CATL unveils dual-battery system for heavy-duty electric trucks, pairing swappable packs with range extender

Chinese battery manufacturing giant CATL has unveiled a new dual-battery system for heavy-duty trucks that the company hopes will help to accelerate the electrification of road freight transportation.

CATL, the world’s largest battery maker, says the new system combines a main chassis-mounted swappable battery with a behind-the-cab range-extension battery.

It is designed to help improve the main battery’s depth of discharge, given that conventional battery-swapping trucks tend not to use the battery’s whole state of charge (SoC). According to CATL, drivers often return the battery for a swap with unused capacity because they are reluctant to run the battery low.

Pairing a swappable battery with a smaller range-extension battery is expected to mitigate this wariness, increasing the depth of discharge from approximately 70 per cent to over 95 per cent, meaning that the swappable battery is being returned with less than 5 per cent SoC left.

When the main swappable battery reaches this level of SoC, CATL’s switching technology transfers power delivery to the range-extension battery “within milliseconds” so as to maintain a continuous and stable power supply.

The initial combination advertised by CATL pairs a swappable battery with a 77 kilowatt-hour (kWh) range-extension battery capable of 3C charging.

However, CATL says that the system is designed around a more amorphous “1+X” architecture which pairs a main battery with a range-extension battery that can be customized for a range of conditions, including options such as ultra-high energy density, low-temperature resistance for cold climates, or ultra-high power.

The two batteries can also be developed and upgraded independently of one another so as to meet their respective technical and operational requirements.

Supporting this dual-battery system is CATL’s heavy-duty truck battery-swapping solution and subsidiary QIJI and its strategy of standardization, new infrastructure, and a full commercial ecosystem.

Announced in tandem with the dual-battery system, QIJI introduced two new standardised swappable batteries, the 260# with 432 kWh and the 300# with 513 kWh, complementing the existing 75# with 171 kWh.

QIJI’s swapping system also enables swaps in just five minutes with a virtually flawless first-time success rate (99.99 per cent).

The company is also in the process of deploying 900 battery-swapping stations by the end of this year, with plans to build another 2,000 by 2027 and a long-term target of 10,000 stations across China.  

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