Has anyone been following the Donut Labs battery announcement and testing data?

[JoeDimwit]

My EV skeptic father sent me the announcement video a couple weeks ago, and I started looking into it. I still see it as mostly vaporware until they are actually being delivered to end users and someone can tear down a battery pack for testing and verification. But, if it proves out, I keep thinking that our favorite Blue Oval manufacturer currently has several battery plants under construction, and it might be worth it to them to change paths on battery types they want to manufacture at them.

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[Kamuelaflyer]

The devil is in the details, of course. We shall see if it scales up from the motorcycle level.

 

[ADDZ71]

a lot of problems with the Donut claims and they are a long way from moving into the automotive space. Some experts that I know have suggested that the claims have major challenges (i.e. charging time experiments extrapolated and not using real world temperature etc.).

 

[Kamuelaflyer]

For those unfamiliar with Donut Labs claims:

 

[AliRafiee]

QuantumScape has been working with VW on solid state batteries for a while now

 

[Ford_orr]

Maybe there's a hole in their theory .

(I'll see my way out)

 

[Snakebitten]

I'm not going to pile on with the naysayers, regardless of how vogue it might be to do so.
But I also admit that I'm trained to be sceptical by this fake prone world we live in.

Man do I want it to be true though!

It has been exciting to get caught up in the battery hype phenomenon.

 

[tbrumleve]

There’s a lot of mystery around this. Some third party tests coming out that show it’s not a “capacitor”, but we still don’t know what’s really going on. The next 6 months will provide more insight. Promising, but wary.

 

[JoeDimwit]

The 3 claims that stand out to me are
1) Potential charge time
2) not being sensitive to temperature (in most of our climates)
3) Energy density

I’m not sure if I’d rather they go with a lighter pack with the same (300ish mile) range, or go with the same weight for 450ish miles.

 

[XGC75]

If I'm Ford I'm not changing plans. These types of things, especially from small startups, fail at expanding inference space. Small teams have a hard time with understanding broadly-defined environments and use cases. Especially when you introduce mass manufacturing variation.

 

[JavaBob]

Maybe there's a hole in their theory .

(I'll see my way out)

I won't sugarcoat it. I donut disagree with you.
Exit stage left.

 

[evfinder]

So far the test results they have released, based on independent testing, has proven their claims, but they are only releasing test results one at a time so there is a lot left to be verified. They did show a motorbike that had their batteries in it being charged, and the test results seemed to match what they are claiming for charge speed. One thing that bothers me is that they don't appear to have patented any of their technology. It will take a while to see if the batteries hold up in terms of longevity.

 

[Kamuelaflyer]

So far the test results they have released, based on independent testing, has proven their claims, but they are only releasing test results one at a time so there is a lot left to be verified. They did show a motorbike that had their batteries in it being charged, and the test results seemed to match what they are claiming for charge speed. One thing that bothers me is that they don't appear to have patented any of their technology. It will take a while to see if the batteries hold up in terms of longevity.

iirc, @Mach-E VLOG mentioned concerns about the slow trickle of information in one of their videos. Patrick and Liv are both forum members; perhaps they can comment at some point.

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