Stop me if you’ve heard this one before
We wait. And we wait a little longer. The genuinely sporty EV – lightweight, agile and tactile like the best combustion-engined exponents of the art – would appear to be in no hurry, and the same can be said of the affordable EV that won’t shackle you with an appalling lack of range.
Solid-state batteries will, we’ve been told every couple of months for the last five years, ride over the sunset any moment now to deliver both: genuinely exciting electric sports cars and cheap EVs with proper range. It’s an intriguing paradox, car makers going to great lengths to explain the complexities involved while also talking like its arrival, fully sorted and ready to revolutionise the ‘motor’ car like few technologies before it, is a dead cert.
At the recent Tokyo motor show you couldn’t move for solid-state concept cars, and everyone you spoke to was desperate for the tech to show up. Designers can’t wait to stop trying to hide the chunky volumes vast slab batteries make mandatory. They’re also bored of penning low-drag streamliners no one likes, just to eke out a few more miles of WLTP range. CEOs, including Nissan’s Makoto Uchida, can’t wait for it to make cars like an electric GT-R feasible. And petrolhead engineers, sick of trying to bestow grace upon 2.5-tonne cars, are chomping at the bit.
Whisper it, but we may now be on the home straight. For the first time that I can remember manufacturers are happy to commit to a timeframe. Toyota’s pledged to bring the tech to market by 2027. Nissan’s talking about 2028. And the numbers, as ever, are staggering. Twice the power density. Superior thermal stability, so you get both repeatable performance and faster charging times by a factor of three. Where lithium-ion cells don’t like to stray past 60°C, solid-state batteries are happy at 100°C, Nissan’s research division vice president Kazuhiro Doi told me.
They promise affordability, too. Where batteries sit at around the $130 per kWh mark at the moment, Nissan’s talking about $75 per kWh by 2028. Lifespan is also longer, such that batteries might see service in two cars, one after the other, before enjoying a third shift as a powerbank or similar.
While the doubled power density could be used to
