Daily Management Review

Toyota Unveiled Its Grand Goals For EV Innovation And Innovative Battery Technology


06/14/2023




Toyota Unveiled Its Grand Goals For EV Innovation And Innovative Battery Technology
Future electric cars (EVs) would use high-performance, solid-state batteries and other technology from Toyota, the manufacturer announced on Tuesday. This strategic shift increased the value of the company's stock.
 
The Japanese giant's technical roadmap was the automaker's most comprehensive exposure of its strategy to compete in the rapidly expanding EV industry, where it has trailed behind rivals led by Tesla. It covered topics as diverse as next-generation battery development and a radical overhaul of manufacturing.
 
The strategy will be examined at an annual shareholders meeting the day before the plan is announced. Governance and strategy, including a gradual shift to battery EVs under former CEO Akio Toyoda, will be under close examination.
 
Shares of the automaker with the greatest global sales increased 5% on the day to 2,173 yen, the highest level since August.
 
Toyota stated that it plans to provide longer-lasting and quicker-charging lithium-ion batteries starting in 2026.
 
Additionally, it touted a "technological breakthrough" that addresses solid-state batteries' durability issues and claimed to be developing methods for mass producing those batteries, with commercialization targeted for 2027–2028.
 
Current liquid electrolyte batteries can't hold as much energy as solid-state batteries. Automakers and analysts anticipate that by solving a significant consumer concern: range, they will hasten the shift to EVs.
 
However, the price of these batteries will undoubtedly increase with time. Toyota will protect itself with more effective lithium iron phosphate batteries, a less expensive substitute for lithium-ion batteries that have sped up EV adoption in China, the largest auto market in the world.
 
Toyota announced that it would build an EV with a more effective lithium-ion battery at the upper end of the market, with a range of 1,000 km (621 miles). Comparatively, the longest-range Tesla Model Y, the best-selling EV in the world, has a range of around 530 kilometres, according to American standards.
 
According to Toyota, an electric vehicle with a solid-state battery would have a 1,200 km range and a 10-minute charge time. In contrast, the greatest network of its sort, the Tesla Supercharger network, provides the equivalent of 321 kilometres of charge in 15 minutes.
 
Toyota did not specify the proposals' anticipated costs or necessary investments.
 
To be more competitive, the automaker's engineers have been thinking about rebooting its EV strategy since last year.
 
According to the roadmap released on Tuesday, Toyota has mostly embraced the redesign that engineers and planners have been preparing as choices for months. This is due to new CEO Koji Sato.
 
This involves utilising electric-axle technology and other products from vendors like Aisin and Denso.
 
"What we want to achieve is to change the future with BEVs," Takero Kato, president of new Toyota EV unit BEV Factory, said in a video posted on the automaker's YouTube channel on Tuesday.
 
Toyota announced that it was creating a dedicated electric vehicle platform to lower the price of new models and a highly automated assembly line that would replace the conveyor belt system that has been a staple of the auto industry since Henry Ford invented it more than a century ago.
 
The "self-propelling" assembly line developed by Toyota allowed the vehicles being produced to move through the process on their own.
 
It also declared that it would utilise Giga casting, a Tesla innovation that makes use of enormous, aluminium casting machines to lessen vehicle complexity, to minimise production costs.
 
Senior analyst at SBI Securities Koji Endo expressed surprise at Toyota's decision to challenge Tesla's production efficiency advantage. Toyota is preparing to attempt, but I'm not sure if it can yet push back in a counteroffensive, he said.
 
According to Kato, Toyota's BEV Factory, which opened in May, is to build around 1.7 million vehicles by 2030, or about half of the 3.5 million EVs the company hopes to sell per year by that time.
 
For the first time ever, the carmaker sold more than 1% of its total global sales in a single month in April with 8,584 EVs sold across the globe, including those sold under the Lexus brand.
 
The market value of Toyota, which sold about 10.5 million automobiles in 2022, is around $254 billion. While selling one-eighth as many cars, Tesla is valued at almost $791 billion, a premium that reflects investor confidence in the company's future growth.
 
As the automotive industry moves away from gasoline-powered vehicles, Toyota has long stated that it intends to give consumers a choice of new-energy vehicles, including battery electric vehicles, hydrogen fuel cells, and petrol-electric hybrids.
 
(Source:www.theprint.in)