CATL: The Biggest Scam of the Battery Industry

CATL: The Biggest Scam of the Battery Industry - If you drive an electric car, there is roughly a one-in-three chance the battery under your feet was made by a company most people in the West cannot name. CATL. It supplies Tesla, BMW, Volkswagen, Ford, Mercedes. It has more battery patents than the next several competitors combined. Last year it listed in Hong Kong in one of the largest offerings of the decade. And in the middle of all that, it did something almost no Chinese manufacturer had done before: it stopped selling Ford batteries and started selling Ford a licence — the designs, the process, the know-how, with the factory on American soil and American workers inside it. Congress lost its mind. That deal tells you more about where this industry is going than every tariff headline combined. Not a factory. Not a single job. What actually got taken apart in that arrangement was a working assumption that had survived three years of sanctions lists, hearings and tariff schedules: that you could keep a technology out of a country even after you had already let the product in. CATL did not have to smuggle anything across the Pacific. It did not have to open a plant on American soil at all. It only had to wait for an American car company to ask for one.