Toyota announces a battery with a range of 1.200 km and 10-minute charge

Soon, the range of electric vehicles will no longer be a barrier as regards their purchase. Toyota claims that within four to five years its cars will be able to travel 1.200 kilometres on a single charge.

According to Toyota, it is possible for an electric vehicle to travel 1.200 kilometres on a single battery charge. Toyota claims to have designed a solid electrolyte battery that can achieve this range. It can be charged very quickly. Toyota says that in less than 10 minutes the battery can go from 10 per cent to 80 per cent capacity. This solid-state or semi-conductor battery technology replaces liquid electrolytes with their equivalent in solid materials.

Until now, many of the experiments on these batteries have focused on improving their longevity. While they perform as well as traditional models, are safer and even twice as dense and light, they still pose major stability problems. The movement of lithium ions during charging causes them to expand, then shrink in size, rapidly altering the overall chemistry of the battery. This limited number of cycles was their only major drawback, in addition to a high production cost.

Research laboratories have, however, found alloys that can solve this problem, but in any case, the cost of mass-producing remains a problem. Moreover, Toyota had initially decided to limit this type of technology to its hybrid cars. But now Toyota seems to have definitively resolved both the problem of stability and the cost of production.

The car maker intends to make this type of battery widely available in its electric range. However, this does not mean that we will see Toyota vehicles equipped with these batteries any time soon. Mass production is expected by 2027 or 2028 at the earliest. According to Toyota, these batteries should cost half as much, while being twice as light and half the size of current models.