Swaptopus: The Audacious Bet To Decarbonise Europe’s Highways

So what do you call an Octopus, that can swap – a Swaptopus. This is the new name for the JV between CATL and Octopus : a 50-50 joint venture to build Europe’s first large-scale HGV battery swap network, using CATL’s Qiji Energy swapping system, already operating at more than 300 stations across China. The first UK hubs open in 2027. By 2035, the plan is 30-plus mega-hubs supporting over 300,000 electric.

The technology is elegant: a lorry pulls in, and a fully charged 513 kWh battery pack — swapped from the vehicle’s underside — replaces the depleted one in under five minutes. Swaptopus owns the packs. Fleet operators pay under a Battery-as-a-Service (Baas) model that removes the single biggest upfront cost barrier to electric truck adoption. “Unlike normal consumers, HGV operators are rational,” Oscar Luo, Executive President CATL told me in a free wheeling discussion on 22^nd at the event. “As long as the economics work, they will adopt.” My own analysis across five European markets, including the UK, confirms the business case is there — especially at current diesel (and high energy) prices.

In the business case that I worked on, battery swapping in Europe can give a project IRR of 20% or more at a monthly cost of £240 – 260 for a 100 KWH battery with energy prices at price of 40p per unit or more. For the financial model to add up, monthly Baas payment, energy margin (difference between buying and selling electricity) and capital expenditure costs (swap station cost and battery cost) needs to be well optimised and that is where Octopus + CATL jointly have an edge – it has its own cost competitive battery swap stations and supplies 40% of world’s batteries in passenger cars. With high mileages that commercial vehicles do, I can only see the business case being lot more attractive.

What This Means For The Industry — And For Europe

According to Oscar, 37% of trucks sold in China this year are electric, up from about 25% in 2025. Europe, by comparison, is still lagging, with less than 5% of medium and heavy commercial vehicles being electric. So, can battery swapping accelerate electrification, especially when a typical heavy goods vehicle can cover more than 100,000 km a year? Absolutely. It can lower fleet operators’ total cost of ownership, while the Battery-as-a-Service model can also remove the need to pay three to four times more upfront for an electric truck than for a diesel equivalent.

And there is one more dimension of the Swaptopus partnership worth noticing. CATL and Octopus are exploring whether the massive battery reserves sitting in swap-station stacks (typical a single Battery swapping station can have between 8-48 batteries of 513 kWh can serve as virtual power plants and Swaptopus plans to have between 2 and 20 stations per site) — charging on cheap overnight renewables, feeding back to the grid during peak demand. If that scales, those 30-plus hubs across Europe do not just decarbonise freight. They become distributed energy assets of genuine national significance.

William Rowe, CEO and Founder of Swaptopus, said: “This technology is already proven at scale. Battery-as-a-service slashes upfront costs for fleets, while battery swapping decouples charging from operations - cutting energy costs and easing pressure on the grid. "We’re convinced the future of road transport is electric and autonomous, and battery swapping is the infrastructure that makes it possible.”

The Sodium Play: Nature’s Answer To Lithium’s Chokehold

Again, I have been working on batteries since 2005, when I first analysed the Nissan Leaf. Back then, batteries cost around $1,500 per kWh, making the battery pack more expensive than the vehicle itself. Since then, lithium-ion has dominated electric vehicles, accounting for around 90% of batteries in cars today. So it was a major surprise when CATL announced plans to launch its next-generation sodium-ion batteries. Coming from a company with roughly 40% share of the passenger-vehicle battery market, this is not just innovation; it is CATL protecting itself from its own Kodak moment.

In April 2025, CATL launched Naxtra — its sodium-ion battery brand — marking the company’s formal shift from research breakthrough to GWh-scale industrialization. The Naxtra cell achieves energy density of up to 175 Wh/kg, operates across a temperature range of -40°C to 70°C, and became the world’s first sodium-ion battery to pass China’s new national safety standard GB 38031-2025. By February 2026, the world’s first mass-produced sodium-ion passenger vehicle — a CATL and Changan Automobile joint creation — had been unveiled for market launch this year.

Oscar walked me through sodium’s genuine advantages without overselling them. Energy density is about 10% lower than LFP — he makes that concession upfront and cleanly. But sodium is inherently safer, performs significantly better at low temperatures, and its raw material, sodium carbonate, is abundant, widely available, and entirely independent of lithium price dynamics. What he said next was the line of the interview: he believes the price competition between sodium-ion and LFP will, over time, set a natural ceiling on lithium prices globally. Not a company forecast — a structural observation. CATL’s Chairman Robin Zeng has gone further, projecting sodium-ion could ultimately replace 30 to 40% of the total battery market. In April 2026, CATL signed the world’s largest sodium-ion order: a three-year, 60 GWh supply agreement with energy storage provider HyperStrong. The company has invested nearly 10 billion yuan in sodium R&D to get here.

This is not a hedge. It is a bet.