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Toyota announced that its first vehicle to use solid-state batteries will go on sale by 2025 in an interview with Autoline. The first Toyotas to use the new batteries will be hybrids, rather than fully electric vehicles, making it possible the first to get the new battery could be the Prius.Solid-state batteries promise to bring quicker charging times and longer ranges.The next major step in electric-vehicle development is solid-state batteries. Compared to the lithium-ion batteries used in the current crop of EVs, solid-state units promise better range, quicker charging times, and a longer battery life. More development is needed, however. Back in 2020, Toyota said that it was working on prototypes powered by solid-state batteries, and now in a video interview with Autoline during the 2022 CES technology how, Toyota confirmed that it will begin selling vehicles with solid-state batteries by 2025.

Toyota Sports EV concept.
Toyota

In the interview, Gill Pratt, Toyota’s chief scientist and head of the Toyota Research Institute, said that Toyota is aiming to “commercialize” its solid-state batteries in the first half of this decade. Surprisingly, Pratt said that the first Toyotas to receive the new batteries will actually be hybrids instead of fully electric vehicles.

Pratt outlined a couple of reasons why Toyota intends to debut solid-state batteries in hybrids. Solid-state batteries are, at the moment, more expensive to produce, he said, and since hybrids have smaller battery packs than EVs, implementing them in hybrids first will reduce the cost. The other challenge facing solid-state batteries currently is battery life, with repeated charging taking a toll on early prototype batteries. In a hybrid, the smaller battery is charged and recharged far more often, and Pratt suggested that the increased amount of cycling for the batteries will make hybrids a good test bed for the new technology.
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“We want to start by putting them in vehicles where we believe that they’re both the most well suited in terms of lifetime but also that will exercise them sufficiently so that as costs continue to come down, we can roll them out in the future in [battery-electric vehicles] also,” explained Pratt. Expect more details to trickle out as 2025 approaches and Toyota prepares its first solid-state-battery hybrid vehicle.
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Volvo is gearing up for its next generation of electric vehicles with a few interesting debuts: a new electric SUV coming soon, a new highway-only self-driving technology called Ride Pilot that the new vehicle will get, and a new subscription service so drivers can actually use Ride Pilot.Volvo is testing its autonomous tech on roads in Sweden and plans to start testing Ride Pilot in California later this year. California is also where the automaker plans to launch Ride Pilot for its customers.Volvo will be asking owners to pay to use Ride Pilot (costs were not announced).Volvo will debut more than a new model when it reveals an electric SUV later this year. The new flagship will introduce three key items, starting with the vehicle itself. The other two are a new, unsupervised autonomous driving feature called Ride Pilot and a subscription service that enables the use of the self-driving technology. Also of note is that when it launches, Ride Pilot will first be available in California before being “gradually” rolled out to other markets and regions. (Pictured is the automaker’s Concept Recharge, revealed in June 2021.)

There are a number of steps Volvo needs to take to make Ride Pilot available to drivers, though. First, obviously, the company needs to reveal the new electric SUV, which is planned for later this year. Second, Volvo needs to verify that the autonomous driving technology that makes up Ride Pilot works as promised on highways in the U.S. Volvo is already testing Ride Pilot in Sweden, together with its partner Zenseact, and gathering data in other parts of Europe and the U.S.

Volvo

Volvo

Volvo plans to start testing Ride Pilot in California by the middle of this year because that’s where, it says, “the climate, traffic conditions and regulatory framework provide a favorable environment for the introduction of autonomous driving.”

