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

Yawn.

[Rei]

Tesla sells actual electric cars that people get in a waiting list years in advance to buy.
GM sells actual electric cars that people generally yawn at.
Toyota: Our lab-scale battery is gonna be a big hit in 2020!

Solid state batteries are no real magic. It just means that you're using a solid electrolyte rather than a liquid one plus a membrane. They offer some nice benefits (such as resistance to dendrite punctures), but they hardly change the world on their own. They're a popular choice for working towards lithium-air batteries, which would be revolutionary, but there's no way anyone (including Toyota) is going to be mass-producing mature lithium-air batteries in 2020.

But anyway... if you're not going to make EVs, I guess you can still make press releases about hypothetical EVs. Seems to be a popular alternative these days.

And for the record... energy density really isn't the issue; Tesla has shown that you can get quite good range even with today's batteries without having your vehicles be excessively heavy (Model S, a bit over 2 tonnes; Model 3, a bit under). Cost per kilowatt hour is the issue. Tesla is reportedly at $190/kWh now and thinks they'll be at $100/kWh in a few years. But ideally you want even lower than that.

Re:Yawn.

[Solandri]

Cumulative number of Tesla S sold = 150,000
Cumulative number of Chevy Bolts sold = 8,000
Cumulative number of Chevy Volts sold = 124,000

Cumulative number of Toyota Prius sold = 4 million
Cumulative number of Toyota hybrids sold = 9 million

In terms of number of battery units produced, Tesla and GM are roundoff error compared to Toyota.

Tesla sells actual electric cars that people get in a waiting list years in advance to buy.

That tells you that there's something seriously wrong with the scalability of their production. (If you want to know what the problem is, 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.)

Re:Yawn.

[nojayuk]

No, energy density is the key issue for electric vehicles, mass as well as volume but mostly mass. Old-style electric vehicles before lithium-ion batteries of various flavours were developed used bulky and heavy lead-acid and NiMH battery systems which didn't provide sufficient range due to their physical limitations. Li-ion batteries are typically twice the Watt-hours per kilogram figure of older battery tech.

Even now a modern electric vehicle's battery pack makes up a large part of the volume and mass of the car for the range it provides. It's sufficiently small though to make them viable although the manufacturers want to improve that even more to reduce the cost of manufacture and extend the range between charges.

I'm usually very cynical about "Biggest Battery Breakthrough Since Breakfast" stories but there are a few things about this one that make me sit up and take note. One is that it's Toshiba who have a track record of delivering new battery tech such as SCiB, a rapid-charge battery (zero to full in ten minutes) with very good operating life of several thousand cycles despite being fast-charged. The other is that they're working on building out production of this new battery (which might be based on SCiB) rather than announcing lab results and talking a lot about nanostructures and the like while scrabbling around for more development funding.

I'm speculating here but it's possible the new Toshiba batteries will provide a fast-charge capability since they are supposedly solid-electrolyte. Fast-charge in the tank-of-gas time range period (five minutes or so) would mitigate range anxiety to a large extent if the infrastructure is in place to provide the large amounts of power to deliver fast-charge.

Re:Yawn.

[Rei]

Deflect much?

1) The conversation was about electric cars, not hybrids. When someone says "I bought an electric car", they don't mean a hybrid. Toyota has no BEVs, and the longest range PHEV that they have has a whopping 11 miles range, which ranks fifth globally in PHEV/BEV sales, including the Model S which starts at literally over double its price.

2) Your choice of comparing cumulative numbers to annual sales numbers is ridiculous. Toyota has been selling hybrids since long before Tesla even existed, and Tesla's growth has been exponential, meaning that for most of its history its sales were a fraction of what they were today, which is in turn a fraction of what they'll be next year.

3) "Battery units" is even more absurd. Toyota has been sitting around on decades-old technology and hardly advancing at all. They got a hit nearly two decades ago and have been milking it ever since. They only even moved to li-ion a couple years ago, only on a minority of their fleet, and their li-ion technology is pathetic. Their drivetrain on all models is obsolete, with a terrible performance to mass ratio vs. what you find in BEVs. There's literally nothing in the EV world of interest coming out of Toyota these days. Seriously, "battery units"? Might as well define lead-acids as "battery units". Or alkaline AAs, for that matter.

That tells you that there's something seriously wrong with the scalability of their production.

It's a brand new model. What, do you want a 500k car-a-year factory to just magic itself into existence at full production? What sort of logic train led you to make a statement like that?

