Is it feasible that this could actually happen in 2027?
Everybody serious, except Tesla, has a solid-state battery program. Here's an overview of where various car makers are.[1] There are a few prototype cars running around on all solid state batteries now. The problem is developing a cheap production process. Most of the big players are saying first production vehicles in 2027, solid state technology takes over around 2030.
There's an interim "semi solid state" technology that's already in some cars. It's one of those stopgap ideas destined to go away, like "mild hybrids".
[1] https://insideevs.com/news/771402/every-solid-state-battery-...
[1] https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_to_use_solidstate_batteries...
There was a rumor a few months ago that Tesla had bought Quantumscape. But that deal does not seem to have happened. Quantumscape is still publicly traded. Ticker symbol QS. Up 350% this year. Latest deal is a partnership with Murata for ceramic separators. They made enough sample batteries to power a motorcycle in Dubai. All the serious players can make high-cost samples now.
[1] https://elonbuzz.com/elon-musk-announces-all-new-solid-state...
[2] https://www.topspeed.com/tesla-stand-on-solid-state-batterie...
Dalhousie/Jeff Dahn dry-synthesis lab [2]
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/tesla-to-buy-batt...
[2] https://www.autoevolution.com/news/tesla-backed-battery-rese...
"Toyota believes it will launch all-solid-state EV batteries by year-end 2027."
My understanding is that 2027 is wishful thinking, due to high manufacturing costs.
It cannot be understated what an overall improvement it would represent if the technology pans out.
Only exception is that they give themselves a bit more lead time "early 2020's" in 2017. Probably because they have an interest to delay competitors EV sales, while Elon is pumping FSD sales
Will be interesting to see which technology comes to market first
https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/toyota-claims-a-leap-that-w...
2017: "Toyota’s new solid-state battery could make its way to cars by 2020" https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/25/toyotas-new-solid-state-ba...
2020: "Toyota's game-changing solid-state battery en route for 2021 debut" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25400725
2023: "Toyota Touts Solid State EVs with 932-Mile Range, 10-Minute Charging by 2027" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36353474
2023: "Toyota Only Plans to Make Enough Solid-State Batteries for 10k Cars in 2030" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38374322
I don't see that for Schrödinger's FSD.
Whereas Tesla have been saying FSD is amazing and breakthrough technology for years now and yet and, as a novelty, it is, kind of. Still needs human intervention. And I wouldn't trust my family with it at all. ymmv
So, we're back at the heart of the basic criticism it's had for years. They've been selling this dud for years, and it's still not feature ready.
Schrödinger.
In Tesla's view, "full" is an antonym to "limited", where Autopilot designed to work on a limited class of roads. In this way, "full" was intended to describe the system's intended ability to perform the full task of piloting a vehicle, not that the system has achieved some unspoken threshold of engineering perfection. In its current state, FSD can perform complete drives without intervention almost every time. (Yes, "almost" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. But the same is true of some human drivers who hold driver licenses.)
And to be fair, it's important to disambiguate technical and regulatory achievements. It is "supervised" because "unsupervised" would necessarily mean Tesla's software is the legally licensed driver of someone else's privately owned vehicle, which is a situation regulators are nowhere near contemplating. And it would require a vastly different insurance product to what is currently sold by insurers.
No. Tesla simply lied. Tesla very specifically claimed it would outperform human drivers.
In 2016 Tesla claimed every Tesla car being produced had "the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver":
https://web.archive.org/web/20161020091022/https://tesla.com...
Wasn't true then, still isn't true now.
The software is perhaps not there yet. But that's not what they claimed.
Tesla doesn't: https://electrek.co/2025/01/29/elon-musk-finally-admits-that...
HW4 isn't good enough either. Tesla straight up lied to you. No point defending the lie.
Externalising the blame to regulators is pretty embarrassing, because regulations are flexible with respect to how well self driving cars work.
Why would Tesla be scared of having liability for a self driving car that drives better than humans? Shifting the liability to the driver who is merely sitting in the car and only exists for regulatory reasons and never controls the car is illogical in the case of the car never getting into an accident or violating traffic rules.
Additionally, it is still illogical even in the case of an accident as the driver did nothing to bring about the accident or traffic rule violation. Their existence as a backup can only prevent such things from occurring.
Assuming adversity from the driver is just one more reason to take control away from humans. E.g. the driver disengaged the self driving features to produce an accident on purpose as liability was shifted to Tesla.
Supervision appears to be extremely suboptimal for Tesla with no conceivable upside if we trust your word that regulations are holding them back from full self driving without the supervision disclaimer.
If anything, they have an incentive for locking out drivers from driving their cars manually. You should be paying for manual control instead of paying for full self driving.
It can drive anywhere a human can.
