ZTE High Energy has fallen into a quality crisis, and battery safety has once again become the focus.

Four consecutive fire accidents occurred in Weimar vehicles equipped with ZTE high-energy batteries, which once again triggered consumers' concerns about the safety of new energy vehicles.

101on October 28th, Weimar automobile decided to recall some Weimar automobile products with the model of ZNP39 14895A-75A, which were produced from June 8th, 2020 to September 23rd, 2020, totaling 1282 vehicles.

Zhongxing High Energy Technology Co., Ltd., the battery supplier of these recalled vehicles, subsequently issued a statement saying that in the two Weimar car fire accidents in Fujian Province, the vehicles involved did use the batteries produced by the company, but the Beijing fire vehicle had nothing to do with it.

At the same time, there is also news on the Internet that ZTE High Energy stopped production and dissolved due to the recall of Weimar. However, the company denied this statement in an interview.

Caijing Automobile contacted ZTE Gaoneng on the above related matters, and did not receive a reply before the press release.

At present, the specific cause of the Weimar car fire accident is still under investigation.

Battery quality crisis

Weimar's battery suppliers are various, including Contemporary Ampere Technology Co., Ltd., Rip Energy, ZTE High Energy, Jiangsu Tafel and so on. According to the battery model provided by Weimar, the battery supplier of these recalled vehicles is ZTE High Energy Technology Co., Ltd.

According to official data, ZTE High Energy Technology Co., Ltd. is a holding subsidiary of ZTE's new energy sector, mainly engaged in the research and development, production and sales of new energy vehicle power battery series products. In terms of capacity planning, ZTE will build a power battery production base with an annual output of 8GWh in three phases. The first phase of the project was put into production in 20 18, with an installed capacity of 1GWh. At present, the company is carrying out the second phase of project construction, which is expected to reach 4GWh by the end of 20021and 8GWh in 2023.

In terms of products, the company mainly focuses on ternary batteries with square aluminum shells, covering pure electric and plug-in hybrid models, and the mass-produced products are 75Ah and 5 1Ah. Among them, Weimar's ZNP39 14895A-75A battery is a ternary lithium ion battery (622 battery) with a nominal capacity of 75Ah and an energy density of 2 15Wh/kg.

After Weimar Automobile issued a recall statement, in the face of public pressure, ZTE High Energy announced on the evening of June 28th/kloc-0 that in two Weimar automobile fires in Shaowu City, Fujian Province, the vehicles involved were all equipped with the company's batteries. After the incident, ZTE High Energy has fully communicated with Weimar and cooperated with Weimar and the quality supervision department to investigate related issues.

For the10 Beijing Weimar car fire incident mentioned by some media, the vehicles involved were not equipped with ZTE high-energy batteries. This means that Weimar's recall statement may still not fully explain the real situation of vehicle fire.

However, ZTE High Energy did not give a corresponding explanation for Weimar's description of battery production process defects.

It is worth mentioning that some netizens said through social networks that in the first ten days of 10, that is, before the announcement of the recall, Weimar owners had been informed to replace ZTE high-energy batteries on some 2020 Weimar cars, and at the same time, they also received traffic compensation in 300 yuan/day.

Network transmission stops running.

According to public information, ZTE High Energy currently mainly supplies power battery products to automobile manufacturers such as Weimar, Geely, Chery, Zhengzhou Nissan, Hanteng and Haima.

Among them, Weimar is an important customer of ZTE High Energy. According to the statistics of High-tech Industry Research Institute, from June 205438 to September 2020, ZTE High Energy's power battery provided 2,257 vehicles for Weimar, with an installed capacity of 1 18.2MWh, accounting for nearly 15% of the total installed capacity of Weimar batteries.

The installed capacity of batteries provided by ZTE High Energy for Weimar gradually increased from June to August: 525 Weimar EX5s were provided in June, with an installed capacity of 27.4MWh；; In July, 705 vehicles were equipped, with a corresponding installed capacity of 37MWh；; By August, the data reached 865,438+06 vehicles, and the installed capacity of batteries reached 43MWh. At the same time, the matching ratio of Weimar EX5 models has also increased from 18.9% in June to 35.8%.

