Toyota Claims Solid-State Battery Has 745 Mile Range, 10 Minute Charging Time -...
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Toyota Claims Solid-State Battery Has 745 Mile Range, 10 Minute Charging Time
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CleanTechnica readers, being the well-informed people they are, are aware that the leap from the laboratory to commercial production is often long and difficult. If Toyota has made progress in that area, that is indeed something to be celebrated. But once again, we have to emphasize, that is a big "if." Nevertheless, our readers will want to know some specifics, things like energy density, charge and discharge rates, the number of charging cycles possible, how the batteries perform in cold temperatures, what they are made of -- things like that. They have been trained over many years to be skeptical of announcements such as this one. After all, companies like QuantumScape have been making similar promises for almost a decade, and we are all still waiting for that company to get its batteries into production.
David Bailey, a professor of business economics at the University of Birmingham, told The Guardian that if Toyota's claims are accurate, it could be a landmark moment for the future of electric cars. "Often there are breakthroughs at the prototype stage but then scaling it up is difficult. If it is a genuine breakthrough it could be a game changer -- very much the holy grail of battery vehicles." Congratulations to Bailey for using two of the three most trite phrases about new technology in one sentence. Sharp-eyed readers will notice that even with this solid-state battery news, Toyota still has modest goals for its battery-electric cars. It plans to manufacture 3 million of them a year by 2030 -- half with solid-state batteries.
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After spending years doggedly chansing hydrogen combustion engines as the way of the future, with an unwillingness to let go of their admittedly fantastic ICE engineering heritage, it's good to see they are hedging their bets with electric vehicles. If they can come up with an electric Prado equivalent with reasonable range (say 500k) with a price tag that's close to the petrol and diesel offerings, i'll be in the queue to buy one.
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Did you not read the article? They're still also doing hydrogen.
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Did you read the comment? He said hedging their bets, not switching entirely.
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Uh, no. They were chasing HFCVs as the way of the future. They partnered directly with PACCAR and also joined a fuel cell partnership [h2fcp.org] with a majority of other major automakers.
This is still brain damaged but makes a lot more sense than hydrogen combustion engines, like the ding-dongs at Cummins are pushing [cummins.com].
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From the quoted bits, it doesn't seem like they've achieved any such breakthrough.
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The source appears to be the Financial Times in direct communication rather than a public press release. They aren't known for blindly making shit up, but likewise there's been no broad public information released here.
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Yeah Slashdot linked the wrong article. The cleantechnica one is here:
https://cleantechnica.com/2023... [cleantechnica.com]
The Guardian article referenced is here:
https://www.theguardian.com/bu... [theguardian.com]
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As that promise also never materialize after being endlessly hyped in the media.
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I can't read GP's mind, but mostly when people talk about the thin film revolution that never happened, they're talking about flexible panels.
We can't have flexible panels because of microcracking of the plastic layer on top. That's what killed nanosolar, for example.
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One commenter there pointed out you just have to go back over their announcements:
In 2017 Toyota announced a Solid State Battery would be on sale in 2020
In 2020 they said it would be here for 2022
2023 they have same announcement again, this time for 2025.-
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Good find.
Though, these are not totally out of line with this announcement. There they said prototype by "next year", which they did unveil, and "sell an electric vehicle equipped with a solid-state battery in the early 2020s". So 2026 doesn't fully qualify as early 20s.
Here's another short summary of the state of things, a year ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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2009 they already had a revolutionary new LiIon technology that would revolutionize electric and hybrid vehicles. I have not seen a revolution come from Toyota after 2009. I have from Tesla.
https://twitter.com/KetanJ0/st... [twitter.com] -
They sound like Elon Musk.
The numbers are interesting.
600 mile range, say 130kWh based on 65kWh cars hitting 300 miles. Charge time 10 minutes, let's assume that's the standard 10% to 80% charge, so 91kWh into the battery. Say 10% losses, being optimistic.
