Newly revealed Toyota EV plans include batteries with 900-plus miles of range

SUSONO, Japan — Solid-state batteries for electric vehicle with ranges of 900 miles or more. Software operating systems that update automatically. Futuristic factories where cars drive themselves through final assembly. Ultra-slick aerodynamics developed through rocket science.

Those are just a few of the new technologies that Toyota is packing into its toolbox for EVs of tomorrow.

Under pressure to show it has a winning game plan for the disruptive new age of electric vehicles, Toyota Motor Corp. has spilled fresh details about its plans to leapfrog ahead in just a few years.

Top executives of the automaker revealed parts of its wide-ranging strategy for the first time this month at Toyota's Higashi-Fuji Technical Center in the foothills of Mount Fuji under the theme "Let's change the future of cars."

An all-day executive briefing drove home Toyota's point that, contrary to being left behind, it has both the technology and the production system needed to deliver industry-leading EVs from 2026.

The showcase comes amid mounting criticism among some investors, environmental activists and EV enthusiasts that Toyota Motor Corp. is not fully engaged in the global race for battery-powered cars. Toyota holds a key annual shareholders' meeting June 14, in which management is fending off a shareholder proposal mandating that the company review its "climate-related lobbying activities" to determine whether they align with global carbon neutrality goals.

Toyota rejects the proposal, saying its disclosures are sufficient as the company sets an aggressive carbon reduction road map and is doing its part by advancing electrification. To back its position, Toyota cited its publicly stated goal to sell 3.5 million electric vehicles a year by 2030.

At last week's technical showcase here, executives pledged that about 1.7 million of those 3.5 million EVs will be next-generation, or what Toyota is calling Step 3, electric vehicles that boast cutting-edge breakthroughs.

Top among the technologies is a wave of advanced batteries.

"We are determined to be the world leader in batteries," Chief Technology Officer Hiroki Nakajima said. "We will need various options for batteries, just like we have different variations of engines. It is important to make these batteries compatible with any kind of model."

Keiji Kaita, Toyota's top battery guru and the president of its carbon neutral advanced engineering development center, outlined five new batteries that will debut by the end of the decade.

They kick off with a next-generation lithium ion power pack that will double the range the current power pack used in the current bZ4X electric crossover. The new battery will deliver driving ranges of 621 miles, he said.

It will cost 20 percent less than Toyota's current EV batteries and will be able to recharge from a 10 percent charge to 80 percent in less than 20 minutes. Toyota compared those targets with the bZ4X battery's range of 382 miles and a 30-minute charging time.

This first next-generation lithium ion battery will debut in 2026.

Next up will be a bipolar lithium iron phosphate battery that arrives around 2026 or 2027. Bipolar batteries boost power density by combining anode and cathode terminals into the same current collector. Anodes and cathodes normally have their own collectors.

This battery will boost range by 20 percent over today's bZ4X battery while reducing its cost by 40 percent, thanks to the use of the less expensive iron phosphate chemistry.

Toyota already uses bipolar batteries but only in nickel-metal hydride chemistries for hybrids.

After that, Toyota plans a nickel-based bipolar lithium ion battery that will come to market around 2027 to 2028. That battery will improve range by 10 percent over the 621-mile range planned for the next-gen lithium ion battery that arrives in 2026 and will cost around 10 percent less.

Meanwhile, Toyota also plans two all-solid-state batteries for the second half of the decade.

At one time, Toyota had suggested solid-state batteries would be ready in the first half of the 2020s. But it now says the first of the two will arrive around 2027 to 2028. It will eke 20 percent more range than the 2026 next-gen lithium ion battery, implying a distance around 745 miles. The cost calculation for it is still a work in progress, but Kaita estimated it will recharge in about 10 minutes.

Finally, Toyota envisions a second, more advanced solid-state battery arriving after 2028.

That solid-state battery will deliver 50 percent more range than the 2026 next-gen lithium ion battery — indicating a target driving range of around 932 miles.

These power packs will underpin a new lineup of next-generation EVs now being developed through a blank-sheet approach by the automaker's newly created BEV Factory division. The vehicles will have new batteries, platforms, software systems and production methods, comprising what CEO Koji Sato calls Step 3 of Toyota's EV rollout plan.

Technology boss Nakajima estimated that about 1.7 million of the EVs sold by the company in 2030 will be these Step 3 next-gen vehicles from the BEV Factory.

