Toyota's game-changing solid-state battery en route for 2021 debut
asia.nikkei.com
asia.nikkei.com
The article makes a lot of claims (500km, 10 minute charge from 0-100%, reduced battery size/footprint) but it doesn't back up those claims or even say who is claiming them. Is it Toyota? A manufacturing partner? "people familiar with the matter"? The authors themselves based on general industry knowledge?
"The production site, located at a research and development center in Saitama Prefecture, will be able to produce dozens of tons of solid electrolyte annually staring next year, enough to fulfill orders for prototypes."
"Toyota plans to be the first company to sell an electric vehicle equipped with a solid-state battery in the early 2020s. The world's largest automaker will unveil a prototype next year."
Solid state batteries will be great, but we might not see them in vehicles on the street for many years.
Thats also comparing against todays Lithium Ion batteries forget about any advancements happening in the next several years.
Huh? Didn't Toyota define EVs in the 2000s with the hybrid Prius? It became iconic, broke into practical use and the mass market, and led the way for things like the Tesla. They were innovators and disrupters, not late to it.
Toyota worked on EVs when they were unfashionable, impractical, and unlikely. And they made them work in spite of all that. Now people are talking about them like they're EV laggards. Madness.
Before either hybrids or EVs were commercially viable, The Innovator's Dilemma included a case study done for the car industry on the switch to electric. The case study concluded that, based on the history of disruptive innovation, the requirements of driving, and the trends in batteries, electric vehicles would become economically viable around 2020. It also concluded that traditional manufacturers would pursue hybrids but would have trouble moving into the EV market.
As a prior correlated example, shortly before steam became competitive for trans-oceanic travel, sailboat manufacturers briefly produced hybrid sail/steam ships. In so doing they made acceptable compromises to sail to allow for the reliability of steam near land. However none of the companies that did that survived into the steamship era.
In fact every detail of that case study has happened as predicted except that they predicted that EVs would start at the bottom of the market and move up, while Tesla started at the top and moved down. However the jury is still out on who will wind up winning the EV market - Tesla or one of the Chinese or Indian manufacturers who produce low-end EVs in higher quantity than Tesla. If it is China or India, then that case study will work out in every detail.
But the point remains. Designing an electric engine whose job is to be a boost to a gasoline engine, compromising both power and range, is not on a natural technological path to a pure electric vehicle. And history suggests that companies that go that route will have trouble when pressure comes to switch to the more natural technology.
Therefore Toyota's migration to hybrids is not only not a move to EVs, but it was both predicted and is suggestive that they would have trouble moving to pure EVs.
> Tesla or one of the Chinese or Indian manufacturers who produce low-end EVs in higher quantity than Tesla
I don't see Tesla ever becoming a gargantuan multinational carmaker giant like Toyota or GM - it's just not in their corporate ethos. I compare Tesla to Apple: they're technological leaders who set the benchmarks (and own the patents) but who also keep a relatively small and simple product matrix. There's loads of computer form-factors that Apple doesn't produce products for (e.g. rugged laptops, industrial control computers, "affordable" computers, and so on) - the demand for these products which are typically lower-margin are met by other manufacturers and I see Tesla being fine with this: let Toyota, GM, etc stress over meeting demand for a sub-$30k BEV while making hardly any profit.
I think the importance of self-driving / autonomous cars should also be considered. GM has Cruise, but Toyota, Ford, Honda, etc are either uninterested for some reason, or hoping Google or Apple will license them their Waymo or Titan system, or playing catchup very, very slowly - given Tesla is looking like they'll make their FSD an open-beta this year (and a public 1.0 release before the year's end, I hope!) that further widens their moat and with their current (overinflated, I admit) valuation that could see them buy-out a smaller carmarker to cement themselves should anything detrimental happen in the medium-term.
And the vision of becoming that is not exactly new. See https://www.tesla.com/blog/secret-tesla-motors-master-plan-j... for Elon Musk laying out that plan back in 2006.
