SHANGHAI (Reuters) – China’s CATL, the world’s largest electric vehicle battery maker, on Tuesday launched a new EV chassis that it says can withstand a 120-kph (75-mph) frontal impact without catching fire or exploding, as it touts safety as a key selling point.
The company aims to sell the new EV platform – called “panshi” in Chinese, which translates to “bedrock” – to premium car makers seeking to accelerate development and lower costs.
Such EV platforms are also known in the industry as “skateboard chassis”, or flexible platforms that combine electric motors, batteries, controls and suspensions.
Other players in this area include Chinese EV maker Xpeng and Shanghai-based engineering firm Launch Design.
The chassis is crucial to CATL Chairman Robin Zeng’s ambitions to push the Chinese battery giant to achieve further growth. Besides this, CATL is also looking into micro power grids and is building a battery swapping service. CATL has a global market share of roughly 37% in EV batteries.
Zeng disclosed the panshi project to Reuters in November, saying it could slash the cost of developing a new EV from billions of dollars to just $10 million and could make a niche EV firm profitable by selling just 10,000 cars a year.
This in turn could open the industry to new EV players in economies without established automakers, and Zeng said at the time that CATL had shown the panshi technology to Porsche for a potential luxury EV and to investors in the United Arab Emirates eager to start a local EV brand.
(Reporting by Zhang Yan and Brenda Goh; Editing by Anne Marie Roantree, Muralikumar Anantharaman and Jamie Freed)
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