Everyone is poo-pooing this, but in car development years, 2027 is really soon. Their announcement was not that they were about to have their breakthrough, but they are setting up production. And specifically that they are announcing manufacturing partners - this is not "looking for potential factory sites" this is tooling up existing factories.
A lot of other companies are saying 2027-2028 so I'm thinking this could be the real deal.
I think this is a bit unfair. In 2017 said they were going to have the technology by 2021. They are a couple of years late, but they say they have the technology in test cars now and are moving to production.
Given it was over 20 years before Lithium batteries were first proposed and when they were commercially viable, we're probably being a bit harsh.
A bit harsh? Toyota have destroyed their own credibility.
I don't even take new battery tech claims seriously AFTER a company begins shipping product. Wake me up when a new battery has been independently tested, the economic viability has been demonstrated, and factory capacity is ramping up to supply enough product to make a meaningful impact in the market.
Wake me up when they've been in use for at least five years so that there are some useful real world statistics about their performance, safety, and degradation levels.
If someone says they'll have something by 2021 and they don't have it in 2025, you've adequately explained why no one believes them. Nobody cares whether or not the delay was justifiable, because they could continue having justifiable delays for the next decade.
From an article last month linked in the above press release:
“Toyota’s all-solid-state EV battery plans officially gained approval from Japan’s Ministry of Trade and Industry (METI). The certification gives Toyota the green light to develop and build next-gen EV batteries as part of Japan’s plans to boost domestic supply.”
It won't happen by 2027. 2028 at the earliest, but still unlikely. It requires new factories, using new processes, new mining operations, new battery production facilities, new designs, staff, training, QA, multiple companies all collaborating together in new ways, it requires tons of cash and approvals, etc. Granted, Japan can get a lot done with handshakes, but this is a very aggressive timeline.
A lot of companies will say a lot of things because it boosts the stock price and costs them nothing. They need good PR to help convince all the parties involved to complete the deals they need to get all this done.
In 2027-2028. Comment in the article: The big company who doesn't have a competitive product attempts to mess up the market by making bold announcements of fantastic products that are coming "soon".
Everybody serious, except Tesla, has a solid-state battery program. Here's an overview of where various car makers are.[1] There are a few prototype cars running around on all solid state batteries now. The problem is developing a cheap production process. Most of the big players are saying first production vehicles in 2027, solid state technology takes over around 2030.
There's an interim "semi solid state" technology that's already in some cars.
It's one of those stopgap ideas destined to go away, like "mild hybrids".
We can get a picture of the cost problem from this.[1] Samsung is about to put tiny solid state batteries in their watches, rings, and earbuds, but they still cost too much for phones.
Tesla bought a solid-state battery company and also is running a research office dedicated to the subject, so I don't think you can say that Tesla has no solid-state battery program.
Yes, Musk said something like that a few weeks ago in September.[1] Musk says a lot of things. As of August 2025, Tesla's position was that the old technology plus expected improvement was good enough.[2]
There was a rumor a few months ago that Tesla had bought Quantumscape. But
that deal does not seem to have happened. Quantumscape is still publicly traded.
Ticker symbol QS. Up 350% this year. Latest deal is a partnership with Murata for ceramic separators. They made enough sample batteries to power a motorcycle in Dubai.
All the serious players can make high-cost samples now.
Toyota's solid-state EV battery promises are almost as bad as Elon's full self driving timeline
Only exception is that they give themselves a bit more lead time "early 2020's" in 2017. Probably because they have an interest to delay competitors EV sales, while Elon is pumping FSD sales
Will be interesting to see which technology comes to market first
Have you ever in your life met, or even heard of, a single person who said "I'm not buying an EV because I read a PR piece that Toyota is doing R&D on some weird cutting edge tech thing" ?
i think they are making a point about Tesla's FSD specifically and not about autonomous vehicles.
We have been trying to automate trucks for one or two decades but I'm not exactly willing to bet on it getting beyond the testing phase in a specific calendar year.
I agree it's a bad choice of name, though I think the controversy is somewhat overstated.
In Tesla's view, "full" is an antonym to "limited", where Autopilot designed to work on a limited class of roads. In this way, "full" was intended to describe the system's intended ability to perform the full task of piloting a vehicle, not that the system has achieved some unspoken threshold of engineering perfection. In its current state, FSD can perform complete drives without intervention almost every time. (Yes, "almost" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. But the same is true of some human drivers who hold driver licenses.)
And to be fair, it's important to disambiguate technical and regulatory achievements. It is "supervised" because "unsupervised" would necessarily mean Tesla's software is the legally licensed driver of someone else's privately owned vehicle, which is a situation regulators are nowhere near contemplating. And it would require a vastly different insurance product to what is currently sold by insurers.
