CATL has figured out how to protect electric vehicle batteries from fires during high-speed crashes

Reuters recalled that CATL management promised last month to present a new platform based on traction batteries with a long range, allowing the creation of electric vehicles at minimal cost and in a short time. As it turned out today, a feature of this platform is the ability of the traction battery to survive a collision at a speed of 120 km/h.

Image source: CATL

True, as sources explain, the tests were carried out under conditions of an electric vehicle colliding with a stationary pole, so they cannot take into account all the possible consequences of real accidents of this type, but the experiment allows us to at least reduce the concerns of many ordinary people about the threat of a fire in the traction battery of an electric vehicle due to the impact at such a speed . The Panshi platform, which means “bedrock” in Chinese from a geological perspective, involves separating the traction battery housing from parts of the electric vehicle body at the bottom when colliding with an obstacle. When hitting an obstacle at a speed of 120 km/h, as the experiment showed, the battery case is not damaged and no fire occurs. In the normal state, the battery housing is integrated into the load-bearing structure of the electric vehicle body.

The CATL platform will make it possible to create premium electric vehicles with a range of up to 1000 km in a year or a year and a half from scratch, which is significantly less than the typical three years for such projects. In addition, the cost of creating a new electric car model using this platform can be reduced to $10 million. To break even, it will be enough to sell about 10,000 cars a year. In fact, such a platform will be of interest to startups or companies that are not ready to invest in the development of their own electric vehicles, but want to immediately introduce a modern electric vehicle with a high level of passive safety.

As CATL representatives noted earlier, the company has already demonstrated this platform to the German company Porsche, as well as to investors from the UAE who would like to launch the production of electric vehicles under their own brand. CATL itself will supply a new type of chassis for the production of electric vehicles under the Avatr brand, which it is promoting on the market together with Changan. It is not specified when the first carrier of this platform will appear.