In Munich, a Bolder CATL Doubles Down on Good-Enough Batteries
For years, Western battery startups using exotic materials have promised outsize driving range and charging speed, all at a good price. None has reached commercial production, and an increasing number have failed.
Not to fret, China’s battery colossus, CATL, seemed to say on Sunday. CATL is steadily improving its tried-and-true battery, which will more than satisfy the auto industry’s needs.
In a presentation ahead of this week’s opening of Europe’s largest auto show, held in Munich, CATL doubled down on its “good enough” battery, made of cheap materials like lithium, iron and phosphate.
Lingbo Zhu, chief technology officer of CATL’s international business unit, said the company is using LFP in a new battery, the Shenxing Pro, which he said would deliver almost 400 miles of driving range. When the battery is running out of juice, a driver could add 210 miles of more range in 20 minutes, he said.
Most importantly, he claimed, the Shenxing Pro is ultrasafe. If a cell shorts in a Shenxing battery pack, he said, any resulting fire would be contained, and not spread immediately to other cells, giving emergency crews time to contain it.
CATL officials at the presentation said the Shenxing is exactly what is needed now, on the cusp of widely deployed EVs that drivers can operate with no hands on the wheel or eyes on the road. This move to more fully autonomous cars, they argued, may shift the responsibility for accidents and other problems from the driver to the system. Since there is no driver, the maker of the battery could be held responsible in a lawsuit. But the Shenxing “is safe enough, good enough, fit for purpose now and the future,” Lingbo said.
CATL, which sells 38% of the world’s lithium-ion batteries, said it was shifting from solely exporting batteries from China, and would make the Shenxing and other batteries in Europe, where it has three factories. The company said it was also shifting from only selling cells to the arguably more profitable business of producing full battery packs for consumers and commercial businesses.
Those moves seemed likely to add to CATL’s dominance, making the presentation a shot over the bow of U.S. and European battery startups, most of which have hit hard times. Last week, California-based sodium-ion battery developer Natron Energy closed its doors; last month, bankrupt European battery champion Northvolt sold itself for pennies on the dollar to Lyten, a California-based battery startup minnow. Norway-based Freyr Battery has started to sell off its production equipment, and has remade itself into a solar panel assembly company.
I went to see the CATL presentation as a flood of Chinese car, battery, software and component companies poured into Munich for this week’s event. Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen and other European automakers are also heavily represented and will attempt to show that they can stand out against the Chinese competition.
Battery veterans I contacted were surprised at the Shenxing Pro’s monstrous size—122 kilowatt-hours, or roughly twice the size of most LFP batteries. The Tesla Model Y SUV and Model 3 sedan made outside the U.S., for example, use 60 kWh LFP batteries.
By supersizing the battery, CATL appeared to be moving to expand LFP into the premium car and pickup truck segments. That would be a step up for LFP batteries, which are typically cheaper but provide less range than the nickel-based batteries used in most Western-made EVs.
But over the last few years, CATL and the industry’s No. 2 battery maker—China’s BYD—have steadily tweaked the chemistry so that nickel-based batteries appear to be at risk of severe marginalization.
In just one innovation, Zhu said CATL had so tightly packed the LFP cells into the pack that it achieved 76% design efficiency, meaning that it had just 24% dead space containing electronics, mountings, a battery management system—the stuff that prevents a fire.
That is extremely high efficiency—a more typical number is in the 60s. But the moves that CATL has made to make the battery safer appear to allow a much tighter pack.
This is the third version of the Shenxing. In April, CATL, announcing a second generation of the battery, startled the industry by saying it could add roughly 200 miles of charge in five minutes. That was three times faster than the quickest charge currently available in Western-made models. But by configuring the battery for such fast charging, the battery sacrifices the kind of range CATL is offering in the latest version.
If all the claims made then and on Sunday are true, what is missing is a commercial order. After the presentation, I asked a company spokesperson whether any automaker had committed to using the battery. He said none had, but that CATL was ready to work with any of them to co-develop one. “That’s how it’s done,” he said.