CATL built the first mass-production passenger car with sodium-ion batteries in February 2026, due on the market by mid-year. Its Naxtra cells reach 175 watt-hours per kilogram by the company's own figure, and it holds a 60 gigawatt-hour, three-year supply deal with HyperStrong signed on April 27, 2026.
Sodium-ion storage is the other half of the story. CATL plans first deliveries in China in September 2026 and one gigawatt-hour of cumulative shipments by year's end. It added 40 gigawatt-hours a year of capacity at Fuding. These are targets and orders, and no completed delivery had been independently reported by early October.
The stakes are plain. Two chemistries that headlines have sold for years as the next step past lithium-ion are finally shipping, but neither looks like the breakthrough version promised. One is real and overpriced. The other is real and only half solid. A buyer or an investor who reads a 2026 spec sheet should know which half they are getting.
Semi-solid ships, sodium scales, all-solid waits
Solid-state shipments grew 51.9 percent to 8.0 gigawatt-hours in 2025, according to EVTank's white paper dated July 31, 2026, as cited by ChinaEVHome. Every commercial-scale cell among them was semi-solid, meaning a hybrid of solid and liquid electrolyte. WeLion and Qingtao led that market, taking nearly half of it between them. WeLion's 150 kilowatt-hour semi-solid pack is already in NIO cars, and Qingtao's cells sit in the SAIC MG4.
China's regulators have begun preparing to rename these cells as solid-liquid batteries so they are not confused with the fully solid kind. A buyer of solid-state today is buying a hybrid.
The price gap for sodium-ion shows in one public tender. A 100 megawatt, 400 megawatt-hour storage project in Renqiu, Hebei, put average bids at about 153 dollars per kilowatt-hour for sodium-ion against 79 dollars per kilowatt-hour for lithium iron phosphate. The lots differed in size, 40 megawatt-hours against 360 megawatt-hours, so this is a market signal rather than a pure chemistry comparison. On his own cost basis, HiNa's general manager puts sodium-ion at 74 to 104 dollars per kilowatt-hour against 45 to 74 dollars for lithium batteries, and expects convergence in 2027 or 2028.
Cost sets sodium's pace
Lithium carbonate rose above 25,000 dollars per tonne in early 2026, and that pressure is what pushed CATL and BYD to accelerate sodium-ion work. Hard-carbon anode costs, the standard sodium-ion anode material, fell from 8,900 to 10,400 dollars per tonne in 2024 to an estimated 5,200 to 5,900 dollars in 2026. China also exempted sodium-ion and solid-state batteries from a new battery consumption tax until the end of 2028, while lithium-ion pays 2 percent from September 2026 and 4 percent from 2027. The published summaries do not say whether semi-solid cells count as solid-state under that rule.
For the moment, a sodium-ion buyer pays extra for supply diversity, and about twice LFP's price in the one tender on record. The inputs move the other way, with lithium dear and carbon tax favoring the newcomer.
All-solid-state stays a factory problem
All-solid-state cells remain at the pilot and test stage. Samsung SDI plans mass production of its sulfide cells in Ulsan from the second half of 2027. BYD plans small-batch trials of its sulfide technology in roughly 1,000 vehicles around 2027. The best-known road result comes from a lithium-metal cell that is not fully solid either, when a lightly modified Mercedes EQS with Factorial's quasi-solid FEST cells drove 1,205 kilometers from Stuttgart to Malmo without recharging, arriving with 137 kilometers of range left, according to Mercedes-Benz.
Manufacturing is the constraint. Sulfide precursors still cost dozens of times as much as conventional liquid-electrolyte materials, based on CarNewsChina's reporting on BYD's programme. Both newcomers also start from a small base, since global lithium-ion shipments reached 2,280.5 gigawatt-hours in 2025 by EVTank's count, with China at 82.8 percent.
Dates have slipped before
The record of moved timelines is long. CATL launched its first sodium-ion cell in July 2021 at up to 160 watt-hours per kilogram and said it would form a basic industrial chain by 2023. BYD began building a 30 gigawatt-hour sodium-ion plant in Xuzhou in January 2024 and now ties its mass-production date to demand. In 2026, CATL is shipping while BYD is still waiting.
Solid-state has the longer record. Toyota first planned all-solid-state batteries for 2020, moved them to 2023 and then 2026, and now targets 2027 to 2028, according to Electrek. QuantumScape, whose cells pair a solid ceramic separator with a liquid electrolyte at the cathode, said when it went public in 2020 that it aimed for commercial production by 2024. In this field, a 2027 date is a target, not a plan.
Sodium-ion has its own failure on record. Natron Energy ceased operations on September 3, 2025 after failing to raise funding, abandoning a planned 1.4 billion dollar factory in North Carolina. A funding gap ended that gigafactory before it was built.
Heavy-duty and cold-weather use is where sodium is being tested first. HiNa Battery and Tonly delivered a sodium-ion mining truck with a 676 kilowatt-hour battery to Sanyou Mining in July. FAW Jiefang's sodium-ion heavy truck, built with HiNa, covered more than 15,000 kilometers in road tests and kept more than 90 percent of its usable capacity at minus 40 degrees Celsius. BYD says it has sodium-ion cells rated for up to 10,000 cycles, with mass production timed to demand.
Forecasts still run ahead of factories
EVTank forecasts 607.2 gigawatt-hours of solid-state shipments by 2030, with all-solid-state cells at nearly 20 percent of that. BYD chief scientist Lian Yubo has said liquid lithium-ion and all-solid-state batteries could coexist for 15 to 20 years. Natron's closure shows a sodium-ion business can fail on funding before its factory exists.
For a storage buyer in late 2026, sodium-ion is an option, mainly from one supplier at scale and at about twice the price of LFP. For a vehicle buyer or investor, semi-solid is what ships today, and all-solid-state is a bet on 2027 to 2030 in a field with a history of slipped dates. In the Renqiu tender, sodium took one tenth of the project, and that share is the honest measure of where it stands now. For more background, see our coverage at battery-tech coverage and Reuters.