Honda Is Building Its Own Solid-State Batteries – CleanTechnica

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Solid-state batteries are seen as the Holy Grail for any company that is serious about building battery-electric cars  in the future. They are said to have many advantages over conventional lithium-ion batteries — lower cost, higher density, faster charging, and greatly reduced risk of fires being the primary ones. Honda has taken the transition to electric cars seriously — more seriously than Toyota, whose battery-powered offerings to date have limited range and have experienced problems keeping the front wheels from falling off. Honda, by contrast, is doing quite well with its Prologue electric SUV, primarily because it looks and drivers very much like a normal car.

The Prologue is essentially a Chevy Blazer EV with bespoke exterior and interior designs, but Honda has already announced it is moving on from its relationship with GM and will build its own EVs in the future. In the past few days, it announced it has opened a 27,000 square meter (300,000 square foot) demonstration production line for solid-state battery cells at its R&D center in Sakura City, Japan. The machinery at the new testing factory allows Honda engineers to test and verify every process in the production of a battery cell, including:

• weighing electrode materials, and mixing them in the correct proportions
• coating the rolls of electrode film
• assembling the two electrode (anode and cathode) and solid electrolyte to form a cell
• assembling cells into modules

The new facility will permit rapid testing of different factors affecting the design and production of the final cells, particularly material specifications and manufacturing processes.

The Verge reports the new factory is split among three buildings, each with its own full complement of test equipment and battery manufacturing machinery. The first is for cathode formation and cell assembly, the second is for anode formation ,and the third is where electrolyte activation and module assembly take place. Honda says the new factory will make use of a continuous inline mixer that is “three times faster” than typical cell batch processing.

The cells will be a proprietary Honda design that has been in development for several years. While solid-state batteries have been touted as the wave of the future, developing them has required dozens of companies globally to spend tens of billions of dollars on research and development over the past 10 years. Now that goal may be getting closer, according to a report by Car and Driver.

Honda hopes to use its cells not only in electric vehicles, but across “a wide range of Honda mobility products,” meaning not just cars and trucks, but motorcycles and even aircraft. Its product engineers are already working with the battery development team, it said, to ensure future solid-state batteries have the necessary structure, materials, and production techniques to let them most easily be used in the vehicles now being designed.

Long, Costly Experimenting & Testing

Fabricating and assembling a battery cell, particularly the crucial electrode films, can be as complex as fabricating certain types of silicon computer chips. For every dozen promising lab advances, perhaps only one may reach the testing phase, and even fewer make it all the way into mass production. Honda says its ability to prototype new materials and processes on a mock assembly line will let it iterate on all those factors as quickly as possible and will help it produce solid-state cells that are cost competitive with existing alternatives. That in turn will allow it to achieve economies of scale faster and deploy the cells across many products more quickly.

In particular, the company noted its solid-state cells will be made using methods similar to the standard production process for liquid electrolyte lithium-ion cells. Its innovation comes, in part, from a “roll processing technique” that lets it use denser layers of solid electrolyte so it can roll out anode, electrolyte, and cathode layers and press them together in a continuous process. The speed of the process is critical to reducing the cost of the finished battery cells, the company says.

Solid-state battery cells have many promised advantages. Who wouldn’t want higher power output, greater energy density, and faster recharging? But they are likely to sell at a premium to convention lithium-ion cells at first, if for no other reason than they will be unable to achieve the economies of scale that apply to those other batteries. Honda is keenly aware of that disadvantage, which is why its solid-state battery research is strongly focused on mass production as a pathway to cost competitiveness with the NCM and LFP cells in use today.

Toyota, Nissan, Volkswagen, & BMW Too

Honda is not alone in its quest for solid-state batteries. Nissan and Toyota are hot on the trail, although Toyota’s progress has been painfully slow. It originally promised its first solid-state batteries would start appearing in its cars in 2020, but now the timeline is still somewhere in the hazy far-off distance after 2028 at the earliest. Last month, Stellantis announced its partner Factorial will test its own “semi-solid state” cells, using a “quasi-solid electrolyte” with a lithium anode (rather than graphite) under real world test conditions in a fleet of electric Dodge Charger Daytonas, although not until 2026.

Volkswagen has taken a stake in US solid-state battery startup Quantumscape, which said recently it has begun shipping some early prototypes to unnamed customers for benchmarking and testing. It is too pessimistic to wonder whether the company will still be in business when Quantumscape is finally ready to start full-scale commercial production? BMW is also said to be on the hunt for solid-state batteries. It said last year they would begin to appear in some of its cars by 2025, but has been largely silent on the subject recently as enthusiasm for electric cars in Europe seems to have cooled somewhat of late.

The Takeaway

A popular game as CleanTechnica writers sit and schvitz in the company sauna after a hard day of typing is guessing which car companies doing business today will still be around in 2030. We admit that Honda has been on the “probably won’t make it” list for a while now. But it has been showing signs of life lately, especially as sales of the Prologue have taken off nicely. This latest announcement about its new solid-state development factory suggests the company is taking the EV revolution seriously, which it needs to do if it wants to still be around when the next decade begins.