Of course the goal posts can always be moved so the current real FSD isn't actually "Full" because of some inevitable imperfection.
No, it can't drive "anywhere a human can".
Based on videos I've seen, FSD is absolutely fine with unpaved roads. My guess is it would fare as well as your average foreign tourist when placed in Delhi or Nairobi. But we can only guess.
As for driving on "lightly flooded" roads, this is an extremely foolhardy thing to do, especially in a normal passenger car, and if FSD refused to drive in that circumstance it would not be a mark against its abilities. Arguably a mark in its favour. Moving water can be orders of magnitude more dangerous than it appears. Even shallow standing water can conceal debris which could insta-destroy a tyre, or your suspension, or your coolant loop, or your fuel tank.
We have been trying to automate trucks for one or two decades but I'm not exactly willing to bet on it getting beyond the testing phase in a specific calendar year.
A good example is those Chinese unmanned delivery vans, that's real world results of current AI driving.
Which the Japanese government and Toyota have also been pushing hard for reasons that don't appear to make any logical sense.
The classic examples of "groupthink" used to be the Japanese Navy in WW2 but I think we have a new contender.
Their hydrogen fuel cell technology is very good for what is. It’s just not something many people need.
They’re not even in the same category. Tesla sells a feature called “full self driving.” It’s a fraud.
“We’re going to release a breakthrough EV in the kind of near future. Don’t buy an EV now” (instead keep buying our ICE vehicles!)
Getting very old at this point.
The best selling vehicle in the US is the RAV4, and not any EV.
You may be technically right because our policy is idiotic, and the chances of this happening unde the bush administration was zero.
But don't pretend this is some optimal engineering formula you've reduced in an economic journal.
It's also not straightforward (in the US at least) to replace gas taxes with electricity taxes. Electricity is a utility, while gasoline is a good. You can tax goods very easily. Taxing utilities, especially when it comes to "I'm only taxing THIS type of electricity tax" directly violates utility carrier regulations. We had a whole argument over net neutrality, and the foundation of the argument was literally "could you imagine if we charged electricity this way??"
So maybe you could do it with registration fees, but that's going to be MUCH harder on lower-income people. It's simple to pay a $.15 tax on your gas tank. It's very difficult to pay an extra $75 on your registration.
You're throwing out the EV fud list straight from the oil companies. You either don't understand hybrid vs Phev vs EV or are being mendacious
Toyota had record sales of 11.2 million in 2023. They're on track to set another sales record in 2025:
https://www.autoblog.com/news/nearly-900000-cars-sold-toyota...
It was to stop people buying other EVs.
https://www.toyota-europe.com/news/2022/prototype-corolla-cr...
Toyota's big enough that they can try everything. It isn't a conspiracy.
I have never seen a hydrogen filling station.
The amount of infrastructure required to build out a hydrogen filling network is astronomical, and it has absolutely no chance of working. They’re just saying random stuff so you don’t buy an EV today.
If you don't want to build infrastructure then the easy solution is to stick with petroleum. That infrastructure is already built out.
> They’re just saying random stuff
No, they're doing research and development.
> so you don’t buy an EV
Toyota's a big car company. Toyota sells lots of different cars.
Toyota sells BEVs. You can buy a Toyota BEV right now.
- When they make announcements about a new supercar they're going to make, it's not to stop you from buying a Lambo. Car companies have to be seen to be working on something new; it generates PR, which generates goodwill, advertises the brand, and helps buoy the stock price.
- Buy an ICE vehicle now because they might make an EV later? Why not buy an EV now and then buy Toyota's EV later? Either way you're buying two cars??
They’re making announcements about something they hope they can invent, but that doesn’t exist. They’re telling you to hold off on purchasing today.
Almost all of the EVs are losing big money, bilions.
Even from a moral highground, the world is in no shortage of EVs, and they do sell PHEVs.
Whether they can smoothly transition to a full BEV future, that's another story, nobody knows.
They could very well have a full decade of gas car gold rush ahead.
But it's a Chinese company's platform they build on with Chinese batteries.
Kind of embarrassing really, that even when they sell EVs they can't build them.
† https://www.motortrend.com/news/toyota-akio-toyoda-electric-...
A lot of other companies are saying 2027-2028 so I'm thinking this could be the real deal.
Given it was over 20 years before Lithium batteries were first proposed and when they were commercially viable, we're probably being a bit harsh.
I don't even take new battery tech claims seriously AFTER a company begins shipping product. Wake me up when a new battery has been independently tested, the economic viability has been demonstrated, and factory capacity is ramping up to supply enough product to make a meaningful impact in the market.
“Toyota’s all-solid-state EV battery plans officially gained approval from Japan’s Ministry of Trade and Industry (METI). The certification gives Toyota the green light to develop and build next-gen EV batteries as part of Japan’s plans to boost domestic supply.”
