FAW Solid-State Battery Reaches a 25 MWh Pilot Line

China’s oldest automaker is making its boldest technology bet in decades. FAW Group has stood up a 25 MWh all-solid-state battery pilot line, with cells that survive 200°C without catching fire — and it is folding the battery into a much wider push to stop being a carmaker and start being a tech company.

From carmaker to tech company

At its 2026 technology conference in Changchun on August 21, FAW — founded in 1953 and the maker of the Hongqi luxury brand — laid out an upgraded “SIGHT 531” strategy built on five brand genes (safety, intelligence, green, health, delight), three technology platforms and ten flagship tasks. The ten tasks are the telling part: all-solid-state batteries, vehicle-to-grid integration, L4 autonomous driving, next-generation smart cockpits, a full-vehicle operating system, vehicle-road-cloud-satellite fusion, quantum encryption, additive manufacturing, embodied-intelligence robots and flying cars.

That is a technology map far larger than the combustion engines and gearboxes that once defined the company. FAW is positioning itself to compete on platforms and core components, not individual models — the same logic that has let BYD turn batteries and software into a moat.

The solid-state milestone

On batteries, FAW now has a 25 MWh all-solid-state cell pilot line with large-capacity cells in small-batch production and yields steadily improving. The cells pass a 200°C thermal-abuse test without igniting — the kind of safety claim that liquid-electrolyte cells cannot match. Current energy density is around 380 Wh/kg, well above the 180–250 Wh/kg typical of today’s lithium-ion cells, and FAW is targeting 400 Wh/kg by the end of 2026.

FAW leads a consortium of 27 state-owned enterprises working on solid-state batteries, and has cracked the hard engineering problems — low-pressure cell design and thermal-buffer module design — that have kept solid-state technology in the lab for years. A mass-production line is scheduled for 2027, with limited deployment in high-end Hongqi models expected later in the decade. Notably, China is simultaneously writing the global IEC standard for exactly this chemistry — the manufacturing and the rulebook are arriving together.

Beyond the battery

The same event showed how far FAW is reaching past cars. On autonomy, it has built a single L2+ to L4 platform with six layers of redundant braking, steering, parking, communication, power and positioning, claiming a goal of L4 safety ten times human level and multi-city, all-day operation by 2030. On robotics, it is moving embodied-intelligence machines into its own factories, joining the growing list of carmakers building humanoids. And its Qiyi Technology unit has flown the “Tiannian No.1” flying car, targeting a commercial product in 2029 and operation by 2030.

The Hongqi connection

The solid-state push lands on the brand that matters most for FAW’s identity. Hongqi has already tapped BYD’s second-generation Blade Battery for some models — a sign that even China’s most prestigious carmaker buys from rivals while it builds its own next-generation cells. The solid-state line is the counter-move: Hongqi wants to graduate from sourcing cutting-edge batteries to making them.