If Toyota can make solid-state batteries work in the way its outlining, EVs will be a substantially more attractive consumer product than they are today.
Back in August, I mentioned that Toyota had surprised investors a month or so previously with the announcement that it could be ready to produce an electric vehicle (EV) powered by a solid-state battery as soon as 2027.
Toyota said that its target for its solid-state batteries was for them to be half the cost, weight, and size of current EV batteries. Today’s batteries can account for as much as 40 percent of the cost of an EV, and quite a bit of its weight, too.
Toyota had originally hoped to have solid-state batteries ready for its hybrids by 2025. However, this proved to be too much of a technological challenge. Now, however, the company is saying that it can overcome it.
This would matter: Solid-state batteries have been thought of as something of a holy grail in the EV world. In its report on the Toyota news, the Financial Times ran a quick description which gives an idea as to why that might be:
Solid-state batteries have long been heralded by industry experts as the most promising technology to solve EV battery problems such as charging time, capacity and the risk of catching fire. They replace a liquid electrolyte with a solid one and use lithium metal at the anode instead of graphite, the current standard in lithium-ion batteries.
They should also last longer.
Solid-state batteries generally degrade at a very slow rate. Today’s electric vehicles have a shorter battery lifespan because [current] lithium-ion batteries tend to degrade faster. After about 1,000 charging cycles, the typical lithium-ion battery drastically loses its ability to store charge. As a result, it depletes charge faster and becomes unreliable. In comparison, QuantamScape’s solid-state battery prototype can retain over 80-percent of its capacity after 800 cycles. To put it into perspective, this represents about 386,000 kilometers of travel. Some more advanced solid-state batteries are capable of sustaining up to 90-percent capacity even after 5,000 cycles of charge. In short, these batteries can survive several decades before showing signs of degradation.
Range and charging time? Toyota is suggesting that its solid-state batteries will have a range of about 750 miles, and that the charging time will be some ten minutes, still longer than the time it takes to fill up a conventional car, but much less than anything currently available in the EV market.
And the, uh, fire issue?
As the FT correctly noted, the problem lies with the liquid electrolyte.
[The liquid electrolyte] is typically made from organic solvents, and these are extremely flammable. Hence, if a Li-ion battery is damaged, which can happen in an accident or if it overheats whilst recharging, it can explode into flames. Using a non-flammable, solid electrolyte prevents that. Solid electrolytes can be made from a variety of chemicals, including polymers and ceramics.
To be fair, it should be noted that EVs are less likely to catch fire than conventional cars, but when they do, the fire is very difficult to put out.
A couple of days ago, Toyota announced that things were still moving ahead nicely with its solid-state battery.
Toyota says it is close to being able to manufacture next-generation solid-state batteries at the same rate as existing batteries for electric vehicles, marking a milestone in the global race to commercialise the technology.
Its headway in manufacturing technology follows a “breakthrough” in battery materials recently claimed by the world’s largest carmaker by vehicles sold. It would allow Toyota to mass-produce solid-state batteries by 2027 or 2028.
But there’s still a way to go.
The FT:
Despite their growing confidence in manufacturing technology, executives at Toyota admit that the company still needs to improve how it ensures the quality of battery materials when they are produced in large volumes.
At a news conference last week, Toyota president Koji Sato also admitted that production volumes of solid-state batteries were likely to be small when the company rolls them out in electric vehicles as early as 2027.
“I think the most important thing at the moment is to put out [the solid-state batteries] into the world and we will consider expansion in volume from there,” he said.
Other companies have also made progress recently. Chinese battery maker CATL revealed it was preparing to mass-produce its semi-solid batteries before the year’s end, while South Korea’s Samsung SDI has completed a fully automated pilot line for solid-state batteries.
Meanwhile, the team at Doomberg has had some interesting things to say about what Toyota may have been doing. It starts by referring to the idea set out by the academic and business writer Clayton Christensen:
[B]ig companies are necessarily very good at serving their existing customers (that’s how they got big!), but this cultural wiring makes them less able to properly respond to disruptive innovations in their sector. During the early phases of breakthrough product development, customers often suffer from shaky prototypes entering the field. This mode is unacceptable to the incumbents who have much to lose. Unencumbered by such constraints, startups drive a process of iterative improvement using real-world feedback, an exponential explosion in value is realized, and the new entrants begin gaining market share. Late to the game and unable to pivot internally, even the most powerful incumbents fall by the wayside.
Was this the underlying reason why Toyota, the world’s largest automaker, had been so reluctant to do much with EVs?
Doomberg:
Despite being a clear market leader in developing fuel-efficient vehicles—its iconic Prius model is probably responsible for abating more carbon emissions than any consumer product in history—Toyota has slow-rolled the development of full battery electric vehicles (BEVs). In the eyes of the company’s many critics, Toyota’s relentless focus on quality and continuous improvement make it incapable of taking the risks needed to maintain its position as one of the world’s largest automakers. Its “Kaizen” culture, with an emphasis on delighting every customer and never repeating mistakes, is a quintessential example of Christensen’s view that such cherished strengths can serve as the proximate cause of long-term weakness.
As I discussed here and here, I doubt that was why Toyota took its time. EVs are, for the most part, a product of politics and regulation, not consumer demand, one good reason for caution. A second was that (surprise!) the emphasis being put on EVs by policy-makers was misguided. One of their misjudgments (among many: central planners are what they are) has been the pace of the proposed forced switch to EVs.
Doomberg:
An alternative interpretation [for Toyota’s EV hesitation] — one that Toyota executives have signaled both directly and indirectly over the years — is that the company has long been deeply skeptical of contemporary lithium-ion batteries as the correct long-term solution for EVs. These batteries use highly flammable liquid electrolytes, something Toyota suspected would condemn the technology to unacceptable fire risk, lower recharging speeds, and insufficient range. Moreover, the company was convinced it was sitting on a game-changing innovation that would make current batteries obsolete. Counting on a careful application of slow and steady improvements to an alternative development of solid-state batteries, it would overcome the shortcomings of existing lithium-ion technology, quiet its critics, and position the company for another generation of global leadership.
There are all sorts of unresolved issues around EVs (and many of them are not going away any time soon). But if Toyota (or its competitors) can make solid-state batteries work in the way that Toyota is outlining, EVs will be a substantially more attractive consumer product than they are today. The big question, of course, is when this happy moment will arrive.
In the meantime, would-be EV buyers have to decide whether they should hold off a purchase for now on the grounds that a far better EV may be coming along in a few years’ time.
And how much more will other large automakers, currently investing billions in the production of “traditional” EVs, have to spend if Toyota is successful?