> In this way, "full" was intended to describe the system's intended ability to perform the full task of piloting a vehicle, not that the system has achieved some unspoken threshold of engineering perfection.
No. Tesla simply lied. Tesla very specifically claimed it would outperform human drivers.
In 2016 Tesla claimed every Tesla car being produced had "the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver":
I don't think it's proven that Tesla knowingly lied as opposed to catastrophically misjudged the level of processing power required in 2017. But you'll get no argument from me that it's a distinction without a difference, for customers stuck with older iterations of FSD hardware.
A little bit of charity should be given to common turns of phrase, as opposed to being uncharitably pedantic. "A human" can also drive a stunt car on a movie set, or drive a fuel tanker around London city streets, or an F1 car around a race circuit at high speed.
Based on videos I've seen, FSD is absolutely fine with unpaved roads. My guess is it would fare as well as your average foreign tourist when placed in Delhi or Nairobi. But we can only guess.
As for driving on "lightly flooded" roads, this is an extremely foolhardy thing to do, especially in a normal passenger car, and if FSD refused to drive in that circumstance it would not be a mark against its abilities. Arguably a mark in its favour. Moving water can be orders of magnitude more dangerous than it appears. Even shallow standing water can conceal debris which could insta-destroy a tyre, or your suspension, or your coolant loop, or your fuel tank.
- When they make announcements about a new supercar they're going to make, it's not to stop you from buying a Lambo. Car companies have to be seen to be working on something new; it generates PR, which generates goodwill, advertises the brand, and helps buoy the stock price.
- Buy an ICE vehicle now because they might make an EV later? Why not buy an EV now and then buy Toyota's EV later? Either way you're buying two cars??
No, it's because they're developing solid state batteries. They're also developing hydrogen fuel cell drive trains. They're even trying hydrogen combustion:
The correct strategy would have been to basically within 10 years of the release of the insight and the Prius, to mandate hybrid electric vehicles for all consumer vehicles, and 20 years after they, phevs.
You may be technically right because our policy is idiotic, and the chances of this happening unde the bush administration was zero.
But don't pretend this is some optimal engineering formula you've reduced in an economic journal.
Similarly, you should not pretend this strategy you've posted above is some optimal engineering formula you've reduced in an economic journal. There are many roadblocks to consider before mandating all vehicles go electric, not least among them being an electrical grid which simply cannot handle this level of energy, a lack of access to enough lithium, or tax considerations for vehicles no longer contributing to highways (while creating an order of magnitude more damage) because they don't buy gas.
You didn't address GP's proposed policy. Hybrids and PHEVs need a lot less lithium than full EVs. The electrical grid can already handle off peak charging of many more EVs than are on the road today. It's straightforward to replace gasoline taxes with electricity taxes and car registration fees, which could also vary by weight, but many states are going further and implementing road usage fees, which can be done by reporting odometer readings.
They do need a lot less lithium, but we have like 300M cars in the US and only 4M EVs, so unless it's using, like, an ounce of lithium, you'll still have massive sourcing problems.
It's also not straightforward (in the US at least) to replace gas taxes with electricity taxes. Electricity is a utility, while gasoline is a good. You can tax goods very easily. Taxing utilities, especially when it comes to "I'm only taxing THIS type of electricity tax" directly violates utility carrier regulations. We had a whole argument over net neutrality, and the foundation of the argument was literally "could you imagine if we charged electricity this way??"
So maybe you could do it with registration fees, but that's going to be MUCH harder on lower-income people. It's simple to pay a $.15 tax on your gas tank. It's very difficult to pay an extra $75 on your registration.
The current battle for electric batteries is cost, not energy density.
LFP and sodium batteries are less dense that non-solid state lithium ion batteries but they are good enough to be used in standard version of Model 3 or Model Y and those are best selling ev cars.
Energy density is good enough, durability is good enough, what matters is lowering the price.
A battery with higher energy density but without lower price is not competitive.
Toyota still doesn't have a high volume electric car. Lack of batteries is not the cause of that but Toyota's own decisions.
Even if they get a slightly better battery, they still need to design a good ev car and that's way more to that than replacing gas tank and engine with a battery and motors.
Furthermore, you don't just mass produce ev batteries. Panasonic was struggling and loosing money for several years making batteries for Tesla. When Tesla decided to make batteries themselves, it also took them years to go from 0 to a significant number of batteries.
Idemitsu doesn't seem to make ev car batteries so I don't see how the could possibly have meaningful production in 2 years.
Furthermore, going solid state is only an incremental improvement of a component of the battery. It has the most economic value when applied at scale. So it would make most sense to license this technology to existing high volume manufacturer like LG Chem or CATL.
