toyota's solid state battery

I didn't see any prices in that article. If Toyotas with solid-state batteries cost $150K-$250K (eg, in an electric LFA), the market for EVs with wet batteries will survive for at least a couple of years more.

 

Yeah, just 3 or 4 years out, can't count the number of times I have heard that in the last 5 years.

 

Somewhere between the Osborn effect and the 1980s Beta-ware wars.

Bob Wilson

 

GMGMF made prototype Aluminum ION button cell batteries you could actually buy and play with. They have built an assembly line, and have produced and demo'd some pouch cells as proof of concept. They are on track, and expect to increase the layer count in the pouch cells next go around. Sometime in 2024 they hope to have some prototypes available for general testing. I have no idea if it will come to fruition, but they've at least made something you can put your fingers on outside the lab.

I've seen a whole lot of rhetoric on several other technologies. Sodium is the only other thing I've seen actual product you can touch. I'll believe solid state when I can buy one that doesn't cost more than a modest home.

I think aluminum would be the 'greenest' technology, but lithium prices have actually been falling, so whatever the next big thing is it will need to be priced / amp-hour similarly, or have a dramatic energy density increase. Most of what I'm reading sodium doesn't have any benefit in the EV Arena. We shall see what actually becomes available. You have to actually be able to build whatever you create at scale. That is the tricky part.

 

Actually, as mentioned in another thread, Toyota says they will be including a solid-state lithium-ion battery in a vehicle next year. It will power a removable JBL Bluetooth dashboard speaker available in the Toyota Tacoma pickup. I doubt they'll sell the speaker without the truck--how many companies will be buying a Tacoma just to get their hands on this battery?

 

Perhaps the catalytic converter thieves will switch to smash-glass and grab? . . . <I think not.>

Bob Wilson

 

This, to me, would indicate Toyota is either having questions about real-world performance or application and want a "soft-launch" of the technology, or they are having issues with scaling up production. Or maybe both things could be true.

 

Something about bait & switch comes to mind. "We have these new Solid State batteries that are going to revolutionize the EV industry"... "Nice when can we get one?". "Oh! Next year we are going to put it in our Gas Guzzling pickup truck." "Wow! That's amazing so your going to make an electric pickup!" "Oh No, we are going to put a small portable speaker unit in an actual gasoline fueled vehicle that will have our solid state battery in it." "Ummmm, sounds revolutionary to me".

 

I bet Chevy wishes they had tested the LG Energy Solution Li-Ion batteries in removable speakers on the dashboards of gas-powered cars before stuffing them into 69,000 Bolts. The subsequent recall would have been significantly less expensive.

 

Sodium-ion seems to be a good fit for things like powerwall and grid stabilization - perhaps displacing LiFePO4. I guess the main advantage is that it uses Earth-abundant materials, but I gather that sometime next year they may have batteries in a form where they can build EV packs for testing. The main disadvantage is that the energy density is a bit lower than normal lithium ion, but some manufacturers are already making EV batteries from LiFePO4, so who knows.

 

Sounds like now that everyone's started looking for lithium sources it's not as "scarce" as originally believed. Bottleneck seems to be mining capacity.

US has huge lithium reserves, but concerns mount over mining

 

Meh, no correlation, apples to peanuts. LG had a bad manufacturing run, they didn't invent anything new they just made some mistakes putting it together for a car. Plenty of other vendors were making the same chemistry batteries without an issue that were not recalled. The LG recall affected a number of other vendors besides Chevy, including my Kona. It's not like you are going to engineer a existing tech into 64KWH lithium battery pack and put in in removable speaker. Plenty of portable devices were already around using the tech, and frankly we were aware of problems with traditional LiON batteries since the Boeing 777 issues, and the Samsung Note 7. Not sure what tossing the tech in a speaker is going to prove. That kinda seems like a BFD sort of thing.

 

The biggest problem with Sodium seems to be bulk, thus to your point possibly a good fit if the price per kwh is more reasonable, which doesn't appear to be the case, as apparently rare earths are seeming to be getting less rare. Long term its going to be about 3 things: joules/gram and joules/liter of material, plus reliability aka charge/discharge cycles. Sodium is supposedly pretty good on the latter. Time will tell.