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

I mean, I have no idea what the point of this is, but I’d give it a 99.9% probability that this is some kind of joke, scam, publicity stunt, or social experiment. There’s just no way that anyone in the world could come up with such spectacular tech and nobody has ever heard about it. Let alone a 22-person company that not only claims to have developed the most advanced, production-ready battery in the world, but also plans to scale a battery factory to the size of Tesla’s Gigafactory within a year. But hey, maybe that’s possible, because the CEO is “a serial entrepreneur with a proven track record.” If you're curious here are all the details about the team behind this : https://www.donutlab.com/about-us/

> 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

It might still be a problem, depending on why you want an EV. There are two annoyances with fast DC charging compared to home charging, and that super fast 800 miles in 5 minutes only addresses one of them.

The one it addresses is time to charge. 800 miles in 5 minutes is similar to ICE cars, and it would mean you can deal with charging with about the same level of hassle as an ICE driver has dealing with gas. I.e., you don't really have to think about it since it is only a few minutes.

However, DC chargers often cost significantly more per kWh than home charging, and also often have additional fixed fees.

If having low energy costs per mile is an important consideration in many places it turns out that an EV only charged at DC chargers will cost more per mile for energy than a Prius or a hybrid Civic or maybe even a hybrid RAV4 or CR-V.

With home charging a Prius and sometimes other hybrids can still beat an EV in some places so if energy cost is important you need to do the math for your area, but in most places the EV will win at least in the US.

There are nice things about EV besides low energy costs, but even if you get one mainly for other reasons the low energy costs can quickly become a favorite feature.

For example, a sandwich chain restaurant in my town raised their prices. My favorite sandwich, which I'd get there once a week, went from something like $9.20 to $12.99. That chain's store in the next town is owned by a different franchisee, and that sandwich is $10.39 there.

Before I got my EV it wouldn't have been worth going to that other town to save $2.60 because the gas for the round trip would come out to around that.

With my EV, charged at home, it is only about $0.60 round trip, so I save $2.00. It does take longer of course, but as I said I like to get that sandwich once a week. There's a weekly podcast I listen to. I use the time driving for the sandwich listening to that, so it is time I otherwise would have spent on the couch listening my my home entertainment system so it cancels out.

I wouldn't call it an outright scam. But yes, you pay yourself a nice salary, travel around the world to meet potential OEMs, you may fly in private jets, you stay in fancy hotels, you have business meetings in Michelin star restaurants.

The motorcycle is real, you can buy it.

I worked for a company in Germany in 2024 and the CEO was quite open about using public grant money as a free gift. The company wasn't build around it but it was a significant part of income. He made engineers sign papers that they had worked on some AI stuff which they didn't. A demonstrator was made with yolo by an intern. He said they have just no competency to figure that out and also that they actually don't want to figure it out.

Or look at the EuroLLM: sounds good on paper, never heard about it again. Grant grabbing is a real industry in Europe with companies specialised on creating grant applications and forming consortiums.

> Concerning range though, I think their estimate is pretty fair as far as the marketoid speech goes -- it can be 600 km

I don't know what 'real world range' means to you. A bike of this size uses roughly 9kWh/100km. The battery has 33kWh capacity you will usually look for a charger at 20% and charge to 80%. So 'real world range' will be around 200-250km.

The last version with a 20kWh battery made a record run from 100% to 0% with 350km. Which translates to 577km on this bigger battery. At least I don't consider the need of a car following me with a trailer a 'real world' scenario.

And another funny thing: if you watch the video, you actually can see that the battery starts to bulb during the charging starting from 67% on and then the video cuts out at 82%...

Btw, the CEO never speaks of cells, only of batteries. In the industry the battery is usually considered the structure plus the cells. He doesn't even speak about a factory or production. So if he buys white label cells in China he is technically not lying.

It is an absolutely fantastic marketing video and cleverly done: Verge says on their website only 33.3kWh capacity and 10min to 80%. We connect the dots in our brains which aren't there.

It is a decent motorbike used to make donut look legit and donut is used to create hype for the motorcycle, likely made in China with a bit of assembly in Europe to call it Finnish.

I have a diesel car and in theory you could fuel it with used cooking oil if you needed to.

I don't think I'm likely to do that as I think this would gum up the engine but I know people that have told me they've done it with a filtration.

For the record I would like to switch to an electric car next but my current diesel seems to have a lot of life in it yet.