And he's been sticking to the roadmap. For example that blog post was the first public announcement that they would eventually produce a family sedan called the Model 3. And indeed they eventually produced a family sedan..and called it the Model 3.
Oh wow, I never saw that, but that's exactly what I saw they were doing and now everything makes sense.
Given they've been literally telegraphing their moves right-up-until the decision to do self-driving tech, I'm surprised bigger automakers haven't reacted at all until now, at which point they're lagging so far behind it's just depressing.
Until they focused too much on where the puck was and not enough on where the puck is going to be.
Toyota OWNED the hybrid market. They are barely part of the EV market now.
They have a fully sorted fuel cell vehicle in the Mirai, based upon technology that is no more expensive to produce than an ICE.
They are late to the game on EV's, but the entire market is still in its early days.
You can bet that once the battery technology becomes cheap enough to stuff into cars with Corolla price tags, Toyota will be doing it, and they will be the #1 seller of EV's in terms of sales volume.
Maybe. But you are assuming the cost of battery technology will be the same for everyone. Currently it seems like Tesla is about 3-5 years ahead of everyone in terms of price & performance. What happens if/ when[1] Tesla launches an EV at Corolla prices and Toyota is still waiting for battery prices to come down?
I think it's far more likely at this point that Tesla will have a $25k EV in the next 5 years than Toyota.
Isn't the range of a Tesla already well over that? What holds you back if your range is only 200 miles? You can charge at home can't you?
people regularly drive to cities which is like 300-400 miles round trip. They need to pull 1 ton in a truck. There’s snow on the road and no charging station, do you want to freeze?
I’m not saying we won’t get there, just saying right now hybrids (which I actually own) are the only real option for people outside of a metropolitan area (or if they just want to drive local, which is fine). Pacifica hybrids are great, they have 30 mile full battery power. Then switch to gas. I drive locally 90% is the time, but can still drive to the closest major city 160 miles away
As a Bay Area resident, let me tell you: I have driven all over California and there are Tesla’s meeting me at each spot. You’re in the past with this take.
Like I said, we will get there. It’s really not there yet. I too lived in the Bay and regularly went down to San Diego. Much easier to do if you’re willing to take a couple 20 min breaks on the way (pretty normal). There are charging stations though. It’s always warm, roads are flat, etc
All I was saying is Tesla is good for what it is. It’s not well suited (today) for country or even some suburbs. For those instances hybrids are a better fit
When I was in Alabama, I drove across Alabama to Florida and back in an evening. A Tesla could handle that no problem. 300 miles is a long range...
A second ago you only needed 100-200 miles a day?
> Many of us like the idea of EV, but also drive 100-200 miles a day.
This was / is common in my area. My point is that a Tesla works well in many cases, particularly in densely populated regions. They work less well if you have to drive distances, carry a heavy load, and especially not if it’s more rugged. All the more true if you have kids, particularly young ones where a 20 min charging break is rough. Or running out of charge could be a problem.
Hybrids are really much better suited to these scenarios. I think EVs will get there, they’re always closing gaps, just right now less densely populated areas make less sense.
.
Towing a boat uphill the whole way.
It’s a policy problem, not a technology problem. Tesla has deployed an enormous fast charging network on their own dime, so it’s reasonable more can be done faster with government support (including mandating and funding EV chargers for apartment dwellers).
No one wants to charge their EV from a Honda generator at their apartment complex. If you’re a Tesla owner in an apartment with no apartment parking EV charger access, you pop over to a Supercharger once a week (which, while suboptimal, is equivalent to gas stations until EV chargers are more widely available).
Yes an electricity supply is available everywhere most people would want. Practical charging facilities, however, are not.
I frequently find myself in situations where I can get petrol very easily but cannot practically plug in anywhere. With a range extender I could run a very efficient little engine and reduce my emissions today.
When you’re not going to the boonies, you’re fully electric without dragging a generator with you, and can rely on charging stations.
