CATL and Changan Automobile unveiled the world's first mass-production passenger vehicle fitted with sodium-ion batteries on February 5, 2026, in Yakeshi, Inner Mongolia. The car is set to reach the market by mid-2026, and CATL will supply its Naxtra sodium-ion packs across Changan's full brand portfolio, covering AVATR, Deepal, Qiyuan and UNI.
The battery is rated at up to 175 Wh/kg, and the vehicle carries a pure-electric range exceeding 400 km thanks to a Cell-to-Pack layout and an intelligent battery management system. That density is below what a good lithium-ion cell delivers today, but the gap is narrowing as the supply chain matures.
The nut graf: this is the first time a major carmaker has committed sodium-ion batteries to a normal passenger car at production scale, not a lab demo. Sodium-ion cells use cheap, abundant sodium instead of lithium, and the timing matters because lithium prices have swung wildly while EV makers want a second chemistry to lean on. If the car ships in mid-2026 as planned, it gives buyers a real alternative chemistry and gives CATL a second revenue stream beyond lithium-ion.
Why sodium-ion, and why now
Sodium is everywhere. It sits in salt and seawater, so the raw material cost is a fraction of lithium's, and the supply chain does not depend on the few countries that dominate lithium mining and refining. CATL began sodium-ion research in 2016 and says it spent nearly 10 billion RMB developing close to 300,000 test cells, with over 300 R&D staff including 20 PhDs. That is a decade of work behind a single product launch.
The trade-off is energy density. Naxtra's 175 Wh/kg is below what a good lithium-ion cell delivers, so the car tops out around 400 km today. CATL projects 500 to 600 km for pure-electric variants and 300 to 400 km for range-extended and hybrid setups as the supply chain matures, which it says covers over half of the range requirements in the new energy vehicle market. The company is betting that density improvements will arrive fast enough to keep the chemistry competitive.
Lithium-ion is not going away. The argument CATL makes is complementarity, not replacement. Sodium-ion handles the cold, the budget segment and the supply-chain risk; lithium-ion keeps the long-range flagships. That division of labor is what Gao Huan, CTO of CATL's China E-car business, meant when he called this the start of a dual-chemistry era.
Cold weather is where it earns its keep
The headline number is not density but temperature. At minus 30 degrees Celsius, Naxtra delivers nearly triple the discharge power of an equivalent lithium iron phosphate battery, keeps over 90 percent of capacity at minus 40 degrees, and still provides power at minus 50 degrees. For a country where winter mornings in the northeast routinely drop below minus 20, that is a real selling point, not a spec-sheet footnote.
Safety testing is the other claim. CATL says the pack survived crushing, drilling and sawing without smoke or fire and kept delivering power. The company positions sodium-ion as the safer chemistry, and in a market where battery fires make national news, that argument carries weight with both regulators and buyers.
Gao Huan framed the launch as a strategic step. "The arrival of sodium-ion technology marks the beginning of a dual-chemistry era," he said, adding that sodium-ion and lithium-ion will complement each other to meet diverse customer needs. He also praised Changan's foresight, comparing its sodium-ion push to its early embrace of electric vehicles.
The market math
Precedence Research puts the global sodium-ion battery market at USD 1.39 billion in 2025, rising to USD 6.83 billion by 2034. That is a small number next to lithium-ion, but it is growing fast, and 2026 is the year CATL wants to move the technology from lab to lot. CATL installed 29.06 GWh of EV batteries in April 2026 alone, so even a small share of its output going to sodium-ion would dwarf today's entire market.
There is also a swap-station angle. CATL plans to open more than 3,000 Choco-Swap battery swap stations across 140 cities in China by the end of 2026, with over 600 in colder northern regions. If sodium-ion packs join that network, drivers in Harbin or Changchun could swap into a cold-weather-ready battery in minutes instead of waiting at a charger.
The swap network matters for another reason. A driver does not need to own the battery, only the car, which lowers the upfront price and shifts the chemistry risk onto the operator. If sodium-ion packs prove cheaper to run in winter, swap stations give CATL a fast way to put them in front of consumers without waiting for new car sales.
What could go wrong
It is not clear this will hold. The 400 km range today is modest, and buyers have been trained to expect 500 km or more from a new EV. If sodium-ion stays stuck near 400 km while lithium-ion keeps climbing, the chemistry risks being boxed into budget cars and cold-region fleets rather than going mainstream.
There is also the question of whether Changan's mid-2026 launch date slips. Mass-producing a new cell chemistry at GWh scale is hard, and CATL itself says full-scale mass production begins by the end of 2026, slightly later than the vehicle's mid-year target. That gap is worth watching, and a slip would hand the first-mover headline to a rival.
Cost is the other open question. Sodium is cheap, but the rest of the cell, the cathode, the anode, the electrolyte, is not. Until CATL publishes a per-kWh figure for Naxtra, the claim of cheaper batteries rests on the raw-material argument alone. Buyers will want a number.
For more on the EV transition, see our desk coverage and related reporting. A primer on sodium-ion chemistry is at Reuters.
The real test comes in the second half of 2026, when the first Changan sodium-ion cars reach showrooms and winter arrives in northern China. If the cold-weather claims hold up on the road, CATL will have earned a second chemistry. If they do not, sodium-ion stays a promising footnote for another year.