Some recent news out of NAE has indicated that Toyota has been...

Some recent news out of NAE has indicated that Toyota has been working on a Solid State battery for use in Electric Vehicles (EV). For a bit of background, Toyota tried to push towards Hydrogen Powered vehicles, but has recently pulled back from this after seeing the rest of the industry embracing EV. In order to try and gain back lost ground or "leap frog" their competition Toyota started spending up big in designing a Solid State battery, a technology that most experts agree is the inevitable "next generation".

The article linked and snipped below explains a little about this technology and the fact that Tin is a major part of this new research. There are also some other technologies being developed in this space that also use Tin, in fact a number of plays for a next gen battery incorporate Tin.

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Tokyo Tech team develops low-cost germanium-free solid electrolyte for Li-ion batteries

Researchers at Tokyo Institute of Technology have devised a low-cost, scalable approach to developing all-solid-state batteries, improving prospects for scaling up the technology for widespread use in electric vehicles, communications and other industrial applications.
Described in a paper in the ACS journal Chemistry of Materials, the approach involves substituting germanium in the solid electrolyte for two more readily available elements: tin and silicon. The new material achieved an ionic conductivity that exceeds that of liquid electrolytes. Reporting the findings, Ryoji Kanno and colleagues stated: “This germanium-free lithium conductor could be a promising candidate as an electrolyte in all-solid-state batteries.”

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http://www.greencarcongress.com/2017/07/20170714-ttech.html#more