[1] https://powerequipment.honda.com/generators
[2] https://www.ebay.com/b/Industrial-Trailer-Mounted-Generators...
Now you've got it! People are demonstrably still going for the 'not this' option. They buy a petrol or diesel car instead of an electric one.
That's the problem.
Scroll down to jurisdictions banning fossil fuel car sales. It’s a problem only until the government no longer allows you to buy a petrol vehicle. Canada’s ban starts in 2040, although I expect that to be pulled forward to align with other jurisdictions targeting 2030.
Right, you're nailing it - it's a problem today. A problem we could solve today. By popping a range extender under the (currently empty!) bonnet of a Tesla. Then everyone could get an EV, figure out how to make it work right now, and be ready for the way forward.
Don't think about what we could be doing by 2030 - think about what we could achieve right now!
And it's not just about petrol - don't fixate on when petrol is phased out - it's about diesel as well.
(An unrelated problem is that EVs need more form factors, such as off-road vehicles, which Teslas don't currently do.)
Tesla is selling all of the cars they can make, and the people simply don't find themselves experiencing the range anxiety they imagine they will. The vast majority of them just plug in their cars when they get home and never, ever think about going to a gas station. It's not about 30 minutes at a charger vs 5 minutes at a gas station; it's about 5 minutes at a gas station vs 0 minutes.
That's 99% of the trips taken in a Tesla. For 99% of the rest, there are superchargers.
So your range extender is a lot of extra machinery in an otherwise mostly solid-state device. To a Tesla owner, it just feels dirty, the way a gas station always feels grimy. It wouldn't help them sell any extra cars because the limiting factor on their sales is how fast they can build them.
They're scaling up, and by the time the gas cars are phased out, the entire system will have shifted. There will be even more superchargers and even more solid options for those 1% of 1% of trips that it won't suffice for.
Meantime, Tesla owners already spend less time than gas car owners fueling their cars, because it happens while they sleep. They don't need a mechanical solution because it's already solved.
Mazda is working on a model with a range extender. BMW just took them out of their models, but they’re not quite the same segment.
EVs were not viable until battery technology improved enough. Batteries have been improving about 7%/year. Based on those figures from the 1990s and an estimate of minimum acceleration, range, and recharge time to be acceptable on the road, EVs were predicted to become viable for the mass market around 2020.
Guess what. Those trends held and EVs became viable for the mass market around 2020. :-)
If you want to do a road trip in an EV Tesla is often the best/only option.
Those (magical new untested technologies) always turn out to be manufacturable, reliable, durable and profitable, of course.
[1] https://techxplore.com/news/2018-12-battery-concept-based-fl...
From the article you linked:
> In the 1970s, researchers attempted to create rechargeable fluoride batteries using solid components, but solid-state batteries work only at high temperatures, making them impractical for everyday use. In the new study, the authors report at last figuring out how to make the fluoride batteries work using liquid components—and liquid batteries easily work at room temperature.
But OP mentions solid state batteries.
This is not my field so I might just be misunderstanding what I'm reading.
I hope this works. Toyota has a good reputation. But the history of battery announcements is so disappointing. If this came with "and you can order the development kit battery now", it would be more convincing.
I'd like to see a 1, 5 and 10 years ago in battery announcements column somewhere that publishes battery announcements.
[1] https://www.electrive.com/2020/08/14/toyota-developing-flour...
[1] 100KWh * 1000(W/Kw) / 800V * 6 (10min/hr) = 750A
10MW (about 14000 hp) can be moved with just 100 amps at 100kv. Most houses have something like 100 amp service from the power company. At 1000kv that's only 10 amps. 10MW for 10 min is about 1500kwh or enough to charge some 15 teslas approx to full.
The power levels you're talking about are big compared to household stuff, but kind of a joke compared to industrial processes.
There's no such thing as a consumer grade 11KV insulated cable.
https://www.schleich.com/en/product/high-voltage-cables-en/
I mean you would need some smarts to ensure the leads are never exposed when active but otherwise I don't see the issue.
