It had been in the works for a while, but now it has formally been adopted. From the article:
The regulation provides that by 2027 portable batteries incorporated into appliances should be removable and replaceable by the end-user, leaving sufficient time for operators to adapt the design of their products to this requirement.
Chemist here. Solid batteries aren’t anywhere close to ready yet, let alone high performance enough to replace regular Li ion. Liquids just work really well for moving ions around.
Toyota have recebtly been claiming to have figured out a viable method to make practical solid state batteries at scale with the intention to have them powering cars in 2027. Whether they will or not by then is yet to be seen of course…
They’ve been claiming this for years, the have form for it…
https://thedriven.io/2023/07/05/solid-state-batteries-toyota-has-history-of-talking-big-on-ev-breakthrough-but-not-delivering/
I see what you’re saying but the previous claims were more along the lines of “we have invented an entirely new type of battery that is more advanced” and the current claim is “we have had a breakthrough on how to manufacture a battery that has already been invented but wasn’t practical to produce at scale previously” which is slightly different. As I said originally, we’ll have to wait and see what if anything they actually produce.