Level Four of Nine

Every few years the battery world settles on a holy grail, and today it is the solid-state cell: replace the flammable liquid electrolyte with a solid one and you get, in theory, more range, faster charging and far less fire risk. China is spending hard to win it. The unusual thing is how candid its champions have been about how far away it still is.

At the World Economic Forum’s summer meeting in Dalian in June 2026, CATL’s founder and chairman Robin Zeng rated the technology bluntly: “Based on a measure of level one to nine, the technology has only reached level four so far.” He put mass production no earlier than 2030 and called the odds of solid-state cars at million-vehicle scale before then “very small.”^[1] CATL’s own plan is small-batch output around 2027 and volume much later.

The state places its bets

Behind the caution sits real money. Reuters reported that Beijing allocated more than 6 billion yuan, on the order of $830 million, to solid-state research, with six firms selected: CATL, BYD, WeLion, FAW, SAIC and Geely.^[2] BYD, for its part, targets limited-batch sulfide-based all-solid-state cells around 2027 in its premium marques, with a mass-production ramp later in the decade.^[4] The direction is unmistakable; the timeline is not 2027.

“Based on a measure of level one to nine, the technology has only reached level four.”, CATL chairman Robin Zeng

Mind the ‘semi’

The sharpest caveat is linguistic and material at once. Many Chinese batteries marketed as “semi-solid-state”, including the 150 kWh pack NIO offers for roughly a thousand kilometres of range, still contain a liquid electrolyte and are not true all-solid-state cells. Chinese regulators have moved to rename them “solid-liquid” batteries precisely to stop the confusion.^[3] The remaining engineering obstacle, cracking at the interfaces as a cell charges and discharges, is exactly the kind of tacit, durability problem that resists a funding announcement.

The read for allocators

Solid-state is where hype and diligence part company most violently, and China has handed investors an unusually honest yardstick in its own leaders’ words. The discipline is threefold: treat 2027 as a trial-production year and 2030 as the real horizon; separate the companies shipping true all-solid-state roadmaps from those rebranding liquid-containing cells; and remember that the same firms leading the solid-state race, CATL and BYD, already dominate the liquid one, so a breakthrough tends to reinforce the incumbents rather than unseat them. Back the roadmap, not the press release.