Featured Toyota Highlander to go BEV

Lord please let it charge at 800v & have >300 miles range !
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Toyota to spend $1.3 billion prepping Kentucky plant for new EV | Business | wdrb.com

lToyota Supercharges North Carolina Battery Plant with New $8 Billion Investment - Toyota USA Newsroom

 

I hope Toyota blows those figures out of the water and advances EV's dynamics ever further!

 

How long after the PHEV Ram do they show up?

 

Maybe shortly after Plug in Ramcharger starts taking away other manufacturers big car sales - they'll package their plug in for the Durango

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Works for me too:

• The 800 V chargers are still very scarce. So it requires a high power, buck converter ($$ and weight) or internal serial-parallel battery switches like the Cybertrick.
• The 300 mi range adds weight for a small fraction of the daily drives. This reduces the vehicle efficiency for the vast majority of trips. Perhaps LiFePO chemistry will 'save it.'

Bob Wilson

 

True - the thing is some if not many purchasers unconsciously feel less drama knowing their vehicle CAN drive 50 miles from nowhere - w/out worrying about charging, whether or not they ever drive to such locations.
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About BEV:

The last few years, I've been pre-heating the battery when ever the temperature was less than 50F (10 C.) There is almost no range loss on the first and back-to-back drives. Recently, I saw and plan to implement an underbody insulation layer to isolate nearly half of the battery from external temperature extremes. Keeping today's battery chemistry in a 'good range' is key to better performance.

Bob Wilson

 

To date Toyota has not been on the Forefront of Battery Tech thermal insulation/conditioning. Best to leave that up to the leaders in the field & hopefully Toyota will follow quickly.
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It has a lower specific energy and energy density. So you need more cells to match the the other Li-ion. The LFP in the Model 3 takes up about the same space as the Li-ion in the long range version, and added 220 pounds over the old standard range L-ion version.

The space needs are probably the bigger obstacle for using it in 300 mile EVs.

 

Happily, my Tesla range degradation, ~90% or 216 mi, has been compensated by more Superchargers, dealers with open access CCS-1 chargers fast DC and J1772, and adding CCS-1 fast DC charging to my 2019 Model 3. The increasing density of fast DC chargers, both Superchargers and CCS-1, begins to approach the density of truck stops on the Interstates and even short cuts between them.

Battery chemistry, manufacturing, and packaging is in rapidly changing technology. Snapshots of earlier chemistries are important 'when you buy in.' But today's batteries are rapidly improving and I'm not count "Press Release Progress."

Bob Wilson

 

I wonder why Toyota decided to make the Highlander only a BEV rather than offer a hybrid variant

 

Don't make the fuel cell assumption that the other Li-ion chemistries aren't also improving alongside LFP. Will Tesla use structural battery packaging with LFP but not Li-ion for instance.

I haven't even seen press release progress claiming LFP will match the nickel based Li-ion in performance.

 

Are we still waiting for Toyots solid state battery? Waah hapen'd

 

We'll see the bipolar tech they used in the Aqua NiMH applied to Li-ion first.

 

It helps it soak in (at least for me) if I translate:

Toyota Highlander to go BEV Highlander is going pure-electric, no engine

This may kill it??