Don't those voltages leak like crazy across things which a normal person would consider as a safe insulator?
E.g. might some regular dirt on a plastic charging cable leak it into your hands?
Liquid nitrogen can be made from the air on-site if needed, and is a hell of a lot easier to handle then hundreds or thousands of volts.
If you get some kilovolts backed by 100 amps on your hands you are pretty much instantly dead.
My point is, we are happy to deal with dangerous and deadly things in our everyday life, why is this any different?
Good! We need to stop manufacturing so much disposable shit.
Yes, the economy will take a hit. We need new ways of defining progress than "money spent" and "shit manufactured". There are other ways to define and provide value in a post-modern society.
Just print money until you make it.
Unfortunately neither of them are IP rated, and I work in a terribly dust environment.
The G1 and the G4 after 2+ years of use and a whole bunch of updates (multiple! major Android versions) got really slow and one of them I dropped so the display had a crack horizontally right across the middle, it still worked for MONTHS like that until I decided to get a new phone.
All in all, reasonable price for a good long-lived product without all the clutter some phone suppliers bog down their Android versions with, i.e. nearly stock Android with some minor unintrusive additions (from what I can see in my apps list right now: an equalizer app with different automatically activated profiles, an optional Motorola product newsletter app and a diagnostics app to help with troubleshooting and hardware tests).
It's well known since 2014 that they have been working on Project Titan for a while and even hired former Ford, Tesla, and Mercedes-Benz employees.
Even when Apple formally announce a product, there’s still a possibility that it will get canned. Like AirPower.
I have no idea nor pretend to know the timeline. I just know that Apple is working on Project Titan for a while now.
Take your issue with the authors who wrote the articles.
As an aside, being able to do this kind of thing is one of the very few alleged benefits of Brexit. Will be interesting to see if they can actually execute on it.
Tesla is serious, and they are having trouble ramping up. These companies are not as serious, so how do they ever expect to ramp up when things get super serious?
Will wait and see, but these companies are in jeopardy of getting dusted unless they start shipping something this year, like the Ford Mach E.
In the early 00's, the EU introduced emmissions regulations focused on Carbon, which didn't take sulphur into account. That's why Volkswagen and others like Mercedes focused so heavily on small diesel turbo engines, and explains the 2005-2010 or so diesel vehicle boom.
American manufacturers mostly just made big gas sonking vehicles running on petrol
Japanese manufacturers developed the Prius and other hybrid-electric products and were early to the game. Remember that the Toyota Prius Hybrid Electric vehicle was released in 1997. 1997! They currently sell four million units a year of Prius alone, and definitely have the knowledge + capacity to mass produce EV's
All else remaining equal who will buy a car you have to drive when you can avoid it, not least to add taxi, trucking and delivery service fleet purchases.
In addition as this market progresses I imagine accidents per km will become a huge purchase decision when self driving is more commonplace so quality of system will be huge. Not many are going to buy the cars that have 3x the accidents or too many famous mess ups.
Batteries are important but if I was an auto manufacturer the self driving component would keep me up at night.
What self driving component? TFA is about batteries.
If you mean, self driving is a bigger competitive advantage, and that's a bigger risk to Toyota/Japan Inc... well, no.
Tesla sold 0.5M vehicles last year and is having trouble scaling up. The total addressable market is over 100M vehicles per year, and self driving isn't going to be a factor in most people's purchase decisions for at least a decade. (More cars are sold in Asia than in the USA.)
> I imagine accidents per km will become a huge purchase decision when self driving is more commonplace.
Accidents are reduced by advanced vehicle safety systems: "self stopping", not self driving. Those systems can be fitted--even retrofitted--to any vehicle. [Edit: and they are being fitted to more and more vehicles.] This is one of the most sad and tired arguments for self driving.
Tesla’s CAGR on number of vehicles produced from 2014 to 2020 has been 55%.