That's 546kW rapid charging. Not unreasonable, but there are some caveats. To sustain that speed for even 10 minutes you will need a water cooled cable. CCS2 connector, NACS probably won't cut it. And the battery will need to be pre-conditioned to the righ
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Sorta like the 50 years of predictions that the climate apocalypse is nigh.
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Oh, that awful, awful word.
and believed it could now make a solid-state battery with a range of 1,200 km (745 miles) that could charge in 10 minutes or less and would be simpler to manufacture than a conventional lithium-ion battery.
and believed it could now make a solid-state battery with a range of 1,200 km (745 miles) that could charge in 10 minutes or less and would be simpler to manufacture than a conventional lithium-ion battery.
and believed it COULD now make a solid-state battery with a range of 1,200 km (745 miles) that could charge in 10 minutes or less and would be simpler to manufacture than a conventional lithium-ion battery.
Much like anyone who claims he COULD satisfy three beautiful women in bed at once, "do it or shut the fuck up."
I grew numb to fantastic masturbatory announcements of the next super amazing battery technology that would never materialize around 2010... The only one recently that I have the slightest belief in is the sodium-ion battery, because the manufacturing plant that turns them out in volume actually exists and commercially available products have been announced for sale.-
To be fair, there have been a bunch of battery advancements in the last 15 years which are shipping in products you can actually buy right now. It isn't all vaporware.
Toyota's announcements though, they're always just an excuse for not doing EVs yet. The technology they need is always coming really soon, any day now. And Toyota's imaginary technology is always so much better than everybody else's current technology, so it'd be a shame to switch to EV right now, you should just keep driving on fossil fuels u
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I suspect it is corporate embarrassment. They don't to admit they backed the wrong horse.
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Come on, they have the bz4x. Sure you can't buy one here yet but apparently they have sold some somewhere. Take a look at it. It has the styling of a brick, which I guess is the latest tend. It must be good, right? I mean all the Toyota fan boys tell me so and option of a Tesla owner is automatically suspect.
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With the entire world banning ICE cars, Toyota better hurry on the EVs, or they won't have anything to sell in any market.
This is overall a good thing. If it takes a ban and people having to commute on bicycles to keep the environment from collapsing, so be it. People should have started buying EVs five years ago.
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No single improvement to batteries has given even a 10% gain in capacity or 10% reduction of charge time - and those types of gains usually aren't the stories that news organizations pick up.
It's the claims of 50%+ more capacity and/or 50%+ less charging time that make the news, and so far, those have all been vaporware. This one follows the same pattern as the vaporware - vagueness over what the method is, focus on the advancement in one single aspect without mentioning any of the other massive issues in t
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I once satisfied three ugly ones. Does that count?
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A lot is happening in batteries, and solid-state is where most of the cutting edge is. Here's a link to one recent review of emerging battery technology https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]? It focuses mainly on robots, which require smaller and lighter batteries, but that's were advances are needed to get 745-mile charging ranges are.
That said, it's going to take time to develop the technology and start manufacturing it.
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We have been hearing about all kinds of "battery breakthrough" in the news around once a few months for years. I will believe it when they actually put such vehicle in the market where people can actually buy one. Everything else is just vaporware.
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True, but usually those come from some university lab or a no-name start-up with a process that works fine in a lab but can't be adapted to mass manufacture. This is coming from Toyota so I think that it may warrant a closer look than usual.
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The truth is there have been continuously incremental battery improvements for the past 20 years or more, those added up to the point where electric vehicles are practical and start to become affordable. Today you can buy an EV that, compared to the original Tesla Model S of 10 years ago, drives 50% farther and costs 3 times less.
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Normally, I would shrug this off as yet another start-up from Silly Valley trying to get funding. But Toyota is a company with a good reputation as being conservative in their development and honest in their proclamations. I believe they can and will do this, and if the world can serve the demand for electricity by building more nuclear power plants, this will be the true threshold of widepsread adoption of electric vehicles.I'd short Tesla if I played that market.
