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Repost of a my previous comment on this elsewhere:
They have been “claiming”/ “announcing” this breakthrough since 2017 repeatedly. They STILL haven’t figured out how to mass produce it affordably to make it meaningful. They keep pushing out the date for when it will arrive for many years now.
OP’s article first claims 2025 and then claims 2027.
As per the image in my post Toyota first announced this in 2017 with a target of 2022… They just keep re-announcing it saying it is coming in about 3-5 years.
Worth pointing out there was a global pandemic in the middle of that timeline
It’ll come out when Tesla releases Full Self Driving for real
I don’t think Tesla is going to be the one announcing that.
Add on top of the nature of these ultra capitalist worldwide corporations, even if they were able to mass produce this affordably that would mean decommisioning tens of millions in already existing production infrastructure. Why would they do that when they can delay next gen tech for greater profit?
mm totally! seems like a very “i’ll just wait for the next gen to buy an EV” kind of thing
… like, even if it’s possible it’s not possible… just the amount of energy required to be transferred into that battery wouldn’t charge in any existing charging infrastructure
Ya that is the other major point. Toyota doesn’t have a charging network, and they didn’t build out a hydrogen network for their hydrogen car.
So even if they have this battery it would not be able to do what they claimed in practical use.
Their hydrogen cars work fine… as long as you live in a tiny area in california and have no desire to leave it lol
And are willing to pay “more” for expensive hydrogen.
Huh, the dude I know with a hydrogen car was bragging about the price of hydrogen compared to gas.
https://www.hydrogenfuelnews.com/why-is-hydrogen-fuel-so-expensive/8558411/
The Toyota Mirai comes with $15,000 worth of free fuel https://www.toyota.com/mirai/
Maybe that is what they where bragging about? Ask them in 3 years when the free fuel runs out.
Just in time for the commercially viable cold fusion.
Was going to reference your post.
Toyota spoofing.
Except none of those are about battery tech, just vehicles. Solid state batteries are a real thing that have shown promising advances as of late.
The title of the one in the top right is “Toyota EVs With Long-Range Solid-State Batteries Due 2022”
Here is a whole article on them making these past claims with sources https://thedriven.io/2023/07/05/solid-state-batteries-toyota-has-history-of-talking-big-on-ev-breakthrough-but-not-delivering/
Excellent sleuthing
I’ll believe it when I see it.
Something like 200 KWh. Charging that in 10 minutes would be along the lines of 1 MW. It’s roughly the output of a 50 metre diameter wind turbine. A medium sized nuclear power plant would only be able to handle around 1000 of those at the same time.
That’s an impressive feat but I doubt they expect the 10 mins to be practical. If they could implement this battery at good value it would be a game changer. Though the capacity seems much higher than most of us need so it makes me wonder what impacts on the environment it would have. As we all know, electric cars are better but are no saints with a somewhat competitive emission amount over its lifetime.
It’s roughly the output of a 50 metre diameter wind turbine.
So you’re saying that if we put a 50m wind turbine on the roof of one of those Toyotas, we’d have a car with infinite range?
Forget turbines we need sails on our cars like they’re talking about putting on cargo ships
Well technically… https://youtu.be/jyQwgBAaBag
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/jyQwgBAaBag
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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This is dumb anyway - nobody is going to pump 1MW into a car, the grid can’t support it, never mind a supercharger-style station with between 8 and 20 plugs. A 20-plug Supercharger needs around 1.5MW to serve each station with 72kW.
And really, when I’m on a road trip, after 3h in the car, I need a break that’s long enough to hit the bathroom, grab a bite to eat, and stretch my legs. The car is usually charged to 90% in under 45 minutes anyway, even if I roll into the charging station at under 5%…
I’d expect a “Ultra-tier” fast charging station to have internal batteries (or perhaps supercapacitors or something like that) which buffer up from the grid. Eg. when not in use and over-night. Probably won’t last much into a day even with that, but we may see smaller buildings connected to charging stations that hold internal batteries to deliver faster charging than the connected grid can deliver.
