Toyota hurries up the developing process for the future battery generation
Battery development become a priority for Japanese from Toyota, so they formed a section to research and develop it composed by 50 engineers.
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This section is especially made for hybrid battery and electric cars. Therefore, Toyota staff hopes to obtain a set of batteries much more performance until launching Prius Plug-in Hybrid in 2012. Unlike the current Prius, his plug-in version is equipped with a set of batteries lithium-ion, which offers high performance, but much more expensive.
Except its high performance and bigger capacity, the lithium-ion batteries have a longer lifetime and also a bigger endurance on download/upload cycles
Although we can expect that the new batteries will use lithium-ion technology, Koei Saga, one of the staff members did not want to comment upon the launching date of these batteries or the technology they use.
Koei Saga said Toyota is taking into consideration the possibility of signing a contract with a bigger batteries producer so that they grow Prius production and other models which use this type of part. For now, Toyota staff uses batteries develop next to Panasonic Japanese, company to which Toyota has shares.
Image source: Automarket
