<i>Japanese firm believes it *could* make a solid-state battery...</i><p>The key word here is obviously *could*.<p>Add one more to the pile of claims and beliefs floating around that have yet to transform into viable products.<p>I have been a Toyota fan from way back. I have owned a number of their vehicles. But in my mind, they lost a lot of technical credibility when they tried to apply political influence in a short sighted attempt to steer the marketplace toward hydrogen.<p>This was really just a thinly veiled effort to prolong the marketplace viability of the internal combustion engine --- to the detriment of the global environment.
Dear battery technology claimant,<p>Thank you for your submission of proposed new revolutionary battery technology. Your new technology claims to be superior to existing lithium-ion technology and is just around the corner from taking over the world. Unfortunately your technology will likely fail, because:<p>[ ] it is impractical to manufacture at scale.<p>[ ] it will be too expensive for users.<p>[ ] it suffers from too few recharge cycles.<p>[ ] it is incapable of delivering current at sufficient levels.<p>[ ] it lacks thermal stability at low or high temperatures.<p>[ ] it lacks the energy density to make it sufficiently portable.<p>[ ] it has too short of a lifetime.<p>[ ] its charge rate is too slow.<p>[ ] its materials are too toxic.<p>[ ] it is too likely to catch fire or explode.<p>[ ] it is too minimal of a step forward for anybody to care.<p>[ ] this was already done 20 years ago and didn't work then.<p>[ ] by the time it ships li-ion advances will match it.<p>----------------------------------------------------------------
I remember this kind of news for tech like hard disks. Day to day it felt that this improvements do not matter but that 20MB hard disk became 100MB then 400MB. It was exciting to see 1GB, it seemed impossible. Now you have for granted 1,000,000MB SSD super-fast high-capacity hard disks.<p>I hope that batteries continue improving like this and other technologies. It is going to be like magic.
<i>a solid-state battery with a range of 1,200km (745 miles) that could charge in 10 minutes or less</i><p>For that range I assume the battery holds 150 Wh/km * 1200 km = 180 kWh. Charging it in 10 minutes would require about 1.1 MW. That's a lot of Watts.
Toyota position on EV for the last 10 years 'we will have these super uber amazing batteries soon, and then we will magically make amazing cars in high volume quickly'.
While Toyota has been busy looking for silver bullets that will solve imagined problems, Tesla has been scaling hard with good-enough technology. Their Q2'23 production is a hair under 2 million units per year, so they're already a mid-size OEM (the size of BMW, MB, Audi, etc).
It’s funny seeing these battery breakthrough articles repeatedly. It’s been years of them now :) I’m always curious who the science writers are who can’t exercise critical thinking and ask a few tougher questions or review a battery breakthrough rubric.