Toyota boasts new battery technology with 745-mile range and 10-minute charging time — here’s how it may impact mass EV adoption::The potential to significantly reduce pollution could be huge.
That’s great. Build it. Until this hits the showroom floor, I don’t care. Electric cars have been consistently 10 years away for the past like 30 or 40 years. For every other automaker, electric cars are now here today. Except Toyota, where they are still 10 years away. And for me, The electric car isn’t 10 years away, it’s parked in my driveway. So as far as I’m concerned, this is all just press bullshit to try and discredit current EVs and buy Toyota time to continue pushing gas and hybrid.
And as for the whole thing of people not buying EVs, that’s twofold. One, people are hurting right now, and people in bad economic condition get really price conscious. The second gas prices go up they’ll all be trading their gas guzzlers for EVs. Second, the simple fact is a lot of EVs on the road kind of suck. And other than Tesla, the public charging infrastructure is awful so if you like road trips you’re going to have a bad time. Given that in another year other automakers will mostly be switching to Tesla charge ports, unless you’re buying a Tesla there’s some logic in waiting.
I bought a car last summer, and I had my wallet out ready to buy an EV. I had only 2 criteria:
- Must seat at least 6 (I have 4 kids)
- Must be under 100k CAD (a bit beyond my budget, but I’m willing to stretch to avoid gas)
Guess how many models were available? 1 - the Tesla Model Y, 7-seater option. And I did order one, but they cancelled my order because they stopped selling that variant in Canada.
So that’s why I didn’t buy an EV. Manufacturers can’t be arsed to build a car that meets my very simple criteria; they prefer making another boring 5-seater crossover or yet another humongous “luxury” SUV. I want a minivan, dammit.
Alternatively, you could go the hybrid route as those are arguably better for most people. Plus their batteries are often large enough you can get 20-40 miles of all electric driving. That alone covers over 95% of all people’s trips.
There are a few options in that category. I believe Toyota’s Highlander is a 3 row hybrid. I think Hyundai’s new Santa Fe also has a hybrid power train with 3 rows. The Mazda CX-90 is another viable hybrid. Though Idk if that officially released yet.But yeah, in terms of pure 3 row EV’s, we’re lacking.
Plugin hybrids are killer. EV around town and good MPG on road trips.
My previous vehicle was a Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid (which I sold in 2022 when I left for a long trip), and I actually bought another one after Tesla cancelled my order. It is a good option, but my main gripe with it is that it doesn’t have enough electric range and it only charges on AC. I was ready to go full electric, but apparently the market isn’t.
The Volvo EX90 is a 7 seat EV.
Volvo makes quite a few EV and hybrids now. The “Overseas Delivery Tourist Experience” is also a nice touch if you ever wanted to go to sweden.
Honest question, what about the buzz-e?
You mean the VW ID.Buzz? It’s not out yet, and I needed a car in June.
Are you talking about the US? They are here, in Copenhagen, and they look awesome!
I’m in Canada, we’re supposed to get the US model which is longer and not out yet. The European model is only a 5-seater so it’s not for me.
Wait list for the EV9 is already over a year and it just became “available” in Canada.
You’re not wrong. A model X would also fit your bill, but last summer they were stupid expensive. Prices have come down a bit. I would suggest buying any car consider the total cost of ownership, not just ‘stretch a bit to avoid gas’. Gas cars need oil changes, tune-ups, belt replacements, and various other maintenance. EVs require very little. Also, if you need more than 5 seats, don’t shun the ‘humongous’ SUV. You’re literally in that market.
But for someone in the market last year, you were pretty fucked even I will admit.
I do wish somebody was making an electric minivan. Closest I’m aware of is Chrysler has a Pacifica plug in hybrid. And now there’s the ID.Buzz coming out soon.
The Pacifica is actually what I ended up buying.
EDIT: And yeah, looks like Model X has come down in price, but it’s still 110k$ CAD (was 140+). Somebody else mentioned the Kia EV9 which actually has a price now, and it’s very interesting. I’ve talked to my local dealer and they’ll call me back when they have one available for test drives.
Also, if you need more than 5 seats, don’t shun the ‘humongous’ SUV. You’re literally in that market.
Humongous, perhaps. Luxury, not really. I’m just not the type of guy who needs a special type of car to feel manly; minivans actually feel more useful to me.
Oh yeah I hear ya. You’d like a big SUV like a Tahoe or Suburban, you don’t need fancy leather seats and big touchscreen and a little motor that massages your butt while you drive (and you don’t want to pay for that stuff).
