In the summer, Toyota caught a lot of headlines with their announcement of a major breakthrough in solid state batteries. If you took the announcement with a pinch of salt, it seems you were right to.
Toyota's roadmap for the future of their battery offering is somewhat conservative - see the roadmap in the linked article below. Production of the solid state batteries looks like a niche endeavour so, much like hydrogen fuel cell cars, it's unlikely you'll be seeing a solid state battery EV pull up alongside you at the lights any time soon.
But we suspected that already, right? Slightly more encouraging is the announcement that the world's largest car maker has a target of 3.5m EVs produced by 2030. Even then, this will be using existing battery technology, and reflects approximately a third of their annual vehicle production, so it still leaves a huge gap yet to be crossed.
So what's the positive news? Well, the batteries are planned to get produced. No product goes from lab to finished article quickly, so expect to see lots of R&D and patent filings from Toyota as they put the solid state cells into initial practice, and figure out how to do it properly along the way. The biggest question is whether someone else will get there first.
Toyota's solid-state EV batteries will improve range by 20% and be capable of fast charging in 20 minutes. The company is also planning a higher-level battery, which aims to improve range by 50%.
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