XIAMEN, China (Reuters) -CATL said on Wednesday it had co-developed 10 new electric vehicle models with automakers that use swappable batteries, as the Chinese battery giant seeks to lead a trend it says will replace a third of gasoline stations in China.
Yang Jun, CEO of CATL’s battery swapping brand EVOGO, said it would roll out the first EV that uses its so-called “choco-swap” battery this month, with the remaining to be launched in upcoming months.
CATL will also look to build 1,000 battery swapping stations next year and to accelerate this further by enlisting partners to build more stations, he added.
The world’s largest battery maker has also been seeking to expand in new business sectors such as micro power grids and skateboard chassis, CATL’s chairman Robin Zeng told Reuters in an interview in November.
It launched the EVOGO battery swap service in 2022, which it said would allow drivers to change EV batteries in one minute. Its automaker partners include state-owned Changan Auto and FAW and to date it has built a small number of charging stations across a few Chinese cities on a trial basis.
The subscription fee for the choco-swap battery swapping service starts from 369 yuan ($51) per month, Yang said at an event in China’s southern city of Xiamen to talk about battery swapping. Zeng told the same event that the batteries would come with two standard sizes to speed up adoption.
The hope, Zeng added, was that the choco-swap battery swapping stations would use as much green energy as possible and play a role in stabilising the power grid.
China could eventually have 30,000-40,000 battery swapping stations which could replace a third of its roughly 100,000 gasoline stations, Yang predicted. Zeng said that he expected battery swapping to make up a third of power-up solutions for EVs alongside home and public chargers by 2030.
Chinese EV maker Nio is another player that has been investing heavily in battery swapping stations and technologies that allow an EV user to replace depleted batteries with a fully charged one in three minutes. Nio has built more than 2,800 such stations, mainly in China, as of early December.
Infrastructure is a key bottleneck for EV growth globally, which has been slowing this year. Chinese automakers such as Nio and Xpeng are also preparing to offer extended range hybrids, especially for overseas markets where EV charging and battery swapping facilities are insufficient.
($1 = 7.2866 Chinese yuan renminbi)
(Reporting by Zhang Yan and Brenda Goh. Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman and Mark Potter)
