Toyota Heats Up The Race To Electrification   

Tesla is still leading the way in electrification. Nio and other well-known Chinese electric car makers are revving up their effort in competing both against Tesla and the old-school Internal Combustion Engine car manufacturers. Since electrification requires fewer moving parts, the cars should be less complicated to produce and streamline the supply chain -- but there are limits still in improving the electrification process. One such limit is the battery range. Another is the battery's not-so-robust recharge cycle amount before the degradation of a battery begins to take place when every time it gets charged up.

No worry though, I think Tesla is doing its best to improve these limits. Lately, Nio upgraded 75 kWh battery technology to 100 kWh, and this means Nio's car owners now can either choose to use the old tech battery or upgrade to a newer one which is the 100 kWh. The 100 kWh battery allows Nio cars to have a better mileage range. Nio's 100 kWh battery allows Nio cars, depending on the vehicle size, to travel up to 615 km (382 miles) per charge. Other EV (Electrical Vehicle) makers are not idling by either because they're too improving the battery tech and getting rid of more limits in the electrification process.

Besides improving the battery tech, sometimes it's also better to reinvent the wheel, and so other EV innovators are coming up with ways of reinventing the whole EV battery tech altogether. Instead of relying on the common lithium-ion battery tech which relies on a liquid electrolytic solution, some EV innovators are hard at work in pushing out solid-state battery tech which gives a better recharged time. For example, QuantumScape -- which went public recently through a SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition Company) merger -- is promising to push out solid-state battery tech which allows an EV battery to be recharged about 80% but it takes only 15 minutes to do so. QuantumScape mentioned that they will begin the manufacturing process around 2024 to get this tech onto the market -- which is four years from now.

Here I thought QuantumScape is already a game-changer, then suddenly Toyota announces that they will release an EV in 2021 with a solid-state battery tech that allows the vehicle to be fully recharged within 10 minutes. I think the age of electrification is now heating up and ready to go much farther in terms of overtaking the traditional ICE makers fast. Check out a cool video right after the break where Toyota boasts about their electrification process of Lexus cars in the near future.