Toyota Announces Future Battery Electric Vehicles Will Only Have 10-Minute Charging Time, Travel 745 Miles Before Next Charge

Toyota looks forward to making charging their battery electric vehicles (BEVs) easier and faster. According to a new report, the company plans to give their future BEV longer mileage per charge and shorter charging time.

Toyota Will Use Solid-State Battery Technology

Toyota announced this week that its future vehicles might be able to go 745 miles between charging stops and charge to full capacity in as little as 10 minutes thanks to solid-state battery technology, Newsweek reported. The Lucid Air currently has the greatest battery electric vehicle (BEV) range available. According to the Environmental Protection Agency's assessment, Lucid Air's luxury electric cars can go 516 miles between charges.

Like many other automakers, Toyota Motor Corporation has charged its engineers with developing more than only the next generation of electric vehicles (EVs). Future EV battery technologies are being examined, including cell composition, range, and recharge capacities.

The next step is solid-state batteries. Solid electrodes and solid electrolytes are features of solid-state batteries. Since these materials are made to be more energy dense, it will be possible to power the car with a smaller battery, which will reduce the weight of the battery on BEVs. These elements will increase the BEV's range.

Unfortunately, they show great potential but are not yet ready for widespread use. The use of solid-state technology in automobiles is relatively recent; the technology itself is not. Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory developed a novel class of solid-state electrolytes in the 1990s that caught the auto industry's attention.

Technology for solid-state battery cells has long been regarded as the Holy Grail. According to John Voelcker, an automotive reporter specializing in EVs for Car and Driver, Green Car Reports, thousands of engineers and billions of dollars in venture capital have made it sufficiently practical, scalable, and affordable for production vehicles. However, battery engineers will tell you that a promising breakthrough in a lab setting frequently fails to deliver in the real world.

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What's Intriguing In Toyota's BEV Claim?

According to Stephanie Brinley, associate director of research and analysis at S&P Global, one of the noteworthy aspects of Toyota's claim is the capacity to charge in just 10 minutes.

In some ways, having a faster charging system and a strong infrastructure to support it is more important than having a range of more than 700 miles. The range and charge time claims are complementary, but customers must know more about infrastructure and charge time.

If you have concerns like "Can I safely and securely charge when I need to and how long will it take?" can be addressed in a fashion that consumers can trust, the range question loses some of its importance.

Many automakers have set goals to transition to all-electric vehicles by 2030 or 2035. Others pride themselves on being "climate neutral," focusing on sustainability during the design, production, and useable vehicle lifecycle and beyond by 2050 or sooner.