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Not really. Toyota was completely obliterated in the US and foreign markets by Tesla. It might be that they, Honda, Acura, and most Japanese auto makes will suffer the same fate as Packard or Studebaker, where they refused to retool and keep adjusting to what customers want.
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No, really.
I could do with 100km of range. LiFePo4 would be more than adequate for the task, I think. At only 100km of range, it would be much smaller and lighter and wouldn't cost an arm and a leg.
Now before I go to what I really am looking for that isn't available, let me say that I usually am not representative of the average customer... Somehow I manage this in most aspects of my life so yeah, what this basically is is my personal rant because nobody caters to my desires.
What I lack is a simple car. There are a LOT of annoyances with modern cars that my asperger brain just cannot tolerate, especially given the prices of these things. Driving assistants work sometimes better, sometimes worse depending on manufacturer. I want to be able to turn them off individually. I don't want touch controls. I don't want piano black interior. I don't want a ginormous iPad in the center of my car.
I am completely content with a car that has 2010 non-luxury levels of amenities. If the mirrors and seats can be adjusted electrically, that'll be enough. I don't need heated seats. I have never used mine even once. I don't need in car entertainment. If I have a space for my phone with a USB-C charger, in even an AUX port would do. I could attach a Bluetooth bridge myself. I don't want in car navigation that is har dto update. I don't want my car to need or even have GSM connectivity. AT ALL,
What I want from a car is a responsive gas pedal, comfortable and quiet interior, enough space to take the family of four on vacation and sometimes go shopping at the DIY stores. I would like it to be able to haul something too.
I would like bird's eye parking assistance and cruise control. Adaptive? Yeah, could be nice but I won't die without it.And I want to be able to interact with my entertainment and climate controls with honest to go buttons.
0-100km/h in under 7 seconds is plenty, 100km range is okay. Price far under 60k CHF.
I feel like most newfangled gadgets only inflate the price but do very little to enhance comfort and fun.
Granted, ours is a family car and while the Mazda CX-9 guzzles 14l per 100km, it gets filled up only every two to three weeks. So yeah, certainly not standard usage. And I get that nobody will make a car for just 5000 people worldwide but I hope it's also understandable why I will not spend 60k plus on a car that annoys me when driving.
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I actually could not, as my daily commute is zero on the car (I either work from home or take the bicycle), but on weekends, I have about 500 miles to drive.
In general, daily trips of less than 20 miles to the same places again and again cry for public transport and not for a car.
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A Nissan Leaf might be a good option for you. It seems like they are phasing that model out, as they stopped selling the largest battery version in the UK. But the 40kWh one is more than enough to meet your range needs.
It seems to tick all the other boxes. The infotainment can be ignored and has an off button that blanks the screen. Physical controls for everything. Birds eye parking cameras. Relatively simple and reliable vehicle, easy and cheap to service, and you can do a lot of it yourself.
For hauling y
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Sounds like you could drive a Leaf. They made a car for you already!
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You kids with your fancy horse powers, in my day we took our time getting up to speed. Why I remember my sporty 84’ Toyota Corolla SR4, which with 100k miles on it was pushing 15 seconds to 100km/hr. I could still drive on freeways and people still love the car for drifting because it’s rear wheel drive. These newfangled electric horseless carriages zip back and forth too fast to see, why id likely snap my neck just hitting the gas. We were made to take our time getting places, just as god
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I own an electric Citroen Berlingo and it's exactly what you describe. Big, very useful interior, only basic like assist you can disable with a button, basic screen for Android auto, everything else controlled with buttons, basic amenities as options but you can get really bare bones models for like 25.000 Euro. 280km range.
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Congrats, I have the perfect car for you:
https://www.caranddriver.com/m... [caranddriver.com]
You'll have a ton of money left over too. Maybe also get a Miata.
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Ages ago I said Slahsdot needed that department, or an icon for it. Then at some point I decided that the battery icon was an excellent proxy for that, because almost all the "can't buy it yet" stories were battery related. Alas, no battery icon just a "transportation" one. Did I imagine it existed, or did they stop using it?
