The industry might think of batteries and electric vehicles as the big innovations that are now rolling across the auto business.

But Denise Gray’s preoccupation goes one step further: How do you innovate the battery itself?

“It’s the nature of auto engineering to focus on innovation and improvement. It just so happens that this time, we’re in the position of innovating something that’s still brand new to us,” said Gray, president of LG Energy Solution Michigan, the North American subsidiary of the Korean supplier of EV batteries around the world.

“Our industry is so experienced in determining how to perfect a product for efficient manufacturing in order to build 5 million of them, just humming along with very little design change,” she told Automotive News. “We’ve been making engine blocks and cylinder heads and crankshafts for 100 years. But we’ve got a new challenge.”

It is also a field with thorny uncertainties. EV battery technology is still relatively new, and improvements are in big demand. This month, General Motors expanded a recall of Bolt EVs because of a risk of fire with their LG batteries. GM said the recall could cost $1 billion, which it will expect LG to cover.

Gray’s career story started at GM, where she went to work at age 17 as a high school intern. She spent most of her career there as an electrical engineer focused on innovations for future vehicles that were always four years away, with the teams that introduced keyless entry systems, low-pressure sensors and window electrification.

Fifteen years ago, as GM’s director of energy storage systems, she had the role of asking GM’s manufacturing experts to remain open-minded about how batteries look and how they would need to be mass-produced.

“This will replace the internal combustion engine,” she recalled telling them. “But we don’t know what it’s going to look like in five years. Our battery format looks like this today — but the next generation might look completely different. So I need you all to be flexible on what we’re doing. We can’t lock ourselves into capital investments and processes that we have to wait 20 years to change.”

Today, Gray presides over a rapidly evolving EV battery landscape. Parent company LG Energy itself is evolving.

Though her U.S. business unit is called LG Energy Solution Michigan, it is responsible for three product lines in Holland, Mich., another line in South Korea and two more in Poland. Separately, the parent company has partnered with GM to produce a proprietary product called the Ultium battery.

That partnership is constructing two major U.S. battery plants — one in Lordstown, Ohio, and another in Spring Hill, Tenn.

Competitors are also investing in U.S. battery plants, and LG is reportedly considering additional sites around North America. Not clear yet is whether it would be Gray’s business unit that has that responsibility.

But first things first: Gray’s mission is to find ways to build batteries better, design them for faster production and bring down their cost.

An EV battery in 2000 — and there weren’t many in the world then — cost about $1,000 per kilowatt-hour to produce.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the target cost in 2020 was about $125 per kWh. The industry is aiming for $85 per kWh in the next few years.

“That’s pushing us forward,” Gray said. “And we need to get there through the chemistry of the product.”

A key point of scrutiny could be the time-consuming process that EV battery-makers call “formation.” It involves the use of very large holding tanks in which battery cells are brought to life, given a charge and then discharged repeatedly.

That stage of manufacturing takes 14 days — an outrageous luxury for mass-production automaking, where a factory manager might thrill to knock two seconds off a process.

In some cases, it can take 21 days.

“It boggles the minds of people in automotive,” she said. “And I don’t know the answer yet to how to change it. But I bring it up all the time to provoke people into thinking about it. Solve that problem, and you’ll become a billionaire.”

She is also pressing the issue of localizing her supply chain. But that will take some doing. Battery-making is still a new field, and so far, its upstream suppliers operate mostly in Asia.

“A lot of materials go into batteries,” she said. “Raw materials, material processing — we’d like to see it locate here close to where we need it. We’re working on that. But it’s going to take some problem-solving.”

She is also looking for ideas on how to recruit and train battery production work forces. She believes the precision work that goes into mass-producing traditional engines today creates an obvious pool for recruitment. But even those seasoned workers will require retraining.

“Battery cells are made in cleanrooms, and that’s going to take some new skill sets,” she said. “Any amount of contamination can spoil the end product.”

The innovation may be in the way that newly recruited work forces are trained. The EV battery industry “exists mostly in Asia. And so when it comes to the necessary knowledge transfer, we face a difference in language and culture that we’ll have to overcome.

“But once these work forces learn the skill of producing them, our task will be to combine those manual processes with new approaches in automation, and then weaving machine learning into what we want to do.”