Remember way back in 2020, when Toyota let word slip that its new fluoride-ion EV battery will replace the familiar lithium-ion formula with improved performance and safety, while paring down costs? Yeah, whatever happened to that — oh, wait. Hold, please. Toyota Is Still Working On That Fluoride-Ion EV Battery Toyota has taken a lot of slack for slow-walking its vehicle electrification journey, but the company has begun to make up for lost time. As promised, the automaker launched the new, all-electric C-HR earlier this year, following its electric bZ into the challenging waters of the US EV market. In August, Toyota reminded everyone that the bZ “plays a central role in Toyota’s commitment to electrification,” adding that the car is also “part of Toyota’s multi-pathway approach to electrification as one of three BEV models that reside alongside 15 hybrid and two plug-in hybrid models.” In the meantime, Toyota has been looking to improve upon lithium-ion batteries. The company has already taken a crack at solid state batteries, and now it is ramping up its interest in the fluoride-ion formula. CleanTechnica’s Steve Hanley caught wind of the fluoride angle in 2020, when Toyota described its partnership with Kyoto University. The research team was working on a solid-state battery that deploys fluoride to achieve an energy density up to seven times greater than typical lithium-ion batteries, meaning substantial improvements in power and range. Additionally, solid-state batteries do not require the costly thermal control systems needed in conventional batteries. “The anode for the new batteries is composed of fluorine, copper, and cobalt. At a time when battery manufacturers and EV makers are striving to eliminate cobalt from their batteries, that’s not good news,” Hanley observed. AI For Good “While this research is all very interesting, it often takes years for such technology breakthroughs to move out of the lab and into commercial production,” Hanley added. You can say that again. However, materials science has changed since 2020, with one breakthrough being the use of AI tools. While much maligned for its energy sucking habits and vulnerability to serious abuse, among other issues, AI does speed up certain research processes. Earlier this week, Johns Hopkins University in Maryland posted an article describing how its partnership with the Toyota Research Institute will deploy high speed AI to shift the timeline on fluoride-ion EV battery research. “Battery chemistry is extremely complicated. A change in one property can influence several others, so understanding those relationships is very difficult,” explains Johns Hopkins associate researcher and assistant professor Yayuan Liu. “Scientists often labor over a trial-and-error process, spending years manually testing countless combinations of materials and chemical formulations,” JHU emphasizes. The electrolyte in fluoride-ion batteries is water-based, in contrast to the volatile liquid electrolyte in conventional lithium-ion batteries. That sounds simple enough, but the devil is in the details. “Some electrolytes offer excellent conductivity but poor stability, while others are stable but transport ions too slowly,” JHU observes. The researchers expect their AI-enabled tests to clock in at 3-4 minutes per experiment. That’s a substantial decrease from the 10 minutes typically needed, though not an exponential one. AI can speed up parts of the process, but it can’t — yet — accomplish the manual tasks involved in prep and cleanup. This Is Not Your Father’s AI If all goes according to plan, data collected from the experiments will hook up with machine learning tools developed by the Toyota Research Institute, with the aim of predicting how different electrolyte combinations behave in action. Beyond simply predicting which formulas work, the research team wants to understand why they work. “Our goal is to move beyond predicting which formulations work to understanding why they work by identifying causal relationships and mechanistic pathways that connect electrolyte chemistry to performance,” explains Toyota senior research scientist Amanda Volk. “We all know correlation is not causation. But what if we could break down this barrier? Our team is trying to see how far we can push causal reasoning to close the gap between materials research and device development,” emphasizes Toyota senior manager Kevin Tran. Here Comes The Fluoride-Ion EV Battery Of The Future, Eventually As for why fluoride, that’s a good question. Availability is one answer. Fluoride occurs naturally in soils, rocks, and water. It is a form of fluorine, the 13th most common element in the earth’s crust. More to the point, the key characteristic of fluoride is its high electronegativity. “Electronegativity describes how well an atom attracts electrons. This allows for the potential to create a battery with more storage capacity and life expectancy than typical lithium-ion batteries,” explains the University of North Carolina, where fluoride batteries have also been a topic of investigation. Other US institutions that have engaged in the field include the US Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago and Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. In the meantime, Toyota is banking on present-day EV battery technology to win over EV-curious drivers in the US, with an assist from the leading US battery maker LG Energy Solution. On August 18, LGES officially kicked off production at its new campus in Lansing, Michigan, which hosts EV battery manufacturing as well as stationary energy storage. Specifically, LG will manufacture nickel-manganese-cobalt EV battery cells for Toyota (there’s that cobalt again!). “These cells will power battery electric vehicles like the 2027 Toyota Highlander EV, which will be assembled at Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky (TMMK) in Georgetown, KY, strengthening the automaker’s U.S. supply chain for its next generation vehicles,” LG pointed out in a press release. Somewhat weirdly — make that somewhat hilariously — US Energy Secretary Doug Burgum chipped in his two cents, too. “Domestic battery production is foundational to America’s energy future,” Burgum said in a lengthy public statement applauding the new factory. Oh, really? Just a year ago, this same guy was trying to get members of the Fox-watching public to believe that 21st century energy storage technology is not a thing that exists. “And of course, when the sun goes down, you have a catastrophic failure called sunset and there’s no solar energy produced, and yet we’re subsidizing these things that are intermittent, unreliable, and expensive,” Burgum said during an appearance on Fox Business Thursday in August of 2025, in which he stretched the truth somewhat to make the Trump administration’s case against solar power. What now, Dougie? Photo: Toyota is still working on a futuristic fluoride-ion EV battery while growing its electrified vehicle footprint in the US market here and now (bZ EVcourtesy of Toyota).
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