CATL dethroning diesel trucks and Tesla Semi with global battery swap network

CATL has announced a joint venture to roll out battery-swapping mega-hubs for electric trucks. The goal is to have hundreds of thousands of truck battery swaps annually across Europe.

The project with Octopus Energy is aptly named Swaptopus and is part of CATL's strategy to expand its battery swap station network globally. It already supplies China's largest network, that of EV maker NIO, and is building its own swap stations for both light and commercial vehicles, electric trucks included.

Due to the high power demands of heavy freight, onboard truck batteries are huge, meaning conventional charging takes longer or needs to be done at dedicated stations, of which there are few and far between.

Swaptopus sidesteps that entirely as depleted packs are swapped out in minutes, removing one of the biggest barriers to decarbonizing the trucking business, as refueling from a diesel pump takes roughly the same time.

CATL already runs hundreds of swap stations across China, and real-world data shows that heavy electric trucks on the Shanghai-to-Ningbo freight corridor are already saving on transport costs versus diesel.

Each European mega-hub is envisioned to serve thousands of trucks daily, and at full scale the partnership could support more than 300,000 electric trucks across the continent. The swap hubs with a reserve of charged battery packs can function as distributed grid storage, too.

Besides the V2G potential, CATL will provide standardized, long-life battery packs like it does for NIO's network, as well as end-of-life recycling, with operating cost savings over diesel trucks to be had.

Tesla is now building a megawatt Supercharger network that can feed its Semi electric trucks in the US, while CATL aims to concurrently blanket the global market with a faster solution, so it remains to be seen whose approach to electric trucking will come out on top.

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