Seems like it’s more legit this time.
They got two. And the Olympics were postponed.
A lot of companies will say a lot of things because it boosts the stock price and costs them nothing. They need good PR to help convince all the parties involved to complete the deals they need to get all this done.
The current battle for electric batteries is cost, not energy density.
LFP and sodium batteries are less dense that non-solid state lithium ion batteries but they are good enough to be used in standard version of Model 3 or Model Y and those are best selling ev cars.
Energy density is good enough, durability is good enough, what matters is lowering the price.
A battery with higher energy density but without lower price is not competitive.
Toyota still doesn't have a high volume electric car. Lack of batteries is not the cause of that but Toyota's own decisions.
Even if they get a slightly better battery, they still need to design a good ev car and that's way more to that than replacing gas tank and engine with a battery and motors.
Furthermore, you don't just mass produce ev batteries. Panasonic was struggling and loosing money for several years making batteries for Tesla. When Tesla decided to make batteries themselves, it also took them years to go from 0 to a significant number of batteries.
Idemitsu doesn't seem to make ev car batteries so I don't see how the could possibly have meaningful production in 2 years.
Furthermore, going solid state is only an incremental improvement of a component of the battery. It has the most economic value when applied at scale. So it would make most sense to license this technology to existing high volume manufacturer like LG Chem or CATL.
The realities of volume production vs. cost make it very unlikely you can just compete with CATL and LG Chem making 1/100 of their volume even if your battery is slightly better.
Lithium extraction has a tiny fraction of the environmental footprint compared to the global oil industry. It's a bit of a straw man argument to complain about the environmental credentials of batteries when the alternative is much worse.
But even if they're not cobalt-free and not cheaper, if Toyota have managed to combine NMC's energy density with LFP's safety profile and cycle life, that's a win already.
johnea•3mo ago
The capabilities of solid state batteries are just one example of the wide open opportunities for EVs that internal combustion can just never have.
While storage, and generation, of electricity has a huge ability to evolve and advance, gasoline and other petro products have an inherent amount of chemical energy per volume that can never be changed.
An EV with 1000 mile range is in the mid-term future, while here in the US we'll be focused on delivering the world's largest coal fired pickup truck 8-/
rasz•3mo ago
jfengel•3mo ago
If they had a hydrogen source for cheap, it would have been so much easier to just transform it into hydrocarbons. They're easier to store, easier to transport, and all of the existing structure is already built around it. Just keep on making the same engines you always have.
They already had a lead in battery-powered hybrids. It would have made so much more sense to lean into that, first into plugin hybrids and then plugin-only.
Hydrogen is such an obvious dead end, and everybody sees it but them -- the ones who should have been the first to figure it out. I just don't get it.
formerly_proven•3mo ago
I think the answer is really simple and basically the same as for where this headline comes from: FUD about EVs so people instead buy a Toyota gas car while pretending to be eco.
> They already had a lead in battery-powered hybrids. It would have made so much more sense to lean into that, first into plugin hybrids and then plugin-only.
That was twenty years ago though.
Just like twenty years ago "hydrogen cars" sounded like a possible solution.
filloooo•3mo ago
hvb2•3mo ago
altcognito•3mo ago
bdamm•3mo ago
Also EV motor homes, but that's basically just a bus.
childintime•3mo ago
I'd wish for solar panels mounts as standard for EV vans, with potentially full roof coverage.
dghlsakjg•3mo ago
Max charge rate is frequently dependent on battery size. A larger battery can absorb more power per unit of time. If you get 50% range in an hour of fast charging, the 1000 mile range car is much better for long distance travel.
Having to only charge your car every 1k miles opens up a lot of use cases. People living in places where they have to street park, and can't charge at night, might feel a lot better about electric cars if they only have to charge once a month.
Towing range is a major issue with the current generation of electric vehicles.
Auxiliary power uses are also appealing to a lot of people. 1000 miles of range can also translate to 500 miles of range and 100kw of power. Think about ambulances, cop cars and other service vehicles that just run their engines for an entire shift to keep the electricity flowing. Plenty of people travel with generators for personal and professional reasons. No need if your car has power to spare.
SoftTalker•3mo ago
adrianmonk•3mo ago
However, some people have extra money to spend, and range is a meaningful upgrade. With gas vehicles, there are already people who get a much bigger vehicle than they really need and are willing to pay way more for the vehicle and for fuel. I don't see any reason not to expect the same with electric cars.
johnea•3mo ago
The main point: electric storage and generation has a huge capacity for innovation and improvement, versus petro combustion's fixed chemical energy.
The 1000 mile range is just one example of that capacity for improvement, and somehow that's the only thing anyone could comment on?