Several Chinese power battery makers have previously announced batteries with ranges of up to 1,000 km, but all are based on nickel-cobalt-manganese (NCM) ternary materials.
Now Gotion High-tech has unveiled a new battery technology, which claims to be able to achieve a range of 1,000 km even without the use of expensive ternary materials.
Hefei, Anhui-based Gotion unveiled its L600 LMFP battery cells based on lithium iron phosphate (LFP) chemistry and a battery pack called Astroinno Battery at its 12th technology conference today.
The L600 LMFP cells have an energy density of 240 Wh/kg, or 525 Wh/L. The cells support 4,000 cycles at room temperature and 1,800 cycles at high temperature, according to the company.
A battery system based on the L600 LMFP cell could have an energy density of 190 Wh/kg, which is higher than the energy density of packs based on ternary chemistry systems that are in mass production now, Gotion said, adding that the new cell will be in mass production in 2024.
The energy density growth of mass-produced LFP cells has faced a bottleneck, and further improvements require chemical system improvements, so the LFP solution with manganese addition was born, said Cheng Qian, Gotion’s executive president of international operations.
Gotion unveiled the Astroinno Battery based on L600 LMFP cells, saying that the pack uses a sandwich structure with double-sided liquid cooling technology and minimalist design, resulting in a 45 percent reduction in the number of structural components and a 32 percent reduction in the weight of structural components.
The minimalist electrical design thinking has resulted in a battery pack with 26 percent of the previous harness length, down to 80 meters from the original 303-meter harness, with a volume utilization ratio of 76 percent, according to the company.
The pack has an energy density of 190 Wh/kg, surpassing the energy density of ternary batteries currently on the market, Gotion said.
Gotion is not the first manufacturer to release a 1,000-km range battery pack, but it is the first to achieve that range based on the LFP chemistry system.
CATL, China’s largest power battery maker, unveiled Qilin Battery, or CTP (cell to pack) 3.0, on June 23, 2022, claiming an energy density of up to 255 Wh/kg to support a vehicle with a 1,000km range.
The Qilin Battery is an innovation in battery structure, not a chemical system, and a 1,000 km range battery pack requires NCM chemistry.
The first Qilin Battery with a 1,000 km range is the Zeekr 001 of Zeekr, a premium electric vehicle brand of Geely, and deliveries of the model with this range have already started on May 16.
On April 21, Svolt Energy, which was spun off from Great Wall Motor, made the real-life debut of its Dragon Armor Battery at the Shanghai auto show.
Dragon Armor is also an innovation in battery pack structure without involving battery chemistry.
Svolt Energy said that the Dragon Armor Battery with LFP cells could have a range of more than 800 kilometers, while such batteries with ternary cells could have a range of more than 1,000 kilometers.
Gotion installed 1.18 GWh of power batteries in China in April, ranking fifth with a 4.68 percent share, according to the China Automotive Battery Innovation Alliance (CABIA).
In the LFP market, Gotion ranked fourth with a 6.17 percent share in April.