Battery Swap Stations and the ABB Robots Behind Them

A battery swap station takes the empty pack out of an electric car and puts a charged one in, while the driver waits in the seat. NIO in China now runs more than 4,100 of them, and at the end of September 2026 Geely agreed to buy 30 percent of NIO's swapping business. This post goes back to the battery exchange services of the 1910s and to Better Place, the Israeli startup that tried swapping for cars and failed. Then it looks at what the stations do now, and at the ABB robots in the battery plants that build the packs these stations move around.

A NIO car inside an open NIO Power swap station in China, 2020. Photo: bfishadow / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

How battery swapping started, from Hartford trucks to Better Place

The idea goes back more than a century. Between 1910 and 1924 the Hartford Electric Light Company in Connecticut ran an exchange service for electric trucks. Owners bought a truck from the General Vehicle Company without a battery and rented the energy from Hartford Electric as a battery that could be changed quickly. They paid a charge per mile plus a monthly fee, and the trucks covered more than 6 million miles. From 1917 a similar service ran in Chicago for owners of Milburn Electric cars. In both cases the exchange was done by workers in a depot, with cranes and carts rather than anything automatic.

A Milburn Electric car in front of the Art Institute of Toledo, about 1916. Milburn owners in Chicago could rent exchange batteries from 1917. Photo: unknown author via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The first modern try came from Better Place, which Shai Agassi launched in October 2007. His plan was a country-wide network where drivers would subscribe to energy and never wait for a charge. Better Place opened its first battery switching station in March 2011 at Kiryat Ekron, near Rehovot in Israel, and a swap took about five minutes. The car was the Renault Fluence Z.E., built so that its pack could be removed from below. By mid September 2012 Israel had 21 public swap stations, and more opened in Denmark.

Better Place founder Shai Agassi cuts the ribbon on the first customer cars in Israel, January 2012. Photo: Better Place / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

The business did not hold. Better Place spent about US$850 million of private money, but fewer than 1,000 Fluence Z.E. cars reached Israeli roads and around 400 reached Denmark. It filed for bankruptcy on 26 May 2013. Tesla demonstrated a Model S battery swap in June 2013 that took just over 90 seconds, and later built one swap station at Harris Ranch in California. It closed that station in 2015 for lack of interest from customers, and kept building its Supercharger network instead.

Renault Fluence Z.E. cars with swappable batteries on the road in Israel, 2012. Photo: Better Place / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Battery swap stations in 2026: NIO, Geely and robot arms in the plants

China kept the idea alive. NIO had 131 swap stations in 2020 and more than 850 by early 2022. On 28 September 2026 it said it had 4,126 stations and had completed more than 125 million battery swaps. The same day NIO and Geely announced a deal: Geely puts 640 million yuan in cash and all of its own swap company, Yiyi Power, into NIO Power in return for a 30 percent stake. CnEVPost put the post-money value at about 16 billion yuan. The two firms plan shared swap standards, and NIO Power is aiming for 10,000 stations by 2030.

A NIO battery swap station in use in Oslo, Norway, 2025. Photo: Premeditated / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Inside the station, the swap is a piece of factory automation. NIO says the process is fully automatic once the car is put in swap mode, takes about three minutes, and includes a health check of the battery and drive system each time. The driver stays in the car while the station takes the pack out from underneath and fits a charged one, and the old pack is recharged inside the station for the next customer. Trucks are getting the same treatment. On 28 September Kandi Technologies said its unit China Battery Exchange had a follow-on order for heavy truck swap stations from a CATL subsidiary, two months after the first one.

A NIO ET5 on the platform of a Power Swap Station 3.0 shown at Auto Guangzhou in November 2023. Photo: Tim Wu / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB does not build swap stations, as far as public sources show, but its robots work in the plants that make the packs. In its own plant in Baden, Switzerland, which builds battery systems, an IRB 4600 places cells into modules. In 2022 ABB agreed to supply IRB 390, IRB 4600 and IRB 6700 robots for Scania's 18,000 square meter battery assembly plant in Södertälje, Sweden, which builds modules from Northvolt cells. ABB's IRB 5710 and IRB 5720, launched that year for payloads of 70 to 180 kg, are aimed at jobs such as picking and placing battery modules. Our post on EV battery assembly covers these lines in more detail.

An ABB robot working over battery modules in the robot cell at ABB's plant in Baden, Switzerland. Photo: ABB

Where battery swap stations go next, for drivers and for factories

For drivers, the next few years depend on whether swapping spreads beyond one brand. The Geely deal matters here, because Geely says it will build swappable cars for consumers that use NIO's stations. Swapping already works for smaller vehicles: Taiwan's Gogoro had nearly 11,000 GoStations for electric scooters by 2021, where riders change the batteries by hand. Home charging stays cheaper for people with a garage, so swap stations make most sense for taxis, delivery fleets, trucks and drivers in cities who park on the street.

A Gogoro GoStation in Taiwan, where scooter riders change their batteries by hand. Photo: 玄史生 / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

For factories, swapping sets tight tolerances. A pack that is lifted out of a car hundreds of times has to line up with the same locks and connectors every time, so the pack housing and the car body must be built accurately. That is the kind of work robots already do in battery and body shops. A large arm like the IRB 5710 or IRB 6700 could in principle handle packs inside a station or in a battery service center, but ABB has not announced such a project, so this is only a possibility. ABB's 2026 automotive outlook survey of 473 industry decision makers found that 51 percent think EVs are now easier to build than a year ago.

Engineers with an ABB IRB 5710, one of the large robots launched in 2022 for jobs such as handling battery modules. Photo: ABB

The open problems are money, standards and skills. A swap station needs a stock of spare packs, which ties up capital, and Better Place showed what happens when too few cars use the network. Each carmaker also designs its own pack, and shared standards like those NIO and Geely promise are still rare. Safety matters too, since a damaged pack that goes back into circulation can be dangerous. The engineers who program the robots in these plants usually test a cell first in simulation, as in our RobotStudio tutorial.

An ABB robot cell for battery modules at ABB's plant in Baden, Switzerland. Photo: ABB

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