> “To put this number in perspective, Microsoft first broke $3 billion in sales in fiscal year 1993, generating $3.7 billion in revenue. ...Six years later Microsoft did $19.7 billion in revenue, which was a CAGR of 32.1%.”
Sustaining 55% CAGR for 6 years after hitting $3 billion is mind-numbing face-melting software monopoly level growth beyond what even M$FT achieved in its glory days.
It was thought this level of compound annual growth was simply just beyond the realm of possibility in the automotive sector, let alone the EV automotive sector.
Not ideal for the environment, admittedly.
I agree that Japanese auto makers are not yet very serious in all this. I shall know, I was in the market for an EV and bought an hybrid because I didn't find anything in my price range, and the charging infrastructure in Japan is still severely lacking.
Maybe it's because they are king in hybrid technology? So don't want/feel the need to switch. Cars are not a social network, it's the opposite of a winner take all market, so it probably doesn't matter much if they are not early in the market.
On the software side if Tesla masters the self-driving car aspect then it's a completely different story. On the other hands if the technology comes from Apple or Alphabet, I think all car makers will be able to access the technology. Especially if it's Alphabet.
[1] Volkswagen Group includes the brands Volkswagen, Audi and Porsche.
[2] https://insideevs.com/news/465956/in-2020-volkswagen-group-s...
So they are looking at 50k cars compared to 500k Tesla ships. This is something these car companies needed to start doing yesterday.
You'll also need to bend 8 half-inch-thick copper wires to plug/unplug this... I am not sure many people are ready for the force that will require. Also copper tends to break if you bend it a lot, so you'll need some other kind of conductor that bends, which means it will conduct less well, which means it will be thicker and heavier...
The alternative is a lighter cable with active cooling and higher losses. This has issues too (failure of cooling can snowball into a fire quite fast, coolant leaks are no fun, etc)
Now, back to our 99% efficient DC-DC converter. It will be shedding 6KW of heat, good luck cooling this, the battery charging at 99% efficiency will also be shedding 6KW of heat...same issue...
Basically, i am sure a small such battery can indeed charge in 10 minutes in the lab (~a 6C charge rate), and that is VERY cool, but moving 100KHw safely in ten minutes from anywhere to anywhere near live humans is a nontrivial engineering difficulty.
EDIT: why not higher voltage? arcing, insulation material limits, cracking, rain, costs
Heat dissipation is one of the only things that doesn't scale linearly. 6kw sounds like a lot of power, but over 10 minutes, you are only talking about 1kwh of energy - about enough to boil 10 liters of water. Given the mass of the 100kwh battery, a large fraction of that could just be absorbed as temperature gain. If you assume the specific heat of iron (which is an underestimate) and the weight of the current 100kwh batteries, its about a 13 degree C change.
https://www.phoenixcontact.com/online/portal/us/?uri=pxc-oc-...
The power level is in active use on electric transit buses (using a charger that drops down onto contacts on the roof). The video here shows it:
$4,000 is high enough I guess, but it matters more how much it costs per charge delivered (which depends on how much it is used and how long it lasts and so on).
Charging at 600kW doesn't sound easy, but it seems possible with current technology.
https://globetech.jp/products/standard-high-current-connecto...
They aren't very cheap though.
If we reduce to something small but prototype ready (20KWh) and walk back their 10m to be "10m to 80% SOC" then the numbers are surely doable with our current tech.
What about doubling the voltage?
I think it's doable
Let's have 4 cables, or maybe 6 cables, charging separate sub-batteries. Since the surface to mass ratio grows as mass decreases, passive cooling becomes more viable. The mass of each cable also becomes manageable. Of course, now you need to have several connectors on the car, likely under a dedicated retractable panel.
Cars aside, I'd apprentice a phone that can charge in 10 minutes, even if it needed to be under a fan during that.
Getting the heat out of batteries is the hard part. And if you can, then keeping up with the heat generated is hard too.
I realize this doesn't address the heat shedding of the converter or battery.