Industry Landscape · Electric Vehicles & Battery Tech
The Solid-State Battery Race: Who Actually Ships by 2027, and Who's Just Talking
Nine companies, three continents, and at least four genuinely different chemistries are all racing toward the same promise: an EV battery that charges in minutes, survives a crash without catching fire, and goes further on a single charge. We went program by program to separate the pilot lines from the press releases.
For fifteen years, "solid-state battery" has been the EV industry's most reliable applause line and least reliable delivery date. That is starting to change — not because the chemistry problem is solved, but because enough manufacturers have moved from slideware to physical pilot lines that the race now has visible checkpoints. Toyota has a supplier building a dedicated electrolyte plant. Nissan has cells coming off a real production line in Yokohama. Samsung SDI has already shipped evaluation samples to automakers. None of that guarantees a car in your driveway by 2027, but it's a meaningfully different starting point than the concept renderings of the early 2020s.
What follows is not a ranking. The programs below are pursuing different chemistries, different timelines, and in one case, a technology that already shipped, sold poorly, and was quietly discontinued — which is itself the most instructive story in this piece. Read it as a field guide to who's doing what, and how skeptical to be about each claim.
Why "solid-state" isn't one technology
The phrase gets used as if every company means the same thing, and they don't. A conventional lithium-ion cell moves ions through a liquid electrolyte between a graphite anode and a metal-oxide cathode. Swap that liquid for a solid — a ceramic, a sulfide glass, or a solid polymer — and you remove the most flammable part of the battery while making room for a lithium-metal anode, which packs far more energy into the same volume. That's the theory behind every program below. The practical differences are in which solid electrolyte a company bets on:
- Sulfide electrolytes (Toyota, Samsung SDI, Honda) conduct ions almost as well as a liquid and enable fast charging, but the material reacts with moisture in the air, which makes manufacturing far harder to scale than lithium-ion's comparatively forgiving wet-slurry process.
- Lithium-metal with a separator-film architecture (QuantumScape) skips a traditional solid ceramic block in favor of a thin ceramic separator, aiming for lithium-ion-like manufacturing steps with a solid-state anode.
- Polymer/hybrid electrolytes (Factorial Energy, used by Mercedes-Benz) trade some energy density and low-temperature performance for a manufacturing process closer to existing pouch-cell lines.
- Semi-solid gel electrolytes (WeLion, used by NIO) are a real-world stepping stone already sold in production cars — a hybrid that keeps a small amount of liquid for conductivity while gaining most of the safety and density benefits.
None of this is marketing nuance. It's the difference between a battery that can be built on retooled existing factories and one that needs an entirely new, moisture-controlled manufacturing environment built from scratch — which is exactly why some of these timelines keep slipping while others, quietly, are already real.
The field: nine programs, four chemistries, one deadline window
Below is every program with a specific, sourced target date or shipping product as of mid-2026. Card length varies deliberately — some programs have a decade of public detail behind them, others have disclosed exactly one number.
Toyota's roadmap, first published in 2023 and reaffirmed since, targets a first-generation solid-state EV battery in the 2027–2028 window, claiming up to roughly 1,000 km (620 miles) of range and a 10–80% charge in about ten minutes. A second generation aims further, toward 1,200 km.
In October 2025, Toyota and Sumitomo Metal Mining signed a joint development agreement to mass-produce the cathode material, while battery partner Idemitsu Kosan began building a dedicated solid-electrolyte plant, targeted to be complete by the end of 2027.
Nissan opened a pilot production line for all-solid-state batteries at its Yokohama plant in early 2025, part of its long-standing "Nissan Ambition 2030" roadmap. The company targets an EV using in-house solid-state cells in fiscal year 2028.
Disclosed specs: roughly 800 Wh/L energy density, about double a conventional liquid pack, with a cost target of $75/kWh at launch, dropping to $65/kWh afterward. Nissan is also working with U.S. firm LiCAP Technologies on manufacturing scale-up.
Honda opened a full demonstration production line for all-solid-state batteries in Sakura City, Japan, in November 2024, running roughly 295,000 square feet, to validate manufacturing steps — electrode coating, cell formation, module assembly — at something closer to production scale before committing capital to a real factory.
Honda's own language is deliberately soft: it aims to apply solid-state batteries to electrified models launching "in the second half of the 2020s," without naming a specific model or year.
Samsung SDI plans to begin mass production of all-solid-state batteries at its Ulsan complex in the second half of 2027, backed by a pledged 25 trillion won (about 16 trillion won of which is earmarked for Ulsan) through 2040.
Unlike most rivals, Samsung SDI says it has already delivered evaluation samples — rated at roughly 900 Wh/L, about 40% denser than typical lithium-ion — to automakers and even humanoid-robot makers, and reports positive early feedback on safety.
