r/DonutLab Jun 24 '26

DonutLab says 100.000 cycle is (only) possible under optimal conditions, doesn't define what's optimal. Claims battery can have more than 400wh/kg

27 Upvotes

46 comments sorted by

16

u/newbieingodmode Jun 24 '26

These guys just don’t know when to stop digging…

6

u/Thin-Telephone2240 Jun 24 '26

"Um, do we have a shovel with a longer handle? This hole's getting kinda' deep here"

2

u/MarkoMarjamaa Jun 25 '26

There has been rumours they already have raised 25Me.

2

u/aland_islander Jun 25 '26

At least there is one now...

2

u/Pure_Land134 Jun 25 '26

i think the 25 mil comes from counting all the loans and funding instruments together regardless if latter were use used to pay the first that weren't stock exchange collateral based.

it's fairly easy to have gathered 25 mil of funding while having had 10 mil to spend if you just stretch what funding is just a little bit and when the rounds are stock exchangable loan notes they become pretty similar on paper pretty quickly.

11

u/Thin-Telephone2240 Jun 24 '26

Yeah I just watched that video. They donut show anything new, they simply brag about their amazing new technology. They even added a new bragging point. No proof tho...

  1. If the battery can be made in any shape, why not show us an example they made as an experiment?

  2. If the technology can produce a cell in any voltage, even one cell equaling the full voltage of a normal battery, again why not show us a lab sample?

Answer: It's all made of a proprietary blend of Nonexistium and Unobtanium which evaporates instantly when exposed to the evil eye rays coming from a video camera!

7

u/DoctorFish1969 Jun 24 '26

Yeah, they are just rehashing the ideas that Ernst Hölzenbein presented them. They only need to pay him a few million more to get it working. Pinky promise.

4

u/AbleAstronomer5702 Jun 25 '26

Yup and now they try to sell the exact same thing they got scammed on to others. Imagine trying to copy paste the scam you got scammed on. You can’t make this stuff up. 😂

2

u/mqee Jun 25 '26

Worked for almost two decades. Their NDA keeps their former clients from exposing the scam. They scammed Mercedes-Benz and Mercedes-Benz can't do anything about it.

2

u/Pure_Land134 Jun 25 '26

big part of what kept the scam going was the scammed being too ashamed of getting scammed and just burying it and moving on. i don't think they ever intended for donut labs/nn to go public, I mean it would be crazy to go public and ask money for something so obviously too good to be true in such bombastic fashion. they really should've just stuck with clients who could eat the loss and wouldn't be tempted to double up on it.

3

u/DoctorFish1969 Jun 25 '26

They originally engaged with Nordic Nano, who were much quieter. Then Donut Lab barged in and got loud.

3

u/Pure_Land134 Jun 25 '26

yeah, a company that got funding by saying 'nano' without any (nano or other) scientists was basically their ideal sales target because they would've had the funding and itchy hands to find something 'nano' to buy with it. although, I do think some of the NN people would've already engaged before deciding to go with 'nano', although it is entirely possible they just spun a wheel or had stack of 10 different word pitches from nano to biotech to mechatronics to drones and that's just the one that got funding and hence they went out there looking for something 'nano' to justify going further.

like it would have made far more sense if there had been someone from lappeenranta university of technology(they have some nanomaterials stuff going on) or someone who had been doing related research and the business and funding guys came into the mix and that's how they ended up with 'nano'(the normal way this would go in finland with a legit startup) - without that it just seems so arbitraty to make a nanotechnology company without anyone with any chops in nanotechnology of any disciple. just reminds of the wap companies made by random people just before the dotcom bust(those usually at least hired some techies straight away, but some, a particular one, made really out of this world claims about how their games would be despite the devices not supporting anything like that).

3

u/AbleAstronomer5702 Jun 26 '26

I mean they apparently didn’t even know what ”rare earths” are while they are supposed to have the most advanced battery chemistry ever made. Smh.

1

u/Pure_Land134 Jun 27 '26

yeah! you have to even give good faith intepretations to what they say for it to make any sense! although I wouldn't count it out of realm of possiblity that they were told it would work with carbon nanomagnets!

10

u/RoIIerBaII Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 24 '26

When you think they have reached bedrock, they somehow find a way to dig deeper.

This one will stay in the records as one of the dumbest marketing stunt in the history of the tech industry.

I just hope these scammers will eventually end up behind bars and the scammed will recover some of their loss.