The realities of volume production vs. cost make it very unlikely you can just compete with CATL and LG Chem making 1/100 of their volume even if your battery is slightly better.
Funny, the three main benefits from solid state batteries that I'd be interested in (faster charging rates, better handling of extreme temperatures, and increased longevity/lifespan), you never even mentioned.
Longevity/lifespan and charging rates are generally the top 3 concerns preventing adoption, according to polls.
As someone with an electric that's running at ~70% battery capacity (not to mention the absolutely absurd depreciation for electric, 45-50% in one year[1]), it's the reason I'm going back to gas/hybrid.
Depends on how high. Hauling less weight means you need less energy storage. Plus lithium is horrible to mine not only for the environment but also because every site is a completely different mining process. Alternatives would be very nice to have.
> "Plus lithium is horrible to mine not only for the environment"
Lithium extraction has a tiny fraction of the environmental footprint compared to the global oil industry. It's a bit of a straw man argument to complain about the environmental credentials of batteries when the alternative is much worse.
The alternative to the alternative is much better, environmentally and (we'll have to wait and see final specs) technically by every single metric, other than momentum (both kinds).
LFP is heavy, while it's a good enough solution for low altitude areas, NMC still dominates high altitude countries like EU ones, even CATL produces quite a lot NMC batteries for high end models in bith China and EU.
A solid state battery has no liquid components. So that should mean more longevity, safety, weight reductions, capacity per pound, and more forgiving thermal properties.
It cannot be understated what an overall improvement it would represent if the technology pans out.
The promise is higher capacity because of more durability. There are higher-powered materials which we currently can't use because batteries with existing tech that use them degrade far too quickly.
Also better performance, since solid state batteries are lighter. More flexible car layouts and longer range since they're more compact. Faster charging due to reduced resistance. More stable in extreme cold or hot temperatures. It truly will revolutionize EVs if they can mass produce these.
What is actually happening is they're building a the Toyota Battery Manufacturing, North Carolina (TBMNC) (https://archive.ph/wip/y9iBR), which is slated to open this year. This factory has nothing to do with solid state batteries, and it makes me wonder how serious their solid state battery claim really is
I'm thrilled with this idea, but I also saw an article very similar to this years ago. I won't pretend to understand the engineering behind it, but I would like to understand exactly how far into the future this will apear.
Is it feasible that this could actually happen in 2027?
It's be surprising if they were first at that point, but otherwise yes. Like the article says, lots of manufacturers are experimenting with solid state batteries and we've already seen prototypes.
It's great news to see Japanese auto makers coming onboard with EVs in a serious way.
The capabilities of solid state batteries are just one example of the wide open opportunities for EVs that internal combustion can just never have.
While storage, and generation, of electricity has a huge ability to evolve and advance, gasoline and other petro products have an inherent amount of chemical energy per volume that can never be changed.
An EV with 1000 mile range is in the mid-term future, while here in the US we'll be focused on delivering the world's largest coal fired pickup truck 8-/
I have no idea what a 1000 mile radius is good for. I would rather have 400 miles and a lighter car. There are some commercial applications maybe but nothing else?
Max charge rate is frequently dependent on battery size. A larger battery can absorb more power per unit of time. If you get 50% range in an hour of fast charging, the 1000 mile range car is much better for long distance travel.
Having to only charge your car every 1k miles opens up a lot of use cases. People living in places where they have to street park, and can't charge at night, might feel a lot better about electric cars if they only have to charge once a month.
Towing range is a major issue with the current generation of electric vehicles.
Auxiliary power uses are also appealing to a lot of people. 1000 miles of range can also translate to 500 miles of range and 100kw of power. Think about ambulances, cop cars and other service vehicles that just run their engines for an entire shift to keep the electricity flowing. Plenty of people travel with generators for personal and professional reasons. No need if your car has power to spare.
Lots of good examples in the replies, but also quoted range tends to be best-case scenarios. Ideal temperature, not running the cabin heat, etc. In the real world, I want to be comfortable that on a -5F winter morning that I can defrost the windows and heat up the cabin and with cold-soaked batteries still get through my day of driving.
It's still all about charging in general. If it takes a 8 hours to deliver 50 and you drive 80 miles a day, you'll want a buffer of miles to prevent, having an extra buffer might get you through to a period where you aren't driving as much. Or you can make longer trips without refill. Or you can worry less about inefficiencies at lower temps.
It will be a luxury item. Unless batteries become incredibly cheap and lightweight, economics will strongly favor a car that has just the right amount of range and no more.
