in Hamburg in September, then closed its only Danish station, in Slagelse, two months later, bringing the network down to 60.

The latest opening restores the total to 61. Germany now has 22 stations, followed by Norway with 20, the Netherlands with 10, Sweden with eight and Belgium with one.

Nio’s European network passed 300,000 battery swaps on June 21, 2026. Even so, the network remains far smaller than the company’s earlier targets, which included 120 new European stations in 2023 alone and 1,000 stations outside China by 2025. Nio opened 24 European stations in 2023.

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