Nio has sold 19 cars in Germany since January. Leapmotor sold 13,392
Nio retreats to one German workshop as Leapmotor passes 1,000 European retail points
Nio closes its hubs in Cologne and Weiterstadt at the end of September 2026, leaving Munich as the only place in Germany where the brand still runs its own workshop. Within hours of that becoming public, Leapmotor confirmed it had passed 1,000 sales and service points in Europe. Two Chinese brands arrived here within two years of each other and chose opposite ways of reaching a buyer.
Nio keeps three Nio Houses in Germany but only one workshop
Cologne and Weiterstadt, near Frankfurt, both shut at the end of this month. Munich remains the single German site with a service bay attached, and Nio now points owners towards a network of selected independent workshops for repairs. The showrooms in Berlin, Frankfurt and Düsseldorf stay open as Nio Houses, which can sell a car but cannot fix one. The Hamburg brand centre closed on 20 July.
Germany registered 19 Nio cars between January and August 2026
Germany's Kraftfahrt-Bundesamt recorded 19 new Nio registrations in the first eight months of this year, one of them in August. Its table for the same period of 2025 shows 191, a fall of 90.1 percent in Europe's largest car market. Five of this year's 19 were the EL6. Nio has said the changes to how it operates in the region do not amount to an exit from Europe, and it is still bringing the EL8 to European markets.
Leapmotor has 1,020 sales points across 36 countries after two years
Leapmotor began European sales in September 2024 with the T03 and the C10, in nine countries. It now has 1,020 retail and service locations across 36 markets, from Iceland to Bulgaria. It built almost none of them. The Leapmotor International joint venture with Stellantis, in which Stellantis holds 51 percent, plugged the brand into showrooms that were already selling Opels, Citroëns and Fiats. German registrations followed the doors: 3,531 in the first eight months of 2025, 13,392 in the same span this year.
Nio opened in Berlin in October 2022 with subscriptions and swap stations
Nio's European plan was the expensive one by design. It launched in Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden on 7 October 2022, selling mainly by subscription, through company-owned Nio Houses built as members' clubs, and supported by its own battery-swap network. That network stopped at around 60 European stations and has not grown this year. All of it had to be paid for before the first customer car was handed over.
BYD, MG, Leapmotor and XPeng outsold Tesla in Germany by 46,812 cars
The German figures do not describe a market closed to Chinese brands. Between January and August, BYD registered 36,748 cars, MG 23,157, Leapmotor 13,392 and XPeng 5,773: 79,070 between them, against 32,258 for Tesla over the same eight months. BYD on its own now outsells both Volvo and Tesla in Germany. Leapmotor, already the fastest-growing brand in Europe in the first half of the year, registered 2,254 cars in Germany in August alone. Nio registered one. Whatever stopped Nio here, it was not the flag on the badge.
AutoNext Take
Nio did not lose Germany on the product. Its cars test well and the battery-swap idea behind them is genuinely clever. What the plan underestimated is how much of a European car purchase happens after the sale, in a workshop the owner can drive to on a Saturday morning. Leapmotor got that for nothing by renting the one Stellantis had already paid for, and it is the clearest single difference between 13,392 registrations and 19.
Nio still has the better technology and the worse route to market, and that is the more fixable order of problems. Handing service to independent workshops is the first honest step, and it gives up nothing the brand was earning anyway. The measure is a plain one: German registrations back into four figures by the time the Kraftfahrt-Bundesamt publishes its 2027 half-year table. Nio has the cars to do it. What it has not had is anywhere for owners to take them.
