- Chinese EV battery manufacturer, CATL, is set to make battery swapping a reality for electric trucks and electric HGVs.
- The firm confirmed that it’ll open 300 battery swapping facilities across China by the end of the year, designed specifically for the next generation of battery-swappable electric trucks.
- These 300 stations will cover 13 core regions of China by the end of 2025, before expanding the network to cover another 16 city clusters by the end of the decade.
First it was electric cars, now electric trucks are set to benefit from battery swapping technology
CATL has already made recent heavy investments into EV battery swapping on the passenger car side, with the battery giant committing to opening 10,000 such stations across China in collaboration with Sinopec. Those stations will support electric cars running on CATL’s Choco-Swap battery platform, but this new battery swapping technology is now being expanded to electric trucks and HGVs.
The firm’s heavy electric vehicle vehicle version of Choco-Swap, called QIJI Energy, has now launched a standardised swappable battery pack for electric HGVs, named the #75. CATL says this new battery pack will have ‘industry-leading’ levels of lifespan, and will allow fleets to easily scale up battery capacity depending on a truck’s application. In collaboration with multiple OEMs, CATL notes that it has already made over 30 electric trucks on the Chinese market compatible with this new swappable #75 battery pack.
Charging speeds for electric trucks are already touching the 1,000kW barrier, and battery swaps for electric trucks could still prove unnecessary when businesses are able to align recharging times with the mandatory rest breaks required to be taken by truck drivers. However, for businesses looking to maximise uptime of their electric truck fleets, battery swapping could still prove a huge benefit – allowing an electric truck to head straight back out on the road with a driver change – or for those times when a low battery doesn’t align with a driver’s break time.
Swappable batteries could also introduce a new level of flexibility into fleets, by allowing businesses to more easily repurpose electric trucks in the longer term. For example, a battery-swappable truck could initially be fitted with a smaller, more affordable, and more lightweight battery pack designed for urban logistics, before taking on a larger-capacity battery pack later on to be repurposed for longer-distance logistics.
Whilst CATL’s electric truck battery swapping solution remains exclusive to China for now, it remains to be seen whether CATL plans to take this plan worldwide in the longer term.
