CATL's Tectrans II commercial vehicle battery debuts in Germany with 1,000-km truck range

At the IAA Transportation show in Hannover on September 14, Chinese battery giant CATL unveiled Tectrans II, its second-generation battery lineup for commercial vehicles. The top-spec heavy-truck configuration is rated for up to 1,000 kilometers per charge, and megawatt-grade fast charging restores 80% of the charge in 25 minutes.

The system is built from standardized packs whose dimensions, electrical interfaces and communication protocols are unified, so trucks can take future battery upgrades without platform redesigns. It works with both e-axle and central-drive layouts and supports either plug charging or battery swapping. CATL says the modular approach can halve vehicle development cycles and trim R&D spending by 60% to 70%. The pack's gravimetric energy density is 170 Wh/kg—roughly 13% above the industry norm—system round-trip efficiency reaches 96%, and it is engineered to last 12 years or 1.5 million kilometers while still holding 70% of its capacity.

Beyond heavy trucks, the lineup will extend to medium-duty trucks and buses for use cases spanning long-haul freight, ports, mines, urban delivery and passenger transport. During the show, CATL also signed a memorandum of understanding with DHL Group that builds on their September 2024 agreement: the two will create green freight corridors across Europe and work with automakers to develop purpose-built electric vehicles and run pilot deployments.

The Tectrans brand dates to July 2024, and the light-commercial-vehicle version of Tectrans II arrived in China in January, including a sodium-ion variant for low temperatures, followed by an 8C ultrafast-charging version in July. CATL's position in the broader market remains dominant: SNE Research data show 289.6 GWh of global installations in the first seven months of 2026, a 39.9% share.