Volkswagen's battery arm PowerCo holds a non-exclusive license to manufacture QuantumScape's solid-state cell technology at up to 40 GWh/year, expandable to 80 GWh — enough for roughly a million EVs annually if fully built out. VW Group also owns about 17% of QuantumScape directly.
In 2025 the partners demonstrated the technology publicly for the first time in a moving vehicle: a Ducati motorcycle at IAA Mobility, rather than a car. PowerCo has separately confirmed the cell passed its first internal endurance test. Public timelines for a passenger-car launch have not been pinned to a specific year.
Mercedes fitted a prototype Factorial Energy solid-state pack, co-developed with its Formula 1 powertrain engineers, into a test-mule EQS and began public road testing. In one long-distance run, the car covered 749 miles (1,205 km) on a single charge — with range still remaining.
Factorial's cells are rated up to roughly 450 Wh/kg at the cell level, and Mercedes cites up to a 25% range increase over an equivalent lithium-ion pack at the same weight and size.
BMW has been testing large-format Solid Power cells in a modified BMW i7 test vehicle around Munich since mid-2025, and is building its own prototype solid-cell line, based on Solid Power's design, at its Cell Manufacturing Competence Center in Parsdorf.
In late 2025, Solid Power added a joint evaluation agreement with both BMW and Samsung SDI, effectively pairing an established cell producer with an automaker that wants in-house manufacturing know-how rather than a pure supply contract.
The world's largest battery maker is placing a second, very different bet alongside its own solid-state research: sodium-ion. CATL's Naxtra sodium-ion cells reached large-scale deployment in 2026, with a Changan passenger EV as the first mass-produced sodium-ion vehicle, rated up to about 175 Wh/kg and roughly 500 km of range.
CATL has separately confirmed solid-state battery production is targeted for 2027, but has also publicly cautioned about the difficulty of scaling manufacturing — a rare admission of friction from a supplier this dominant.
This is the cautionary tale. NIO's 150 kWh semi-solid battery pack, built with WeLion New Energy, actually shipped in the ET7 sedan, hitting over 1,000 km (about 650 miles) in real-world range tests and even a live-streamed 1,044 km drive.
It's real, it drove, and people bought it — and NIO discontinued the pack after only a few hundred units, citing lack of demand, widely attributed to its high cost relative to the range benefit most buyers actually needed day to day.
A rough timeline, if the public targets hold
- Already shipped (2024–2025)
NIO's WeLion semi-solid pack in the ET7 — sold in limited numbers, then discontinued. Honda's demonstration line running in Tochigi. BMW and Mercedes both road-testing prototype packs in modified production cars.
- 2026
CATL's Naxtra sodium-ion reaches mass-market deployment in a Changan EV — a genuinely new chemistry at scale, even though it isn't solid-state.
- 2027
Samsung SDI's targeted mass-production start at Ulsan. Idemitsu's dedicated solid-electrolyte plant for Toyota targeted for completion. CATL's own solid-state production target.
- 2027–2028
Toyota's targeted first-generation solid-state EV launch window.
- Fiscal 2028
Nissan's targeted in-house solid-state EV, manufactured at the Yokohama pilot line's production successor.
- "Second half of the 2020s" (unspecified)
Honda's stated application window — intentionally the vaguest commitment of any major program here.
So does any of this actually matter yet?
Not for a purchase decision — nothing above is a car you can order. What it changes today is which liquid-electrolyte EVs are worth trusting as a longer-term hold versus which brands are visibly racing to make their current lineup obsolete on their own timeline. A company with a funded pilot line and a named supplier (Toyota, Nissan, Samsung SDI) is behaving differently than one that has shown a single test mule and a press event (most of the rest). Neither approach is wrong — but they are not the same level of commitment, and it's worth knowing which is which before taking any single announcement at face value.
What we didn't include
This is not a complete map of every battery lab on earth. We left out early-stage academic and startup chemistries without a named automotive partner or a public pilot line, because at that stage a claim is a paper, not a program. We also left out ProLogium's Mercedes-Benz partnership and Stellantis's Factorial investment beyond what's noted above, since neither has disclosed a program-specific timeline as concrete as the ones covered here — they're real, but thinner on public specifics as of this writing.
The bottom line
Solid-state batteries are no longer purely a slide in an investor deck — Nissan has cells coming off a real line, Samsung SDI has samples in other companies' labs, and Toyota's suppliers are pouring concrete for dedicated plants. But NIO's experience is the detail every other headline skips: getting a solid(ish)-state battery into a real car is a solved problem for at least one company already. Getting people to actually want to pay for what it costs to build is the part nobody on this list has proven yet. That's the gap between 2026's demonstrations and 2027's promised deliveries — and it's the number to watch, not the range figure.
Corrections or updates on any of these programs: corrections@dopaminekart.com