Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer Nio has agreed to strengthen its collaboration with Contemporary Amperex Technology Company Ltd (CATL), the world’s largest EV battery manufacturer, for the development of new technologies to extend the lifecycles of batteries.
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Nio and CATL signed a new five-year collaboration agreement in early January, as part of their efforts to find a solution to the expiry of EV batteries. The two companies began to collaborate in this area in 2024.
Current EV batteries have a lifecycle of between eight and ten years. With replacement batteries costing upwards of CNY 60,000 (US$ 8,600), consumers in China and elsewhere will face an increasingly expensive issue from the end of the decade, following the strong growth in global EV sales in the last several years.
Nio’s CEO, William Li, said in a statement: “Batteries will become a big issue in eight to ten years’ time. We are under time pressure to find ways to tackle the problem.” The company estimates that the batteries powering the 40 million or so EVs currently in circulation in China will expire by 2032, at a significant cost to consumers.”
Nio confirmed that the new collaboration agreement represented “a higher level of synergy between the two companies across the whole ecosystem.”
In early January, Nio celebrated the production of its one millionth BEV at its plant in Hefei, in China’s Anhui province. The company announced it is targeting annualized sales growth of between 40% and 50% over the next decade, after its global sales rose by 47% to 326,028 units in 2025.
