Industry experts who met with CT Coatings representatives doubted their technical skills. Julian Zanau from the Fraunhofer Research Institute recalled concerns following discussions with company officials.
“The first impression I got was that these people have no idea how a battery actually works. They were talking about no rare earth metals in their batteries and therefore no lithium, and to any chemist lithium has nothing to do with rare earth minerals.”
🔥
The running theory I had seen was that they were licensing out someone else’s tech, and then claiming it as their own.
And now this article shows that to be more true than I had thought.
Meanwhile, there’s a company out of Taiwan doing this, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQFVIs4leig
The guy cuts a cell in half with a pair of scissors, and as soon as the scissors are pulled away the little LED light comes back on.
sure, because everything on Youtube is real.
These seem like ones tested by GreatScott 7 years ago: https://youtu.be/kJXRyWQgOY4
Same company, their newest cells are based on that tech, but with 7 years of advances, so 360Wh/kg. Which is about the same as most other top end Lithium-ion batteries, just solid-state rather than a liquid electrolyte.
That’s actually super cool, and more in line with what one might expect from the gradual progression of solid state energy storage.
(Also, I’m a layperson, so my expectations should be taken as such.)
Who knew donuts had holes?
Wild. Did they really think they could just hype this up and release something like this and not get found out?
That’s how its done now thanks to assholes like this.
No one thinks they’ll get caught.
Investors are stupid enough if only everyone else didn’t tell them to be so dumb about this
Reading the article, the investigation isn’t a case of independent labs getting hold of the battery and definitively disproving Donut’s claims. It’s battery experts and researchers looking at the data Donut has released and saying, “these claims are extraordinary and the evidence doesn’t yet convince us. Here’s what we think the battery actually is.” That’s a very reasonable scientific position, especially when you’re talking about 400 Wh/kg, 5-minute charging, and 100,000 cycles all at once.
But without independently tested samples, there are still a lot of unknowns and inferences involved. That’s not to say the skeptics are wrong, but it’s still arguably a case of skeptics being skeptical… reasonably so, but based on analysis of the available evidence rather than direct examination of the battery itself.
This seems to be a smoking gun:
Researchers say the most convincing evidence came from measuring how the cell expanded during charging.
When a battery charges, ions move into the anode, causing it to expand. Graphite anodes have a unique expansion pattern because of changes in graphite’s layered structure. The Donut Lab cell showed this exact pattern.
This finding matters because sodium ions are too big to fit into graphite the way lithium ions do. According to investigators, the graphite expansion pattern clearly shows that lithium is the active ion in the battery.
I mean these days with all the hyped up scams all over social media including Lemmy… yeah?
It’s worked for their channel so far.
Except they’ve misled investors, and that will get them into deep shit.
Because fuck consumers
Mislead consumers, FTC sleeps
Mislead investors…
What FTC lmao, they’re a Finnish company registered in Estonia. Billionaires don’t get fast tracked court cases here. They’ll move to some other country long before anything happens.
My mistake. I forgot other countries exist.
But yeah I dropped that key point I guess between finishing the article and commenting.
Ftfy
Because fuck consumers
Mislead consumers, FTC sleeps
Mislead investors…
Also they just need to make a little donation and I’m sure they will be pardoned.
Pardoned by whom? We don’t have presidential pardons in the countries they’re operating out of.
That wouldn’t be unprecedented behavior in the battery industry. The mark ups on batteries can be huge and if they fail, unless the battery explodes, most people will just buy a new one. It’s difficult for one customer to see the difference between a defective battery and a battery that failed sooner than expected. It is the kind of industry that attracts con artists.
I’m not surprised, but I am disappointed
I’m shocked, I tell you. SHOCKED!
That’s the electricity in action.
Where can I buy this?
- Step 1: Buy a house.
- Step 2: You are now legally required to buy electricity from the utility company.
- Step 3: Enjoy your new electricity and debt!
I’m surprised like the people who Trump fucked over when they voted for him for the second time
Third time for a lot of them.
Not by this thing, you’re not.
Dang, was just seeing a bunch of YT vids popping up about this, how it was going to be big if true.
If they are really a fraud, how did they think they wouldn’t get caught??
