Nissan DOUBTS Toyota Solid State electric car batteries will arrive any time soon

A Nissan Technology VP, Takao Asami, believes that plans by Toyota and others to deliver solid state batteries for electric cars by the early 2020s just won’t happen.

As far back as 2011 we revealed that Toyota is developing solid state batteries for electric cars, with the promise they could deliver a 600-mile range, charge quickly and be cheap to produce.

There wasn’t a whole heap of updates over the years following, but in 2016 we asked if Toyota had cracked the 600-mile solid state battery when reports from Japan said Toyota were planning a range of electric cars, despite dropping plans for any BEVs in 2012.

Fast forward a year and we learnt that Toyota are indeed planning a range of electric cars with solid state batteries, and three months ago Toyota confirmed plans for an all electrified range, including Lexus, and 10 new electric cars.

And it’s not just Toyota which believes solid state batteries are on the cusp of being viable in electric cars, but Fisker and Dyson too, and even cautious BMW are getting in to the mix.

But one notably quiet voice on the solid state battery issue has been Nissan – perhaps the car maker with the most experience in BEVs – but now a senior Nissan Technology VP, Takao Asami, has questioned just how viable Toyota’s plans are.

Speaking to Automotive News, he said he believed solid state batteries are still in the initial phase of research and that there is zero chance of them arriving commercially before at least the middle of the next decade.

Asami conceded that solid state batteries were working in the lab, but said that’s a long way from making them commercially viable. In fact, Asami asserted, there’s still more room for lithium ion batteries to progress, with at least two more generations of improvements to come before solid state batteries are viable.

So who’s right? Nissan or Toyota?