A new battery out China should electric cars a range of 400 kilometers after just ten minutes of charging. The “Shenxing” cell will herald an “era of super-fast charging of electric vehicles”, announced the largest Chinese battery manufacturer CATL on Thursday night (CET). For comparison: Tesla claims to be able to charge the Model 3 with a range of up to 275 kilometers within 15 minutes with its supercharger.
Overall, the battery from CATL should enable a range of 700 kilometers per charge. Mass production of the lithium iron phosphate cell is scheduled to begin this year, and the battery should be available from the first quarter of 2024. China is the market leader for batteries for electric cars. In January of this year, CATL started in Thuringia its first battery cell production outside of China and invested 1.8 billion euros in it. The Chinese group is one of the largest cell producers in the world. The German car manufacturers Volkswagen, BMW and Mercedes are also among the customers.
In addition to a nationwide charging infrastructure, high-performance batteries are an essential prerequisite for the further spread of electric cars. Lithium-ion batteries are increasingly reaching their limits in view of the desire for higher energy density and thus more range. At the same time, reports of battery fires with sometimes drastic consequences keep popping up, even if, statistically speaking, electric cars burn less frequently than petrol or diesel engines.
Companies around the world have been researching alternative batteries for years – including CATL. Experts are placing great hopes in so-called solid-state batteries, which have so far been considered too expensive and too complex to produce. But there are signs of progress. Experts reckon that by 2030, solid-state batteries could already account for 10 percent of the world market
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CATL, which seems to take lithium-ion technology to a new level with its recent development, is the best example of the rise of Chinese e-segment companies. The battery manufacturer is represented in the ranking of the largest automotive suppliers in the world since 2018 and makes great leaps upwards year after year. Due to its market power and the global electric car boom, the company was able to increase its sales by around 85 percent in 2022 – and at the same time achieved a margin of more than 17 percent. CATL now ranks seventh in the ranking of the world’s largest automotive suppliers. Within the top 100, “no other supplier comes even close to this outstanding success,” according to the study’s authors.
Race for lithium batteries
With the boom in electric cars and the rapidly increasing need for batteries is also accompanied by a global race for the raw material lithium. Chinese companies are investing billions in countries in Latin America and Africa to secure lithium deposits there. By the year 2025 could China According to experts’ expectations, they control around a third of the world’s lithium supply.
In view of the aggressive approach, the Kiel economics professor Tobias Heidland calls for greater diversification in German industry. “The dependence on China for lithium is a major risk for German companies,” says the director of the International Development Research Center at the IfW economic research institute. “Should major tensions arise, they could lose access to crucial intermediates.”
A competitive advantage of Chinese investments in countries in South America and Africa is that they usually place lower demands on environmental and human rights standards than, for example, European companies. “Governments know that by working with Chinese companies they don’t get the same level of quality – but it also gives them fewer headaches, there are fewer regulations, fewer lectures on environmental impact and fewer complaints from NGOs,” said Ryan Berg recently from the US Center for Strategic and International Studies of the journal Foreign Policy.
Race for deposits in Zimbabwe
Chinese company Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt owns control rights to Arcadia, Zimbabwe’s second largest lithium mine. According to Clinton Pavlovic, an analyst at international law firm Hogan Lovells, Chinese investors are estimated to have invested or planned to invest $10 billion or more in lithium projects in Zimbabwe over the past three years. Zimbabwe is also rich in other commodities, needed for the development of electric vehicles, such as cobalt, manganese, nickel and graphite. This makes the country all the more interesting for investors. The export ban on raw lithium that was issued in December does not change that – but foreign companies that are already there are exempt from it.