Daqus Energy has a plan to make EV sports cars fast, light, and cheap

Cheaper, lighter, and denser: the trifecta defines an ideal battery. No one has devised a perfect cell quite yet, but one stealthy startup thinks it has found a new material that solves at least two of those challenges. Daqus Energy has been quietly operating for the past couple years, refining a compound known as TAQ that promises to be cheaper and lighter than competing battery materials. “We have not seen a metric at which TAQ does poorly compared with the incumbents,” Harish Banda, co-founder and CEO of Daqus, told TechCrunch. The company was spun out of MIT, where research into the material was funded in part through a partnership with Lamborghini. There are a few caveats, which Banda freely offers: The company is still scaling production of TAQ, and it has only just begun working on the type of cells that could drop into an EV. Plus, many promising battery materials have died on the path to commercialization. But the upside is strong enough that Daqus is emerging from stealth ... Read full article.