At the recent World Internet Conference, NIO founder Li Bin and Geely founder Li Shufu participated in the same dialogue session.

Li Shufu was remarkably direct: "Geely fully endorses the battery swapping model." This marked the first time the two appeared publicly on the same stage since Geely merged Yiyi Interconnection into NIO Power on September 28.

Whether battery swapping is a good idea or not, the industry has been debating it for nearly a decade, and both supporters and opponents can each produce a hundred slides of arguments. What is worth pondering is not the word "endorse," but the reasoning Li Shufu offered. He did not mention three-minute energy replenishment; he talked about batteries: batteries degrade and get damaged, and a car's service life extends well beyond seven, eight, or nine years.

"Directly swapping in a brand-new battery pack is too expensive; disassembling, refurbishing, and repairing the battery costs just as much. So battery swapping is the best solution to this problem." When the head of a traditional automaker who does not rely on battery swapping to sell cars lays out the math this way, it is more convincing than NIO making the same case ten times over.

This statement does not stand in isolation, either. On September 28, Geely Holding acquired a 30% stake in NIO Power with 100% equity of Yiyi Interconnection plus 640 million yuan in cash, and the two parties agreed to jointly build a unified consumer-facing battery swapping standard. Geely will also develop consumer-facing battery swapping models, with NIO Power providing the swapping services. A month later, BAIC signed a "million-unit battery swapping" agreement with CATL.

The battery swapping business is transforming from one automaker's exclusive route into a direction in which multiple automakers are betting together. On October 21, Li Shufu had just said that cooperating with NIO was intended to avoid duplicate construction. Clearly, at a time when industry profit margins are being squeezed thin, no one is willing to invest in a separate battery swapping network again.

Why now? Because this matter has a timetable. The current power battery warranty stands at 8 years or 160,000 kilometers, with a health level of 70%; the recommended national standard GB/T 46991.1-2025, implemented on July 1 this year, sets the threshold at 8 years or 160,000 kilometers, with usable energy not less than 75%.

Li Bin made an estimate: over the next 8 years, more than 41 million vehicles will be out of warranty. If all of them were to swap in a new battery costing 60,000 yuan, the total cost would reach 2.5 trillion yuan. The sales peak from 2021 to 2023 will expire in concentrated fashion around 2029. This is not a question of values, but a question of the balance sheet.

But it is worth noting that what Li Shufu endorses is the route, not a shared standard. What Geely has invested in is NIO Power, taking on the system of "separation of vehicle and battery, chargeable, swappable, and upgradable"; CATL's Chocolate battery swapping takes another path, relying on an open platform to bring automakers in. The two companies' battery packs are not physically interchangeable, and the so-called nationwide universal swapping currently holds only within their respective ecosystems.

The scale is already considerable. As of November 5, NIO had invested more than 20 billion yuan cumulatively in charging and battery swapping infrastructure and built 9,801 charging and battery swapping stations, including 4,239 battery swapping stations, with cumulative battery swaps exceeding 130 million, and plans to reach 10,000 stations by 2030; Chocolate battery swapping has 2,520 stations covering 200 cities, and BAIC's target is one million battery swapping vehicles. Both sides are still in the investment period, and there is currently no public timetable for when the consumer market will break even.

So the weight of Li Shufu's statement does not lie in stamping approval on battery swapping, but in laying on the table a bill that must be paid sooner or later. As for whether the two networks of NIO and CATL can be merged and when, no one has given a timetable yet.

However, there are far more people willing to bet on battery swapping than there were six years ago. And battery swapping is evolving from one company's business model story into an infrastructure narrative on which China's auto industry is betting together.