Upgrade to solid state?

I’m not aware of any credible suggestion that Toyota, or any other supplier, plans to offer solid state batteries for retrofit installations in existing vehicles.

Toyota’s warranties, like those of other automakers, cover defects in materials or workmanship, corrosion perforation, and failure to meet government emissions standards that applied when the vehicle was built. (See the Warranty & Maintenance Guide (PDF) for details.) There is no coverage for obsolescence.

 

the warranty thing is confusing

toyota doesn't even make a solid state battery

 

The first solid state batteries may be going in the Prius hybrid (not the Prius Prime) and not until after 2025, if then. Even the new 2023 Prius Hybrid is getting an upgraded Lithium Ion battery, the same one in their Noah and Voxy, instead of the NiMH. The 2023 Prius Prime will be getting a newer version of the Lithium battery they have now with other Prime and 450h+ labeled vehicles along with a 2.0L engine. Toyota has never offered an upgrade to a drive train to my knowledge to a currently sold vehicle.

Toyota is exploring with Yamato and CJPT a cartridge type battery swap for some commercial vehicles. Not exactly what you're thinking.
Yamato Transport and CJPT to Begin Studying Standardization and Commercialization of Cartridge Batteries | Corporate | Global Newsroom | Toyota Motor Corporation Official Global Website

 

Umm, no.
All of the previous comments are still applicable.
Will Toyota offer upgrades when its solid state comes out? | PriusChat

Who ever put this silly idea in your head? Have you EVER heard of a car manufacturer upgrading someone's engine/drivetrain before?
You want a SS battery? You buy a new vehicle that has one.

 

That would be bad in business rationale

 

You can as well ask for an upgrade to a "flux capacitor." Solid-state batteries do not exist yet, at least working ones.

Wait, they are selling flux capacitors at O'Reilly!

https://www.oreillyauto.com/flux-capacitor

Coming back to solid-state batteries, this is what happened to the ones who jumped the gun earlier:

Paris suspends 149 Bolloré electric buses after two fires

Nevertheless, progress is being made. The Taiwanese ProLogium, one of the more credible contenders, announced a couple of weeks ago a planned 120-GWh factory with Mercedes–Benz in 2030:

Solid-state battery by Mercedes partner ProLogium first to hit 100% silicon anode for up to 620-mile range—NotebookCheck.net news

The American QuantumScape probably still remains the most credible solid-state-battery contender. Today, they reported progress on their 24-layer A samples to be shipped to OEMs in a few months and unveiled their "hybrid" cell design, which has an expanding and contracting bellow, which is necessary with lithium-metal cells, as the lithium metal on the anode current collector is entirely depleted during discharging and replated during charging, causing contraction and expansion of the cell, respectively.

https://s29.q4cdn.com/884415011/files/doc_financials/2022/q2/q3/QS-Shareholder-Letter-Q3-2022.pdf

 

Solid State batteries are still a decade off from mainstream sales numbers. The infrastructure required to make them will just take that long to deploy. First they have to make a machine that makes them consistently and then scale that to problem solve however many different variables there will be in the manufacturing process which in itself can take years after they've built the factory for manufacturing them at scale. God help you if any of the suppliers change something that nobody thought about and then have to figure out what changed, etc. Seriously, this stuff is painful.

 

I would say solid-state batteries are more like half a decade away—to start having a decent market share in late 2020s.

 

Unless you know of a single vehicle prototype product out there today. I'm going to have to disagree with you.

1. The product isn't an evolutionary design of the existing batteries out there. So we can't just update the existing assembly lines and make tons of them.
2. The fact that the product is so disruptive on the market place, means that bringing it to measurable commercial share market is cost prohibitive purely based on the manufacturing rule of. "The machine that makes the machine is potentially infinitely more complicated than the machine."

Building smaller factories, focusing on higher value(aka higher margin) low volume(less risk) product demands and slowly working into the higher volume is more the route to go for such a product. This gets them lower cost of entry into market, and allows for perfecting the machine to make these products as an evolutionary thing rather than a band-aid fix the multi-billion dollar boondoggle thing. Ontop of that, the sheer number of certifications these batteries will need to complete before anyone will invest the money towards a full scale factory will take more than three-five years of development process. As the automotive world is a QA process. Any manufacture will require at least 3-5 years worth of product testing before they would roll into such a change and start building major factories.

In a sense, I think we will see it first in specialized military applications followed by smaller commercial specialized applications, and then slowly into the high volume small device applications(laptops, cell phones, etc.) Then we will see it in larger format applications which will be around a decade before we see the revolutionary benefits of solid state batteries. Seriously, there is a host of other higher value targets that would benefit from SSB than transportation. 1200 dollar smart phones and 2000 dollar laptops would be more likely to have them first.

 

If it used the same technology, it would be available now. They have been working on this for many years already, and it will start seeing mainstream applications in less than five years. They work in collaboration with auto OEMs; so, there is no separate development process.

 

It's not using the same technology. The entire manufacturing process for SSB is different from existing lithium ion battery designs. In a sense, every factory making existing lithium ion batteries will need to be clean slated before making this tech or they will need new large expensive multi-billion dollar factories to make this which means it's going to cost somewhere between 30 and 100 billion american dollars yet to bring it to automotive market. Not to mention the time required to achieve every certification required is still a decade. As a reference point, Panasonic didn't even start making money on the existing batteries in the auto market until 1.5 years ago and these batteries have been around for over a decade. It takes a long-time to perfect the machine that makes the machine.