Toyota Motor Corp to develop more advanced electric car battery in few years

Toyota Motor Corp said it aimed to develop a more advanced electric-car battery "in a few years" that will allow the Japanese automaker to build vehicles with up to 15 per cent greater range and battery life than they had currently.

''Lithium-ion battery is a key technology for electrifying cars, and there is a clear need, going forward, for improving this technology and its performance even more,'' Hisao Yamashige, a battery technology researcher at Toyota, told a media briefing in Tokyo today.

The improvement of performance of lithium-ion battery technology was a pressing issue for traditional automakers such as Toyota and new entrants such as Tesla Motors Inc due to its limiting characteristics.

Producers of all-electric battery cars, plug-in electric hybrids, as also conventional gas-electric hybrids were all engaged in efforts to develop more advanced battery technologies to improve range, battery life and safety.

Toyota, Japan's biggest automaker by volume, had pioneered gasoline-electric hybrid technology and was in the process of developing a new, near-all-electric plug-in hybrid called the Prius Prime. It was also pushing plans to build an all-electric battery car by about 2020.

Thanks to techniques Toyota developed in collaboration with a Japanese publicly-financed laboratory and four universities in Japan, its engineers were able to better see the movement of lithium ions in "real time", inside electrodes, Yamashige said. 

According to Toyota, it had developed what it claimed was ''the world's first method for observing the behaviour of lithium ions in an electrolyte when a battery charges and discharges.'' 

With the ability to see the ions in real time, Toyota researchers think they had found the reason behind the ageing of batteries. 

The commercialisation of the breakthrough was expected to happen in ''two to three years,'' which could lead to an improved lithium ion battery  performance by 15 per cent, Yamashige said.