However, some people have extra money to spend, and range is a meaningful upgrade. With gas vehicles, there are already people who get a much bigger vehicle than they really need and are willing to pay way more for the vehicle and for fuel. I don't see any reason not to expect the same with electric cars.
Promises of something 'in 3 years' is not in any way serious while selling mediocre overpriced EV right now. This is Toyota standard stalling while hoping their beloved Hydrogen somehow happens in the mean time.
I do not get why Toyota is so wedded to hydrogen. There's no infrastructure for it. It would require a far bigger revamp than the switch to BEVs. There's no existing hydrogen source, and the stuff is tricky to transport and store.
If they had a hydrogen source for cheap, it would have been so much easier to just transform it into hydrocarbons. They're easier to store, easier to transport, and all of the existing structure is already built around it. Just keep on making the same engines you always have.
They already had a lead in battery-powered hybrids. It would have made so much more sense to lean into that, first into plugin hybrids and then plugin-only.
Hydrogen is such an obvious dead end, and everybody sees it but them -- the ones who should have been the first to figure it out. I just don't get it.
Because they are a JP company, over there they have no way of cheaply producing the electricity needed, already relying on natural gas imports, hydrogen needs only a few more steps on top of it to make.
> I do not get why Toyota is so wedded to hydrogen. There's no infrastructure for it. It would require a far bigger revamp than the switch to BEVs. There's no existing hydrogen source, and the stuff is tricky to transport and store.
I think the answer is really simple and basically the same as for where this headline comes from: FUD about EVs so people instead buy a Toyota gas car while pretending to be eco.
> They already had a lead in battery-powered hybrids. It would have made so much more sense to lean into that, first into plugin hybrids and then plugin-only.
That was twenty years ago though.
Just like twenty years ago "hydrogen cars" sounded like a possible solution.
Everyone is poo-pooing this, but in car development years, 2027 is really soon. Their announcement was not that they were about to have their breakthrough, but they are setting up production. And specifically that they are announcing manufacturing partners - this is not "looking for potential factory sites" this is tooling up existing factories.
A lot of other companies are saying 2027-2028 so I'm thinking this could be the real deal.
It might be the real deal, but the last half dozen times they said it, it wasn't. They don't have much credibility with these statements.
I think this is a bit unfair. In 2017 said they were going to have the technology by 2021. They are a couple of years late, but they say they have the technology in test cars now and are moving to production.
Given it was over 20 years before Lithium batteries were first proposed and when they were commercially viable, we're probably being a bit harsh.
Isn’t that exactly what all the Tesla fans have been saying? I guess the roadster isn’t late now?
A bit harsh? Toyota have destroyed their own credibility.
I don't even take new battery tech claims seriously AFTER a company begins shipping product. Wake me up when a new battery has been independently tested, the economic viability has been demonstrated, and factory capacity is ramping up to supply enough product to make a meaningful impact in the market.
Wake me up when they've been in use for at least five years so that there are some useful real world statistics about their performance, safety, and degradation levels.
If someone says they'll have something by 2021 and they don't have it in 2025, you've adequately explained why no one believes them. Nobody cares whether or not the delay was justifiable, because they could continue having justifiable delays for the next decade.
And once they have t nobody will even remember the delays
Unless they're Elon Musk, apparently.
I think most people also don't believe Elon about these kinds of promises either.
Sure, and yet TSLA stock continues to reach even higher heights of insanity. It's worth almost 6x what Toyota is.
It would seem that life's not fair. Invest in Toyota I guess.
From an article last month linked in the above press release:
“Toyota’s all-solid-state EV battery plans officially gained approval from Japan’s Ministry of Trade and Industry (METI). The certification gives Toyota the green light to develop and build next-gen EV batteries as part of Japan’s plans to boost domestic supply.”
Seems like it’s more legit this time.
2027 also feels like a million years away when it's really just a shade over one year away.
It won't happen by 2027. 2028 at the earliest, but still unlikely. It requires new factories, using new processes, new mining operations, new battery production facilities, new designs, staff, training, QA, multiple companies all collaborating together in new ways, it requires tons of cash and approvals, etc. Granted, Japan can get a lot done with handshakes, but this is a very aggressive timeline.
A lot of companies will say a lot of things because it boosts the stock price and costs them nothing. They need good PR to help convince all the parties involved to complete the deals they need to get all this done.
In 2027-2028. Comment in the article: The big company who doesn't have a competitive product attempts to mess up the market by making bold announcements of fantastic products that are coming "soon".
Everybody serious, except Tesla, has a solid-state battery program. Here's an overview of where various car makers are.[1] There are a few prototype cars running around on all solid state batteries now. The problem is developing a cheap production process. Most of the big players are saying first production vehicles in 2027, solid state technology takes over around 2030.