Not much in that regard available these days…
Actually, no. I’d like a Dodge Caravan or Odyssey. The Tahoe and Suburban are way too big on the outside, but they’re actually very small on the inside.
You’re on point about the fanciness, though. I got TVs in my current car (Pacifica Pinnacle, it’s the only model they had), and they’re awful. For the cost of that option, I would’ve been much better off buying a bunch of iPads.
I’ve been looking at the EV9 and people who have driven it seem to love a lot about it, except for one thing. The incessant beeping. It has safety features that beep about everything and often you don’t know why it’s even doing it. You can turn it off but they only stay disabled till you turn off the vehicle. next time you get in bEep BEep beEp.
My wife would end up lighting it on fire and pushing off a cliff she would be so annoyed. If there is no way to permanently disable it then hard pass.
“Simple criteria.” Dude, you live in the north pole and have enough kids to field a MOBA team, you need Santa to make you clown car.
The only thing that will sell that car is if it actually gets those charge and range numbers, it’s affordable - and I mean affordable relative to current average ICE cars, not EVs; and it actually does car things that people want. Not built like a tin can, decent interior and seating, etc.
Current EVs price most people out of the market right away. Range and charge times eliminate a lot more people because there may not be charging convenient to where they leave the car for work, shopping, etc and they don’t want to sit for “x” time to allow the car to charge. Towing reducing range rapidly in EV trucks seems to keep people away because it’s not doing what a ICE truck can do despite all the power the motor has.
Yes, we’re still in the relatively early stages of EV development, so I’m not trying to bash EV. I’m very much for them. Just got a PHEV and love it, going for weeks and only burning 1/8 tank of gas is f’n awesome. But straight EV has a lot of work to do to become viable for the masses.
LoL. There’s a Google tech talk where the guys doing the autonomous driving DARPA challenge talk about how slow and awful military contractors are. Then they say “we just took off the shelf gps systems (you know, the ones the military contractors spent decades designing and building) and built something that works! Look how much faster the private sector is!”
That talk is 15 years old now.
Oh for sure. There’s a whole industry of them, and they all milk Uncle Sam for everything the taxpayers worth with little need to produce real result. Look at SpaceX versus SLS. Well it’s true that SLS design was handicapped by Congress requirement to use old shuttle parts, the result is still a giant boondoggle that is very late, tens of billions over budget, and best case is going to cost $2 billion for each launch (which can only happen once every year or so). Meanwhile, all SpaceX expenditures to date including development of Falcon 1, Falcon 9, Starship, Super Heavy, Merlin, Raptor, and construction of an entire spaceport in Texas, have cost them by most estimates less than Boeing took to design one rocket. SpaceX is launching Falcon 9 twice a week. And to compete with SLS, once Starship is online it could theoretically launch once a day for $20 million rather than once a year for $2 billion.
Private sector can be efficient, but only when their own bottom line depends on efficiency. When there’s cost plus contracts involved, it really doesn’t.
Also most of Tesla’s worth is in stock. If that ever collapses theres a good chance those stations will be little more than scrap.
Other car makers have adopted that charger, I’m sure they would grab those up.
Strong disagree. Let’s say Tesla stock collapses. They are still a very profitable company with a product that sells well. So unless they’re finances are structured in such a way that makes a stock price collapse catastrophic, they would continue to sell cars. They’re charging network is actually one of the most valuable things they have. It’s taken them a decade plus to get that infrastructure installed, there are more stations and stalls than all other charging networks combined in the US. That’s why just about every automaker has pledged to adopt the Tesla charging connector. They recognize that pinning their EV future to Electrify America’s shitty unreliable network is not a success strategy, and part of the reason their EVs aren’t selling is because public charging on road trips is a nightmare.
So no, those stations aren’t scrap. They’re insanely valuable. Even if you assume something horrible happens to Tesla and everybody decides not to adopt that connector, the stations can be easily retrofit to use the CCS connector that other automakers use currently.
2010 investigating solid state
2013 mentions working on solid state
2017 ETA commercialize by Early 2020s
2019 Will establish a joint venture with Panasonic by 2020 no ETA on batteries
2023 June commercialization in 2027-2028
Note that further interviews state: limited production starts in 2027 The 745 and 10 min charging are worded as “could enable” IE will NOT be in the 2027-28 initial release.
They also plan to introduce it in hybrids first.
Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me eight times, I’m an absolute moron for believing Toyota’s bullshit once again.
How is it fooling you to set a timeline, post updated that adhere to that timeline, then state your breakthrough 4 years before that timeline ends?
That’s not was happened. They’ve been releasing this nonsense as ‘a few years away’ annually since 2009. Often accompanied by the implication not to buy an EV now, it’s about to be made obsolete by solid state batteries.
I’m just going by home boys links.
And that’s assuming they put in a battery that large and not a marginally bigger battery than the competitors.
I mean, nobody actually needs that big of a battery. The vast majority drive less than what EV batteries provide.
If they can introduce a car that weighs 2,000lbs less and have a battery replacement half that of the competitors, while providing the same range, that’s a huge win.
I think it’s still reasonable to focus on the 250ish mile range. I have a semi-old 2018 PHEV that gets 15-20 miles on electric plus 350 miles on gas and I fill up a few times a year. I live relatively close to work but 100 miles of electric range would be enough for 99% of people.
But when I leave the beaten path, I still use a good chunk of the gas engine. Going on a normal road trip on interstates is fine but rural gas stations aren’t converting yet. It still takes planning to go off the beaten path even if it’s obvious we’ll get there.
Pretty sure I saw something recently where they said they’d only have the batteries to make 10k SSB cars a year by 2030
It still blows my mind that Toyota single-handedly made hybrids a very successful thing and yet squandered that position to Elon effing Musk. Toyota could’ve been THE market-leader for EVs while still making a killing with the Prius and ICE cars. They’d have a solid lock in all markets.
Toyota has one of the best reliability reputations of any automaker and yet anyone in the EV market (like I was recently) passes them over because they have zero models to sell. Instead of parlaying the Prius’ R&D into a viable EV too, they’ve left money on the table. Hyundai has gone all in and is selling a ton of EVs. I see more of theirs / Kia’s on the road than anything else (besides teslas).
I was in the impression that Toyota didn’t see full EVs as viable products in long term. Sticking with hybrids was the safe option.
I see a couple of Tesla’s a week, everything else is Hyundai or Kia…even the RAV4 is less popular than it was 2 years ago.
And I was sitting/driving only the cheap Hyindais, but even a mid-range Kia looks cool and solid inside, I enjoyed using carsharing Souls, sat in an expensive bus-of-a-car minivan, and I see no difference in comfort with Mercedes c or e class respectively. (Sorry Mercedes fans, I’m not against you, it’s just kias are nice)
The only reason why the Koreans are not leaders yet is because it’s “yet”Hyundai has gone all in and is selling a ton of EVs. I see more of theirs / Kia’s on the road than anything else (besides teslas).
That’s what really strikes me, even more than Teslas. I see legacy manufacturers complain about no one wanting EVs or they can’t build EVs for sufficient profit, and backsliding on their transition plans.
I have relatives working for legacy manufacturers and asked them: doesn’t this strike you as similar to the 1970s? Legacy manufacturers sticking to what they know and trying to convince themselves the world isn’t changing. That led to the rise of Toyota, Honda, etc, as world leaders. this time you have Hyundai/Kia quickly climbing the ladder from their start as a low cost alternative, to a market leader, maybe soon a volume leader. Will the legacy manufacturers suffer the same losses as they did in the 1970s?
You will see the market move to phevs. Having a 400 Mike battery is stupid for most people nearly every day.
20, 40, 80 mile phevs are going to be what 95% of people need and is going to reduce battery needs.
I doubt it: BEV technology is already past phev for most people. Some of the advantages of BEV are based on simplifying, never needing the thousands of parts and hundreds of pounds that is an engine and transmission. Never needing the maintenance or fluids to support all that. They’ll eventually be cheaper by having a shorter supply chain and faster manufacturing. They don’t need the complexity.
Ok, currently rural areas need the complexity of phev. But even the most rural house already has electricity that can support a charger, and supercharging networks are rapidly expanding, so even this is only true for the next few years
These “breakthroughs” are Toyota “Full-Self Driving next year!” fluff and I’ll believe it when it’s shipped and performing.
Really feeling like “new battery technology” is the vehicular equivalent of “holographic storage” for computers.
People have been talking about it for decades, there have been promising demos and absolutely no commercial application. :(
Meanwhile:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/americans-aren-t-buying-evs-122809686.html
"among those respondents who did purchase a car or truck in the last 12 months, only 3.71% bought a new fully electric model, compared to 27.32% who got a gas combustion vehicle and 13.53% who opted for a new hybrid.
