CATL wants 2,000 battery swapping stations by 2027. Israel tried this almost 20 years ago, spent $850 million, and watched the dream collapse.
China’s battery giant CATL is bringing back an idea that Israel once believed would change the world. On October 20, the company unveiled its Tianxing II batteries for heavy-duty electric trucks, alongside its Qiji system that can replace a depleted battery in about five minutes.
CATL plans to have 900 truck battery-swapping stations in China by the end of 2026, 2,000 by 2027 and eventually 10,000. It is an ambitious infrastructure play, but we’ve seen this movie before.
Green Prophet extensively covered Israeli entrepreneur Shai Agassi and his company Better Place, which raised more than $850 million to build battery-swapping infrastructure in Israel and expand internationally, including plans in California supported by then-San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom.
The cars were Renault Fluence Z.E. sedans, rather unsexy vehicles that looked worse than a Toyota Prius and were priced at around $35,000. Better Place was selling an expensive infrastructure revolution wrapped in a car that few people particularly wanted. The company collapsed in 2013, leaving behind dozens of battery-swapping stations and charging posts collecting dust in Israeli parking lots. Many of these became obsolete reminders of an idea that arrived before its market.
China, however, is approaching the market differently. Instead of convincing ordinary drivers to buy an expensive, uninspiring sedan, CATL is targeting commercial trucks, where downtime is money and a five-minute battery swap can make economic sense.
For Europe, CATL is already exploring electric freight corridors with DHL, potentially challenging Mercedes-Benz’s eActros 600 and Volvo’s electric trucks, which depend primarily on plug-in charging.
In North America, Tesla’s Semi, with an advertised range of up to 500 miles, is betting on high-power Megachargers rather than battery swapping. China’s BYD is another major competitor in electric commercial vehicles, while NIO and Geely are developing extensive swapping networks primarily for passenger vehicles and commercial fleets.
The difference now is scale: China has the battery manufacturing capacity, standardized technology ambitions and domestic truck market to make swapping an industrial proposition rather than a venture-capital experiment.
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For the Middle East, where freight corridors connect ports, logistics centers and desert highways, battery swapping could eventually offer an alternative to building enormous truck-charging installations.
In the United States and Canada, where trucks travel vast distances and operators face expensive downtime, the technology could also find a market, provided manufacturers agree on common battery formats and someone finances the stations. CATL’s latest push suggests that the idea behind Better Place wasn’t necessarily wrong. It may simply have been aimed at the wrong customers, at the wrong price, in the wrong decade. The question now is whether China can succeed where Israel’s most famous electric-car experiment failed.
