Toyota boasts new battery technology with 745-mile range and 10-minute charging time — here’s how it may impact mass EV adoption::The potential to significantly reduce pollution could be huge.
That’s great. Build it. Until this hits the showroom floor, I don’t care. Electric cars have been consistently 10 years away for the past like 30 or 40 years. For every other automaker, electric cars are now here today. Except Toyota, where they are still 10 years away. And for me, The electric car isn’t 10 years away, it’s parked in my driveway. So as far as I’m concerned, this is all just press bullshit to try and discredit current EVs and buy Toyota time to continue pushing gas and hybrid.
And as for the whole thing of people not buying EVs, that’s twofold. One, people are hurting right now, and people in bad economic condition get really price conscious. The second gas prices go up they’ll all be trading their gas guzzlers for EVs. Second, the simple fact is a lot of EVs on the road kind of suck. And other than Tesla, the public charging infrastructure is awful so if you like road trips you’re going to have a bad time. Given that in another year other automakers will mostly be switching to Tesla charge ports, unless you’re buying a Tesla there’s some logic in waiting.
I bought a car last summer, and I had my wallet out ready to buy an EV. I had only 2 criteria:
- Must seat at least 6 (I have 4 kids)
- Must be under 100k CAD (a bit beyond my budget, but I’m willing to stretch to avoid gas)
Guess how many models were available? 1 - the Tesla Model Y, 7-seater option. And I did order one, but they cancelled my order because they stopped selling that variant in Canada.
So that’s why I didn’t buy an EV. Manufacturers can’t be arsed to build a car that meets my very simple criteria; they prefer making another boring 5-seater crossover or yet another humongous “luxury” SUV. I want a minivan, dammit.
You’re not wrong. A model X would also fit your bill, but last summer they were stupid expensive. Prices have come down a bit. I would suggest buying any car consider the total cost of ownership, not just ‘stretch a bit to avoid gas’. Gas cars need oil changes, tune-ups, belt replacements, and various other maintenance. EVs require very little. Also, if you need more than 5 seats, don’t shun the ‘humongous’ SUV. You’re literally in that market.
But for someone in the market last year, you were pretty fucked even I will admit.
I do wish somebody was making an electric minivan. Closest I’m aware of is Chrysler has a Pacifica plug in hybrid. And now there’s the ID.Buzz coming out soon.
The Pacifica is actually what I ended up buying.
EDIT: And yeah, looks like Model X has come down in price, but it’s still 110k$ CAD (was 140+). Somebody else mentioned the Kia EV9 which actually has a price now, and it’s very interesting. I’ve talked to my local dealer and they’ll call me back when they have one available for test drives.
Also, if you need more than 5 seats, don’t shun the ‘humongous’ SUV. You’re literally in that market.
Humongous, perhaps. Luxury, not really. I’m just not the type of guy who needs a special type of car to feel manly; minivans actually feel more useful to me.
Oh yeah I hear ya. You’d like a big SUV like a Tahoe or Suburban, you don’t need fancy leather seats and big touchscreen and a little motor that massages your butt while you drive (and you don’t want to pay for that stuff).
Not much in that regard available these days…
Actually, no. I’d like a Dodge Caravan or Odyssey. The Tahoe and Suburban are way too big on the outside, but they’re actually very small on the inside.
You’re on point about the fanciness, though. I got TVs in my current car (Pacifica Pinnacle, it’s the only model they had), and they’re awful. For the cost of that option, I would’ve been much better off buying a bunch of iPads.
I’ve been looking at the EV9 and people who have driven it seem to love a lot about it, except for one thing. The incessant beeping. It has safety features that beep about everything and often you don’t know why it’s even doing it. You can turn it off but they only stay disabled till you turn off the vehicle. next time you get in bEep BEep beEp.
My wife would end up lighting it on fire and pushing off a cliff she would be so annoyed. If there is no way to permanently disable it then hard pass.
LoL. There’s a Google tech talk where the guys doing the autonomous driving DARPA challenge talk about how slow and awful military contractors are. Then they say “we just took off the shelf gps systems (you know, the ones the military contractors spent decades designing and building) and built something that works! Look how much faster the private sector is!”
That talk is 15 years old now.
Oh for sure. There’s a whole industry of them, and they all milk Uncle Sam for everything the taxpayers worth with little need to produce real result. Look at SpaceX versus SLS. Well it’s true that SLS design was handicapped by Congress requirement to use old shuttle parts, the result is still a giant boondoggle that is very late, tens of billions over budget, and best case is going to cost $2 billion for each launch (which can only happen once every year or so). Meanwhile, all SpaceX expenditures to date including development of Falcon 1, Falcon 9, Starship, Super Heavy, Merlin, Raptor, and construction of an entire spaceport in Texas, have cost them by most estimates less than Boeing took to design one rocket. SpaceX is launching Falcon 9 twice a week. And to compete with SLS, once Starship is online it could theoretically launch once a day for $20 million rather than once a year for $2 billion.
Private sector can be efficient, but only when their own bottom line depends on efficiency. When there’s cost plus contracts involved, it really doesn’t.
The impact they’re hoping it’ll have is people will think this isn’t the right time to buy an EV so they’ll keep buying Toyota gas cars. That’s why Toyota is constantly in the news regarding battery tech - it’s to support their fossil fuel business.
I pretty much agree. To prove this theory wrong they have to produce a working prototype with those capabilities.
This is such an absurd take about Toyota, who has been putting some of the most reliable and fuel efficient vehicles on the road for decades. Just because they haven’t jumped all in into an emerging market doesn’t mean they secretly want to build a bunch of gas guzzlers and keep people hooked on gasoline.
