In one of the more recent episodes of the Fully Charged Show, Robert talks about Toyota’s supposed development of a solid state battery:
(Should start at ~12:44 in)
Supposedly they are working on a solid state battery that has twice the energy density of what’s available now, and can fast-charge like nobody’s business - like 0 - 100% in 15 minutes. They are supposed to hit the market in 2025. Now my question is - is Toyota actually going to pull this off, or is this just more fluff from them to get people to avoid buying a non-Toyota EV in the next few years?
If they have truly pulled this off, I could see this being quite a huge game changer. But there’s still a lot of questions in my mind:
- What will it cost? Will the cost be similar to existing batteries right now, or will it command some sort of price premium? Will other cell costs have dropped even more by 2025, or have things really tapered off?
- Can it actually be mass produced at the scale needed to satisfy a lot of customers? Or will this be relegated to some high-end models for the next 10 years, only to slowly filter down to the EV equivalent of Corolla (whatever that ends up being)?
The skeptic part of me thinks Toyota is talking fluff. Maybe they are talking these things up, just like how VW said they were going to be the world leader in EVs by 2020. (Yeah, that didn’t quite happen, considering they are just now launching their first serious EV in any significant volume). So far, it seems like Toyota has been dragged, kicking and screaming, into producing anything other than the Prius. The first plug-in Prius had an abysmal range. The second gen plug-in Prius had a much better range, but still was less than that of a first-gen Chevy Volt. The Rav4 Prime? Yeah... they announced that they were only going to deliver 5,000 to the US market for the entire year. You can bet there’s a waiting list for those. This tells me that they still aren’t serious about producing an EV in significant quantities for the world market. (China is a different story - they are basically being forced into it there, and even then, their efforts have been half-hearted).