Zeekr’s New Golden Batteries Are … Golden

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EV battery technology continues to advance, sometimes at what seems to be a rapid clip. Much of the progress is subtle, incremental, nearly ignored progress that eventually adds up to a lot. Some of the progress, though, is golden. To be specific, there’s a new golden battery going into the Zeekr 007 electric car, and it is both eye catching and a big deal.

Is this golden battery coming from CATL? Or is it coming from LG Chem or Panasonic? No, it’s not coming from any of those battery giants — it was developed in-house at Zeekr!

As with a recently introduced CATL battery used in the Li Mega, though, we’re talking super fast charging that can add 500 km (311 miles) of driving range in 15 minutes. “The new LFP battery supports ultra-fast charging enhanced by 800V electrical system,” Zeekr writes. Furthermore, the company plans to operate 1,000 EV fast chargers in 2024 in order to help make the most of the new battery. As of the end of November, Zeekr had opened 401 ultra-fast EV charging stations offering 2,200 charging posts. All of this is just in China. For now. Aside from the goal of reaching 1,000 EV ultra-fast chargers in 2024, the company plans to have 10,000 charging posts in operation by 2026.

The Zeekr 007, with deliveries beginning in January 2024, will be the first model to use the battery, but several other models are already planned that will use the battery as well.

Here some more perspective on the golden batteries: “LFP batteries are traditionally regarded by the industry to have lower energy density in comparison with nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) batteries at the cell level. In order to tackle that, ZEEKR’s engineers carefully designed the battery pack for the new LFP to achieve high energy density at the pack level. Thanks to the application of newly-developed materials and simplified structural design, the volume utilization of the new battery pack reaches 83.7%, higher than many global peers.”