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It'll be ready just when fusion reactors come online.
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Any battery technology that benefits cars would benefit virtually every industry. Even if you couldnâ(TM)t compress the necessary packaging or charge / discharge control circuitry (aka bms), you could revolutionize home, grid, rv, and boat energy storage.
This article fails the basic sniff test: if a new battery technology existed that offered this kind of specific or volumetric energy density, it would be used for almost anything and everything, not just cars.
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Completely the wrong battery type for home and grid storage. EV batteries need to be very mechanically robust with lots of resistance to vibration, while being energy and power dense in a small light package. Grid and home storage can be very fragile and susceptible to vibration because it’s immobile, same with energy and power density, there is no space or weight requirements like a vehicle, instead the important metric is the total cost per kWh delivered over the lifetime of the battery. Lithium
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As much as I would love this to be true is has a bad smell to it. They are claiming a break thru that would put them at the lead in BEVs and their target is to wait 6 years to match the production volumes Tesla is close to reaching this year?
People have long said Toyota was so far ahead of Tesla they could take their time in doing BEVs but with Tesla knocking them off the #1 spot this year they have to know they are on track to become an also ran. So they announce serious game changer in battery techno-
>As much as I would love this to be true is has a bad smell to it.
It sounds like Goodenough's solid state glass battery that was announced in 2019. The breakthrough wouldn't be in the fundamental technology - it was working on a lab bench years ago - but in developing a commercially viable production method.
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Toyota's shares are traded on NYSE.
After the news broke (June 13), the shares rose by 6.7% and now are 1.9% higher than they were at the time of the announcement.
So, clearly, the investors consider it bullshit.
Anyway, I'd expect the SEC to have a look at it... -
Breakthroughs in battery tech are announce all the time, offering game-changing specs. So far, we've not seen much in the way of big leap-forward tech actually make it into the world. The promise of these sorts of batteries is always "a few years away". To be fair, this still seems better than fusion's "about 20 years away", which has been the position for about 50 years now.
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Really?
In 2012, the "long range" capability of a Tesla Model S was 265 miles.
In 2021, the "long range" capability of a Tesla Model S was 405 miles.
That's what happened in a single company in less than a decade. A company that was also quite busy fighting against an incessant political fight from the rest of the auto industry while creating next-generation space travel.
If you don't want to call that kind of advancement "game changing" on a planet infected with personal transport, then no one else should be
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Translation: We're tired of our stock getting pummeled by all those companies that announced EVs years ago and now are selling them, we're woefully unprepared due to incompetence of our CEO and board members but we'd like to stop the bleeding by announcing this ridiculous breakthrough.
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Another revolutionary battery claim. Yawn.
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Assuming that the laws of physics havenâ(TM)t been repealed by a green new deal⦠If the Tesla Model S which has one of the most efficient drive systems gets around 300 miles on a 100kwh battery, and you want to 750miles it stands to reason you will need at least 250 kWh, this means you will need to recharge at a rate of 1.6 MW. Thatâ(TM)s 72 homes (100amp) at max power draw real usage is probably closer to 150, so you are looking at a subdivision per vehicle. In order to make a super charger that can service say 8 cars you are easily looking at the power draw of a small American town. Guess we are going to need a lot more windmills.
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A large, inexpensive stationary battery, and scaled up conductors. There won't be 10 cars charging 24/7.
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For home charging, you wont be able to pump out enough amps to charge it that fast. For home charging level 2, 50amp & 220v, does it matter if it takes 10mins or 6hours to fully charge? The car is sitting for like 10hrs or more and you can plug it in every day if needed to top it off since its convenient. 10min charge at a commercial charger is a huge deal since you are spending similar time at a gas station for ICE.
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If this is true it is a game changer for electric cars.
It makes it possible for condo and apartment dwellers without their own charging stations to own electric cars.
It makes weekend road trips possible and takes care of reasonable work commutes
MANY charging stations will be needed. Can you imagine what things would be like at gas stations if it took each car 10 minutes to fill up?
