BMW and Toyota partner up on batteries

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Our favorite kind of Germans, the Bavarian ones that make BMW, have announced that they will be creating a partnership with the Japanese at Toyota.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t read through the entire press release but hoping there’s no Berlin-Tokyo axis involved in the affair.

BMW i8 Concept

On a less jovial front, BMW and Toyota will be partnering up in order to cut back on the costs of developing new battery technology.

If you have a bit of a memory over boring stuff, you might even remember that this is stage two of an agreement between the two companies.

They must have sorted out everything about the engines because new they’re moving to what they plan to get the power from.

Toyota NS4

There’s plenty of interesting battery technologies to sort from these days, each with their own plus and minus points. The two associates have chosen to go for Li-Ion ones, the oldest and most popular one around.

There’s reason in their choice. Having gone for the batteries that everybody has experience with will eventually imply certain lowered costs.

What BMW and Toyota will be focusing on is the materials used for the vital parts of the battery, namely the cathodes, anodes and electrolytes.

BMW i8 Concept

Their aim is not to make batteries cheaper but to improve on the performance and overall capacity of the “juice” boxes.

This should in turn give us better batteries on all fronts for us in a few years and, given BMW’s partnership with Brilliance, they might be getting a lot cheaper as well.