With the supporting Weimar EX5, ZTE High Energy also entered the top ten installed capacity of passenger car power batteries in China for the first time in August, ranking ninth. However, statistics show that this company only supported one Weimar automobile company that month.

The industry believes that in the recall of Weimar Automobile, ZTE High Energy will compensate customers with a high probability and bear the losses caused by battery quality problems; It is even possible to lose the main source of the order, Weimar Automobile.

As for whether other car companies also have "problem" batteries supporting ZTE's high energy, Weibo user "Jiang Baoxin" quoted Deng Ya, a senior researcher at the First Electric Research Institute, as saying: As of September 2020, only Weimar's cars were equipped with ZTE's high energy power batteries. In the relevant data of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, ZTE High Energy was not seen in the previous two years, so these batteries carried by Weimar should be the first power batteries carried by ZTE High Energy on passenger cars.

While ZTE High Energy was deeply involved in the quality crisis, a screenshot of an email signed "ZTE High Energy Purchasing Department" said that ZTE High Energy "temporarily stopped production and operation due to serious difficulties in production and operation. Please immediately stop all activities such as material procurement, production and delivery corresponding to our company according to our notice. "

There is also a screenshot of WeChat chat, which shows that the company's capital chain was very tight last year, and it is suspected that it has been "discontinued and dissolved" due to the Weimar fire incident.

According to Caijing Tianxia Weekly, ZTE Gaoneng said that there was no "site dissolution" and "supply was not affected".

Caijing Auto found that ZTE Gaoneng is still recruiting employees by querying official website and recruitment websites, and the information update time is 65438+29 2020 10 month.

Security is back in focus.

A series of vehicle battery fire accidents have once again triggered consumers' concerns about the safety of electric vehicles and questioned the quality of new car products.

In this regard, Zhang Xiang, an automotive industry analyst, believes that recall is an internationally accepted quality supervision method for mature automotive industries. In the field of fuel vehicles, traditional car companies often recall hundreds of thousands of cars, which is hundreds of times the number of cars recalled by Weimar. However, Weimar's recall did expose a series of problems such as the level of China's power battery industry needs to be improved, the charging infrastructure standards are not perfect, and electric vehicle owners lack safe driving habits.

Regarding the safety of new energy vehicles, Gao Zeng, an academician of China Academy of Sciences and executive vice chairman of China Electric Vehicle 100 Committee, pointed out that the essence of safety accidents of new energy vehicles is that the batteries are out of control. The causes of thermal runaway include mechanical reasons (battery collision and extrusion, acupuncture, etc.). ) and electrochemical reasons (battery overcharge and overdischarge, fast charge, low temperature charge, self-initiated internal short circuit, etc. ). When one cell is out of control, the adjacent cells are also out of control after being affected, which leads to the spread of thermal control and eventually leads to safety accidents.

However, from the existing data, the safety of new energy vehicles may not be worse than that of traditional vehicles. Sun Fengchun, an academician of China Academy of Engineering and a professor at Beijing Institute of Technology, said at the 2020 Global Smart Travel Conference that from the safety supervision data of the national supervision platform for new energy vehicles, since 2020, the fire accident rate of new energy vehicles has been 0.26 per 10,000; According to the data of the public security department, the fire accident rate of traditional vehicles in the same period is about 1 to two ten thousandths.

In view of the frequent spontaneous combustion of new energy vehicles, the safety goal of new energy vehicles is set for the first time in the newly revised technology roadmap of energy-saving and new energy vehicles 2.0: by 2025, 2030 and 2035, the fire accident rate of new energy vehicles should be less than 0.5 times/10,000 vehicles, 0./kloc-0 times/10,000 vehicles and 0.0/kloc-0 times/10,000 vehicles respectively.

Zhang Xiang also called on consumers to have confidence in the safety of new energy vehicles in China. By the end of 2020 10, the number of new energy vehicles in China has exceeded 4.8 million, accounting for more than half of the world. At the same time, China car companies have accumulated a lot of experience and data, and are at the global leading level in many technical fields.

This article comes from car home, the author of the car manufacturer, and does not represent car home's position.