Perhaps the way to go is to have a charging station in each parking spot at supermarkets, parking garages, and places o
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The responsibility is on the drivers to find charging stations, especially once ICE vehicles are booted off the roads. If they can't find them, well, might as well go with a ten speed until they figure that out.
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People would have to figure out how to stagger their recharging times more. It would be a real hassle, but not insurmountable.
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Parking lots with chargers and coffee bars replacing gas stations.
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It takes about 5-10mins to fill up a gas car. If you never spent 10min waiting, you dont have a big car. When is the last time you filled up a car? Gas stations welcome 10mins to make their real $$, the convenient store sales. Here is a thought: Gas stations put in commercial chargers too.
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So what's the charging rate? If the reasonable max at the moment is 250kW, can we assume this battery will need at least 1mW?
How will the power grid infrastructure deliver such high levels of usage? We should be upgrading our power lines now if we're expecting to support this type of load.
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Touted range is meaningless - tell us the battery capacity in terms of kwh, not range. I get it, using range is more of an attention grabber, but range is defendant upon so many other factors. Ah, putting a range estimate in makes the reader conclude that the battery is in a reasonable "normal" type vehicle. For example, Aptera has a battery that will go 1,000 miles(its a 100kWh fyi), so what's the big deal about Toyota's announcement? But who wants to drive an Aptera 1,000 miles in a single go?
Stick that
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Yeah. Like procrastination.
The procrastinator who only cares about range because it means they won't have to be bothered with plugging a cable in more than once a month?
You really seem to be overlooking the most obvious with today's generation. I've never seen so many drivers who will literally use their gas tank like they do their cell phone battery.
"What? The dash says I got 7 miles left and Google says I need to go 6...I'm fine..."
Not sure why I'm not already invested in a roadside assistance busine
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You are wrong, no one cares about capacity. You dont drive around a battery, you drive around an entire package known as a car. Aint no consumer want to do that math. If you market 1000mi range on a full charge from a car, thats all people care about. No one gonna try to swap one car battery into another car, unless you have a youtube channel.
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Talk is cheap. Until independent parties can verify it, this is nothing but vaporware from a big buy attempting to bully the smaller guys.
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Does it explode if it hears you talking about it?
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Let's make some assumptions here... a fairly dinky 50kW motor. Let's say it's consuming full power at 100km/h for 1200km. That's 12 hours of driving for a total energy expenditure of 600kWh. To charge that in 10 minutes means you put in 600kWh in 1/6 of an hour, which means the charging rate is 3.6MW. So what, your charger runs at 3600V at 1000A??
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I would never assume a company with Toyota's reputation and history of accomplishment is "doomed". Certainly they've got a lot of work to do to catch up.
On the other hand, just about anybody who's owned a Toyota will be in the market for another one, especially if they're looking for a "next generation" vehicle.
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> I would never assume a company with Toyota's reputation and history of accomplishment is "doomed".
History is littered with the corpses of companies people once heaped such praise upon. Just sayin'
=Smidge=
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You mean failed business history is littered with ignorance and arrogance. Also known as unnecessary voids in longstanding companies.
If Toyota can deliver on even half of their claims, it will (once again) be others playing catch-up due to the same arrogance and ignorance that allowed Toyota to come dominate in other countries 40+ years ago. They don't merely still make the Corolla. They still sell the shit out of them. And the reason for that popularity never changed.
If Toyota can actually pull off the
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These "Next-Generation" claims are specifically designed push people off buying EVs now and into those same last-gen Corollas for as long as possible.
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But are they true. If the claims are true, then it doesn't matter why they were made. (And you're probably right about that.)
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There is a very long way from battery chemistry proof of concept to affordable product. In order to scale up production and achieve the massive economies of scale necessary you need years of process development and hardcore engineering. Engineering the manufacturing process is likely to be significantly harder than the research which searches for a new battery type.
If that wasn't the case, solid-state batteries would already be the dominant product: they're not exactly a new idea any more.
