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 biggest global sales increased by 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.
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). In contrast, the lithium-ion-powered Tesla Model Y, the world’s best-selling EV, has a longer range and can go roughly 530 km according to US norms.
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.
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 (7259.T) and Denso (6902.T).
Takero Kato, head of the brand-new Toyota EV business BEV Factory, stated in a video that was uploaded to the automaker’s YouTube account on Tuesday that “what we want to achieve is to change the future with BEVs.”
Toyota’s new assembly technology
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.
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 globally, 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 selection of new-energy vehicles, including battery electric vehicles, hydrogen fuel cells, and petrol-electric hybrids.