There's an interim "semi solid state" technology that's already in some cars. It's one of those stopgap ideas destined to go away, like "mild hybrids".
[1] https://insideevs.com/news/771402/every-solid-state-battery-...
We can get a picture of the cost problem from this.[1] Samsung is about to put tiny solid state batteries in their watches, rings, and earbuds, but they still cost too much for phones.
[1] https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_to_use_solidstate_batteries...
That's a point. If solid state batteries are going to be a thing you'd expect to see them phones and laptops before cars.
Tesla bought a solid-state battery company and also is running a research office dedicated to the subject, so I don't think you can say that Tesla has no solid-state battery program.
Yes, Musk said something like that a few weeks ago in September.[1] Musk says a lot of things. As of August 2025, Tesla's position was that the old technology plus expected improvement was good enough.[2]
There was a rumor a few months ago that Tesla had bought Quantumscape. But that deal does not seem to have happened. Quantumscape is still publicly traded. Ticker symbol QS. Up 350% this year. Latest deal is a partnership with Murata for ceramic separators. They made enough sample batteries to power a motorcycle in Dubai. All the serious players can make high-cost samples now.
[1] https://elonbuzz.com/elon-musk-announces-all-new-solid-state...
[2] https://www.topspeed.com/tesla-stand-on-solid-state-batterie...
Toyota's solid-state EV battery promises are almost as bad as Elon's full self driving timeline
Only exception is that they give themselves a bit more lead time "early 2020's" in 2017. Probably because they have an interest to delay competitors EV sales, while Elon is pumping FSD sales
Will be interesting to see which technology comes to market first
https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/toyota-claims-a-leap-that-w...
A few choice headlines:
2017: "Toyota’s new solid-state battery could make its way to cars by 2020" https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/25/toyotas-new-solid-state-ba...
2020: "Toyota's game-changing solid-state battery en route for 2021 debut" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25400725
2023: "Toyota Touts Solid State EVs with 932-Mile Range, 10-Minute Charging by 2027" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36353474
2023: "Toyota Only Plans to Make Enough Solid-State Batteries for 10k Cars in 2030" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38374322
Have you ever in your life met, or even heard of, a single person who said "I'm not buying an EV because I read a PR piece that Toyota is doing R&D on some weird cutting edge tech thing" ?
At least there's an actual, verifiable end result for Toyota.
I don't see that for Schrödinger's FSD.
You’ve never seen a self driving waymo, and extrapolated that to trucks and other commercial uses that will no longer need drivers?
All of these need human intervention as failsafe, you just don't see them sitting in the car.
A good example is those Chinese unmanned delivery vans, that's real world results of current AI driving.
i think they are making a point about Tesla's FSD specifically and not about autonomous vehicles.
We have been trying to automate trucks for one or two decades but I'm not exactly willing to bet on it getting beyond the testing phase in a specific calendar year.
It's verifiable in the sense that you can check whether they followed through, and they did not? How is that better?
All recent model Teslas can use FSD now, at least in the US. It's a $100/month subscription.
Tesla calls it "Full Self-Driving (Supervised)" now, no? Seems odd to call it "full" self-driving if it has to be supervised.
I agree it's a bad choice of name, though I think the controversy is somewhat overstated.
In Tesla's view, "full" is an antonym to "limited", where Autopilot designed to work on a limited class of roads. In this way, "full" was intended to describe the system's intended ability to perform the full task of piloting a vehicle, not that the system has achieved some unspoken threshold of engineering perfection. In its current state, FSD can perform complete drives without intervention almost every time. (Yes, "almost" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. But the same is true of some human drivers who hold driver licenses.)
And to be fair, it's important to disambiguate technical and regulatory achievements. It is "supervised" because "unsupervised" would necessarily mean Tesla's software is the legally licensed driver of someone else's privately owned vehicle, which is a situation regulators are nowhere near contemplating. And it would require a vastly different insurance product to what is currently sold by insurers.
> In this way, "full" was intended to describe the system's intended ability to perform the full task of piloting a vehicle, not that the system has achieved some unspoken threshold of engineering perfection.
No. Tesla simply lied. Tesla very specifically claimed it would outperform human drivers.
In 2016 Tesla claimed every Tesla car being produced had "the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver":
https://web.archive.org/web/20161020091022/https://tesla.com...
Wasn't true then, still isn't true now.
I don't think it's proven that Tesla knowingly lied as opposed to catastrophically misjudged the level of processing power required in 2017. But you'll get no argument from me that it's a distinction without a difference, for customers stuck with older iterations of FSD hardware.
I think the hardware definitely is that good.
The software is perhaps not there yet. But that's not what they claimed.
