It seems the Chinese are about to make battery swapping work. And Europe is watching from the sidelines again.

Yesterday Geely agreed to buy 30 per cent of Nio Power, Nio's battery-swapping business, in a deal worth more than two billion dollars. Two competitors, sharing one infrastructure. Nio already runs close to 4,000 swap stations in China and passed 100 million swaps this year.

I have met both men behind this up close: Li Shufu of Geely in 2010, Li Bin of Nio in 2018. Both are very sharp. Neither of them spends billions out of sentiment.

My own view is that charging will get so fast that cars won't need swapping. BYD and XPeng are already proposing chargers that deliver a megawatt. But I may be wrong. And one part of the idea already works: a battery sitting in a station is also storage for a weak grid. The flash chargers coming to Europe put a battery behind the charger for exactly that reason. Maybe the swap that wins in the end is not the car's battery, but the station's.

But that is not my point.

My point is that China runs the experiment. Europe ran it once. In 2012 I was in talks with Better Place about leading its European business when the company went bankrupt. It had been swapping batteries for Renault cars in Israel and Denmark. Europe drew its conclusion and closed the file.

China runs a dozen experiments in parallel: swapping, flash charging, new battery chemistries, new ways to sell and service cars. Many will fail, some expensively. The ones that work will set the standard for everyone else.

Europe tends to debate which option is right before it tries any of them. CATL plans its first swap station in the EU for Paris in March 2027, as a demonstration, still waiting for government approval.

We are good at deciding. We are bad at finding out.

Will battery swapping win? Honestly, I don't know. But I would like to know where Europe is running its own experiment.