In 2023 Nissan has set out plans for a pilot production plant for solid-state batteries to be operational in 2025, supporting initial application engineering by 2026 and vehicle application in 2028. Now we have an update.
Nissan has stacked 23 solid-state cells into a single prototype pack. That might sound like a nerdy footnote, but it’s the difference between “lab experiment” and “thing that could go in a car.”
For years now, every carmaker on the planet has been promising solid-state batteries are just around the corner. Toyota, BMW, VW, Stellantis — pick a brand, they’ve got a press release. Most of them are still demoing single cells the size of a coaster. Getting to 23 stacked cells, working together, hitting charge and discharge targets, is the bit where most projects quietly die.
According to Nikkei’s reporting in April, Nissan’s prototype is hitting the performance numbers it needs to actually ship. And the numbers are wild if they hold up at production scale: roughly double the energy density of today’s lithium-ion, charging times cut by about two-thirds, and a WLTP range north of 620 miles. For context, that’s a Sunderland-to-Edinburgh round trip on one charge, with miles to spare.
The 2028 launch date Nissan set back when David Moss was talking about “deleting the liquid electrolyte” — that one’s still standing. The Yokohama pilot line opened in January 2025. Per-cell performance targets were hit later that year. Now the multi-cell pack works. That’s three milestones, on schedule, which honestly is more than you can say for most of this industry.
There’s a manufacturing wrinkle worth flagging too. Nissan’s tied up with a company called LiCAP, whose dry-electrode process skips the solvent-and-drying step that makes battery production so expensive and energy-hungry. Sounds boring, matters enormously — solid-state batteries have always had a “yes but can you actually build them affordably” problem, and this is the bit nobody talks about at the press events.
The other thing Nissan is doing, which gets less attention but might matter more in the short term: a cobalt-free lithium-ion cell, also due in 2028, that could knock up to 65% off battery costs. Solid-state is the headline, but cobalt-free Li-ion is what makes a £25,000 EV actually possible. Both arriving the same year is not a coincidence.
What’s still murky: which car gets it first. Nissan hasn’t said. The smart money is on something flagship-shaped — a next-gen Ariya, or whatever replaces the GT-R in everyone’s fever dreams — because solid-state will be expensive at launch and needs a halo product to absorb the cost. A 600-mile electric GT-R would, frankly, sell itself.
Worth being a bit sceptical, though. “Double the range, third of the charging time” is the kind of claim that gets quietly walked back somewhere between the press release and the showroom. Real-world WLTP figures have a habit of arriving smaller than the prototype suggests, and the first cars off any new battery line tend to be the ones with the teething problems. We’ve also been here before with solid-state — every two years for about a decade now.
But for the first time, the timeline isn’t slipping. That on its own is news.
