In September, Toyota offered the world a glimpse into the company's future. In an 11-second YouTube video, it displayed a modern four-door car cruising down a test track. The most important upgrade was the tagline emblazoned on the car's right side: 'Powered By All-Solid-State Battery.' In recent years, car giants such as Toyota, Ford and Volkswagen have been trying to overcome the shortcomings of batteries that power electric vehicles by racing to produce a next-generation battery. Many compani
Pranshu VermaIn September, Toyota offered the world a glimpse into the company's future. In an 11-second YouTube video, it displayed a modern four-door car cruising down a test track. The most important upgrade was the tagline emblazoned on the car's right side: "Powered By All-Solid-State Battery."
The contest comes at a crucial time. Gas prices have skyrocketed, and climate change has accelerated efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions, increasing demand for electric vehicles. This has led to shortages of many minerals used in current electric-vehicle batteries, amid ethical concerns as they're often mined by adults and children in backbreaking conditions with little protection.
Lei Cheng, a chemist and material science expert at Argonne National Laboratory, said there's "no doubt" that solid-state batteries will replace lithium-ion batteries in the future. The new batteries, which would replace flammable liquid electrolytes with a solid layer of graphite, could be safer, reduce dependency on nickel and cobalt, and hold more energy in a cheaper way, she said, making them alluring to car manufacturers.
Volkswagen has invested $300 million in QuantumScape, a solid-state battery company also backed by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, aiming to bring the batteries to production by the middle of this decade. Ford and BMW led a $130 million investment round in a Colorado solid-state battery start-up called Solid Power, hoping to debut the technology around 2027. In January, Toyota announced it will put solid-state batteries in hybrid cars on dealership lots by 2025.
"We want to start by putting them in [hybrid] vehicles where we believe that they're both the most well suited in terms of lifetime, but also that will exercise them sufficiently so that as costs continue to come down, we can roll them out in the future" in fully electric vehicles, he told the Autoline Network.
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