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.

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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.

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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.