Toyota outlined on Tuesday a battery development drive aimed at reducing costs and increasing battery life. The automaker plans to spend $13.5 billion on battery development by 2030, with the goal of cutting the cost of the battery per vehicle by 50% compared to the Toyota bZ4X, the electric crossover the automaker plans to launch next year, said CTO Masahiko Maeda in a media presentation.
Starting from the bZ4X, Toyota aims to reduce the amount of electricity used per kilometer of driving by 30%, Maeda said. This will allow for a reduction in battery capacity, which alone should cut the cost per vehicle by 30%, he added. Other cost reductions will be achieved through changes in the material and structure of the battery.
Toyota is also targeting a long battery life. Starting with the bZ4X, the automaker believes it can limit range degradation to just 10% after 10 years of use.
“We will also aim to commercialize all-solid-state batteries,” Maeda said in the presentation. In June of last year, Toyota began testing a prototype vehicle powered by all-solid-state batteries on a test track, moving to public road tests in August, he said.
However, initial data showed that “short life” was a problem, Maeda said. He noted that development work will continue but did not confirm a deadline for the release of solid-state batteries in production cars.
This ambitious talk does not quite match what Toyota has been saying in the United States so far. Thus far, the automaker has outlined goals that essentially align with what would be required under California’s next-generation ZEV standards, aiming for 80% electric vehicles by 2035.
In addition to the bZ4X, which is set to go on sale globally in 2022, Toyota has at least one more electric model planned for the U.S. By 2025, Toyota wants 40% of its sales in the U.S. to be electrified models (hybrids, plug-in hybrids, and electric vehicles), expected to increase to almost 70% by 2030.
