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CATL unveils battery with 12-minute charging and 1.5 million mile life
(interestingengineering.com)
this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2026
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Technology
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No, CATL makes the same wild claims. Just within the last few months they've been overselling the capabilities of sodium batteries.
https://www.livescience.com/technology/electric-vehicles/new-battery-breakthrough-could-make-electric-cars-and-grid-scale-storage-far-safer
The whole industry is polluted with these fluff claims. Of course we want them to be true, but waiting for results to make noise is wiser.
Wild claims? "'We did this thing in the lab.' It could be a breakthrough provided they can scale production." The only thing that would make this a wild claim is if they didn't actually do what they said or if it didn't work like they said. They didn't even claim this could be commercialized.
Also, Professor Zhao works at Western University, in Ontario, Canada. Here's an article about this same research on their website. The only reference to CATL in the article you linked mentions that they are commercially producing sodium ion batteries using a different process.
Here's a more-recent article then: https://carnewschina.com/2026/01/22/catl-unveils-worlds-first-mass-production-sodium-ion-battery-for-commercial-vehicles/
Public buses in areas of China trialed these batteries and they didn't live up to their claims which is they can be bought on Alibaba second hand. I don't have the "energy" to find the articles in English as it's out the scope of my original comment anyhow. It's not just claims around CATL batteries, it's an industry-wide problem.
That's a much more interesting comment and link. Hopefully the production batteries do better than the trial run. We will see soon enough.
OK, but where are the data that they're inflating claims? From where I'm looking, they keep iterating. Your approach feels like sinophobia. What are we doing here in the states? Certainly not announcing new batteries.