Ningde Times Yiwei Lithium Energy won the BMW battery contract

The BMW Group has announced that the company will be the first to use cylindrical cells in "new generation" models from 2025. Among them, the two domestic battery factories of CATL and Yiwei Lithium Energy have become their battery cell suppliers, and the total battery cell production demand contract exceeds 10 billion euros.

On the same day, CATL announced that it will supply new cylindrical batteries with a standard diameter of 46 mm to BMW Group. The products will be produced at two battery factories in China and Europe, each with an annual capacity of up to 20GWh to supply BMW. In this cooperation, CATL will give priority to the use of renewable energy power and recycled materials to produce high-performance batteries, and raw materials such as cobalt and lithium used in the production of new-generation batteries will only be sourced from certified mines.

On the same day, Yiwei Lithium Energy also announced that its subsidiary Hubei Yiwei Power Co., Ltd. received a letter from BMW Group and will provide large cylindrical lithium-ion batteries for BMW Group’s Neue Klasse series models.

According to BMW, the new battery technology is matched with pure electric models based on the new architecture, which not only greatly improves energy density, endurance and charging speed, but also reduces carbon footprint and resource consumption in battery manufacturing. The BMW Group has developed a completely new cell form and chemical system for the sixth-generation eDrive electric drive technology. A new cylindrical cell specially designed for the electrical and electronic architecture of the "new generation" model can increase the battery life by up to 30% (WLTP). Compared with the fifth-generation square cells, the sixth-generation cylindrical cells have higher nickel content in the negative electrode, reduced cobalt content, and increased silicon content in the positive electrode. The volumetric energy density will increase by more than 20%. The sixth-generation cell technology will also use lithium iron phosphate as the cathode material for the first time, thereby further avoiding the use of raw materials cobalt and nickel in the cathode material. BMW is also continuously advancing the development of solid-state batteries, with the goal of applying solid-state high-voltage batteries to mass-produced vehicles by 2030.

People in the lithium battery industry said that cylindrical batteries are a major direction of power battery structural innovation, and at the same time, they are combined with high-nickel positive electrodes, silicon-based negative electrodes and other material innovations. Tesla released a "4680" cylindrical battery named after the size in 2020. At present, Tesla's Texas factory models use self-produced 4680 cells and are in the stage of ramping up production capacity. At the same time, LG New Energy and Panasonic will also supply "4680" batteries for Tesla. Ningde Times and Yiwei Lithium Energy have also invested heavily in this regard. The new order with BMW will help to further promote the further development of high-nickel cathode materials and silicon-based anode materials in China.