A People's Daily feature on China FAW highlights the group's full-chain innovation across solid-state batteries, embodied-intelligence robots on the production line and flying cars. FAW's R&D team spent over two months cracking a solid-electrolyte cell bottleneck, creating a sulfur/halide dual-electrolyte system and solving low-pressure cycle-stability from first principles.
FAW led a 27-member consortium of research institutes and enterprises on all-solid-state batteries. Li Xue of the CATARC New Energy Battery Technology Center said an ultra-high-energy lithium-rich manganese solid-liquid cell reaches 530 Wh/kg with a 288 Wh/kg system and 1,000 km range, debuting on the Hongqi Tian Gong model. Separately, the industry's first production-ready heavy-duty hydrogen internal-combustion-engine tractor has completed over 100,000 km of road-reliability testing.
In low-altitude mobility, the Hongqi "Tian Nian 1" prototype completed a protected first flight in December 2025, with a future aerial range exceeding 200 km. On the smart-driving front, FAW is also advancing assisted-driving systems as the boundary between ground and air mobility blurs.
The observations frame FAW's transformation as "toward the new, toward intelligence, toward excellence," illustrating how a 70-year-old automaker is reinventing itself through foundational materials and system integration.
Source: People's Daily / FAW
