The Electric: Raising $1 Billion to Make Batteries in the U.S.—An Afternoon With Our Next Energy CEO Mujeeb Ijaz

In the 2000s, Mujeeb Ijaz—managing a team that made experimental electric vehicles for Ford—designed a sedan that would operate on two batteries rather than just one, like most EVs even today. One battery would be conventional lithium-ion, and the other a hydrogen fuel cell. The magic of the approach was that the car—a Ford Focus—could deliver hundreds of miles of range, which was a lot for the time: When the lithium-ion battery was exhausted, the fuel cell would replenish it. Ijaz and the engineers who worked for him demonstrated the vehicle for company executives, who watched but shelved it. Today, the dual-battery Focus is all but forgotten.

Two decades later, Ijaz has adopted the same concept at Our Next Energy, a Novi, Mich.-based next-generation battery company that he founded in 2020. The 56-year-old Ijaz is using two lithium-ion batteries in a pack that has delivered 600 miles of driving range in a BMW prototype. One battery is workaday lithium-iron-phosphate; the other is nickel-led, and serves to refill the LFP-led battery when it’s empty. In what so far has been a dizzyingly fast scale-up of his technology, Ijaz hopes to produce one of the least expensive long-range batteries on the market and help to enable affordable, mass-market EVs.