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Donut Lab’s all-solid-state battery delivers 400 Wh/kg of energy density

donutlab.com

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Re: Donut Lab’s all-solid-state battery delivers 400 Wh/kg of energy density

#121
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fine, those folks can just get angrier and angrier as the market makes their ICE cars more and more difficult and expensive to own.

I'm still waiting for the EV that's a car instead of some kind of techbro reimagining of personal transportation with a 27" tv glued to the dash. So far the plug-in hybrid market is figuring that out first -- the Mazda CX90 is a real car. The VW ID3 gets close, but it still feels like someone tried to design a B-movie space ship. There's a great market out there willing to buy B-movie space ships, but if EVs are goin…

It’s fun driving a spaceship, though. :D I’m just glad we’re past the phase where apparently EVs had to look like science experiments. That’s one thing Tesla got right, they built a car that was electric, rather than building an electric vehicle.

Re: Donut Lab’s all-solid-state battery delivers 400 Wh/kg of energy density

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s range anxiety and it’s real. And it’s not entirely unjustified. Where I live in the Midwest I have literally never seen a public charging station. I know they exist because I can search for them on maps app and I see dots, but it speaks to their general small numbers that I’ve never seen one in person that I can remember. Now, prior to this, I lived in California for many years from 2011 until 2019, and I saw to…

Most current EV owners charge at home for daily needs, you really only need charging stations for long distance and owners w/o options where they park (i.e. renters or street parking only) Even with street parking, I see lots of people running cables across the sidewalk (with safety / step covers thankfully) I drove across the country and accounted for midwest charging. Generally the rocky mountain states are minimal…

Yep. Mine is always charged at home, and so I've never needed to use a charging station locally. They're around just by virtue of the area being part of a major metro, but I haven't needed them.

I haven't yet done a cross-country drive but would like to and have plotted out routes with ABRP, and yes, there's more in the midwest states than you'd think. Enough that just about any EV with EPA 250mi range or better can manage a long haul trip without too much trouble (just with a few more bathroom/snack/coffee stops).

Re: Donut Lab’s all-solid-state battery delivers 400 Wh/kg of energy density

#123
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fine, those folks can just get angrier and angrier as the market makes their ICE cars more and more difficult and expensive to own.

I'm still waiting for the EV that's a car instead of some kind of techbro reimagining of personal transportation with a 27" tv glued to the dash. So far the plug-in hybrid market is figuring that out first -- the Mazda CX90 is a real car. The VW ID3 gets close, but it still feels like someone tried to design a B-movie space ship. There's a great market out there willing to buy B-movie space ships, but if EVs are goin…

Nissan is skipping the US for the 2026 model year due to tariff issues, but their Ariya is reasonably close to "a car, just electric". They designed it specifically to make transitioning from an ICE car less abrupt, including making the acceleration curve more gentle. Its cabin design leans minimal, but more in a luxury Japanese zen style than tech bro style.

The 2026 Leaf, which is based on the same platform, is pretty good in this regard too.

Re: Donut Lab’s all-solid-state battery delivers 400 Wh/kg of energy density

#124

So solid state battery tech is very likely on-schedule for mass production over the next 4 years. There really isn't much time left for the haters to post stories attempting to factually dismantle and dismiss EVs before EVs pass the 51% adoption curve in 2030.

Even as things currently stand, some folks just have a bone to pick with EVs. Even if future models have an 800mi range, can charge to 100% in 5 minutes, and have useful lifetimes as long or longer than ICE counterparts, some will figure out some reason to get angry about them.

A person I know is upset about EVs because they are built around the assumption that every system in the car will phone home to the car manufacturer (or perhaps the cops), and basically require you to have a proprietary smartphone app in order to interact with EV chargers and perhaps the car itself. Of course, this is also true of new ICE cars, but it's at least possible to continue driving an older ICE car with more limited telemetry, whereas effective, mass-available EVs basically came onto to the scene at the same time that spyware car computer systems did.

