Toyota's New Solid-State Battery Could Make Its Way To Cars By 2020 (techcrunch.com)

According to the Wall Street Journal, Toyota is in production engineering for a solid state battery, which uses a solid electrolyte instead of the conventional semi-liquid version used in today's lithium-ion batteries. The company said it aims to put the new tech in production electric vehicles as early as 2020. TechCrunch reports: The improved battery technology would make it possible to create smaller, more lightweight lithium-ion batteries for use in EVs, that could also potentially boost the total charge capacity and result in longer-range vehicles. Another improvement for this type of battery would be longer overall usable life, which would make it possible to both use the vehicles they're installed in for longer, and add potential for product recycling and alternative post-vehicle life (some companies are already looking into putting EV batteries into use in home and commercial energy storage, for example).

Comments

Re:Oh, so the finally rewrote the laws of physics?

[drinkypoo]

Actually, I read about a solid state battery being developed in a lab not too long ago. Can't remember where... gettin old is a biatch

The last one I can recall is the lithium glass battery.

Re:Oh, so the finally rewrote the laws of physics?

[Shompol]

Apparently the invention of cardinal grammeters goes as far back as 1944.

Re:Yawn.

[Michael Woodhams]

The Toyota vs Tesla numbers is a point well made. However

Tesla relies on selling ZEV credits to other automakers to keep from going bankrupt. But other automakers only need a certain number of ZEV credits each year to comply with CARB regulations. So Tesla has to be careful not to produce too many ZEVs lest they cause the price of ZEV credits to plummet due to oversupply.

Can you provide evidence for this? An obvious alternative hypothesis is that Tesla would love to have much higher production, and are working as hard as they can to overcome the financial, organizational and engineering problems to be able to do so. Tesla say they will be soon be producing the model 3 in huge numbers, which means either they are lying, or they are abandoning the ZEV credit plan, or you are plain wrong. (Here is an article saying they are aiming for 400,000 to 600,000 per year, but also saying they can't realistically get over 230,000, and gives reasons entirely independent of ZEV credits.)