This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Repost of a my previous comment on this elsewhere:
They have been “claiming”/ “announcing” this breakthrough since 2017 repeatedly. They STILL haven’t figured out how to mass produce it affordably to make it meaningful. They keep pushing out the date for when it will arrive for many years now.
OP's article first claims 2025 and then claims 2027.
As per the image in my post Toyota first announced this in 2017 with a target of 2022.. They just keep re-announcing it saying it is coming in about 3-5 years.
Worth pointing out there was a global pandemic in the middle of that timeline
It'll come out when Tesla releases Full Self Driving for real
I don't think Tesla is going to be the one announcing that.
Add on top of the nature of these ultra capitalist worldwide corporations, even if they were able to mass produce this affordably that would mean decommisioning tens of millions in already existing production infrastructure. Why would they do that when they can delay next gen tech for greater profit?
mm totally! seems like a very “i’ll just wait for the next gen to buy an EV” kind of thing
… like, even if it’s possible it’s not possible… just the amount of energy required to be transferred into that battery wouldn’t charge in any existing charging infrastructure
Just in time for the commercially viable cold fusion.
Was going to reference your post.
Toyota spoofing.
I'll believe it when I see it.
Something like 200 KWh. Charging that in 10 minutes would be along the lines of 1 MW. It's roughly the output of a 50 metre diameter wind turbine. A medium sized nuclear power plant would only be able to handle around 1000 of those at the same time.
That's an impressive feat but I doubt they expect the 10 mins to be practical. If they could implement this battery at good value it would be a game changer. Though the capacity seems much higher than most of us need so it makes me wonder what impacts on the environment it would have. As we all know, electric cars are better but are no saints with a somewhat competitive emission amount over its lifetime.
It’s roughly the output of a 50 metre diameter wind turbine.
So you're saying that if we put a 50m wind turbine on the roof of one of those Toyotas, we'd have a car with infinite range?
This is dumb anyway - nobody is going to pump 1MW into a car, the grid can't support it, never mind a supercharger-style station with between 8 and 20 plugs. A 20-plug Supercharger needs around 1.5MW to serve each station with 72kW.
And really, when I'm on a road trip, after 3h in the car, I need a break that's long enough to hit the bathroom, grab a bite to eat, and stretch my legs. The car is usually charged to 90% in under 45 minutes anyway, even if I roll into the charging station at under 5%...
I'd expect a "Ultra-tier" fast charging station to have internal batteries (or perhaps supercapacitors or something like that) which buffer up from the grid. Eg. when not in use and over-night. Probably won't last much into a day even with that, but we may see smaller buildings connected to charging stations that hold internal batteries to deliver faster charging than the connected grid can deliver.
As long as there is demand and profit to be made, it could happen. The biggest cost is of course the batteries, but if solid-state batteries turn into reality I think things might be more cost effective. Especially since fixed position batteries aren't subject to the same contraints as car batteries. Don't need to handle vibration, weight is not a big problem. Key goals are lifetime value, energy density + and (dis)charging rates.
Cheaper electricity during night might not be a thing everywhere or in the future, but small savings by stocking up cheaper during nighttime, gives better margins.
This is what Superchargers are. The snag is that during busy weekends, the batteries eventually hit zero, and everyone is capped at 72kW, because that's what the AC/DC transformer can provide.
That's just an engineering or planning problem. Really though it's probably just not cost effective to have enough capacity to cover the super busy times.
Assuming that this is for private vehicles, and not trying to set the stage for something like a freight truck.
Something like that might have a more reasonable demand for that 1MW, especially if they need massive batteries for interstate/international travel.
This would be useful for the logistics industry, especially the non-US logistics industry (though useful for short-haul there). There is a LOT of logistics that isn't big-rig long-haulers.
Amazon would for sure buy millions at that range, as an example. That's multiple days of use with overnight charging drawing it even longer.
bullshit
Riiiiight.
Toyota is so far behind in the EV game that they are throwing out BS claims to give people pause who might be considering a purchase from all the other companies viable EVs right now. This is like 15 and 20 years ago when car makers were saying that their hydrogen cars were just a few years ago... which of course never materialized, but they used it as publicity stunts.
I have a hard time believing that this announcement is just a straight up lie. If they don't have an actual working prototype, regardless of scale costs that they may be ignoring, wouldn't they be open to a stakeholder suit for misleading the investors?
You are reading WAY too much into this. As many of other posts have already pointed out that YES this is feasible... but with very expensive, one-off prototype hardware. There's no lie in that. It is simply exaggerating the HELL out of the truth because this ain't going to see production for a long ass time (and most definitely at reduced specs).
