Right, nearing mass production is what we call it when their PR department announced just a couple weeks ago that they’re delaying the project until 2025, and they’ve been working on it for a decade.
These posts need to stop. Their only purpose is to lead gullible people on while the company desperately wishes for a magical fix to all their problems.
I’ll believe it when it’s actually in production. Toyota has been making claims about this for a long time now and it always seems to be “just a few years” away.
That’s where I am, too. We’ve been hearing that fully practical electrification of transportation is Just Around The Corner! since the '90’s. I’m still waiting for it to actually happen.
But I’m ready. Bring it on already.
On the bright side, with several almost completely practical BEV’s on the market already we’re much closer than we’ve ever been.
Thing is, if you’re willing to go down to a Geo Metro type of car, BEVs would have been easily viable quite some time ago. Safety demands (for the passengers, not pedestrians) have made it impossible to remake anything like the Geo Metro, and general market trends have pushed cars even bigger and heavier. Meanwhile, we’ve increased pedestrian deaths with all these huge cars.
One of the biggest problems in the BEV market right now isn’t the technology, but that manufacturers focused on gigantic luxury SUVs and trucks first.
Yep, thankfully there’s more manufacturers trying to make it work. Samsung sounds promising
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.
A Samsung car would have pop-up ads on the windshield
And parts to repair it be unavailable after a year
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.
SOOOOO not really close… another press release hyping this up. How small is SMALL? Hundreds?
They clearly are still having trouble scaling production of this technology. It has EXISTED for some time but isn’t of use to cars if they can’t make hundreds of thousands of them.
they’re using the promise of better batteries to make people reconsider buying full electric vehicles now. I expect it to be exactly like fusion, always a few years away.
Commercial fusion is not a few years away, and I’ve never seen the claim apart from deranged individuals on Twitter. If everything goes to plan, commercial fusion won’t be here for a few decades.
What the claim may have been is experimental fusion, which does exist right now, we have generated power using fusion, and we even made more power than we put into it recently. It’s moving, but it’s slow, as planned for the last few decades.
And even that “more power than we put into it” comes with a big asterisk. The power being output by the laser is smaller than the power being output by fusion. Big lasers tend to be grossly inefficient things. We’ll need at least 10 times the output in order to generate enough to power the laser. That’s not even considering the power usage of the facility around it.
So, yeah, we’re at least a few years away from enough power for the laser to sustain itself, at least a few more to be able to run the facility and still have net power, and then at least a decade after that to get to commercialization.
Not even a press release, but an FT post. Which is worth less than a press release somehow.
As far as electrification goes, Toyota is virtually at the bottom of the list of car manufacturer . I’ll see it when I believe it.
F.U.D. Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt. A favorite tactic of IBM, then Microsoft, now Toyota. If you can’t compete, announce an upcoming “breakthrough” so customers will delay purchases from competitors
Yeah with car manufacturers the usual tactic is ‘concept’ cars of ‘the next model’ containing every single thing a consumer could wish for… which of course never get built.
Pontiac Aztec was the worst ever. The concept was so cool and they claimed almost ready for production. It would have been YUGE! …… then somehow they released a completely different disaster of a vehicle that is now part of history as one of the worst ever
Truth, these type of announcements are meant to instill a sense if something better is coming if we just wait. It’s a honest strategy if there is truly something in the works but right now a lot of misinformation is just making it an bad strategy to use.
Prius
And that leaves them towards the bottom, since that’s pretty much it.
The Prius was the first mass market car in the entire world that could drive on battery power. Sure, the range sucked, and they dropped the ball after that by failing to shift focus to hydrogen, but the fact is Toyota does have a history of strong innovation in this space and I could totally see them being the first to ship a car with a solid state battery.
What have they done in this space since then?
The fact that they have some history doesn’t mean they’re even close to being a leader at the moment, which I think was the original point. Having done very little since the Prius leaves them towards the bottom.
Considering a lot of other claims and all the feet dragging and other things people have mentioned I also will believe it when I see it and not before.
But I’m with you that it could happen, and I hope it does.
The Prius was the first mass market car in the entire world that could drive on battery power.
Firstly, no it wasn’t. There were many attempts at pure BEV in the twentieth century, including several “mass market” models in the 90s. None were particularly successful, but that doesn’t make Prius the first.
