Toyota is promising a potential battery breakthrough that it hopes will be a turning point for its electric vehicles.

The world’s largest automaker said that while it is still a few years off, it’s making progress on plans to make EV batteries lighter, smaller, and — drumroll, please — cheaper.

If they succeed, it could revolutionize the EV industry, and reinvigorate Toyota’s place in it. 

It’s been more than 25 years since Toyota introduced the hybrid Prius, paving the way for a mass market electric car, but then?

“Of course, Tesla came in and, you know, took over that crown,” said Jessica Caldwell, executive director of insights at Edmunds.

She said Toyota is trying to put itself back on top by developing an affordable solid-state battery that would replace the liquid lithium-ion batteries now standard in EVs.

That’s something companies across the industry have raced to develop for years.

“They’re very efficient,” said Caldwell. “They can offer extremely long ranges, pretty much solving a lot of the issues that consumers would have with buying an electric vehicle.”

That technology would be a gamechanger for Toyota, said Michelle Krebs, executive analyst at Cox Automotive.

“If it is successful with this kind of battery, it will leapfrog some of the other automakers,” she said.

But there are a lot of “if”s on the way to that success.