Used vehicle buyers chose to buy gas-fueled cars, per the study. According to response rates, 41.91% preferred to buy a car or truck with an internal combustion engine, whereas 4.51% and 9.02% went for used fully electric and hybrid varieties, respectively."
“among those respondents who did purchase a car or truck in the last 12 months, only 3.71% bought a new fully electric model, compared to 27.32% who got a gas combustion vehicle and 13.53% who opted for a new hybrid.”
Where are the missing 55%? And only 27.32% went for an ICE?? Something doesn’t add up.
“Used vehicle buyers chose to buy gas-fueled cars, per the study. According to response rates, 41.91% preferred to buy a car or truck with an internal combustion engine, whereas 4.51% and 9.02% went for used fully electric and hybrid varieties, respectively.”
Does this take into account how the market for used cars looks like? It seems like there would be tons of more ICE cars than electric varieties, since they’ve been even more popular in the past.
Edit: At least the EU is stepping up https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/eu-october-car-sales-up-146-ev-sales-jump-more-than-36-2023-11-21/
Almost 50% of new passenger car registrations Jan-Oct were fullt electric or hybrid.
“Where are the missing 55%?”
Diesel? Stat specifically says gas combustion. But that doesn’t make ANY sense unless they ran the poll somewhere outside the US.
Oho… I think I have it figured out…
Follow the logic:
“Among those who purchased a car or truck in the last 12 months…”
3.71% - New Electric
27.32% - Gas Combustion
13.53% - New HybridSo of the people buying a car or truck in the past 12 months, 44.56% bought NEW vehicles. The remaining 55.44% bought USED.
The failing is excluding the word “new” from the gas purchases while it’s included in the other two.
Then they relay the used statistics.
41.91% - Used ICE
9.02% - Used Hybrid
4.51% - Used Electric55.44%
Aaah, nice catch! I also thought of diesel first, but came to the same conclusion as you.
Available in 2027 or 2028. I might be in the market around then, though I’m sure they’re gonna push it to the luxury brands first as an upgrade.
If there was any chance of this being viable by 2028, they would have a demo car today that works
Car production timelines are LONG
Yes this. If those years were realistic there would be a car we’d be looking at in prototype form.
They could maybe make the battery the same form factor as the other one already in production so it wouldn’t be an issue. The battery tech may not allow that… but it’s possible.
The rest of the vehicle just cares about the voltage coming from the battery.
It requires years of test drives to go to market and get production quantities enough to sell
There is a 0% chance it’s available in 2028 if there isn’t a demo unit today.
It might be in some high end “we’ll sell 1,000 of these cars” by then
It’s a battery, they can probably forgo a lot of the usual testing since it’s only necessary to match voltage performance requirements.
In theory, it could also be used to replacing existing vehicles batteries as well.
They can’t bypass certifications
They’ve also been pushing hydrogen and not working on BEVs while everyone else was working on BEVs
I like your optimism, but this is just marketing fluff that won’t come to market on that timeline
I don’t know if the journalist didn’t understand, or Toyota lied, but it’s not happening by 2028
What certification does it need other than be certified by Toyota for use?
You’re right it’s unlikely to happen, but not for any technical or testing reasons like you claimed. If Toyota wants to make it be able to replace existing ones, it’s entirely possible. There’s nothing stopping them other than the battery technology not being able to be the same formfactor for performance.
What certification does it need other than be certified by Toyota for use?
Engineer in the automotive industry here. Vehicles need a ton of certification by tons of different governments and face very strict regulation.
Just a battery alone is going to be subject to lots of EMC emissions and interference tests. Then you have the capability to survive crashes, fail operational requirements, how does the battery fail (does it explode or just disconnect itself?), etc. etc. These are all dependent on the chassis the battery is in, so they can’t just swap it into an existing chassis and say “Oh it worked with battery A, it’ll work with battery B.” Unfortunately the requirements are just way too strict for that.
Additionally I can’t go into details but the sentiment others are echoing of “If it’s coming in 2028 they should have a functioning prototype” are true in my experience. It takes several years to design and release a car, and when you’re introducing a new battery tech or drive train or similar changes it takes even longer.
Then Toyota has some magic power that all the other car companies I work with don’t
I know Tesla plays fast and loose with NHTSA regulations, but I doubt Toyota will
This battery technology will have to pass safety inspections, just as Li-ion
Dude, Toyota is bullshitting like this for the last 20 years exactly for the reason you’ve written.