> I think the hardware definitely is that good.
Tesla doesn't: https://electrek.co/2025/01/29/elon-musk-finally-admits-that...
HW4 isn't good enough either. Tesla straight up lied to you. No point defending the lie.
The "supervised" part is more legal than technical.
It can drive anywhere a human can.
Of course the goal posts can always be moved so the current real FSD isn't actually "Full" because of some inevitable imperfection.
Can it drive in downtown Delhi or Nairobi? On unpaved roads on safari? Onto and off a flatbed truck for transport? Through a lightly flooded town?
No, it can't drive "anywhere a human can".
A little bit of charity should be given to common turns of phrase, as opposed to being uncharitably pedantic. "A human" can also drive a stunt car on a movie set, or drive a fuel tanker around London city streets, or an F1 car around a race circuit at high speed.
Based on videos I've seen, FSD is absolutely fine with unpaved roads. My guess is it would fare as well as your average foreign tourist when placed in Delhi or Nairobi. But we can only guess.
As for driving on "lightly flooded" roads, this is an extremely foolhardy thing to do, especially in a normal passenger car, and if FSD refused to drive in that circumstance it would not be a mark against its abilities. Arguably a mark in its favour. Moving water can be orders of magnitude more dangerous than it appears. Even shallow standing water can conceal debris which could insta-destroy a tyre, or your suspension, or your coolant loop, or your fuel tank.
Toyota’s strategy for the last many years:
“We’re going to release a breakthrough EV in the kind of near future. Don’t buy an EV now” (instead keep buying our ICE vehicles!)
Getting very old at this point.
Toyota's main strategy is to sell cars. They sell the most cars of any automaker.
Toyota had record sales of 11.2 million in 2023. They're on track to set another sales record in 2025:
https://www.autoblog.com/news/nearly-900000-cars-sold-toyota...
While delaying the uptake of EVs.
No, by simply understanding the car market. Toyota's in the car business. They sell cars.
So why all the announcements since 2017 about their revolutionary battery coming soon (tm)
It was to stop people buying other EVs.
This logic makes no sense...
- When they make announcements about a new supercar they're going to make, it's not to stop you from buying a Lambo. Car companies have to be seen to be working on something new; it generates PR, which generates goodwill, advertises the brand, and helps buoy the stock price.
- Buy an ICE vehicle now because they might make an EV later? Why not buy an EV now and then buy Toyota's EV later? Either way you're buying two cars??
They’re not making announcements about something they’re going to make (like your super car example)
They’re making announcements about something they hope they can invent, but that doesn’t exist. They’re telling you to hold off on purchasing today.
No, it's because they're developing solid state batteries. They're also developing hydrogen fuel cell drive trains. They're even trying hydrogen combustion:
https://www.toyota-europe.com/news/2022/prototype-corolla-cr...
Toyota's big enough that they can try everything. It isn't a conspiracy.
From a capitalism POV, they were absolutely right in this decision, be it wisdom or stupidity, they are making more money than ever.
Almost all of the EVs are losing big money, bilions.
Even from a moral highground, the world is in no shortage of EVs, and they do sell PHEVs.
Whether they can smoothly transition to a full BEV future, that's another story, nobody knows.
They could very well have a full decade of gas car gold rush ahead.
IIUC, Akio Toyoda loves him some hydrogen and was/is reluctant to give up the dream for this battery nonsense.†
† https://www.motortrend.com/news/toyota-akio-toyoda-electric-...
And it was the correct strategy: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/09/business/toyotas-hybrid-e...
The best selling vehicle in the US is the RAV4, and not any EV.
The correct strategy would have been to basically within 10 years of the release of the insight and the Prius, to mandate hybrid electric vehicles for all consumer vehicles, and 20 years after they, phevs.
You may be technically right because our policy is idiotic, and the chances of this happening unde the bush administration was zero.
But don't pretend this is some optimal engineering formula you've reduced in an economic journal.
Similarly, you should not pretend this strategy you've posted above is some optimal engineering formula you've reduced in an economic journal. There are many roadblocks to consider before mandating all vehicles go electric, not least among them being an electrical grid which simply cannot handle this level of energy, a lack of access to enough lithium, or tax considerations for vehicles no longer contributing to highways (while creating an order of magnitude more damage) because they don't buy gas.
You didn't address GP's proposed policy. Hybrids and PHEVs need a lot less lithium than full EVs. The electrical grid can already handle off peak charging of many more EVs than are on the road today. It's straightforward to replace gasoline taxes with electricity taxes and car registration fees, which could also vary by weight, but many states are going further and implementing road usage fees, which can be done by reporting odometer readings.