If they are really a fraud, how did they think they wouldn’t get caught??
That’s how Ponzi schemes work. See this thing?
Under $50,000! All carbon fiber! Solar powered! 1,600 km range!
This thing has been vaporware since 2009, company started 20 YEARS AGO -4,000 suckers signed up.
It went chapter 11 in 2011.
Bought by a Chinese company, " company stated it would manufacture 5000 vehicles by the end of 2012".
total to date: 0.
On December 8, 2020, the company presented a driveable prototype and started accepting reservations. By December 14 the company had over 3000 refundable preorders for $100 each. Aptera released its 2021 annual report in May 2022, stating they had 103 employees and over 18,000 reservations for their solar electric vehicle. By mid 2022, the company raised a total of $40 million, planning to get to production by the end of the year.They acquired three buildings in Carlsbad, California, with a combined space of over 100,000 sq ft (9,300 m2). In November 2022 Aptera announced they have redesigned the structural components of the vehicle, and it requires more funding before they can get to production.
total to date: 0.
Aptera announced in April 2025 the company raised a total of $130 million through crowdfunding and $10 million from other investors, and the company requires an additional $60 million before it can start low-volume production.
total to date: 0.
Aptera announced in March 2026 it has raised a further $17M, and plans starting low-scale production no earlier than March 2027 pending raising a further $50 million.
It just goes on and on and no one is questioning the utter bullshit claims of range and solar charging and the lack of a single vehicle in 20 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptera_Motors
But when Elizabeth Holmes did this…straight to jail.
Now in 2026, there are serious safety concerns about vehicles that look like cars but are actually motorcycles. There is a Federal bill to ban these on the table.
They didn’t need to keep it secret forever, just long enough to grab more money.
If you find out about something through YouTube ad, that’s all the proof you need that it’s a scam
Fake it til you make it
That doesn’t work for products
It actually has a lot of times. Make lots of promises, take investor money, show “working” prototypes, release nothing.
Sometimes, they even get away without lawsuits or criminal charges.
There’s even a word for it: vaporware.
It’s basically the entire business model of kickstarter et al. to facilitate these scammers…
No no no sorry: fake it (products) until you make [off with] it (investor’s money)
If they need to advertise to promote their product, its trash
Does this mean the technology is impossible at current then? Or just that the company didn’t deliver?
There are several companies making great leaps right now. It is still far from commercially viable yet.
Which is why it seemed so far fetched for Donut to claim they had this battery without anyone knowing they were working on it. It was immediately suspicious.
It is still far from commercially viable yet.
Solid-state sodium is still in the laboratory stage. People assumed Donut was claiming to have developed a solid-state sodium battery due to their “no lithium” statement, but they never specifically claimed they were using sodium.
All solid-state lithium is a bit further along. Korea has pilot plants producing full-sized EV batteries that are being used for testing before they do the final scale up to production. Chinese manufacturers are also basically at the same stage. Those will likely be available in production EVs by 2030.
Just this company that didn’t deliver. There’s still a lot of other companies doing research for solid state battery
Who will all have a harder time finding investor money and will meet with more skepticism as development proceeds.
Like all other aspects of our greedy scam culture, the possibility of this new battery chemistry and some of the remaining social trust has been monetized and traded for cash to line somebody’s pockets.
You can buy a solid state battery right now on Digikey for 5 bucks. Lithium-ceramic. They suck ass. But cool tech.
Impossible outright? No. Not possible currently? Most definitely.
Well we all had high hopes, but if something looks too good to be true, it probably is.
Dammit
Whaaat, who had thought about THAT. /s
I’ve heard it all about miracle battery tech. None of it ever works
Of course it is. If you had the technology to create a revolutionary battery, you wouldn’t waste time with the motorcycle business.
You actually might. Motorcycles are a perfect use case for an energy dense battery technology because current ones are simply too heavy with not enough range to make them viable.
Well, prior to this, Donut lost most of their host for the YT channel. I’m guessing they saw the writing on the wall and left.
What? Donut Lab is a Finnish company. Donut Media is a YouTube channel company.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donut_Lab
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donut_Media
Is this a bot that just chimes in about Donut Media just because it has the word Donut in the headline?