Toyota has been
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Uhm, the only innovation of an electric car is it's battery. The electronics are pretty old school. Tesla's been dead for quite some time now. If Toyota did what they claim, they will pulverize the competition, and not only in the car market. But let's wait and see.
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Just how are they going to "pulverize" anyone if there stated plan is "It plans to manufacture 3 million of them a year by 2030"?
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Give it some time.
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So 3 million by 2030. How much time should I give them? 2040? 2050? Statistically speaking there is a good change I will be dead by then, so you are welcome to visit may grave and tell me I was wrong.
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The Model S was a strategic product for Tesla in the beginning - that's no longer the case. Model 3 and Model Y are Tesla's strategic focus now. That's why they increased the Model S price, to give it some margin head-room.
Model Y is the best-selling vehicle globally so far this year. A bit early to proclaim "Tesla's been dead for quite some time now", don't you think?
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If their claim is true (very big if) every manufacturer will want to use their battery technology.
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To charge a battery with that capacity in ten minutes is very impressive indeed. Gonna be hella current going into it in order to charge a battery with that energy density in that short a time Some serious watts.
We've been inundated with miracle batteries for a long time now. Most of the "Ehrmagherd!" batteries seem to violate things like the electrochemical series Standard Electrode potential or even the conservation of energy. Just one example, the quantum battery.
The self charging quantum battery so
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There have been a bunch of innovations in power electronics, motors, and control schemes.
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You mean completely incompetent with software [embeddedgurus.com], or some other part of their reputation? I don't want to buy an electric car, whose characteristics are largely controlled by software, from a company that can't get throttle by wire right.
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by Askmum ( 1038780 ) on Thursday July 06, 2023 @04:02AM (#63661020)
I agree. Toyota has the best hybrid platform you can get and they've had it since 1997. But they did not further it in relation to emission-free driving. They could have downsized their petrol engines and increased their batteries. Except for one plug-in model they have gone the other direction. They are now putting more petrol power in their cars and diminishing the role of the battery. They have got it backwards.-
That's not entirely wrong, but they're not doing it hard enough. There are only two kinds of hybrids it really makes sense to make: full plug-in, and mild. You get 80+% of the benefit of a full hybrid with a mild one. You get way more benefit with a hybrid if you can run it on electric all the time, except when you make a long trip, hence the benefit of a full hybrid. The only thing that makes no sense is a full hybrid you can't plug in... which they did exclusively for years.
Toyota is dumb AF, which is a g
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This doesn't seem right at all. "Mild" hybrids are basically just start-stop systems with maybe a bit of assist on acceleration and electric accessories.
Normal hybrids like the Prius have significant advantages in city driving conditions. I don't know of any car that has both options but whenever there is a mild hybrid version, it seems to make barely any difference compared to pure ICE.
Now plug-in is "better" but also costs more to buy and you have to recharge it every day. Great option if you can fit your
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First, that's 90% of where the benefit of a hybrid comes from. Even if they did literally nothing but charge the battery when the engine has excess output, provide seamless start-stop, and help you move away from a stop they would still provide massive benefit. But second, you're wrong, because they do in fact do regenerative braking. And if you aren't nailing the pedals all the time, then they can do a good job of it. Add in that a mild hybrid system weighs basically nothing (yes the alternator is replaced
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They're certainly late to the game but I don't think it's (necessarily) fatal unless they keep doubling down on hydrogen or something.
They have a huge footprint in hybrids and those are basically EV by now and capable of driving on electric only, and new models are often available as plug-ins. As batteries become cheaper and more energy dense, they can slowly put larger and large ones in until the engines aren't necessary.
As for the solid state tech, I trust them a bit more than some random startup claiming
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Hybrids still use gasoline. They are not EVs. That's what most Prius are.
Maybe you meant plug in hybrids - PHEVs, which possibly can be run on electricity without any gasoline.