Secondly, that was more than quarter of a century ago. The first Prius came out as many years before today as the Apollo 15 moon landing was before the Prius. The market has moved on. Toyota can’t dine out on Prius forever.
Arguably their biggest cockup was betting the house on hydrogen while the rest of the market realised battery-electric was the way to go. Hydrogen is a dead end technology for private cars, and Toyota was pretty much alone in not realising this.
Battery electric cars predate internal combustion. It is emphatically not the way to go. In fact, it is just a fad driven by subsidies and desire to appear green. It will die off once the subsidies go away and people realize that paying vastly more for an inferior type of car is not a smart decision.
ICE cars are being banned entirely in lots of jurisdictions; they’re not going to be coming back into fashion again. And hydrogen is a completely unworkable dead-end technology.
So what technology is going to power the cars of the future?
In my view, it’ll be battery-electric all the way, but with the battery cell technology changing over time as replacements for li-ion are gradually developed.
Hopefully, the answer is also “fewer cars”. We don’t need to replace all of them, but getting city commuters from 5% bikes to 20% bikes would be transformative. Especially if we can also keep the current levels of working from home.
For starters, ICE cars have not been banned nearly anywhere. For seconds, hydrogen is not unworkable. That is pure BEV propaganda.
The future will almost certainly be hydrogen cars. They are also EVs BTW. BEV fanatics are just bullshitting about this fact here. In reality, BEVs are not a sustainable idea and are doomed.
Battery cell technology will change over time. Into fuel cells.
The Prius is perfect, there is no need for Toyota to make any new models.
And then sat around for about the next two decades and watched everyone surpass them.
Wtf is this linked to? A good dozen tries and I can’t pass the captcha? Am I just a sentient robot who is unaware or this a mechanical Turk thing where I’m helping some bot pass l
Just archive.ph?
Here’s the original link, post it on archive.ph
https://www.ft.com/content/6224f235-568c-4e2f-8247-e7dacf0ef20c
Do you use Cloudflare DNS (1.1.1.1)? They block it because they remove some trackable information from requests.
That’s fucking stupid. But yes, I had the same problem, and the article is behind a paywall 😥
Not intentionally, but I’m on iOS which ma becrelevant
Same here - not sure if this is a cloudflare problem, but i’ve been getting these more and more. I’m on a Mac, I’m pretty darn sure I don’t have a virus, so I don’t know what’s going on.
Never did get to the article, btw.
Problems include the extreme sensitivity of the batteries to moisture and oxygen, as well as the mechanical pressure needed to hold them together
Not quite the ideal thing to have in a real world car. For example, what happens after a little accident leaves an opening in the hull of such a battery? Or creates some more pressure than needed here and there?
Probably safer than current ev batteries
Not at all.
Why? Solid state batteries don’t use a flammable electrolyte
The electrolyte isn’t the only flammable material in lithium cells.
No, but it’s the difference between solid state and lithium cells. There’s still a fire risk with solid state, but then there’s a fire risk with ICE. It just needs better engineering like they’ve done with current ev batteries
That isn’t what’s being discussed. We’re comparing cells to cells, not ICE to BEV.
I know… solid state doesn’t have a flammable liquid electrolyte
Someone enlighten me: what is a non-solid-state battery?
One with a fluid electrolyte. That includes current Lithium-Ion and Lithium-Polymer batteries, as well as the older Nickle-Metal Hydride and Lead-Acid batteries.
A lithium-ion battery is composed of cathode, anode, separator and electrolyte. Lithium-ion batteries for smartphones, power tools and EVs uses liquid electrolyte solution. On the other hand, a solid-state battery uses solid electrolyte, not liquid.
https://www.samsungsdi.com/column/technology/detail/56462.html
I was unaware that a lithium battery was liquid.
TIL, thank you, kind Lemmer.
Liquid in the scientific sense, it’s more of a paste. Lithium hexafluorophosphate(aka LiFPO) mixed with Dimethyl carbonate or Diethyl carbonate which are just there to float the Lithium between the plates without letting it burst into flame from any humidity that might happen to reach in.
If you puncture one with a nail or something, you can see the liquid drip out… /s
If you can look past the fire and toxic fumes
It’s pretty tasty too, but quite spicy
Very interested to see what things look like not when it releases but a few years after.
Wake me when it happens
