CATL's TECTRANS II Aims to Make Electric Trucks a 1,000-Kilometer Business

CATL introduced TECTRANS II, a modular battery platform for commercial vehicles, at IAA Transportation 2026 in Hanover on September 14. The pitch is blunt: make battery-electric trucks a practical substitute for diesel in long-haul and heavy-duty work, not just in depots and short routes.

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The platform is built from standardized packs that can be combined in different quantities to hit different energy and payload targets. In its largest configuration, CATL says TECTRANS II delivers up to 1,000 kilometers of range and charges from empty to 80% in 25 minutes on megawatt-level fast charging. Those are the company's own figures and depend heavily on load, route and weather, but they describe a specification that would move electric trucks out of the category buyers tolerate and into the category they compare directly with diesel.

The numbers CATL is claiming

The headline technical figure is a gravimetric energy density of 170 Wh/kg, which CATL says is around 13% above the industry average. In commercial vehicles, where every kilogram subtracted from the battery can become payload, that matters. CATL says the gain allows roughly 0.6 tonnes of extra payload at the same battery capacity.

The company attributes the efficiency to a full-tab, low-impedance cell design it describes as the first of its kind globally. It puts system round-trip efficiency at 96%, meaning less energy is lost as heat during charging and discharging. Thermal management is the hard problem in megawatt charging, and better efficiency is one of the few levers that improves both charge speed and pack life at once.

For heavy trucks, CATL designs the battery for a 12-year or 1.5-million-kilometer service life with 70% capacity retention, a durability claim aimed at fleet operators who depreciate vehicles over a decade or more and need the residual value of the whole asset to hold. The pack is also designed to resist corrosion for 15 years, including in coastal and cold climates, and keeps IPXXB protection whether the main connectors are connected or not, a safety point for maintenance crews working on high-voltage systems.

Swapping, charging and the fleet business case

TECTRANS II is designed to work with either e-axle or central-drive architectures, and to accept conventional charging or battery swapping. That second option is the more interesting one for high-utilization fleets. Swapping lets a truck run nearly continuously if a network of stations exists, whereas fast charging ties the vehicle up for the duration of the charge. The trade-off is infrastructure cost and standardization, and that is where the battle over electric trucking is really being fought.

CATL also signed a memorandum of understanding with DHL Group during the show. The agreement expands a partnership first struck in September 2024 and covers the development of Green Freight Corridors across Europe, combining DHL's logistics network and route data with CATL's battery technology. The two companies said they plan to involve automakers and other partners in developing purpose-built electric vehicles and running pilot deployments.

That kind of partnership is a signal about how electrification in freight will actually arrive. A battery specification is necessary but not sufficient. The operator needs routes, depots, charging or swapping capacity and predictable duty cycles. DHL brings the routes and the operating data; CATL brings the cells. Neither solves the problem alone.

The competitive context

CATL remains the world's largest battery maker. Its installed battery volume reached 289.6 GWh in the first seven months of 2026, up 26.6% year on year, for a 39.9% global market share, according to the Korean researcher SNE Research. In China, however, the picture is more restless: a "de-CATL" trend has automakers spreading orders across rivals such as Sunwoda, CALB and Gotion, and the company's Shenzhen-listed shares briefly fell below 300 yuan on September 16 as smaller battery names rallied.

The commercial vehicle push is partly a way to stay ahead in a segment with different dynamics. Passenger car buyers care about range and price, but fleet operators care about total cost of ownership, uptime and residual value. A battery that lasts 1.5 million kilometers and charges fast enough to keep a truck moving is a TCO argument, and it is one CATL can make with a different set of metrics than the consumer market uses.

CATL is also spreading the model overseas. On September 16 it signed a technology cooperation agreement with Egypt's BME for a battery-pack plant with a planned annual capacity of 1 GWh, rising to 5 GWh in long-term plans, aimed primarily at heavy commercial vehicles. CATL provides the technology licensing, equipment and training; BME funds and builds the plant. It is a template for localizing pack assembly without exporting cells, which is how CATL can grow in markets that want domestic manufacturing.

Why megawatt charging is the hard part

Charging a heavy truck at a megawatt is not simply a faster version of charging a car. It means pushing roughly a thousand kilowatts through a connector and a pack, which turns thermal management, cable design and grid capacity into first-order problems. The reason CATL pairs the platform with 400 kWh of onboard energy storage in related products is that the battery buffer absorbs the peak and lets the site draw a smaller, steadier load from the grid. Without it, many depots would need an expensive distribution upgrade before a single truck could fast-charge.

The 25-minute claim is plausible only under the right conditions. State of charge, temperature and the power curve all limit how long a pack can accept peak current, and the last stretch from 80% to 100% is slow by design to protect the cells. A 25-minute stop to 80% is realistic for a highway corridor with a capable charger. Expecting the same from a cold pack in a winter depot is not.

Vehicle weight is the other half of the equation, and it is why the payload figure matters more than the range figure for many operators. Trucking economics are measured in tonnes moved per trip, and every kilogram of battery is a kilogram of cargo that cannot be carried. Getting 170 Wh/kg means an operator can either match diesel range with more cargo, or match diesel payload with a smaller battery and a lower cost. The choice depends on the route, which is exactly why CATL sells a modular system rather than a single pack.

None of this makes the switch automatic. Electric trucks also need drivers willing to plan around charging, maintenance networks that understand high-voltage systems, and financing that can absorb a higher purchase price in exchange for lower running costs. The battery is the enabling part, but the transition is an operations problem as much as an engineering one.

What to watch

Three things will decide whether TECTRANS II changes electric trucking. First, whether the 1,000-kilometer and 25-minute claims hold up in independent fleet trials, because depot-to-depot range in winter is where optimistic specifications tend to break. Second, whether megawatt charging and swapping infrastructure gets built at the density a long-haul operator needs, which is a bigger capital problem than the battery. Third, whether the platform wins named customers beyond DHL and translates into real truck orders rather than press releases.

Electric heavy trucks have been the last holdout in road transport electrification, largely because batteries were too heavy, too slow to charge and too uncertain in resale value. CATL is now selling a platform that claims to answer all three. The claims are credible enough to take seriously and unverified enough to wait for the road tests before believing.

The broader logic is hard to argue with. Freight is a large and concentrated source of emissions, and the operators who run it are unusually sensitive to fuel and maintenance costs, which makes them an ideal customer for a technology that shifts spend from diesel to electricity. If the batteries and the charging network both arrive, the switch stops being an environmental argument and becomes an accounting one. That is the point at which fleets move.

Cover: CATL's booth at IAA Transportation 2024 in Hanover, by Matti Blume (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia Commons, cropped 16:9.