Starts with several tens of thousands of cars per year
The big promise in EV land, and in Toyota’s EV future in particular, is the efficient ‘solid state battery’. According to many, these batteries will bring about a revolution, but it will not be as big around 2030 as Toyota previously thought. Production is still limited.
Toyota’s first steps into EV land came late with the bZ4X and, in all honesty, are not very groundbreaking. However, that has to change, as we have known for some time. Toyota wants to be a pioneer in the field of solid state batteries and previously said that EVs will come onto the market from 2026 that will have a range of 1,000 to 1,200 km thanks to such a battery. Later, those plans were made more concrete and Toyota stated that solid state batteries will be produced from approximately 2027 to 2028, and will then do so on a large scale ‘not much later’.
The plan has now been explained again in an internal publication with the nice name the Toyota Times, which we were brought to our attention by Automotive News. The ‘commercialization’, or bringing the first solid state EVs onto the market, is still planned for sometime around 2027. However, it will not immediately be the case that these new generation EVs will be sold by the hundreds of thousands at the same time. After an initial phase with several thousand vehicles per year, from 2030 onwards there will be a scale-up to battery production that is sufficient for ‘several tens of thousands of cars’ per year. So we are still talking about very limited series production, especially by Toyota standards. To give you an idea: Toyota already sold more than 100,000 Corollas and more than 100,000 Yaris this year, only in Europe. Every year, more than 10 million cars are sold by this Japanese manufacturer. Moreover, it may well be that Toyota first uses the special batteries in hybrids, so that fewer batteries and therefore fewer raw materials are needed to provide more cars with such a battery.
Before your electric Corolla equivalent with 1,000 km range arrives in the driveway, a few elections will pass. Compared to more conventional lithium-ion batteries, solid-state batteries not only have a much higher energy density, but can also charge faster. A package must be able to be charged from 10 to 80 percent in 10 minutes or less. Solid-state is not the only horse Toyota is betting on to take its EVs to a new level. There will also be a new generation of EVs with different battery types, which should also be good for driving ranges of up to 1,000 kilometers and/or a significant cost reduction. So there is still a lot to be done in this area, there at Toyota.
– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl