Back then, when Ovshinsky talked of scaling up his battery to run a car, he was ridiculed. "The auto companies said it wouldn't work," he recalls. "Then, after one car got 200 miles on a single charge, they said it couldn't be manufactured. Now that we are making them, they say it is too costly. But that is a red herring too." Ovshinsky's team of engineers and electrochemists has slashed the cost 40% in two years, they claim. If automakers would commit to buying tens of thousands, Ovshinsky says, the batteries would make electric cars as cheap as gasoline models.

Not everyone is convinced. "Ovshinsky is brilliant," says Daniel Sperling, director of the Transportation Institute at the University of California at Davis. "But his battery will be cost-competitive only for small electrics, such as Toyota's E-com or Ford's Th!nk--both still prototypes." The battery will also work in "hybrid" cars, with both gasoline engines and electric motors, that Japanese firms will send to the U.S. by next year.

Ovshinsky has attracted financing--$36 million in grants from the U.S. Advanced Battery Consortium and $20 million from GM. His new battery factory in Ohio, however, is running at less than half capacity. "Automakers built an industry on gasoline," says an undaunted Ovshinsky. "And large corporations don't change easily. But electric cars are here. The genie is out of the bottle."