Ten years ago, Tesla was still in its infancy as a public company. Its Tesla Roadster — the first highway-legal production car to use lithium-ion cells — had only been on the road for a few years, but manufacturer interest in lithium-ion battery technology was heating up fast.
Back then, Yuxing Wang knew solid-state batteries faced a long road to commercialization, but they still dominated his research for the next decade. Eventually, he thought, solid-state technology might shape the battery…