ONE’s 600-Mile Solution For Range Anxiety Could Be EV Game-Changer

Automakers have been trying to ratchet up market share for their new electric vehicles by ratcheting up their range of new models. This largely has meant developing, perfecting and marketing engineering advancements in incremental steps, evolving from early 50-mile ranges to 100 miles, then 200 miles, now 300 miles and more.

Our Next Energy (ONE) is intending to blast that business and technology model to bits with its bid to produce an automotive-battery system that provides 600 miles of range. And the startup under Founder and CEO Mujeeb Ijaz is a long way toward proving its proposition commercially: The three-year-old company now is building a $1.6-billion manufacturing plant in suburban Detroit, which will manufacture a unique dual-chemistry-battery architecture for electric propulsion that already is being deployed in tests by BMW and others.

Essentially, Ijaz and ONE have purported to offer the ultimate solution to the challenge that has been restraining growth in U.S. electric-vehicle sales more than any other: range anxiety.

“If your normal willingness to drive is on a four- or five-hour trip, you should be able to do that without needing to stop for a charge somewhere or having zero range when you get there” with ONE’s Gemini battery system, Ijaz told me.

Ijaz believed that Americans’ acute range anxiety overlay three broad obstacles to widespread, long-term EV adoption. At a time when about 300 miles is still seen as the outside possible range for all-electric vehicles, he calculated that “we needed around 600 miles” in reliable range for consumers to feel completely comfortable.

He also was convinced the EV industry was going down the wrong path to rely so heavily, as it does, on batteries made with cobalt. For one thing, “thermal runaway” reactions between cobalt and nickel have been responsible for most of the onboard battery fires that have plagued early EVs. Also, Ijaz said, “I thought using cobalt would become a train wreck for a supply chain” dependent on the mineral that is mostly imported from Congo, whose mines operate with dubious safety and worker-protection standards.

And third, Ijaz believed it was time for a battery company that not only was going to build batteries in the United States but also whose science and engineering were conducted in America, rather than in South Korea or China, the world’s two leaders in EV-battery technology. Funding for domestic EV production now available under the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) underscored that Ijaz was correct.

“We started the company at just the right time, because it wasn’t clear until now that we would get any traction from becoming an American battery company,” Ijaz said. “Now, with the IRA, U.S. battery companies have a mechanism to level competitiveness in the near term so that we can get larger volumes in the long term.”

In an important way, Ijaz’s technical model is elegantly simple: employ two batteries in ONE’s Gemini system instead of one. The main battery is based on the rising basic chemistry in the industry: lithium iron phosphate (LFP). ONE’s LFP battery will provide about 150 miles of range, which will cover nearly all everyday use cases for an EV even though some automakers now can provide up to 300 miles of range. And low-cost iron, widely available in the United States, essentially replaces lithium, whose global supplies also are under stress.

Operationally, the second battery is the key to ONE’s approach: It’s a range-extending battery that will add 450 miles before the car runs out of juice. This is the part of the Gemini system that will be pressed into service by vehicles in “edge cases.” These occurrences average only four times a year for the average American driver, Ijaz said, but having confidence in an overall range of 600 miles can be a deal-maker for hesitant EV-car buyers who remain very wary of charging-infrastructure concerns.

ONE has demonstrated Gemini’s capabilities on a retrofitted Tesla Model S that achieved 752 miles on a single charge. BMW is working with ONE to begin testing an electric iX SUV equipped with the dual battery system this year. Meanwhile, ONE has kicked off limited production in its Novi facilities of a battery system for the commercial-truck market and is entering the utility-grid storage market via a deal to supply a solar-powered microgrid for a Berkshire Hathaway defense plant in West Virginia.

As it creates new partnerships and probes initial verticals before completing its big plant in Michigan, ONE already has reached the level of about $60 million in annual revenues, with a projection of $350 million in revenues in 2024, Ijaz says.

“We’ve already got that first dollar bill that you frame if you’re a new business and you start taking in proceeds,” Ijaz said. “I just have to figure out how to frame a check.”