One of the reasons why more electric cars are not sold is the reduced autonomy they have compared to vehicles with late engines, internal combustion. Battery manufacturer Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Limited (CATL) in China believes it has a solution to this problem.
The company, which is Tesla’s partner in the Asian state, is proposing a new technology that would give electric cars a range of more than 800 km.
The current method is to produce battery cells, combine them into modules, then modules into packages. In most electric cars there is only one battery pack. There are also larger vehicles that have more packages.
Electric cars with batteries arranged differently
CATL proposes a new approach, called Cell-To-Pack (CTP), through which the module stage is passed and packages are made directly from the cells. This saves space and reduces the weight of the car. The result is a higher cell density and a longer range of the vehicle.
The next step would be to integrate the battery cells directly into the chassis (a solution called Cell-To-Chassis / CTC), skipping over packages as well. In this case, however, it would be more difficult to replace the damaged or used batteries.
Some electric car manufacturers will still prefer the current method, with cell modules. This is because this system allows the replacement of batteries with some already charged, at special points. Changing the batteries is faster than charging them. Such a strategy has the German manufacturer of the modular vehicle eBussy.