Toyota’s New e-SUV Comes Equipped with Toshiba’s LTO Battery Tech

The Toyota bZ4X has made its European debut as a production-ready vehicle and will hit European roads in 2022. A battery electric compact crossover SUV, Toyota’s new e-car equips itself with a 20Ah-HP SCiB li-ion battery, which uses Lithium titanium oxide (LTO) chemistry and is produced by Japanese brand Toshiba.

Toshiba’s battery comes with an extended care programme that guarantees its operation at 70% of its original capacity after up to 10 years of use or one million kilometres driven.

Further, Toyota assures that bZ4X’s battery has been developed with a target of 90% of capacity retained after 10 years/240,000 km. While EV batteries do generally last for a long time, with carmakers already offering an 8-year warranty for li-ion batteries, the longer lifetime usually comes with a lower mileage, generally below 162,000 km.

Battery Features

The Super SCiB battery is able to retain close to 100 percent of its capacity even after more than 8,000 charging cycles. This favourably contrasts with current li-Ion batteries degrading below 80% of the original capacity just after 1,000 charging cycles!

The battery chemistry, though it offers lower voltage and energy density than other li-ion cell types, is capable of withstanding a higher number of cycles without degrading. Toyota promises that the latest breakthrough for this technology will add to LTO cells’ benefits while also alleviating its shortcomings.

The 20Ah-HP rechargeable lithium-ion battery cell offers enhanced features for an electric vehicle. The battery comes with a high energy density (84Wh/kg and 176Wh/L). This is coupled with increased charging power (+70%) and discharging power (+60%). The internal resistance is reduced by about 40 percent, resulting into a major heat suppression. Also, the cell allows high current rates for fast charging. This hugely reduces the downtime of an electric vehicle.

The flip side of LTO, however, remains its high cost, rendering the Super SCiB battery a bit expensive. This is likely to be a sore point for many Toyota customers, especially since rival brand Tesla recently equipped its EVs with comparatively cheaper LFP batteries technology.