Right, nearing mass production is what we call it when their PR department announced just a couple weeks ago that they’re delaying the project until 2025, and they’ve been working on it for a decade.
These posts need to stop. Their only purpose is to lead gullible people on while the company desperately wishes for a magical fix to all their problems.
I’ll believe it when it’s actually in production. Toyota has been making claims about this for a long time now and it always seems to be “just a few years” away.
That’s where I am, too. We’ve been hearing that fully practical electrification of transportation is Just Around The Corner! since the '90’s. I’m still waiting for it to actually happen.
But I’m ready. Bring it on already.
On the bright side, with several almost completely practical BEV’s on the market already we’re much closer than we’ve ever been.
Thing is, if you’re willing to go down to a Geo Metro type of car, BEVs would have been easily viable quite some time ago. Safety demands (for the passengers, not pedestrians) have made it impossible to remake anything like the Geo Metro, and general market trends have pushed cars even bigger and heavier. Meanwhile, we’ve increased pedestrian deaths with all these huge cars.
One of the biggest problems in the BEV market right now isn’t the technology, but that manufacturers focused on gigantic luxury SUVs and trucks first.
Yep, thankfully there’s more manufacturers trying to make it work. Samsung sounds promising
Other companies have also made progress recently. Chinese battery maker CATL revealed it was preparing to mass-produce its semi-solid batteries before the year’s end, while South Korea’s Samsung SDI has completed a fully automated pilot line for solid-state batteries.
Toyota president Koji Sato also admitted that production volumes of solid-state batteries were likely to be small when the company rolls them out in electric vehicles as early as 2027. “I think the most important thing at the moment is to put out [the solid-state batteries] into the world and we will consider expansion in volume from there,” he said.
SOOOOO not really close… another press release hyping this up. How small is SMALL? Hundreds?
They clearly are still having trouble scaling production of this technology. It has EXISTED for some time but isn’t of use to cars if they can’t make hundreds of thousands of them.
they’re using the promise of better batteries to make people reconsider buying full electric vehicles now. I expect it to be exactly like fusion, always a few years away.
Commercial fusion is not a few years away, and I’ve never seen the claim apart from deranged individuals on Twitter. If everything goes to plan, commercial fusion won’t be here for a few decades.
What the claim may have been is experimental fusion, which does exist right now, we have generated power using fusion, and we even made more power than we put into it recently. It’s moving, but it’s slow, as planned for the last few decades.
And even that “more power than we put into it” comes with a big asterisk. The power being output by the laser is smaller than the power being output by fusion. Big lasers tend to be grossly inefficient things. We’ll need at least 10 times the output in order to generate enough to power the laser. That’s not even considering the power usage of the facility around it.
So, yeah, we’re at least a few years away from enough power for the laser to sustain itself, at least a few more to be able to run the facility and still have net power, and then at least a decade after that to get to commercialization.
As far as electrification goes, Toyota is virtually at the bottom of the list of car manufacturer . I’ll see it when I believe it.
F.U.D. Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt. A favorite tactic of IBM, then Microsoft, now Toyota. If you can’t compete, announce an upcoming “breakthrough” so customers will delay purchases from competitors
Yeah with car manufacturers the usual tactic is ‘concept’ cars of ‘the next model’ containing every single thing a consumer could wish for… which of course never get built.
The Prius was the first mass market car in the entire world that could drive on battery power. Sure, the range sucked, and they dropped the ball after that by failing to shift focus to hydrogen, but the fact is Toyota does have a history of strong innovation in this space and I could totally see them being the first to ship a car with a solid state battery.
