Toyota about to dive in to electric cars – have they cracked the 600-mile battery?

Toyota is planning long-range electric vehicles according to a new report from Japan. Does that mean they’ve cracked the 600 mile solid-state battery?

Toyota has long been sceptical about electric cars, feeling, as we always have, that until battery technology can deliver range and refuelling comparable to ICE cars they will never be viable other than as city cars.

In fact, back in 2012, Toyota dropped plans for EVs to concentrate instead on hybrids, plug-in hybrids and hydrogen fuel cell cars. But that looks to be about to change.

According to the Nikkei business daily in Japan, Toyota are planning to set up a team next year dedicated to developing a range of electric cars with impressive range to be delivered to the market in 2020. So what’s changed?

Clearly, the move by other car makers to deliver EVs to the market, despite the market’s reluctance to embrace them, plays a part, as does the increasingly stringent average CO2 regulations being imposed on car makers. But we wonder if there’s more to it than that.

Back in 2011, Toyota declared it was working with the Tokyo Institute of Technology and the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization to deliver a new solid-state battery which would be capable of a 600-mile range in a car, charge quickly and be cheap to produce. They also said it would be ready to go by 2020, just as Nikkei is reporting Toyota will launch its long-range EVs.

A bit of digging reveals that earlier this year the team Toyota is working with revealed they had succeeded in creating lithium-based crystalline “superionic” materials which can act as solid electrolytes and deliver batteries which work from -30c to +100c, have high energy and power densities, low resistance, are easily stacked and with fast charging and long lifespan.

Not only that, but the batteries are easy to produce and easy to dispose of when they’ve reached the end of their useful life.

Of course, just like Graphene batteries, the Toyota research may be more ‘promising’ than practical, and turn out to be impossible to produce commercially.

But there must be more to Toyota’s huge change of heart on BEVs than just the competition and regulation. Mustn’t there?