I personally do want an EV, but I have qualms about the smartphone-ification of such cars as well. More importantly, the place where I currently live doesn't have a parking spot with an EV charger (there's a limited number of such spots, you have to join a waitlist to get one). If electric cars really could be charged to be ready to drive 800 miles in 5 minutes, that wouldn't be a problem - but even if this press release is being more or less accurate about the battery claims, I can't buy an EV with this technology today, and as far as I'm aware it still takes significantly longer to charge an EV than to fill up with gas to an equivalent amount.

Re: Donut Lab’s all-solid-state battery delivers 400 Wh/kg of energy density

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that the causation runs the other way. They think EV owners, Californians, and anyone who doesn't smell like petroleum is crazy. Therefore they won't buy electric cars and so nobody builds charging stations.

I can only speak for the people I know well (I know people from lots of different backgrounds here), but I can confidently say that every one of them would love EVs if charging stations were everywhere and charged in 10 minutes. There may be a real chicken-and-egg problem with building the charging stations, but if it were magically fixed and ultra fast charging stations were ubiquitous overnight, I think minds would…

> I can confidently say that every one of them would love EVs if [...]

And I can confidently say I see rural pickup owners rolling coal about weekly, so no, they will not be loving EVs, because it hampers them destroying their surroundings.

Re: Donut Lab’s all-solid-state battery delivers 400 Wh/kg of energy density

#127

This is so out of left field and so "ideal" that it warrants some pretty heavy skepticism. Donut isn't even a battery company, and plenty of other battery companies with lots of knowledge and lots more money have been pouring over this problem with mixed results. Because of this, now I am even a bit skeptical of their electric motor claims, which before I didn't really question much at all.

They’re making very direct, no caveat statements though, using words like “now”, “immediately”, and “in production”. So if it’s a bluff, they haven’t left themselves much wiggle room with weasel words. I don’t see any wiggle room. And if that’s that case then a failure to deliver would be have to be more “wow, yeah, turns out forgot a decimal point and messed up some imperial-metric confusion”. Or “my teenager kid found the blog unlocked and thought it would be awesome no-press-is-bad-press PR stunt. Sorry”

Re: Donut Lab’s all-solid-state battery delivers 400 Wh/kg of energy density

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s range anxiety and it’s real. And it’s not entirely unjustified. Where I live in the Midwest I have literally never seen a public charging station. I know they exist because I can search for them on maps app and I see dots, but it speaks to their general small numbers that I’ve never seen one in person that I can remember. Now, prior to this, I lived in California for many years from 2011 until 2019, and I saw to…

Most current EV owners charge at home for daily needs, you really only need charging stations for long distance and owners w/o options where they park (i.e. renters or street parking only) Even with street parking, I see lots of people running cables across the sidewalk (with safety / step covers thankfully) I drove across the country and accounted for midwest charging. Generally the rocky mountain states are minimal…

Yes, I think people mistakenly believe that if chargers aren't as ubiquitous as gas stations, there must not be enough of them. Range anxiety can still happen on a cross country trip, but not for the vast majority of daily driving. Now, if you live in an apartment building where it's difficult to charge at home, it's a different story. Not so much because of range anxiety, but because the cost of public fast charging rivals and sometimes exceeds the cost of gasoline.

Re: Donut Lab’s all-solid-state battery delivers 400 Wh/kg of energy density

#129

So solid state battery tech is very likely on-schedule for mass production over the next 4 years. There really isn't much time left for the haters to post stories attempting to factually dismantle and dismiss EVs before EVs pass the 51% adoption curve in 2030.

Even as things currently stand, some folks just have a bone to pick with EVs. Even if future models have an 800mi range, can charge to 100% in 5 minutes, and have useful lifetimes as long or longer than ICE counterparts, some will figure out some reason to get angry about them.

If you live in the north, lithium ion batteries are not a great bet for longevity of a vehicle. There are legitimate reasons to not be pro EV in their current form.

Re: Donut Lab’s all-solid-state battery delivers 400 Wh/kg of energy density

#130
So, cheaper, higher density, no difficult to acquire elements needed, works in -30 weather, does not degrade over time, and safer. Basically a magic battery that is better on every possible metric. This could be world changing.

Either they are lying about something, or they are about to be the richest company on the planet out of nowhere.

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