Toshiba is an advanced technology manufacturer, making everything from laptops to power plants that power those laptops. The company had invested considerably into battery technology, which it currently sells primarily to electric bicycle manufacturers. Now the company wants to get into the automotive battery game, and Toshiba announced last-year their intention to manufacture 3 million cells per month by 2010.
The company has developed a quick-charge technology that promises a lot for the future of electric vehicles. As recently as a few months ago, Toshiba was able to recharge their SCiB lithium batteries (Toshiba’s name) to 90% capacity in as little as 5 minutes. Now, they’ve announced their ability to reduce that time to an incredible 90 seconds. 90% in 90 seconds. To me that seems just unbelievable if Toshiba can really deliver on that.
The news about the technology was reported by Business Green via Japanese financial paper Nikkei. First of all it remains to be seen if these claims will pan out in the real-world. Second of all, I think it goes without saying that to achieve anything near that time, it will require an power source of extremely high voltage. Not the ability to do that at home, but you can’t refill you car at home either, can you?
If a technology like this really made it to production, it could be used in hybrids and range-extended electric vehicles as well as pure EVs. An infrastructure of charging stations could be built similar to the gas station network we have right now. 90 second recharges would be absolutely amazing, and would afford electric vehicles with the same convenience as gas ones.
The SCiB batteries would render battery-swapping as unneeded. Why need to swap for a fully-charged pack when you can just recharge in 90 seconds? Better Place certainly has the right idea and business plan though as it is developing a network of battery swap and charging stations as well. Good things are happening in the alternative fuels world, I look forward to the advances we’ll be seeing in the area over the next few years!
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