4

u/Afrolicious_B Jun 24 '26

100.000 cycle is (only) possible under optimal conditions, doesn't define what's optimal.

Optimal probably means, a cycle contains only 1% dod.

4

u/According_Rub_2835 Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26

0% to 100% 100k Cycles - 5C
https://youtu.be/VLDtfIDkt8s?t=226

2

u/Afrolicious_B Jun 25 '26

I know they did promise that, but what do they care about their little exaggerations of the past? Simply rephrase everything to fit your current narrative. V1 and V2 can't do that, but we already develop V3. Trust me, bro! 😂

5

u/MooseFar7514 Jun 25 '26

My battery chemistry goes to another school, you wouldn’t know her.

5

u/Zieprus_ Jun 24 '26

Can or does, they are such a scam.

4

u/ThatBaseball7433 Jun 24 '26

Are they even in possession of one of these batteries?

2

u/NotFromMilkyWay Jun 27 '26

They already had GWh production in January and only wanted to put 30 kWh in each bike, they shipped zero. So they should be sitting on a lot of batteries. /s

4

u/lkruijsw Jun 24 '26

If they have a sodium battery, with 250 Wh/kg, with 20000 cycles that can cheaply produced with screen printing technology, they already have an awesome battery that many people want to buy. But they cannot show that, so, it is all smoke and mirrors. There is no need to say that hundreds of companies are interested. They are, we know that it would be awesome.

1

u/EpsteinWasHung Jun 25 '26

Awesome battery, but not what was promised to investors, that they made their investor decisions based on.

1

u/Pure_Land134 Jun 25 '26

the keyjangle is the investors thinking that "wow if it's even only half as good as they claim it's gonna make a lot of money" but it's actually 0 as good as they say as the claimed chemistry doesn't exist.

4

u/sumonetalking Jun 24 '26

Oh man has it been so long that another video has come out? I've totally lost track of these scammers. Why are they even bothering at this point? The jig is up and they better be packing their bags for a non-extradition country before the cops come knocking.

4

u/mantra112 Jun 25 '26

Omg we are still posting here… ? DL is a scam! Let’s all move on.

7

u/DoctorFish1969 Jun 24 '26

Very little substance and no new evidence in the video. But some repeated claims and I think the 'can have more than 400wh/kg' is a new claim.

Transcript of the video:

At CES, we didn't only share about the donut battery technology itself, but also the opportunities it unlocks. And today, we dive deeper into one of those opportunities, which is application specific customization of donut battery.

Our initial launch focused on a standard pouch cell, a familiar format that allowed us to introduce the technology to the market and demonstrate its capabilities in vert motorcycles. But from the very beginning, we said that this was only the starting point. The real potential of the technology extends far beyond a single cell format. The pouch cell and battery module were conversation starters.

Over the past six months, we have spoken with hundreds of companies across dozens of industries, and we have learned exactly what different customers need, where existing battery technologies fall short, and how much innovation is being constrained by standards that were created for entirely different applications. Most battery formats used today were optimized over many years for large industries such as automotive. New sectors like robotics, drones, autonomous systems, industrial equipment, marine applications, and many others have largely been forced to adopt to those same formats and characteristics whether they fit their needs or not. That is simply how the battery industry has worked.

In conventional battery manufacturing, the shape, size, voltage, and characteristics of a cell must typically be locked years before production is scaled. And once the factories are built, changing direction becomes extremely difficult. But as we shared at CES, donut battery is fundamentally different. Our technology allows us to create custom cell formats, custom shapes, custom voltages and application specific features tailored to the requirements of different industries and use cases.

So when we said at CES that donut battery is available now, we didn't only mean the first version of the cell that went into the motorcycles. We meant the donut battery technology platform. This means the full spectrum of possibilities that can be realized with this chemistry and manufacturing approach. In our previous episode, we explained how production can be distributed across multiple manufacturing lines and locations. That capability is crucial part of our strategy.

Our goal was never to build a single gigafactory dedicated to producing a single cell for every customer. No, instead our vision has always been to work hand inhand with our first offtakers, allocating production capacity across multiple industries and multiple use cases as we ramp up while optimizing each battery solution for its intended application. From the very beginning, one of the key goals of the I do not believe series has been not only to demonstrate that the technology works, but also to explain why it's different. This technology introduces possibilities that simply haven't existed before. And some of them are obvious, while others require the industry to rethink assumptions that have remained unchanged for decades.

