Tesla might have been the first automaker to flirt with the concept of battery swapping stations for its EVs, but it’s China’s top car manufacturers that have fully embraced it, running miles ahead of the competition. Nio is currently leading the charge in battery swap tech, with thousands of stations scattered across China and even a few popping up in Europe. Soon, battery-swapping will become even more commonplace in China.

Just this week, Changan Automobile rolled out the first 1,000 units of its Oshan 520 sedan. Built with local taxi services in mind, these cars are significant for one reason: they’re the first to use CATL’s new Choco-SEB swappable battery packs.

What really steals the show here is the speed—these batteries can be swapped out in just 100 seconds at specialized stations that are about to become a common sight across China. Chongqing already boasts 34 Choco-SEB swap stations, and by 2025, CATL plans to have 1,000 of these stations spread across 31 cities.

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CATL, which just so happens to be the world’s largest EV battery supplier, has inked deals with GAC, Chery, Nio, SAIC, FAW, BAIC, and others to build EVs with these new battery packs. This means vehicles from all those brands will be able to use CATL’s swap stations, which can handle 822 swaps each day each.

As for the Oshan 520, it’s got a modest 56 kWh battery, offering a respectable range of up to 515 km (320 miles). At a starting price of 166,890 yuan (around $23,100 at current exchange rates), it’s relatively affordable for the average Chinese driver.

The real benefit, though, lies in the battery swap tech. Taxi drivers, for example, can skip the agonizing wait at a high-speed charger and swap batteries in just 100 second. That’s faster than it would take to fuel up a traditional gas-powered car. In a world where time equals money, this is a huge win.

A slew of other Chinese EVs have already been confirmed to support the Choco-SEB battery system. These include the new GAC Aion S, Hongqi E-QM5, SAIC Roewe D7, BAIC C66, Wuling Bingo, Wuling Starlight, SAIC Rising R7, SAIC Maxus Mifa 9, and the SAIC Maxus Dana. So, it looks like swapping batteries is going to be the norm, at least for China’s EVs, in the very near future.

As electric vehicles continue their steady march toward becoming a dominant force on global roads, one country has pulled far ahead of the rest- and it didn’t happen by accident.

By now, it’s widely understood that Chinese automakers have taken a commanding lead in the EV race, while many Western legacy brands are still scrambling to catch up. It’s also well known that Chinese battery companies are driving much of this momentum, leading with rapid innovation and serious scale. But how did they manage to surge ahead so dramatically in such a short time? The answer is fairly straightforward: money. More precisely, billions in government subsidies every single year.

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Fresh data from Nikkei Asia shows just how significant this financial support has been. Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., better known as CATL, the world’s largest EV battery manufacturer, has been raking in the kind of government funding that would likely make Elon Musk reconsider his next big tax tweet.

While CATL has not reveal full-year details of the government help it received in 2024, it has disclosed that in the first half it got 3.84 billion yuan ($532 million) in state subsidies. This made it one of the largest beneficiaries of the Chinese government’s policy, only behind state-owned oil company Sinopec, which received 4.06 billion yuan ($563 million). Importantly, however, that’s how much Sinopec received for the full 2024 calendar year, whereas CATL’s figure is only for the first six months of 2024 – thus, it total, the latter’s figure far exceeded Sinopec’s.

The subsidies CATL has received appear to have jumped in the second half of 2024. As noted by Nikkei Asia, in 2023, it disclosed its subsidies under ‘other income’ in its financial reports. In 2023, ‘other income’ totaled 6.26 billion yuan (~$868 million), and of this, 5.72 billion yuan (~$793 million) were subsidies. In 2024, its full-year report revealed 9.96 billion yuan (~$1.3 billion) in ‘other income,’ but didn’t specify how much of this was subsidies.

Of course, it’s not just CATL that is benefiting from this practice Full-year data from 2024 reveals that BYD received almost 3.8 billion yuan (~$527 million) in subsidies last year, no doubt playing a significant role in the firm’s ability to release so many new models so frequently.

Great Wall Motor was the fourth-largest recipient of subsidies, earning a touch under 3 billion yuan (~$416 million). SAIC Motor closely trailed GWM, receiving more than 2 billion yuan (~$277 million) in subsidies for the year.

All this answers the questions we posed at the beginning. There’s no secret sauce at play here; the Chinese managed to leapfrog the competition and undercut their rivals at the same time simply due to immense state help. No wonder, then, that the US and the EU are seething as they watch their own brands trying to compete in an uneven playing field.