They do need a lot less lithium, but we have like 300M cars in the US and only 4M EVs, so unless it's using, like, an ounce of lithium, you'll still have massive sourcing problems.
It's also not straightforward (in the US at least) to replace gas taxes with electricity taxes. Electricity is a utility, while gasoline is a good. You can tax goods very easily. Taxing utilities, especially when it comes to "I'm only taxing THIS type of electricity tax" directly violates utility carrier regulations. We had a whole argument over net neutrality, and the foundation of the argument was literally "could you imagine if we charged electricity this way??"
So maybe you could do it with registration fees, but that's going to be MUCH harder on lower-income people. It's simple to pay a $.15 tax on your gas tank. It's very difficult to pay an extra $75 on your registration.
Even if true, I don't see this as significant.
The current battle for electric batteries is cost, not energy density.
LFP and sodium batteries are less dense that non-solid state lithium ion batteries but they are good enough to be used in standard version of Model 3 or Model Y and those are best selling ev cars.
Energy density is good enough, durability is good enough, what matters is lowering the price.
A battery with higher energy density but without lower price is not competitive.
Toyota still doesn't have a high volume electric car. Lack of batteries is not the cause of that but Toyota's own decisions.
Even if they get a slightly better battery, they still need to design a good ev car and that's way more to that than replacing gas tank and engine with a battery and motors.
Furthermore, you don't just mass produce ev batteries. Panasonic was struggling and loosing money for several years making batteries for Tesla. When Tesla decided to make batteries themselves, it also took them years to go from 0 to a significant number of batteries.
Idemitsu doesn't seem to make ev car batteries so I don't see how the could possibly have meaningful production in 2 years.
Furthermore, going solid state is only an incremental improvement of a component of the battery. It has the most economic value when applied at scale. So it would make most sense to license this technology to existing high volume manufacturer like LG Chem or CATL.
The realities of volume production vs. cost make it very unlikely you can just compete with CATL and LG Chem making 1/100 of their volume even if your battery is slightly better.
Funny, the three main benefits from solid state batteries that I'd be interested in (faster charging rates, better handling of extreme temperatures, and increased longevity/lifespan), you never even mentioned.
Longevity/lifespan and charging rates are generally the top 3 concerns preventing adoption, according to polls.
As someone with an electric that's running at ~70% battery capacity (not to mention the absolutely absurd depreciation for electric, 45-50% in one year[1]), it's the reason I'm going back to gas/hybrid.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/evs-are-losing-up-to-50-percent-...
This assumes a static market but higher energy density means more range and more use cases, right?
Depends on how high. Hauling less weight means you need less energy storage. Plus lithium is horrible to mine not only for the environment but also because every site is a completely different mining process. Alternatives would be very nice to have.
> "Plus lithium is horrible to mine not only for the environment"
Lithium extraction has a tiny fraction of the environmental footprint compared to the global oil industry. It's a bit of a straw man argument to complain about the environmental credentials of batteries when the alternative is much worse.
The alternative to the alternative is much better, environmentally and (we'll have to wait and see final specs) technically by every single metric, other than momentum (both kinds).
What alternative are you referring to? You know that these solid state batteries still use lithium, right?
LFP is heavy, while it's a good enough solution for low altitude areas, NMC still dominates high altitude countries like EU ones, even CATL produces quite a lot NMC batteries for high end models in bith China and EU.
Is solid state for more durability (1m+ charge cycles) or performance (fast discharge, plaid) or both?
A solid state battery has no liquid components. So that should mean more longevity, safety, weight reductions, capacity per pound, and more forgiving thermal properties.
It cannot be understated what an overall improvement it would represent if the technology pans out.
What is the liquid component in existing batteries?
The electrolyte - usually some kind of lithium salt dissolved in an organic solvent.
AFAIK, the electrolyte.
Solid state promises to be safer. Less likely to self-ignite when the battery degrades. The quick charging and performance are a bonus.
The promise is higher capacity because of more durability. There are higher-powered materials which we currently can't use because batteries with existing tech that use them degrade far too quickly.
Safety
Also better performance, since solid state batteries are lighter. More flexible car layouts and longer range since they're more compact. Faster charging due to reduced resistance. More stable in extreme cold or hot temperatures. It truly will revolutionize EVs if they can mass produce these.
Can anyone recommend a good source that quantifies these qualities against LFP/NMC benchmarks?
With LFP being supposedly more safe than NMC would it have a weight benefit as well?
That headline needs a few edits to make it, you know, accurate:
"Toyota believes it will launch all-solid-state EV batteries by year-end 2027."
My understanding is that 2027 is wishful thinking, due to high manufacturing costs.