As long as there is demand and profit to be made, it could happen. The biggest cost is of course the batteries, but if solid-state batteries turn into reality I think things might be more cost effective. Especially since fixed position batteries aren’t subject to the same contraints as car batteries. Don’t need to handle vibration, weight is not a big problem. Key goals are lifetime value, energy density + and (dis)charging rates.
Cheaper electricity during night might not be a thing everywhere or in the future, but small savings by stocking up cheaper during nighttime, gives better margins.
This is what Superchargers are. The snag is that during busy weekends, the batteries eventually hit zero, and everyone is capped at 72kW, because that’s what the AC/DC transformer can provide.
That’s just an engineering or planning problem. Really though it’s probably just not cost effective to have enough capacity to cover the super busy times.
Assuming that this is for private vehicles, and not trying to set the stage for something like a freight truck.
Something like that might have a more reasonable demand for that 1MW, especially if they need massive batteries for interstate/international travel.
This would be useful for the logistics industry, especially the non-US logistics industry (though useful for short-haul there). There is a LOT of logistics that isn’t big-rig long-haulers.
Amazon would for sure buy millions at that range, as an example. That’s multiple days of use with overnight charging drawing it even longer.
…and also, such intensely fast charging might shorten the lifespan of the battery considerably? This is an impressive engineering feat, but most ICE cars get half that range per fill-up. Targeting that level with rapid recharge might be more realistic to make practical, and would still be a huge step forward in practicality for a lot of non-urban drivers.
I agree it’s not practical, but they don’t necessarily need that output all the time. They could charge extra for faster charging and just make it so while the fast chargers aren’t being used they charge batteries/capacitors for the fast charging stalls. But even with this, the fast chargers would probably always never be available in urban areas, and this would lead to a lot of waste too if nobody is fast charging.
bullshit
Riiiiight.
Toyota is so far behind in the EV game that they are throwing out BS claims to give people pause who might be considering a purchase from all the other companies viable EVs right now. This is like 15 and 20 years ago when car makers were saying that their hydrogen cars were just a few years ago… which of course never materialized, but they used it as publicity stunts.
I have a hard time believing that this announcement is just a straight up lie. If they don’t have an actual working prototype, regardless of scale costs that they may be ignoring, wouldn’t they be open to a stakeholder suit for misleading the investors?
You are reading WAY too much into this. As many of other posts have already pointed out that YES this is feasible… but with very expensive, one-off prototype hardware. There’s no lie in that. It is simply exaggerating the HELL out of the truth because this ain’t going to see production for a long ass time (and most definitely at reduced specs).
As I mentioned in my post about hydrogen powered concept cars from like 20 years ago - many of them were indeed running (or sort of running), but they were far, far from near-production.
Toyota is in fact actively selling hydrogen cars. The Mirai is not awful, as long as you get a lease that includes free hydrogen. They’re probably losing tons of money on each one, but they’re selling them lol.
The Mirai is far, far from a “production” car.
They aren’t ignoring scaling if your read the article…
Often there are breakthroughs at the prototype stage but then scaling it up is difficult,” he said. “If it is a genuine breakthrough it could be a gamechanger, very much the holy grail of battery vehicles.”
Typical tabloid battery rubbish…
745 miles, assume 5 miles/kwh which is not unreasonable. That’s a 3.7Mwh battery (which my back of the envelope calcs would weight about 5 tonnes).
Charge that in 10 minutes you’d have to feed it from a 22Mw charger. So the output of a decent size offshore wind turbine. Per charger.
I haven’t got a clue how bloody heavy the connector would have to be… it wouldn’t be CCS, I can tell you that…
I find it funny how the media has just regurgitated their bullshit with essentially zero fact checking. This stuff is just outside the understanding of most people that they might not question it. To them this is Toyota making these claims. The company that made the '95 Camry which has been passed around to various family members and rolled up 300k miles. They trust Toyota. Maybe a little too much.
Very weird turn of events given that Toyota has a history of being anti-EVs.
Their announcements about products that are way better than anything that actually exists with no solid plans to actually bring it to market is actually just another flavor of anti-EV FUD.
