Toshiba’s Scib Battery Aims for Electric Cars and Bikes

CHIBA, Japan—It won’t blow up and it charges rapidly. Conceivably, you could have a an electric car that charges in a few minutes. Those are the some of the reasons that Toshiba says the Scib battery will become popular in electric vehicles in the coming years.

Scib (which stands for super-charge ion battery) is a lithium-titanate battery – similar to the ones being put together by tiny Altair Nanotechnologies – that can be used in a wide variety of applications. Conventional lithium-ion batteries have a lithium-cobalt cathode. (In batteries, charged lithium particles move from the cathode to the anode and back again). Unfortunately, lithium-cobalt batteries can break down and cause a “thermal runaway reaction” or explosion. Lithium-cobalt batteries also degrade over time: The more they get used, the less power they can hold. If you want to buy an electric car today, battery replacement is an issue you have to consider.

Developing new batteries remains to be one of the big challenges in electronics. Batteries roughly improve 6 percent a year in performance. Silicon chips improve by around 60 percent a year. The key part to remember with Scib is that this is Toshiba, one of the major supplier of components to the electronic world. The cafeteria at corporate headquarters probably employs 35 times more people that Altair has in total. NEC and Nissan are also working on batteries for electric cars. This is good news for electric and plug-in car fans: when large mass manufacturers begin to show strong and positive interests in new technologies, the odds of that technology making it to market increase dramatically.

But it is also bad news for startups that have been touting novel batteries for the last few years. Pretend you are a manager at a car company. Who are you going to buy batteries from?

Scib doesn’t have the same energy density as a lithium-cobalt battery, but it’s got a lot of other things going for it. For instance, you can drive a nail through it without it blowing up. A single cell (that blue thing pictured) also recharges in five minutes, compared to 30 minutes for a standard high-quality lithium-cobalt battery. Thus, an electric bike with 15 Scib cells in it can be recharged rapidly. In lab tests, Toshiba says that Scib cells only lose about 10 percent of their capacity to hold energy after 3,000 charge-discharge cycles, which is quite low.

You could theoretically charge a plug-in hybrid or an electric car in five minutes, but because any car using these would have hundreds of cells, you’d need a really powerful charger. Still, a car with a Scib-based battery pack would likely charge more rapidly than a car with a conventional pack even at a regular charging station.

Toshiba came out with Scibs for notebooks and the battery packs for electric bikes this year. Next, it will aim for scooters.