What is actually happening is they're building a the Toyota Battery Manufacturing, North Carolina (TBMNC) (https://archive.ph/wip/y9iBR), which is slated to open this year. This factory has nothing to do with solid state batteries, and it makes me wonder how serious their solid state battery claim really is
I'm thrilled with this idea, but I also saw an article very similar to this years ago. I won't pretend to understand the engineering behind it, but I would like to understand exactly how far into the future this will apear.
Is it feasible that this could actually happen in 2027?
It's be surprising if they were first at that point, but otherwise yes. Like the article says, lots of manufacturers are experimenting with solid state batteries and we've already seen prototypes.
I think this is every few years.
* in 2027
It's great news to see Japanese auto makers coming onboard with EVs in a serious way.
The capabilities of solid state batteries are just one example of the wide open opportunities for EVs that internal combustion can just never have.
While storage, and generation, of electricity has a huge ability to evolve and advance, gasoline and other petro products have an inherent amount of chemical energy per volume that can never be changed.
An EV with 1000 mile range is in the mid-term future, while here in the US we'll be focused on delivering the world's largest coal fired pickup truck 8-/
I have no idea what a 1000 mile radius is good for. I would rather have 400 miles and a lighter car. There are some commercial applications maybe but nothing else?
For a variety of reasons it is interesting.
Max charge rate is frequently dependent on battery size. A larger battery can absorb more power per unit of time. If you get 50% range in an hour of fast charging, the 1000 mile range car is much better for long distance travel.
Having to only charge your car every 1k miles opens up a lot of use cases. People living in places where they have to street park, and can't charge at night, might feel a lot better about electric cars if they only have to charge once a month.
Towing range is a major issue with the current generation of electric vehicles.
Auxiliary power uses are also appealing to a lot of people. 1000 miles of range can also translate to 500 miles of range and 100kw of power. Think about ambulances, cop cars and other service vehicles that just run their engines for an entire shift to keep the electricity flowing. Plenty of people travel with generators for personal and professional reasons. No need if your car has power to spare.
Lots of good examples in the replies, but also quoted range tends to be best-case scenarios. Ideal temperature, not running the cabin heat, etc. In the real world, I want to be comfortable that on a -5F winter morning that I can defrost the windows and heat up the cabin and with cold-soaked batteries still get through my day of driving.
It's still all about charging in general. If it takes a 8 hours to deliver 50 and you drive 80 miles a day, you'll want a buffer of miles to prevent, having an extra buffer might get you through to a period where you aren't driving as much. Or you can make longer trips without refill. Or you can worry less about inefficiencies at lower temps.
It will be a luxury item. Unless batteries become incredibly cheap and lightweight, economics will strongly favor a car that has just the right amount of range and no more.
However, some people have extra money to spend, and range is a meaningful upgrade. With gas vehicles, there are already people who get a much bigger vehicle than they really need and are willing to pay way more for the vehicle and for fuel. I don't see any reason not to expect the same with electric cars.
Trucks. Inter-city Buses. Extremely lightweight EVs (think Mazda Miata EV).
Also EV motor homes, but that's basically just a bus.
Promises of something 'in 3 years' is not in any way serious while selling mediocre overpriced EV right now. This is Toyota standard stalling while hoping their beloved Hydrogen somehow happens in the mean time.
I do not get why Toyota is so wedded to hydrogen. There's no infrastructure for it. It would require a far bigger revamp than the switch to BEVs. There's no existing hydrogen source, and the stuff is tricky to transport and store.
If they had a hydrogen source for cheap, it would have been so much easier to just transform it into hydrocarbons. They're easier to store, easier to transport, and all of the existing structure is already built around it. Just keep on making the same engines you always have.
They already had a lead in battery-powered hybrids. It would have made so much more sense to lean into that, first into plugin hybrids and then plugin-only.
Hydrogen is such an obvious dead end, and everybody sees it but them -- the ones who should have been the first to figure it out. I just don't get it.
Because they are a JP company, over there they have no way of cheaply producing the electricity needed, already relying on natural gas imports, hydrogen needs only a few more steps on top of it to make.
> I do not get why Toyota is so wedded to hydrogen. There's no infrastructure for it. It would require a far bigger revamp than the switch to BEVs. There's no existing hydrogen source, and the stuff is tricky to transport and store.
I think the answer is really simple and basically the same as for where this headline comes from: FUD about EVs so people instead buy a Toyota gas car while pretending to be eco.
> They already had a lead in battery-powered hybrids. It would have made so much more sense to lean into that, first into plugin hybrids and then plugin-only.
That was twenty years ago though.
Just like twenty years ago "hydrogen cars" sounded like a possible solution.
Yet another Better Battery Bulletin. Just a few more years this time just like last time