Toyota was once the leader in electric vehicles. However, the Japanese car maker lost
the plot and squandered its lead. But now, Toyota is coming back for its lost crown with
its secret new solid state battery! Will the solid state battery return Toyota to the front of
the pack?
Join us as we dive into Toyota’s secret new solid state battery!
The story of Toyota and electric cars deserves to be taught in business classes for how
to avoid losing pole market position.
Toyota is the world’s largest automaker by volume and a distant second by market
capitalization to Tesla who is now in the exclusive trillion dollar club.
More than 25 years ago, Toyota set the ball rolling on its electric vehicle agenda when it
formed a team led by Takeshi Uchiyamada to build a car for the 21st century that would
reduce greenhouse gas emissions and other harmful pollutants.
This culminated in Toyota releasing the iconic Prius in 1997 around the time of the
Kyoto Protocol signing. The Prius was a hybrid electric car that went on to achieve fame
and even starred in a couple of films. Toyota reported it crossed the 15 million units of
the Prius sold mark last year.
Combined with the Lexus brand, Toyota had 44 hybrid vehicles on sale and by its
reckoning, had saved more than 120 million tonnes of CO2 emission from entering the
environment.
Naturally, with this early mover's advantage in electric vehicles and its nearly limitless
capacity as a car maker, you would expect Toyota to progress into a position where it is
giving Tesla serious competition. It even says on its website “Hybrid naturally leads to
BEV"
But that is not the case. Rather, the Japanese firm is scrambling to catch up with almost
everybody else!
So you may ask: What happened to Toyota’s electrification plan? Let’s quickly answer
that question before we move on to its solid state battery.
The company made more than a few mistakes, but the biggest was not setting its
priorities right. Instead of building on its overwhelming success with hybrid electric
vehicles and transition to purely electric models, Toyota viewed the hybrids are merely a
placeholder or stop gap until a better tech was ready.
That better tech was supposed to be hydrogen fuel cells, and it poured all its resources
into the development. However, it has not panned out as Toyota expected.
Much of the blame should be laid at the feet of the CEO, Akio Toyoda, who felt electric
vehicles did not deserve the hype they got. He even argued that electric cars did not
help the environment much, as they were charged by electric plants that produced
emissions. For these reasons, Toyoda steered Toyota away from working on battery
electric vehicles.
But now, the EV terrain has changed so much that Toyota is finding itself on uncertain
grounds. Tesla has shown the world that electric cars are viable, and governments all
over the world are using the carrot and stick approach to push electric cars by offering
incentives for buying them and also announcing bans of the sales of fossil fuel powered
cars.
In Norway, for example, after years of a dedicated push by the government, electric
cars now make up the majority of new car registrations. The UK is also banning the
sales of new light-duty ICE cars by 2030.
Toyota has now got the memo and is getting in on the program. Showing it is not the
world's largest vehicle manufacturer for nothing, Toyota has said it will release 15 new
purely electric models before 2025!
The first of the EV onslaught is the BZ4X, an electric SUV that Toyota will start selling
next year in its home country. It is based on the e-TNGA electric platform Toyota
developed in collaboration with Subaru. If you think the two companies are strange
bedfellows, Toyota is an investor in Subaru.
Just like Tesla, Toyota is not afraid to court controversy as the BZ4X will also have a
yoke for steering, although there is a version with the tested and trusted steering wheel.
The rest of Toyota’s electric vehicles, in the nearest future at least, will be based on the
same platform.
To power these electric vehicles, Toyota is working on its own battery. As a company
that has sold millions of hybrid cars, Toyota has deep expertise when it comes to
batteries, and holds thousands of patents based on it.
Toyota aims to slash the cost of its batteries by 30 percent or more, by working on the
materials used, and how the cells are structured, similar to what Tesla is doing with its
4680 battery.
Making the battery cheaper is not enough to catch up with other EV makers. So, Toyota
is also trying to improve the power consumption of the cars themselves. Starting with
the BZ4X, Toyota wants to cut the electricity used per kilometer by 30 percent.
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