Toyota's game-changing solid-state battery en route for 2021 debut

Right. The title is misleading. The original Japanese newspaper article (https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXZQODC037540T01C20A2000000) just states that the research prototype car is planed to be made in 2021.

Then, can’t Tesla just buy their solid state battery from Toyota? Or from whoever Toyota’s battery manufacturer is?

The battery pack is not really the critical factor. It’s actually the limiting factor.

If Tesla can find a better battery technology, then I’m sure they would love to just license it, and slap on a new battery to their cars.

The critical factors in the electric car are all the other components, or the lack of, which makes the electric car more reliable than traditional gasoline cars.

Yeah, they’ve doubled down on hydrogen hard enough that switching to battery electric now would lose face.

It says it recharges in ten minutes. Let’s see.

Assuming that people aren’t charging 10p% of the time, I would have thought that a charging station would itself be battery powered, dumping its energy at high speed into a car and charging more slowly from the grid?

That would reduce strain on the grid while providing high charging times to users.

I once had a discussion with my friends about this. We ended up concluding that liquid fuel is so power-dense that it would take building a new 110kV transmission line to replace three fuel tank trucks a day.

I suspect that swappable batteries are the future, at least partly, e.g. for big trucks. Not only do they help to refuel in minutes; transporting them to an installation with high-power electrical infrastructure could be the only way to efficiently recharge them.

Correct. Liquid or gel electrolyte makes a battery non-solid state. The goal is to have a battery where you can't have "tin whiskers" grow between the two halves, which is both a safety hazard and puts a limit on how fast they can be charged.

The terminology is very confusing. Most 'solid state' batteries are lithium-ion batteries, specially all the commercial ones you hear about as being the next big thing.

In those batteries rather then having a graphite with some silicone mixed in, the anode is simply pure lithium metal and you do not have liquid electrolyte in the whole battery.

However some solid state batteries still have a liquid electrolyte on the cathode side.

Your phone is most likely using standard, 622-NCM (Nickel 60%, Cobalt 20%, Aluminum 20%) Cathode with graphite anode.

Reminds me of the time 16 year old me argued with my step father that 3.5 inch diskettes were ‘hard disks’ because they were not floppy! (And only the 5.25 disks were truly floppy.)

Toyota already makes a hybrid which is more complicated than an electric car. You have an electric drive and a gas drive and you have to make them work together.

They are very expensive.

Depends on who’s doing the judgement and toward what end goal. For EVs, SSBs seem pretty optimal. But you can ding them for using lithium (though it’s not as rare as detractors would suggest). If you’re trying to store power generated off peak until peak demand hours flow batteries using different technologies entirely probably make more sense. There are likely to be situations where even artificially generated chemical fuels make more sense than batteries. Then there’s the hydrogen option. Also no ones proven able to massively produce SSBs yet. Etc

There are no downsides 'per se', that is not really the question. The question is more 'what is the upside'.

Until these batteries are in mass production, unless Toyota is much, much further along then anybody think, it is questionable if 'traditional' batteries might not just be simply better. 'Traditional' lithium ion is also evolving very fast and is produced in numbers that will be incredibly hard to reach, and thus achieving cost parity will be difficult.

What Tesla interceded for example is just a further evolution of li-ion but as you add more silicon to the anode, the performance is not actually that different from lithium metal anode (ie what everybody is working on for solid state).

Confusingly pure lithium metal anode does not actually have less volume then a silicon anode that is full of lithium-ions. That is very everybody is going, current batteries have 10% silicon anode, Tesla is likely taking it to 20-30% or more in the next couple years (other working on the same probably). There are already companies selling pure silicon anode products that are on the same kind of timeline as solid state companies. They however generally have the advantage of being usable in a standard battery factory.

One of the claims to fame for solid-state is safety. That can be true and probably will be. However there are also developments in the traditional space that might make them just as safe, by introducing new seperators.

So its kind of race, between different paths of design and maybe even more importantly on how you can scale the technology. You have some startups QuantumScape (VW invested), SolidPower (Ford, BMW invested) and large companies like Toyota really pushing solid state as the future. You have some startups like Sila Nanotechnology (Daimler invested) and some large companies like Tesla push silicon.

One question is, really how much better does your car need to be then a current Tesla 3 or comparable. Practically speaking we are not so far away from where you will likely stop just boosting the specs. So it will generally come down to how cheap can you produce the batteries and how many can you actually produce.

This is why my bet is that by 2030 the waste majority of EV and even the EV sold will not be solid state.

They don't exist yet.

My hypothesis is that between GM, Toyota, VW, Ford and FCA, at least one of them will make amply attractive electric vehicles that are competitive in some sense with Tesla. (Also don't forget Nissan!) Tesla still competes on the higher end of the scale.

Yes, I know, "average" new car price and all - but for ICE vehicles, most expensive vehicles are trucks and they bring the average up. Sedans/hatchbacks tend to be below that average. SUVs are right around that average, but higher for electric versions.

So vehicles like the Mustang Mach-E and VW's ID.3, ID.4, etc. will get siblings and provide consumer choice. Vehicles like the Cybertruck, Ford F150 electric, whatever GM makes after the Hummer, etc. will compete in the electric pickup race.

And between all these traditional manufacturers and governments, enough alternative charging networks will exist to be reasonable competitors to Tesla.