Makes me even more optimistic about future EV retrofitting. I have an FJ Cruiser that has an incredible amount of room for batteries between the frame rails; I’d love to have it be retrofitted one day.
I’m hoping to retrofit my plugin Prius.
There are companies that EV motors that fit LS mounts however you still have to fab the battery mounts yourself.
Excellent make it then makr a cheaper, lighter option with half that range.
“The company has estimated that vehicles boasting solid-state batteries could be available starting in 2027 or 2028.”
Could be available a few years from now? Wake me up if that actually happens.
Cool, do trains next. Mass transit is the answer to transportation needs. We need: Electric bikes with a 250 mile range. Electric busses and trains. Neighborhood charge stations. Shared neighborhood battery packs piwered by solar.
We can build a better future.
Trains are easy enough to electrify with current technology, no need for batteries.
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Because the current charging stations don’t have enough to kill someone? This seems really overblown, like they’re just going to have live wires you have to connect to your car or something. There will probably be no real difference in charging for the user.
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Same goes with an open tank of a combustible liquid, right? And filling it with a combustible liquid gun. Sooo safe!
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How do they jump out?
And yet millions of drivers pump flammable liquids into their car every day. I fail to see why you’re lumping lithium battery instability in with this new solid state battery tech.
Gosh, 🤣 … the image of having carbonized and/or partially vaporized humans quickly switched my awe in the technology into repugnance.
Darn, why does amaizing technology often end up with horrifying set backs and adverse effects?
Its because the flesh is weak. We must replace it with the strength and certainty of steal, praise the Omnisiah!
YOU. WILL. BE. UPGRADED.
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Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for this but I remember reading a comment on here a while back saying that to get that kind of energy jammed into a battery that quickly you’d need a cable as thick as a telephone pole to keep it from glowing like a toaster coil.
Nah that’s bullshit.
Interstate powerlines are like half an inch and they carry several orders of magnitude more power than you’d ever need to quickly charge a car battery.
EV charge cables are thick because a lot of them contain several wires which all need to be electrically shielded from each other (which is generally done by maintaining a physical gap between the actual wires). Part of that is just because we have multiple generations of EV charge technology and the new standards are backwards compatible with the old standards… so a lot of the wires in the cable are not even used when you charge your EV.
Yes but that’s 10s of thousand volts AC power at a reasonable current. We’re talking DC at a couple hundred volts and an extremely high current.
Yes - cables do get thicker as you increase the capacity… but you’re never going to see a cable as “thick as a telephone pole”. Any vehicle that needs that much power will use hydrogen instead (Airbus plans to have hydrogen powered commercial passenger aircraft operational within two years).
The other thing that needs to be considered is distance. Those interstate highway lines need to carry power over extreme distances. An EV charge cable can be very short (and they could be a lot shorter than they typically are, if thickness were to become an issue).
There are already 350kW DC fast charge systems in deployment right now and the entire bundle of cables (several wires) is about as thick as the cable we’re all used to for pumping gas.
At 350kW you could charge a small EV battery in something like two minutes. In reality, it takes longer… because current battery tech can’t take that much power on a small battery - it can on very large batteries such as commercial heavy vehicles, but hopefully that will change soon.
Nah, just use higher voltage to push more juice over the same size wires
Yeaaahh, I’ll press x to doubt, yet again.
First off, 745 miles range on a battery is a weird thing as batteries don’t drive. Cars, bikes and the such do, batteries use mAH for example.
Second, any “revolutionary batter” is bullshit. Why? Because I’ve seen about 3625 revolutionary new batteries in the past 30 years, and 99.99% of them have been bullshit.
Batteries are pretty much at the upper level of what’s possible with batteries as we currently have them, so either we switch to something revolutionary as antimatter batteries or something else esoteric, or wel’ll be happy to add 5% to what we already got.
I will never buy an ev until it has at least a 500 mile drive in it and less than an hour full recharge…
Yes I drive less than 10 miles on average daily. More typically, half that. But my immediate family is 250 miles away, extended is more than 500. And I have a lot of Boomer funerals coming up.
You know you can stop to charge right? People make cross country trips in EVs with 200 miles of range daily.
Some people prefer to piss in a bottle and drink 2 day old coffee kept in thermos.
Well we should definitely base our entire energy policy on the edge cases of people who piss in bottles and drink old coffee to endanger everyone else on the road.
Just think of how far we could go as society this way!
