Samsung Could Give Toyota Prius Prime Tesla-Like Distance With Its New Battery

It makes no sense to me to put a battery in a plug-in that gives it more than 50-60 miles in electric-only range. I'd rather see less weight and a lower price. The Prius Prime could use AWD and more power. It doesn't have to be as quick as the RAV4 Prime to attract attention.

With 9.65 times the energy density the Prime would indeed get fantastic mileage. But imagine something like the Hyundai Kona EV or the Chevy Bolt! We could then be seeing almost a 2400 mile range.

At that range the notion of needing gasoline range extending engine.
Let us imagine a battery only half the size of the 1000lb 64KWh battery. We save 500 lbs of weight and still have 1200 miles of range in a car that now weighs about the same as a traditional car with even greater efficiencies that come with having to move less mass.

The 9.65 number is nonsense, nobody is claiming anything like that for solid-state batteries. Metal air batteries have shown numbers like that but so far no one has figured out how to build one that has the durability that would be necessary. The tone of the article that lithium ion batteries are an extreme fire hazard is also objectionable. Yes they can catch fire but it hardly ever happens, gasoline fires are an order of magnitude more likely to happen. The inherent safety of solid state batteries will make a big difference mostly because it will reduce the costs associated with protecting the batteries and 0 fires is better than a few fires. But the author deliberately exaggerated the risk.

It sounds wonderful. But the catch is .... when will this new battery technology be actually deployed in actual production of cars?? If it's this year, yes then it's mind blowing. Bye bye Tesla! But in 3 years? 5 years? Remember Toyota is also working on solid state battery, and it's projected to go to production in 5 years!! That's a long time. And why should Samsung give the battery to Toyota when it could easily sell it to fellow Korean conglomerates Hyundai/Kia first?

I'll believe it when I can buy it. Promises of advances in battery tech have a long history of producing nothing. If it does come to pass, we won't be seeing many 1000-mile range batteries. Maybe 400 miles tops for some cars. The batteries would still need to be charged, and charging takes a long time. Much more likely would be a smaller battery, hopefully costing less, that would give sufficient range. I also wonder about global silver supplies. Battery tech relying on silver would drive up demand for limited supplies, driving up the cost of silver and hence the battery as a whole -- another reason to keep the battery smaller. Solar panels have gotten cheaper primarily by the reducing the amount of silver used. Reducing battery degradation would be good benefit. What we really need is a good-enough battery made with abundant and cheap materials. That would be a great advance.

I really hope solid state batteries are not fusion.... perpetually 20 years away.

It makes absolutely no sense to increase the electric-only range of the Prius Prime to 240 miles. At that point, just make the battery a bit bigger and dump the gas engine completely.

No, it's far more likely that the battery would be shrunk to 1/5 the current size. Give it a 50 mile electric range, lower weight, lower cost, and more cargo area. That's more than enough range for the average person's daily drive.

And that's the key to electric vehicles, hybrid or not. They're designed to be charged every day overnight, and most people won't use more than 20-40 miles. Then, for those uncommon times that more range is needed, the question is how to provide that. An electric car shoves a much larger battery in the car -- lots of expensive weight that's mostly unused. A plug-in hybrid shoves in a gas engine -- proven technology that has to be maintained. Putting both range extension options into the same vehicle is pointless and only confers the disadvantages of both.

I agree on the idea of making a smaller battery to yield a range of 300 or so miles. As Timothy Parker notes a 200lb battery would mean that an EV would possibly 150-250 lbs lighter than an ICE vehicle.
As to the predicted energy density of 9.65 times current densities, we will have to wait to see if this can be a commercial product. OTOH, even a simple doubling or tripling of energy density will create a disruption in the EV market that will spark a huge migration to EVs.

The trick is that we are always on the brink of a battery technology breakthrough. Samsung battery engineers are very talented, and they announced 3 years ago that they were coming out with automotive EV batteries that would have twice the storage as Panasonic's 2170 batteries used in the Tesla Model 3. But they have not been manufactured yet in volume. Samsung showed that they could build a promising prototype graphene battery in 2018. Graphene is an amazing material that enabled their prototype battery to recharge fully in 1/3rd the time of conventional Lithium Ion batteries, but most likely we will only see them used in phones, and that will be maybe 1-2 years away from now. Similarly their latest battery design does show great promise with longer life and greater energy density. But again it is still in the early prototype stage of development, and it will probably be 2-3 years before they produce phone batteries based on this technology, and another 2-3 years before car batteries are produced. Previously, Elon Musk was asked about solid state batteries in an open conference call, because the press was busy plastering the internet with stories of new, innovative battery technologies that would be far better than the lithium Ion batteries used today. He said that there were many promising technologies out there, but the road from university lab experiments, to prototype batteries, to mass battery manufacturing is a long one, with most ideas unable to make it to production for a myriad of reasons. He said that Tesla was one of the world's largest buyers of lithium ion batteries, and if anyone had a better battery that they should bring it by Tesla for them to evaluate for production/purchase. Shortly after that Tesla bought Maxwell Technologies.