NIO has opened the first of its fifth-generation battery-swap stations in China, finally giving the compact Firefly access to the company’s swapping network.

It is an important step for NIO’s technology, but one European Firefly owners should not get too excited about. In Belgium and the Netherlands, swapping is unlikely to become part of the Firefly experience anytime soon.

The new generation debuted on 7 August, when NIO also opened its 4,000th swap station in China and passed 120 million battery exchanges.

One station for three brands

The fifth-generation station automatically adapts to different vehicles and locates their battery mounting points, accommodating wheelbases of up to 3.5 meters. For the first time, one station can therefore serve all three NIO brands: NIO, Onvo and Firefly.

That matters because the Mini-sized Firefly was designed from the outset with a removable battery, but its short wheelbase made it incompatible with existing NIO stations. Plans for a separate, cheaper Firefly network were later abandoned. Gen 5 now solves that problem in China.

Europe is another story. NIO currently lists 61 swap stations on the continent, including several in the Netherlands and one in Edegem near Antwerp, but none is fifth-generation. Dutch and Belgian Fireflies therefore cannot use them.

There is little reason to expect a rapid change. NIO has halted further construction of its own European charging and swapping infrastructure as it switches to a less capital-intensive expansion strategy based more heavily on local partners.

Too few cars

The potential audience is tiny anyway. The Netherlands, one of NIO’s oldest European markets, has only 887 NIO-registered cars on the road, according to RDW data, including 97 Fireflies.

Belgium is smaller still. FEBIAC recorded only 97 new NIO registrations from 2024 through July 2026, including 38 this year, although its public figures do not distinguish Firefly from the NIO brand.

At those volumes, upgrading European stations specifically for Firefly is difficult to justify. And that marks quite a reversal.

Battery swapping was once presented as one of NIO’s main weapons for conquering Europe. In the Netherlands, its relatively dense early network gave owners a genuinely different EV experience, while the Edegem station was positioned to serve Dutch NIO drivers traveling south towards France.

Firefly now neatly exposes the weakness of that strategy. European customers can buy a car engineered for swapping, and Belgians can even drive past a NIO swap station, but they cannot use it.

Charging is catching up

There is also a broader question: does battery swapping still make sense for private cars as conventional charging becomes dramatically faster?

NIO clearly thinks it does in China. A swap takes only a few minutes, eliminates charging queues and allows batteries to be recharged inside the station when electricity demand and prices are lower. It also supports NIO’s Battery-as-a-Service model, separating the costly battery from car ownership.

The economics are tougher in Europe. A swap station is more complex and expensive than installing DC chargers, requires a stock of costly spare batteries, and needs high daily utilization to pay for itself.

Meanwhile, 800-volt EVs increasingly recover most of their range in around 15 minutes. Saving another ten minutes becomes a less compelling argument for building an entirely parallel infrastructure.

Fleets may be the better fit

That does not mean swapping is dead. Its strongest future in Europe may lie elsewhere.

Taxis, ride-hailing cars, delivery vans and trucks cover high mileages and lose money while standing still. They also tend to return repeatedly to the same areas, making it easier to keep a small number of swap stations busy.

Research into electric ride-hailing fleets similarly suggests that charging and swapping can complement each other where vehicle utilization matters more than infrastructure convenience.

CATL appears to be betting on exactly that market. The world’s largest battery manufacturer is building a multi-brand swapping ecosystem in China and wants to bring the concept to Europe.

For trucks, that is already becoming concrete: CATL and Octopus Energy plan European hubs capable of swapping batteries of more than 500 kWh in around five minutes, with the first UK sites expected from 2027.

NIO’s 4,000th station therefore shows that battery swapping is far from dead. China may even prove that it can work for private motorists when millions of compatible cars share a dense network.

Europe looks different. Faster charging and low NIO volumes make a parallel-swapping network difficult to justify for private cars. For taxis, fleets and heavy trucks, however, every minute of downtime has a price.

For Dutch and Belgian Firefly owners, the irony remains simpler: their cars can swap batteries. Just not here.