It’s not the right time to buy an EV because our imaginary product is SO much better than any of those boring products, you should wait for it and keep buying our gas vehicles for now.
It’s depressing how cynical that is.
It’s depressing because its probably true and even if Toyota did create such a miracle tech, it would be insanely expensive to produce and thus purchase for the consumer. Not to mention with such an insane charge rate it would most likely never reach it due to the charge stations not supporting it and power infrastructure being unable to cope with such a load.
I was referring to Toyota’s strategy being cynical, not the comment.
Oh, Toyota’s strategy isnt Cynical, its a deliberate choice by the higher ups to champion hybrid, hydrogen and refuse to join in the EV party- its not some cynical idea that ev’s aren’t here to stay or wont take off.
They were pro hydrogen but I think they realized that ship has sailed and EVs are here to stay for now
I think they were pro-hydrogen, and now they’re using hydrogen as an excuse not to do battery EVs.
People who have heard of hydrogen cars but haven’t looked at how inefficient and expensive they are still think that they’re the future.
I swear every other week I see a new video claiming Hydrogen cars are the future, despite our current tech just being inadequate to give them enough range, and how unsafe they are- ontop of how 95% of the world has next to 0 infrastructure to fuel said hydrogen fuel cars.
That’s not to mention the costly & environmentally unfriendly production of hydrogen in the first place which at current production rates could never even if multiplied by multiple degrees- fully support a hydrogen majority of cars on the road.
Hydrogen Cars, the uncleanest, most unpractical and expensive “clean energy!” alternative fuel…
Most of hydrogen’s problems are solvable - we can pack a car with hydrogen tanks, make hydrogen with electrolysis, build infrastructure, etc.
The big killer is price. Those hydrogen filling stations aren’t $1000 each like home chargers or $50,000 each like DC fast chargers, they’re something like 2 million dollars each. And you need them everywhere, there’s no home filling to carry most of your usage.
The hydrogen you put in them? You have to pay for not just the electricity that makes it into your car’s electric motor, but all the energy that was wasted along the way:
Nobody’s looking to spend all that money on filling stations, and nobody’s interested in paying 2-3x as much to fill their car.
Yes, money is usually the answer.
So incorrect. Look at any major truck company (Volvo, Hyundai, Cummins, etc) and where the investments are. Grey hydrogen stations are getting funding all over, here’s one in my extremely conservative and shit province https://www.src.sk.ca/news/sask-going-blue-hydrogen-hub-will-promote-further-investment-province. If you ignore all the investments and growth in the sector then sure, it’s never gonna happen.
Toyota has historically been pretty conservative on tech changes. They were one of the last to move away from carburetors for example
Hmm, they were one of the first to mass produce hybrids, and the one of the first to try hydrogen. They must just have executives that really don’t like the idea of filling up slowly.
No, you can’t see it.
She goes to another factory!
(It’s early and I probably calculated this on the wrong napkin, but) the smallest EV battery (in the mini cooper) claims a capacity of ~29kWh. Supplying this power in 10 minutes would require 170kW. If the supply is 240 volts single phase and perfect power factor, that would require over 700 amps.
Who knew old Doc from Back to the Future was building a Toyota Fast Charger the whole time. It’s crazy that all Toyota has needed all this time is to change their flux capacitor fluid.
DC fast charging, which this almost certainly refers to, isn’t done at 240 it’s done at the pack voltage which is usually between 300 and 900v. Most cars use 400v, Hyundai and Kia use 800v. The Hummer EV (and other forthcoming big GM vehicles) uses a clever pack that operates at 400v but can switch from parallel to series and charge at 800v. The “good” chargers go up to 1000v 500a.
So to get that same roughly 170kw at 400v is 425a - so a lot of chargers already exist that could handle a 30kwh pack just fine.
At full tilt 1000v 500a a charger could deliver roughly 80kwh in 10 minutes, (assuming it didn’t limit itself because of the heat) which is a lot but it’s not getting you 700 miles of range.