Third, and perhaps most controversially, Volvo has to convince people who buy the new SUV to pony up a subscription fee for Ride Pilot to work. Volvo did not provide any insight into how much it will charge for a subscription to Ride Pilot. There’s a hint of how Volvo plans to make its sales pitch in the company announcement this week: “Ride Pilot aims to free up more time for customers and make driving a Volvo even more convenient and enjoyable.” In other words, expect to see arguments that ask you to consider spending money to take advantage of the time you’d otherwise waste driving your car. Mentioning all of the time drivers lose behind the wheel is not a message automakers have been eager to promote in the past, but if the industry is changing to an electric, autonomous future, some of the ad messages are likely to change as well. Here’s another line from Volvo’s announcement: “By using Ride Pilot, drivers will be able to free up time while driving, and spend it on secondary activities like reading, writing, working or socializing. The feature can also help drivers arrive at their destination rested and recharged, by reducing the mental strain that may come with driving, especially in traffic jams or heavy traffic.” The sensor suite Volvo will use in the upcoming electric SUV and other next-generation vehicles is made up of over two dozen sensors, including lidar from another partner in the project, Luminar, as well as five radars, eight cameras, and 16 ultrasonic sensors. Over-the-air updates will also be used to keep Ride Pilot’s software current.

Volvo

Volvo

From the preliminary information Volvo is releasing, Ride Pilot sounds like an enhanced version of self-driving technologies such as GM’s Super Cruise. The car is able to drive itself in limited situations without input from the driver and will be limited to use on highways, at least at the beginning. Volvo said the software and sensors used to enable Ride Pilot will be standard and that the car will be able to benefit from safety features that use the sensor suite, but Ride Pilot’s actual self-driving capability “will only be made available to customers once it has gone through Volvo Cars’ rigorous verification and testing protocol. This includes validation of the technology as safe for use on highways in a number of varying conditions.” And, of course, once you pay your subscription fee. The new electric SUV will also come with a new type of name for a Volvo model. Volvo Cars’ CEO Håkan Samuelsson told Automotive News Europe in July 2021 that the new EV will use a name that one would give to a child, not an alphanumeric designation like XC60 or XC90, and he later added that the name will start with a vowel.
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U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

With self-driving cars at least on the distant horizon, automakers are thinking of ways to change the steering wheel. BMW’s latest idea is to turn it into a steering handle that you can manipulate with one hand.A wide crossbar with two L-shaped handles on either end is the basic shape of BMW’s idea here, and the outside handles can rotate independently of how the center bar has been turned.The whole idea here is to create a smaller steering wheel, one that would allow riders in an autonomous car the ability to read a newspaper or check emails. Yay?We’ll let you make your own “reinvent the wheel” jokes. The subject is a newly discovered patent filing from BMW describing a “steering handle”—basically, a strange little yoke that feels like the next worst thing to a standard wheel. BMW envisages this new wheel/handle/yoke as something that would be used in an “at least partially autonomously driving double-track motor vehicle.” That’s patentspeak for something like a Level 3 or higher autonomous car, where a standard steering wheel would take up too much space when the car is in autonomous mode.

BMW knows we will all want to put our books and tablets in that space where the steering wheel is now, and this is one partial solution. Specifically, BMW said in the filing that a handle like this means “as much free space as possible is to be provided for the driver . . . with the result that he/she can read a newspaper, for example, or can manage emails, for example, by means of a tablet or the like with the aid of the display unit.”As the pictures show, the overall design of the steering handle is a thick central section with a free-rotating grip on either side. BMW said in its filing that when the car is being driven autonomously, the central section of the steering handle would stay in a standard, horizontal position, “even when driving around bends.”

It’s the way that the handle would be used by the human driver, though, that’s most interesting. We’ve seen other unusual yoke designs in cars recently—by Tesla, most famously—but BMW’s is different because of the exterior grips that can be moved clockwise in the steering wheel’s arc while your hand doesn’t change its vertical axis. So, as you move your left hand from the 9 o’clock to 12 o’clock position, it can stay with the thumb pointed upward, for example.

BMW acknowledges that a person could steer a car that’s equipped with a handle like this single-handedly, and that even if some parts of the handle were folded in, it could still be used to maneuver the vehicle. Overall, despite how strange the grips make this yoke, the main idea here is to shrink down the steering control mechanism, which BMW has unquestionably done. The patent was first reported by CarBuzz, which also notes that the patent has been filed in China and Germany, showing that BMW is serious about claiming this kind of design, even if simply filing a patent doesn’t in any way guarantee that the subject of the patent will ever be produced.
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