As I mentioned in my post about hydrogen powered concept cars from like 20 years ago - many of them were indeed running (or sort of running), but they were far, far from near-production.
Very weird turn of events given that Toyota has a history of being anti-EVs.
Their announcements about products that are way better than anything that actually exists with no solid plans to actually bring it to market is actually just another flavor of anti-EV FUD.
It's not the right time to buy an EV because our imaginary product is SO much better than any of those boring products, you should wait for it and keep buying our gas vehicles for now.
It’s depressing how cynical that is.
It's depressing because its probably true and even if Toyota did create such a miracle tech, it would be insanely expensive to produce and thus purchase for the consumer. Not to mention with such an insane charge rate it would most likely never reach it due to the charge stations not supporting it and power infrastructure being unable to cope with such a load.
They were pro hydrogen but I think they realized that ship has sailed and EVs are here to stay for now
I think they were pro-hydrogen, and now they're using hydrogen as an excuse not to do battery EVs.
People who have heard of hydrogen cars but haven't looked at how inefficient and expensive they are still think that they're the future.
Toyota has historically been pretty conservative on tech changes. They were one of the last to move away from carburetors for example
No, you can't see it.
She goes to another factory!
(It's early and I probably calculated this on the wrong napkin, but) the smallest EV battery (in the mini cooper) claims a capacity of ~29kWh. Supplying this power in 10 minutes would require 170kW. If the supply is 240 volts single phase and perfect power factor, that would require over 700 amps.
Who knew old Doc from Back to the Future was building a Toyota Fast Charger the whole time. It's crazy that all Toyota has needed all this time is to change their flux capacitor fluid.
DC fast charging, which this almost certainly refers to, isn't done at 240 it's done at the pack voltage which is usually between 300 and 900v. Most cars use 400v, Hyundai and Kia use 800v. The Hummer EV (and other forthcoming big GM vehicles) uses a clever pack that operates at 400v but can switch from parallel to series and charge at 800v. The "good" chargers go up to 1000v 500a.
So to get that same roughly 170kw at 400v is 425a - so a lot of chargers already exist that could handle a 30kwh pack just fine.
At full tilt 1000v 500a a charger could deliver roughly 80kwh in 10 minutes, (assuming it didn't limit itself because of the heat) which is a lot but it's not getting you 700 miles of range.
Watts is watts though. You can convert to any voltage you'd like, but short of reinventing the grid or only installing chargers at electrical sub stations, I don't see how the grid can supply the required power at any kind of localized level. People can claim whatever they like for the standards that the converter is capable of, but ultimately the wires supplying mains voltage have a very real limit and can not supply massive amounts of current. Even in industry, power is increased by adding phases first, then increasing voltage second, because reinventing the grid to supply massive amounts of current is just not practical. So now what, are we going to pipe 10k7 volts to charge batteries? That's "pick up the pieces" level of dead when the average idiot makes a mistake anywhere remotely close to the thing. If you want to try with 3 phase 480, now you have a tremendous amount of heat to deal with along with a bunch of extra complexity that isn't needed. You also need the same local power infrastructure as most large businesses and industrial sites. That won't be available in most of outskirt suburbia where demand will be the highest.
In other news, Toyota is full of shit.
Probably not, but charging an experimental battery with specialized experimental equipment in a lab is very different from actually having vehicles with consumer useable equipment to charge it, at scale.
This is just bragging and it is cool, but probably won't be applicable in the real world. Still neat though.
So this battery is supposed to be: Half the weight AND half the volume AND half the price AND solid state!
And we are supposed to believe they can have that by 2025?
To charge for 745 miles, would require at least 150 kWh battery, meaning they'd have to charge at 1 MWh. AFAIK the most powerful chargers available today are about 750 kWh. So 1 MWh is possible. But very doubtful for a new solid state battery weighing and costing half of current batteries.
it sounds like they might be producing them for cars to be out in 2027
but... they're also working on making the manufactoring "simplified" and cheaper than lithium-ion batteries
i dont assume that'll be done by '27
so i expect... costs to be high for the first year or two, and possibly only available in a few (low volume) car models
but we'll see.
i hope they do surprise us greatly. but i have been sceptical of toyota regarding electric... which is weird coz they were among the first to make hybrids
If there's a vehicle manufacturer I can trust to make a reliable battery with that kind of performance, it's Toyota... Buuuuuuuuuuuut, I'll believe it when I see it.
Toyota would also really like the grid to be able to support whatever they're claiming, or the laws of physics to bend in their general direction to make this possible.
I love Toyota, but this battery tech is still not viable until they figure out how to mass produce it for cheap.
Really too bad it’s going to require a subscription and monthly fees to get it. And that’s after the car payment.