Watts is watts though. You can convert to any voltage you’d like, but short of reinventing the grid or only installing chargers at electrical sub stations, I don’t see how the grid can supply the required power at any kind of localized level. People can claim whatever they like for the standards that the converter is capable of, but ultimately the wires supplying mains voltage have a very real limit and can not supply massive amounts of current. Even in industry, power is increased by adding phases first, then increasing voltage second, because reinventing the grid to supply massive amounts of current is just not practical. So now what, are we going to pipe 10k7 volts to charge batteries? That’s “pick up the pieces” level of dead when the average idiot makes a mistake anywhere remotely close to the thing. If you want to try with 3 phase 480, now you have a tremendous amount of heat to deal with along with a bunch of extra complexity that isn’t needed. You also need the same local power infrastructure as most large businesses and industrial sites. That won’t be available in most of outskirt suburbia where demand will be the highest.
I don’t think the intention is for the average home to charge at these rates, but rather for charging stations to be faster. In large part even with 350kw DC fast charging stations (which already exist) the battery is the limiting factor, not the charger.
Essentially, yes these would kind of only be installed at electrical sub stations.
The stations that are already capable of 350kW must be using additional on site static storage that is able to supply this kind of power. Otherwise, it is junk marketing of design capacity and safety margins instead of real world limitations. Most homes in the USA have 240V with a 100A main breaker, and only if the home/local grid is relatively modern. Many homes only have 40A or 60A main breakers. It is impossible for 240V/100A to exceed 24kW under any circumstances other than breaking the physics of the entire universe. The only way to supply more power is to add local storage. 350kW is a lot of storage and engineering in practice to deliver. I’m willing to bet most of these setups are not performing anywhere near this. Heck any old average wall wort from your junk drawer will have a full bridge rectifier with 4× 1N4007 diodes. Those are rated at 1kV at 1A. By modern marketing standards they’d call that a 4A 4kV power supply. In the real world, that thing is pumping a massive 500mA at 5V and those diodes are probably still going to fail eventually.
Watts are the hard power limit that can’t be changed. The volts and current can seesaw against each other in a converter or transformer, but the combination can never alter the total available watts. Most people are not going to be able to buy an electric vehicle AND a massive static local supply source capable of high current output.
If you want centralized infrastructure, the scale of local storage is massive, nearly as much as everyone’s home solution combined, or it involves extremely high voltage distribution lines with extremely skilled labor managing it, or lots of dead people. I doubt the distribution line infrastructure can handle the types of loading that such random high current loads would induce. It would probably require massive local buffering infrastructure like momentum wheels to maintain the grid specification while multiple batteries are simultaneously charged at random. Any infrastructure requiring additional local storage must also justify itself against the fact that all of the EV batteries are not economically recyclable. Doubling the battery count for more convenient charging is just exchanging one environmental catastrophe with fossil fuel for another, even more so than it is already.
Again, large DC fast chargers are not for individual homes. Home 240v EVSEs run about 5-10kw and cost $500ish.
350kw chargers do exist and are not just marketing - they just aren’t being installed normal people’s houses. Here’s a DC fast charger for sale:
https://www.power-sonic.com/product/evdc-360na/
It uses 480v three phase at up to 440a to accomplish it. No one is going to get that in a residential setting. The unit itself probably costs on the order of $200k, and that wouldn’t include the construction of the site or any installation costs from the electrical company.
Why would you assume 240V? Maybe im missing something, but I charge my Ioniq 5 at 170kW all the time. 230kW on more powerful chargers. The grid seems okay with it.
The charger is connected to the mains electrical grid. The specification of the mains grid is what determines the total wattage that is available at any one time. Watts = Volts × Current. Watts can not be changed. If you know the voltage and current limitations of the mains grid, you know the hard limit on the watts supplied based on the limitations of the grid to your home. The only way to alter this equation is adding local storage.
