Toyota was dragged
Toyota was dragged unwillingly into this if you keep track of Toyoda’s statements about BEV’s. I am 100% sure that it is very limited production and Toyota will lose money on each one produced. Their RAV4 Prime is eating into the profits of their SUV’s and even larger losses for the RAV4 EV. The fact is the SSB’s are more expensive per unit capacity than Tesla’s Lithium Ion batteries. So their RAV4 Prime they really don’t want to ramp up even if they’ll use current lithium ion and their EV based on SSB’s would even be far fewer. They just did it because they don’t want to be left behind. I hope I am wrong that indeed, the last hurdle of bringing the costs of solid state batteries down and competitive with Tesla’s costs of production. Here’s hoping that Toyota would seriously scale this up even if initially it will eat into the profit margins of their current ICE offerings.