500k cars a year, haven't even had the official full reveal yet (that's on Friday), none in dealerships, no test drives, not even the full options and options pricing announced yet - and they're booked solid until late 2018 at the best, probably early 2019. Meanwhile, Toyota piddles along on hybrids without pushing the tech envelope.

If you want to know what the problem is, Tesla relies on selling ZEV credits to other automakers to keep from going bankrupt.

If you want to know what the problem is, it's you going off about things that you don't know about. First off, ZEV credits sell for pennies on the dollar. The revenue from them is so small that Tesla doesn't even break it out on their budget sheet anymore. Secondly, Tesla's total sales revenue is in turn small compared to the investment that has gone into going from a luxury car maker to a mass-market midrange car maker. Again, you seem to have this notion that 500k car-a-year factories magic themselves into existence. They don't.

Tesla has to be careful not to produce too many ZEVs lest they cause the price of ZEV credits to plummet due to oversupply.

The reality is precisely the opposite. Tesla is undergoing an exponential scaleup, and has been throughout its entire existence.

Crap "analysis"

[sjbe]

In terms of number of battery units produced, Tesla and GM are roundoff error compared to Toyota.

Several issues with your "analysis". 1) The Tesla Model S is a $70-100K car so not exactly and apples to apples comparison 2) The cars you are comparing have been on the market for 6 years or less versus 20 years for the Prius. Of course cumulative sales will be bigger for the Prius. Do you know how many Prius were sold in the first 5 years on the market worldwide? 81,700. That means that both the Volt and the Model S outsold the Prius over the first several years of their availability. 3) The Bolt has been on the market for a year. Are you seriously going to compare cumulative sales of a vehicle that has been on the market for a year to one that has been on the market for 20?

That tells you that there's something seriously wrong with the scalability of their production.

Not even remotely. I design manufacturing production systems for a living. Tesla scaling production to deliver cars more quickly would be a substantial cost with no obvious benefit to Tesla either short or long term. The reason they haven't done it isn't that they cannot do it but because they have chosen not to do it. As long as customers are willing to wait for delivery it would be enormously stupid of Tesla to devote that much capital to upgrading assembly lines and supply chains. There is no evidence to suggest that faster production would result in enough marginal extra sales to be worth the expense. They need to produce cars fast enough to keep their customers happy but any faster is wasting money. So far Tesla customers clearly are ok with waiting a bit.

(If you want to know what the problem is, 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.

Wrong again. Tesla is not throttling production for that reason and they certainly aren't calibrating it to demand for emissions credits. That would not be a sustainable business model and Elon Musk certainly knows that. The reason Tesla isn't profitable and why they produce at the rate they do is much simpler. They simply lack the economies of scale enjoyed by major auto firms. That fact alone is why you haven't seen a major new car company in decades. It's hard to achieve minimum efficient scale in the auto industry, particularly with a wildly non-traditional product offering. They have to reinvest all their capital (and then some) into building the company. Production lines to make cars are enormously expensive. Companies like Ford and GM and Toyota have had years to develop the scale and balance sheets necessary to bankroll such investments. Tesla is still a small young company with a weak balance sheet and it will take time to get to where the major auto makers are now.

Pretty much all small companies have the same problem including mine. My company makes auto parts and we could easily bring in enough people and machines to deliver products to our customers in a few days. But the expense would be enormous and we would immediately become uncompetitive on price. We also could produce products ahead of time and inventory them but that means we tie up vast amounts of capital in inventory and storage. Producing products faster than your customers demand them is wasteful, expensive, and stupid.

Re:Biggest question completely ignored

[Rei]

Even Tesla's super-charger takes at least an hour to fully charge the small capacity batteries.

1) Tesla's batteries are "small capacity"? 4-5 hours highway driving time per charge is "small capacity"?

2) Actually, it takes 125 minutes to fully charge a Tesla pack. But it takes only 30 minutes to charge one to 80%. There's a taper over the course of a charge, so the higher you want the percentage, the slower it gets.**

3) Supercharger V2 is 120kW per vehicle / 145kW shared, but the upcoming V3 is going to be "over 350kW". That could potentially up the speed in the first ~50% or so of a charge, although more dramatic improvements will also require battery pack improvements.

** - Basically, early in the charge, almost all of the energy you pump in becomes stored as fast as you can get, with only a tiny fraction converted to heat. As cells begin to fill up (unevenly), however, the incoming power is increasingly turned into heat. The charge rate must consequently be reduced to avoid excessive cell heat during charging, which is one of the biggest contributors to reducing cell lifespans.