At a Nio battery-swapping station near Shanghai’s Huangpu river, it takes only a brief voice command to start an automated process that will power up the electric vehicle in just three minutes.

Steering itself, the car halts above a retractable metal floor, before robotic arms remove its undercarriage and swap its depleted battery for a fully charged one. With a few hardware and software checks, the vehicle is ready for the road — and the next can swing into the station.

Nio, a US-listed Chinese EV start-up, runs more than 3,000 such stations in China. Its embrace of the technology has made it an outlier among its peers because most other manufacturers rely on recharging technology.

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