This battery tech has the potential to revolutionize anything containing a battery just like lithium ion batteries did when we were still stuffing D-cell batteries into everything. It’s a worthy endeavor and all these comparisons to failed gimmicks from other industries are BS.
Toyota, who has been putting some of the most reliable and fuel efficient vehicles on the road for decades
That’s kind of my point - they want to keep doing that and they can see the market rapidly moving away from them, so they’re trying to make it stop.
Solid state battery tech is indeed a worthy endeavor, I just don’t believe the company to actually deliver it will be Toyota. Judging from the woeful efficiency of their BZ4x they’d need advanced battery tech to get similar range as other EVs.
The market isn’t rapidly moving away from them, though, as they’re some of the most popular vehicles on the road. Currently, EVs only make up a single digit percentage of new cars sold in the US and the infrastructure isn’t there to support mass adoption yet.
By all accounts, the BZ4x is a piece of crap and I suspect it’s little more than a light test-bed and compliance car similar to the HHR and PT Cruiser in their day. Toyota developed it with Subaru so they could split the cost and have something in the segment even if it’s underwhelming. They’re likely waiting for other manufacturers to iron out all the EV kinks along with further developing their battery tech before committing to any real design. Being conservative in their designs is what they’ve done for decades and has served them well thus far.
The market hasn’t gone far yet, but it is moving. Toyota’s ten year forecasts will all have DOOM written across them in a 48 point red font.
There’s quite a few places planning on banning internal combustion engine vehicles by 2035, and that’s Toyota’s entire business. And vehicle design and production timelines are long - the amount of time before the wave of bans come in is getting close to the amount of time it takes to get a vehicle from initial idea to mass deliveries.
Yeah, it’s a possibility but I’m incredibly skeptical that the bans will actually be implemented by those dates. It’s real easy to make a claim about the future, but it’s another to actually follow through with it. At the pace charging networks and grid upgrades are rolling out, I don’t think we’ll be ready even 20 or 30 years in the future.
More likely that they’re trying to hedge their bet on their hydrogen fuel cell technology that they’ve heavily invested in. It’s actually fairly impressive.
And how do you produce hydrogen? Either with methane (producing tons of co2) or by wasting tons of electricity with hydrolysis. BEV is the superior technology in all aspects but one: recharge time.
“The company has estimated that vehicles boasting solid-state batteries could be available starting in 2027 or 2028.”
Could be available a few years from now? Wake me up if that actually happens.
2010 investigating solid state
2013 mentions working on solid state
2017 ETA commercialize by Early 2020s
2019 Will establish a joint venture with Panasonic by 2020 no ETA on batteries
2023 June commercialization in 2027-2028
Note that further interviews state: limited production starts in 2027 The 745 and 10 min charging are worded as “could enable” IE will NOT be in the 2027-28 initial release.
They also plan to introduce it in hybrids first.
Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me eight times, I’m an absolute moron for believing Toyota’s bullshit once again.
Cool, do trains next. Mass transit is the answer to transportation needs. We need: Electric bikes with a 250 mile range. Electric busses and trains. Neighborhood charge stations. Shared neighborhood battery packs piwered by solar.
We can build a better future.
Trains are easy enough to electrify with current technology, no need for batteries.
It still blows my mind that Toyota single-handedly made hybrids a very successful thing and yet squandered that position to Elon effing Musk. Toyota could’ve been THE market-leader for EVs while still making a killing with the Prius and ICE cars. They’d have a solid lock in all markets.
Toyota has one of the best reliability reputations of any automaker and yet anyone in the EV market (like I was recently) passes them over because they have zero models to sell. Instead of parlaying the Prius’ R&D into a viable EV too, they’ve left money on the table. Hyundai has gone all in and is selling a ton of EVs. I see more of theirs / Kia’s on the road than anything else (besides teslas).
These “breakthroughs” are Toyota “Full-Self Driving next year!” fluff and I’ll believe it when it’s shipped and performing.
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Available in 2027 or 2028. I might be in the market around then, though I’m sure they’re gonna push it to the luxury brands first as an upgrade.
Dude, Toyota is bullshitting like this for the last 20 years exactly for the reason you’ve written.
Yeaaahh, I’ll press x to doubt, yet again.
First off, 745 miles range on a battery is a weird thing as batteries don’t drive. Cars, bikes and the such do, batteries use mAH for example.
Second, any “revolutionary batter” is bullshit. Why? Because I’ve seen about 3625 revolutionary new batteries in the past 30 years, and 99.99% of them have been bullshit.
Batteries are pretty much at the upper level of what’s possible with batteries as we currently have them, so either we switch to something revolutionary as antimatter batteries or something else esoteric, or wel’ll be happy to add 5% to what we already got.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for this but I remember reading a comment on here a while back saying that to get that kind of energy jammed into a battery that quickly you’d need a cable as thick as a telephone pole to keep it from glowing like a toaster coil.
Nah that’s bullshit.
Interstate powerlines are like half an inch and they carry several orders of magnitude more power than you’d ever need to quickly charge a car battery.
EV charge cables are thick because a lot of them contain several wires which all need to be electrically shielded from each other (which is generally done by maintaining a physical gap between the actual wires). Part of that is just because we have multiple generations of EV charge technology and the new standards are backwards compatible with the old standards… so a lot of the wires in the cable are not even used when you charge your EV.
Yes but that’s 10s of thousand volts AC power at a reasonable current. We’re talking DC at a couple hundred volts and an extremely high current.
