Volkswagen has hope to make electric cars cheaper: sodium batteries

Sodium-ion technology It has been promising for years without ever taking off. Gotion High-Tech, a Chinese company in which Volkswagen is its largest individual shareholder, has just taken the most serious step to date: for its own brand of sodium batteries to have a product ready to be manufactured at scale.

An evolution is urgently needed. Lithium-ion batteries They have been dominating for decades the energy storage and mobility sector but they have an underlying problem that more and more companies want to tackle: lithium is a geographically concentrated resource, with fragile supply chains and dependent on a few countries.

Sodium, on the other hand, is one of the most abundant elements on the planet. If sodium-ion technology reaches competitive energy densities and can be manufactured on a large scale, the game changes. And that is precisely what Gotion has in mind.

Production-ready batteries. At its 15th Global Technology Conference, the company introduced the Gnascent brandwhich groups three versions of sodium-ion battery designed for specific applications, not a single multipurpose cell. The brand already has production lines ready in Tangshan and Hefei, China, and they are on the order of gigawatt-hours.

Three versions. Each Gnascent variant targets a different niche:

• High energy: reaches 261 Wh/kg, 60% more than conventional sodium batteries. It is designed for light electric vehicles and drones for commercial use, where weight is a critical factor.
• Power: with 162 Wh/kg, it supports discharge at temperatures down to -50 °C. Its target market is commercial vehicles and equipment in extreme cold regions, where the performance of lithium batteries drops dramatically.
• Energy storage: with 180 Ah per cell and more than 20,000 useful life cycles, it maintains 88% of its capacity at -40 °C. The company claims to have passed penetration tests with 8 mm nails and heating to 400 °C without ignition. It can become a serious option for network installations and industrial use.

What your technology is about. Just like account The company, Gnascent is backed by more than 90 patents covering cathode materials (sheet oxides, polyanions and sodium-manganese-iron pyrophosphate), hard carbon anodes and electrolyte additives. On the other hand, its anode-less design reduces material costs while increasing energy density.

Who is behind. Gotion High-Tech, founded in 2006 and headquartered in Hefei, has Volkswagen Group as its largest shareholder. At the end of 2025, the company had a cumulative production capacity of 400 GWh and 20 manufacturing bases spread around the world. Just like share According to CarNewsChina, in the Chinese market it is the third supplier of batteries for electric vehicles, only behind CATL and BYD, with a share of 6.6%.

Who climbs it first and best?. Gotion is not the only one on this path. CATL and BYD too are accelerating their own sodium ion programswhich points to a broader strategy in which this chemistry is the protagonist and ends up becoming a real alternative to lithium.

And now what. For the moment, Gotion wants to enter the large-scale energy storage segment through Gnascent. That is electrical networks, industrial facilities or residential use, complementing with smaller markets such as two-wheeled vehicles. It only remains to be seen if the strategy ends up being given the green light and if more companies choose to consider this option in the near future.

Cover image | Gotion High-Tech and Volkswagen

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