Major Advances in E.V. Batteries Are Announced by Chinese Company
CATL, the world’s largest maker of batteries for electric vehicles, described breakthroughs that could make E.V.s more competitive with gasoline-powered cars.
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CATL, based in Ningde, China, said it had developed batteries for electric vehicles that were cheaper, faster to recharge and better in the cold and provide greater driving range than current batteries. Credit...Greg Baker/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
By Keith Bradsher
Reporting from Shanghai
April 21, 2025
The Chinese manufacturing giant CATL, the biggest supplier of batteries for the world’s electric cars, said on Monday that it had made technological advances that would allow it to produce batteries that are cheaper, lighter, faster to recharge and more resistant to cold, while providing greater driving range.
Most of the changes, which are a couple of years away from being widely available in new cars, could make electric cars more competitive in price and performance with gasoline-powered models.
CATL — its full name is the Contemporary Amperex Technology Company Ltd. — produces a third of the world’s electric car batteries and supplies 16 of the world’s biggest carmakers, including General Motors and the Shanghai factory of Tesla. Its main rivals for the global market are BYD in Shenzhen, China, which makes about one-sixth of the world’s E.V. batteries, almost entirely for its own cars, and South Korean and Japanese battery manufacturers.
CATL executives spoke at a news conference ahead of the Shanghai auto show, which starts on Wednesday. The choreographed event evoked the launch of a new car model.
Batteries represent at least a third of the cost of an electric car, making CATL a critical player in the E.V. supply chain in China and beyond. Many automakers have been watching nervously whether CATL will someday try to establish its own car brand that could overshadow their own models.
The biggest surprise by CATL was an announcement about auxiliary batteries for electric cars. The batteries would share space in the underbody of cars, where there is now only one large battery.
The auxiliary battery would be the first commercially available electric vehicle battery that would not use graphite as one of its poles, CATL said.
Removing costly graphite will eventually make the batteries cheaper, after some initial costs, and will allow 60 percent more electricity to be squeezed in each cubic inch of the battery, said Gao Huan, CATL’s chief technology officer for electric cars in China. The extra energy density means that the car’s driving range can be greater, or the overall size of the battery can be reduced, leaving more room for the car’s passenger compartment.
The second battery also would provide backup in case one has trouble. That has become more important as self-driving features, which require uninterrupted electricity, become more common.
Ouyang Chuying, co-president for research and development at CATL, said auxiliary batteries without graphite would be available in cars in two to three years and possibly sooner. He declined to say which automakers might be the first to use them.
But taking out the graphite has a downside, which is why CATL will remove it only for the auxiliary batteries. Batteries without graphite recharge more slowly, and cannot be recharged as many times as conventional E.V. batteries before they need to be replaced.
The auxiliary batteries are meant to be used less frequently, on longer drives after the main battery is exhausted.
CATL, which is based in Ningde, China, also said it had made more progress in the speed of charging main batteries. The company said its new system would allow an electric vehicle to be charged enough in five minutes to drive 520 kilometers, or 320 miles.
BYD and Huawei, a Chinese electronics giant that plays an ever-larger role in auto parts manufacturing, have also announced five-minute charging systems, known as supercharging.
CATL also said it would start selling sodium-ion batteries, which can retain over 90 percent of their charge even at a temperature of 40 degrees below zero, for use in cars and trucks with internal combustion engines. The sodium batteries could be used by automakers to replace conventional lead-acid batteries, which go dead in very cold weather, and in some electric cars.
Mr. Ouyang said that the electricity of these sodium batteries would be compatible with the electrical systems of existing gasoline-powered cars, but that the new batteries might not fit in the same space.
CATL said its first customer for sodium-ion batteries would be freight trucks from First Auto Works, an automaker in Changchun, in China’s far northeast, where temperatures frequently fall well below zero. Developing sodium-ion batteries has been a priority for the Chinese electric car industry because the country’s northern provinces, bordering Mongolia and Russia’s Siberia, have bitterly cold temperatures in winter.
In interviews last autumn, car owners in Urumqi, in the far northwest of China, drivers said cold weather was why they would not consider buying electric cars.
Battery makers have been working on sodium-ion batteries for many years, but the United States may have a long-term advantage in the technology. Almost all of the world’s naturally occurring geological deposits of soda ash, the raw material for sodium-ion batteries, are in southwestern Wyoming.
CATL showed a video of its sodium-ion batteries undergoing stress tests, such as being punctured with a nail or power drill or even cut in half with a power saw, without catching fire or exploding. Just five years ago, CATL had argued that nail tests were unrealistic and that batteries should not be expected to withstand them.
Li You contributed research.
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Keith Bradsher is the Beijing bureau chief for The Times. He previously served as bureau chief in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Detroit and as a Washington correspondent. He has lived and reported in mainland China through the pandemic.
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