A Decade-Long Search for a Battery That Can End the Gasoline Era
On a frigid day in early January, as she worked in her office in the Boston suburb of Billerica, Mass., Siyu Huang received a two-word text message.“Spinning wheels,” it said. Attached was a short video clip showing a car on rollers in an indoor testing center.To the untrained eye there was nothing remarkable in the video. The car could have been getting its emissions tested at a Connecticut auto repair shop (except it had no tailpipe). But to Ms. Huang, the chief executive of Factorial Energy, the video was a milestone in a quest that had already occupied a decade of her life.Ms. Huang, her husband, Alex Yu, and their employees at Factorial had been working on a new kind of electric vehicle battery, known as solid state, that could turn the auto industry on its head in a few years — if a ...