Gasgoo Munich- According to NIO, a convoy of first-, second-, and third-generation ES8s driven by four owners reached the Khorgos Port in Xinjiang on October 27.
Departing Guangzhou on October 15, the 13-day journey covered 8,045 km across ten provinces and municipalities — Guangdong, Jiangxi, Anhui, Shandong, Hebei, Beijing, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Gansu, and Xinjiang. Along the way, the convoy relied entirely on 79 NIO highway battery-swap stations.
Gasgoo has learned that the convoy was organized by the same veteran owner who led the route eight years ago: Doctor Jin.
Image Source: NIO
Retracing the Route to Prove a Point
Turn the clock back to September 2018.
The first-generation ES8 had just been delivered. Doctor Jin and a few friends drove their Founder Edition ES8s from Guangzhou to Xinjiang.
Sixteen days. 7,000 km. Fully electric, end to end.
Today, such a road trip is hardly unusual. Back then, however, all of Xinjiang had just two charging poles. To cross the 400–500 km no-man's land, NIO's charging team had to dispatch a fuel tanker lugging a mobile charging unit behind the convoy. The setup was later mocked online as the "nanny car."
"If you can use a tanker to haul fuel, why can't I haul electricity?" William Li's retort back then still carries a defiant edge today.
Eight years on, that question has a new answer.
This time, there was no nanny car. No obsessive range calculations before departure. No manually mapping out every charging stop.
The convoy headed west along the G45 Daguang, G5 Jingkun, G2 Jinghu, and G30 Lianhuo expressways. Hungry? Pull into a service area. Low on power? Swing into a swap station. Three minutes later, they were back on the road with a full battery.
Notably, just a week before the convoy reached Khorgos, Li himself drove the route on September 26.
According to NIO, he started from the Dushanzi swap station, livestreaming the entire drive through Jinghe and Sayram Lake before arriving at Khorgos, where he personally inaugurated the completion of the Silk Road battery-swap route.
The boss ran a final check on the route just before the National Day holiday. A week later, the owner convoy followed.
What is NIO trying to prove? On the surface, it's that the old mantra — "EVs can go wherever ICE vehicles go" — has become everyday reality. Dig deeper, and the test isn't about any single car's range; it's about a network. Can you start at any swap station in the country and reach every provincial-level administrative region relying solely on battery swaps? The 8,045-km journey was a public stress test of that very network.
Eight Years: What Changed and What Didn't
The numbers tell the story.
In 2018, Xinjiang had just two charging poles. By October 28, 2026, NIO had deployed 9,715 power stations across China. This included 4,202 swap stations and 5,513 charging stations, topping the industry in total installations. Its 1,074 highway swap stations now form a "9-vertical, 11-horizontal" network spanning 16 major city clusters, linking over 550 cities nationwide.
A detail often overlooked, as Gasgoo noted: when the 2018 convoy passed through Hefei, Anhui province had zero swap stations, with charging supported entirely by NIO's One-Click Power service. Eight years later, Anhui alone hosts 216 swap stations, covering all 104 of its districts and counties — achieving full county-level coverage.
The cars have changed, too.
The original ES8 was NIO's debut model, unveiled at NIO Day in late 2017 and delivered starting June 2018. It was a full-aluminum, seven-seat SUV. It stood alone as China's first mass-produced vehicle from a new-energy startup. The second-generation ES8, built on the NT2.0 platform, packed a LiDAR, four Orin-X chips, and a fully self-developed smart driving system into the large SUV. In September 2025, the third-generation ES8 hit the market on the NT3.0 platform, featuring 900V architecture and the Shenji chip, slashing swap time to 2 minutes and 24 seconds.
Li calls the third-generation ES8 "the world's first smart EV to complete three generations of iteration."
Three generations in eight years. The ES8 nameplate remains, but almost everything inside has been replaced.
The industry's attitude toward battery swapping has shifted as well.
NIO walked the asset-heavy path of battery swapping alone for eight years, pouring more than 20 billion yuan into the network.
The winds shifted sharply in 2026. In late September, Geely took a strategic stake in NIO Energy. CATL's Choco swap stations have now topped 2,500. Huawei's Yinwang, meanwhile, joined forces with CATL and Times EV Service to enter the fray.
From "NIO's solo act" to "a crowded field" — the 8,045-km route serves as the perfect footnote.
So what hasn't changed?
First, the users are still there. Doctor Jin led the Xinjiang run eight years ago, and Doctor Jin retraced the route today. He traded his first-generation ES8 for a third-generation model. A convoy mixing all three generations is, in itself, a compelling testament to customer retention.
On his Weibo account, Li noted that he ran into these veteran owners in Beijing on the evening of October 27. "Back then, charging infrastructure was scarce, the nanny car trailed us, and we faced plenty of doubt," he wrote. "Now, they've verified NIO's infrastructure progress themselves, retracing the road they traveled eight years ago."
Eight years on, the exchange was widely shared among users. Even as startups universally emphasize community engagement these days, NIO's bond with its earliest owners appears undiluted by scale.
Second, the stubborn drive remains. NIO insists on building swap stations in places "EVs aren't supposed to go." These range from the Sichuan-Tibet and Yunnan-Tibet routes along G318, to the Hexi Corridor and the Silk Road. To date, the company has completed 92 Power Journeys, with plans to reach 100 by the end of 2026.
The 8,045-km journey is a milestone, not the finish line. Moving from skepticism to "just get in and go," the trip retraced more than a route. It was NIO's public accounting of its eight-year bet on battery swapping.