An above average home is only capable of 240V/100A=24kW. This is due to the wire sizes used, and transformer at the pole, along with local grid infrastructure that connects them. Use this 24kW to help understand the scales involved too. Supplying 240kW safely, in the real world, without marketing idiots would require at least ten times the infrastructure that supplies your entire home. This could be done with a massive local battery, but it is not going to be cheap, small, or or simple. I can only speculate here, but the build specification is likely limited by temperature due to high current flow. The components capable of dealing with temperature tend to have higher power ratings. Marketing criminals tend to take these numbers and run with them when they are completely irrelevant to the real design constraints.
These aren’t designed for homes. Three phase power exists in the US for commercial customers that set up fast chargers. I grew up in Europe and we had three phase power for our residential AC as well.
In other news, Toyota is full of shit.
Probably not, but charging an experimental battery with specialized experimental equipment in a lab is very different from actually having vehicles with consumer useable equipment to charge it, at scale.
This is just bragging and it is cool, but probably won’t be applicable in the real world. Still neat though.
Honestly, I don’t doubt that they have a battery that could scale up to give thar kind of performance. But, the infrastructure to support it is just not there. Hell, just to run power to the fast charges we have now is barely feasible without upgrading the utility to the property. Point it the bottleneck isn’t the battery, it’s getting that much power to the battery without resorting to cables and connectors used to provide shorepower to cruise ships.
My wife works for our local electricity board. She says that the grid isn’t even prepared for the uk governments target of no more petrol/diesel cars sold by 2030/35 the grid cant take the load of charging electric cars in every home.
Now put a toyota charging in 10 minutes on every driveway and your grid fails.
Its crazy.
So this battery is supposed to be: Half the weight AND half the volume AND half the price AND solid state!
And we are supposed to believe they can have that by 2025?
To charge for 745 miles, would require at least 150 kWh battery, meaning they’d have to charge at 1 MWh. AFAIK the most powerful chargers available today are about 750 kWh. So 1 MWh is possible. But very doubtful for a new solid state battery weighing and costing half of current batteries.
it sounds like they might be producing them for cars to be out in 2027
but… they’re also working on making the manufactoring “simplified” and cheaper than lithium-ion batteries
i dont assume that’ll be done by '27
so i expect… costs to be high for the first year or two, and possibly only available in a few (low volume) car models
but we’ll see.
i hope they do surprise us greatly. but i have been sceptical of toyota regarding electric… which is weird coz they were among the first to make hybrids
Reading the article again, it merely states Toyota expect to have solid state battery by 2017, which is quite underwhelming, considering BYD already sell cars with solid state batteries.
And we are supposed to believe they can have that by 2025?
The article says 2027, so a bit more time for infrastructure and development.
From the article:
The company expects to be able to manufacture solid-state batteries for use in electric vehicles as soon as 2027, according to the Financial Times, which first reported on Toyota’s claimed breakthrough.
Actually reading it again, it seems we are both wrong. 2025 is a “better” battery, 2027 is a solid state battery.
Having a solid state battery by 2027 is in no way impressive, since BYD already produce and sell fully electric cars with solid state batteries.
Toyota (partnered with Panasonic) has already broken ground on a new battery plant in NC, maybe that’s when they’re expecting production to begin there?
No doubt Panasonic makes some of the best batteries in the world, and is a much more trustworthy name regarding batteries than Toyota.
Still the claims of the article are ridiculous, and I doubt Panasonic would make claims of a solid state battery half the weigh size and prize of current batteries within 2-4 years.
If there’s a vehicle manufacturer I can trust to make a reliable battery with that kind of performance, it’s Toyota… Buuuuuuuuuuuut, I’ll believe it when I see it.
I love Toyota, but this battery tech is still not viable until they figure out how to mass produce it for cheap.
This isn’t some university press release. Toyota is in the business of mass manufacturing, so I think they’ve probably already considered that.
Toyota would also really like the grid to be able to support whatever they’re claiming, or the laws of physics to bend in their general direction to make this possible.
Really too bad it’s going to require a subscription and monthly fees to get it. And that’s after the car payment.
Puts our Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV’s 30km after a 5 hour charge to shame!
Same with my Ford Escape PHEV’s 60km after 10-11 hours at home (4ish hours on a level 2).
