Huawei’s smart car business is signing on to CATL’s battery swap network, giving the world’s largest battery maker another heavyweight partner for a technology most of the industry wrote off a decade ago.

Yinwang, the Huawei-controlled automotive unit also known as Newcool, signed a strategic cooperation framework with CATL and its swap subsidiary CAES on Monday. CATL’s Choco-swap network already counts 2,520 stations across about 200 Chinese cities.

In a move that challenges Orange Juicer and Buick Electra for the highly coveted Best Name in the EV Business title, a new venture between CATL and Octopus Energy called “Swaptopus” has been formed to build out a European battery swap network for commercial trucks.

Geely launched its new TT electric sport sedan in China, starting at 129,900 yuan (about $19,100), with 800V fast charging and LiDAR on every trim.

That price puts a 640 km sedan with next-generation charging hardware at roughly half the price of a Tesla.

CATL has signed a memorandum of understanding with Dutch energy company Alfen to deploy 5 GWh of its Tener Sodium energy storage systems across Europe, one of the largest sodium-ion commitments the region has seen.

The batteries are rated for 15,000 cycles and a 25-to-30-year service life — the pitch that sodium-ion’s longevity, not its energy density, is what wins grid storage.

A new analysis of nearly 10,000 real-world EV battery tests found that the same Tesla Model 3 holds up very differently depending on which battery it was built with — and the cheaper LFP version comes out on top.

The Model 3 with CATL’s lithium iron phosphate (LFP) pack averaged 93.3% battery health among cars that had driven more than 62,000 miles, beating every nickel-based version of the car in the dataset.

A commercial sodium-ion battery from Chinese manufacturer Hina matches Tesla’s lithium-ion cells on manufacturing quality and internal design, according to an independent teardown published in the Cell Press journal Cell Reports Physical Science.

Researchers at Germany’s RWTH Aachen University measured cell-to-cell resistance varying by just 5.3% across 120 cells — a sign of tightly controlled mass production rivaling the best lithium cells on the market.