Toyota Says Its Solid-State Battery Has Massive Range, Charges in 10 Minutes
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The highly competitive EV market is heating up, but that doesn’t mean all parties are progressing at the same pace. While companies like Tesla, Ford, and Hyundai lead the pack with available options, others — Stellantis and Toyota, for example — have few U.S. offerings to speak of.
But a recent announcement from Toyota suggests that there might be some leapfrogging that’s about to take place. The Japan-based company that brought hybrid electrics into the mainstream with its best-selling Prius believes it can soon deliver on pure-EV technology in a way that blows its competition out of the water.
Toyota recently broke the news about some battery developments that far exceed industry standards on range, charging time, manufacturing, and even safety.
The company has claimed that its next generation of batteries will offer a range of up to 745 miles per charge — more than doubling the current industry average of around 300. And to get there, Toyota says its newest battery can charge in ten minutes or less. Toyota’s engineers also said they believe its solid-state battery technology will be simpler to manufacture than a traditional lithium-ion.
And while the developments are exciting, many industry observers are urging caution as we wait for this to happen, most notably due to the current lack of details about the technology.
A report in The Guardian quotes David Bailey, a University of Birmingham professor of business economics, who stresses that sometimes a significant breakthrough can take place at the prototype phase, but it’s extraordinarily challenging to scale it. He adds that if this were to advance to production levels, it would constitute “the holy grail of battery vehicles.”