At the tech briefing, he offered a rough volume breakdown by EV segment:

• 600,000 large crossovers and SUVs
• 360,000 midsize crossovers
• 360,000 compact sedans, hatchbacks
• 240,000 large sedans, hatchbacks
• 120,000 MPVs

Toyota's table for its next-generation EVs included no allotment for midsize sedans or hatchbacks. But under the large sedan segment, it teased a rendering of the sleek wedge-shaped Lexus EV that is expected to debut in concept form at this autumn's Japan Mobility Show.

The slick aerodynamics of that concept indicates the new focus Toyota is putting on the design of its next-generation EVs. Air-shedding body work is not only eye-catching but paramount to squeezing out every extra mile of range from their costly batteries.

The studios under global design chief Simon Humphries are leveraging the learnings of rocket engineers at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries' aerospace division to improve air flow around vehicles.

The designers plan to adopt a technology used to protect rockets traveling at speeds of Mach 30. The technique creates an air film around the surface of the vehicle that helps reduce wind resistance.

In two to three years, Toyota wants to leverage this to achieve drag coefficients of 0.1x for its cars. The lower the figure, the more slippery the car. And drag coefficients below 0.20 are a kind of holy grail for designers. Hyundai, for example, targeted 0.1x for its Ioniq 6 electric fastback sedan but delivered only 0.21. The Toyota Prius is around 0.24, while the Tesla Model 3 gets 0.23.

The Step 3 EVs will also incorporate the Arene automotive operating system being developed by the carmaker's renamed software subsidiary Woven by Toyota, formerly known as Woven Planet.

Automatic over-the-air updates will keep the software cutting edge on the customer side, and the use of Arene will also speed up product development, Nakajima said.

Arene will initially target global, mass-market nameplates but also include EVs, he said.

Takahiro Ishijima, president of Toyota's vehicle development center, said the company wants to cut development lead time to around 20 months by around 2026, from an average of 30 months now. Today, Toyota lacks the flexibility to quickly change direction in the middle of that development cycle in order to adapt new technologies when they emerge, he said.

"This is what we learned from the Chinese," Ishijima said.

Takero Kato, BEV Factory president, was the top Toyota engineer at its joint venture with Chinese EV heavyweight BYD Co., which rivals Tesla as the world's top-selling EV manufacturers. Kato is expected to import a lot of Toyota's learning from BYD, which helped Toyota roll out its bZ3 EV in two-thirds the time normally needed for a new vehicle.

Achieving low-cost, efficient production of these EVs is crucial to Toyota's plan. To that end, Toyota is also rethinking its vaunted production system from scratch.

As it prepares for its new products, factory engineers will also introduce a slew of manufacturing techniques for the 2026 EVs. Their goal is to halve the number of production processes, halve the amount of plant investment and halve the amount of production lead needed to set up for new nameplates.

The new techniques will include the use of giga casting, which eliminates the countless parts and brackets by essentially casting the vehicle's front and back as two giant modules.

The under-rear section of the current Toyota bZ4X, for example, is a complex amalgam of 86 parts manufactured through 33 processes. But Toyota is prototyping a way to stamp the same multi-part module as a single piece from one process, thanks to the use of a giga press.

"This is overwhelmingly faster," Yoshio Nakamura, deputy chief of global production, told Automotive News. "The point is, we will have a high level of freedom."

Giga casting will be deployed at plants making Step 3 EVs from 2026, Nakamura said. Those cars will essentially have three simplified modules, a front, a rear and a middle battery pan. The approach will improve manufacturing efficiency by 20 percent, he said. That means that with the same amount of materials and processes, Toyota will be able to make 20 percent more vehicles.

In another new approach, Toyota will eliminate anchored production lines.

The idea here is for the cars to drive themselves through the plant.

Toyota calls it self-propelled production, and the idea is already being used at the company's Motomachi assembly plant, where the bZ4X drives itself from final assembly to final inspection.

Engineers want to extend that self-driving mode to final assembly, essentially letting the car drive to the parts, rather than bringing the parts to the car. It should slash the amount of investment because there will be no fixed conveyors or hangers hauling cars through the factory.

Doing that will allow for more compact layouts and more flexible parts storage. Nakamura predicted it could save hundreds of millions of dollars in investment and cut production time in half.

The system uses a remote-control technology, similar to that in a radio-controlled car, to move the vehicles. And because they are EVs, they can move under the power of their own batteries.

Nakamura said the overhaul of Toyota's approach to EV manufacturing is an extension, not a repudiation, of the carmaker's world-renowned Toyota Production System, the gold standard of lean manufacturing that is copied and applied to everything from food banks to hospital labs.

"The concept behind the Toyota Production System remains the same," Nakamura said. "The concept is to eliminate waste and unnecessary work."