In which case only the Prius Prime qualifies. The older Plug in Prius couldn't drive electric on freeway and doesn't really count.-
Any vehicle that uses an electric motor to drive the wheels is an EV (Electric Vehicle). Meaning that the E in EV refers to the electric motor based drivetrain.
In other words, the term EV is a class of electric vehicle but does not specify the power source. The only important criteria is the presence of an electric motor to drive the wheels.
To avoid confusion, use the term BEV to specifically refer to the EV type that has a traction battery to power the electric motor(s) which turn the wheels.
A BEV is an EV
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Toyota is much too late, has no real product yet. They are doomed.
Never underestimate a mega-corporation with a superabundance of cash that isn't being run by a complete space cadet with an extremely expensive and unhealthy Twitter obsession.
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by ukoda ( 537183 ) on Thursday July 06, 2023 @06:25AM (#63661172) Homepage
Um? You do know Toyota does not actually have "superabundance of cash"? In fact they are the most indebted company in the world? Not the most indebted auto manufacture, but the most indebted company of any type, at $220.57 B owed. Tesla has a $17 B surplus.
Where do you think Toyota are going to get the money to convert their factories from ICEVs to BEVs production?-
And Toyota booked a net profit of USD 18 billion in 2022. If this pans out for them they should be pretty OK. That being said, even if they mess the ICEVs to BEVs transition up does it matter? Given that Toyota Motors are Japan's most successful business I'm pretty sure that the Japanese government will bail them out of any FUBAR Toyota's leadership manages to construct so long as there is enough Taxpayer money in Japan to pay the bill. That's what politicians around the world always do. Governments around
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When it comes to profit it is worth researching how much profit each company makes on each car they sell. Tesla are doing well on that metric. Other US companies like Ford and GM are really marginal, or even loss making. I suspect that is why they are scale back plans. With Toyota only selling a few thousand bz4x it would be hard know what their per vehicle profit is.
Actually I would like to see the Japanese manufacturer succeed, I really want a 4 motor Suzuki Jimny. I have decades of Japanese vehic-
That's like comparing apples and oranges. Tesla makes luxury vehicles. Toyota for the most part makes no-nonsense cars aimed the general public. Toyota makes lower margins but make it up in sales volume. Similarly Apple makes luxury phones with a few not very inspiring medium segment models while Android is aimed at the wide majority of all users outside the luxury market right down to the budget models. Those are two completely different business models. What matters is how much profit a car company makes
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Toyota not only makes luxury Toyotas, they have an entirely separate luxury brand, in Lexus. Toyota is no different than any other mega-car company now: they focus on higher-end, higher-profit margin vehicles because no one makes any money off the entry level stuff anymore.
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Toyota is much too late, has no real product yet. They are doomed.
Toyota does have a range of EVs in Europe - both vans and a small SUV, the brilliantly named bZ4x [toyota.no].
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By all accounts the bz4x is rather meh and they have only sold 2,500 in Europe which tend suggest they are not taking the market by storm. Tesla sells 10 times that amount each month in Europe. To be fair it is better than the 0 bz4x they have sold here.
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I'm presuming Toyota makes their vehicles with right-hand steering for those of you in Europe, unlike Tesla which now makes only left-hand steering but conveniently provides a reacher [electrek.co] for you to use.
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The only parts of Europe that are left hand drive(right-hand steering as you put it) are The UK, Ireland, Malta and Cyprus.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org].
Tesla make Model 3 and Y in both RHD and LHD but currently only make the Model S and X in RHD(they did LHD versions in the past) so not great for India, UK, Japan, Australia etc.
I would guess that they do not sell enough S+X to justify LHD versions.-
Are you mixing up RHD with RHT?
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I think you have got your LHD and RHD terms swapped over.
RHD means Right Hand Drive so has the steering wheel on the right, vehicle drives on the left eg. UK
LHD means Left Hand Drive so has the steering wheel on the left, vehicle drives on the right eg. France
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250 kilowatt Superchargers are available more and more. We are at the point where if someone claims they can't find a charger, they might as well be off the road anyway, because of how common they are, even in rural areas.
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