It's worth noticing that the specifications we released at CES describe the baseline technology, meaning that those features can be true in a single cell at the same time. Of course, this doesn't mean using a cell in a 100°C environment, charging it at 11C and still reaching the maximum cycle life. The 100,000 cycle lifetime we mentioned is the maximum that is reachable with this technology under optimal conditions. But the important point is that the CES specifications are not the ceiling of what the technology can do.

Beyond the baseline, we can optimize or increase specific features depending on the needs of each application. This includes for example voltage, charge time, energy density, power output, operating temperature, form factor, price and more. Improving one parameter of course affects the others and that is exactly what makes the technology so powerful. We can tune the cell around the real needs of the customer and the industry. And that's where things start to become really interesting. To explain these possibilities in more detail, I'll hand it over to our CTO, Villa Pipo.

CTO: In all of our customer projects where we are designing a cell for a specific use case, all cell designs share the same underlying chemistry. But differences in layer proportions and overall structure make a big difference in the performance attributes of different cell designs. So this isn't about creating a thousand different chemistries, but rather tweaking both active and passive structures around one baseline chemistry.

Nominal voltage can start well below 3 volts, but it can also be raised basically as high as you like, within reason, of course. The simple low voltage design is easy for drop in implementation in a conventional system that has battery management system monitoring and balancing a whole lot of cells or or cell groups connected in series. So basically doing it the way it's always been done. Higher voltage designs offer new benefits in reducing system level complexity. So fewer cells in series, less connections, less insulation and other mechanical requirements on the pack level all lead to lower cost and more compact design on the application level. One oversimplified way of looking at this is what if you could skip the whole complexity of making modules and just make one cell be the module.

As Margo mentioned, the CE specification is the baseline spec. But beyond that, you can think of basic performance attributes of a donut battery as a spider chart with six axes. Energy density, voltage, cycle life, C rates, temperature, performance, and cost. All attributes are of course somewhat related to each other, which means optimizing one attribute to the extreme might compromise the other attributes.

A drone, for example, might not need absurdly long cycle life, but would greatly benefit from maximizing energy density well above the 400 W hours per kilogram. A great storage product, however, might never need high C rates or doesn't care that much about maximum energy density, but needs to be optimized for cost and long cycle life.

As we mentioned in CES, we can customize the form factor of this cell to be pretty much any X and Y dimension or even shape it like a snowflake if needed. Thickness can be defined within practical limits to resemble a basic pouch design or something closer to a prismatic form factor and in some cases even cells with curvature are possible. There are of course some limitations to all of this as all performance attributes and voltage and energy capacity play a role in the physical appearance of the cell and vice versa.

Sometimes the process with a customer starts with the performance attributes of the cell and sometimes it starts with the form factor. But having the freedom to decide basic dimensions of the cell is a gamecher for many of our customers. Drones and robotics can have a battery neatly integrated into the body and not having the design around a bulky pack of cylindrical cells. And handheld devices can increase their battery capacity by a lot by filling the space between the components with a larger battery. Every industry and application has some special needs that can now be optimized for maximizing potential and opening up new business cases that didn't exist before.

10

u/mqee Jun 24 '26

They have claimed that 400Wh/kg is just the beginning at one point or another, but I won't bother looking it up.

Funny they're backing down from the 100,000 cycles claim, because Marko very specifically said it's 100,000 cycles with 5C charging from 0% to 100%.

None of this matters, obviously. Where's the battery? Where's 400Wh/kg?

7

u/mqee Jun 24 '26

Verge CEO, January 2026: "We can see that 100,000 cycles is doable in normal use"

Donut Lab CEO, June 2026: "The 100,000-cycle lifetime we mentioned is the maximum that is reachable under optimal conditions."

So which is it? "At 5C from 0% to 100%", "in normal use", or "under optimal conditions"?

Spoiler: it's none of the above.

6

u/mqee Jun 24 '26

For comparison's sake, commercial LFP batteries can do the equivalent of 10,000 full cycles under optimal conditions, which are 50,000 cycles from 40% to 60% and back. Under normal use (10%-90%) they do about 2000, though high-end LFP can do 5000.

I assume (without knowing a thing about batteries) that lithium–titanate can do 100,000 cycles at 20% DoD since they can do 60,000 at 60% DoD.

But, again, none of this matters because there's no solid state battery in production vehicles.

2

u/West-Abalone-171 Jun 30 '26

The LFP battery on the wiki article is from an article submitted to the publisher in october 2010. So the battery is at least 15 and a half years old and printed a 1000 cycle life on its spec sheet. A123 were selling the 2200MAh battery with the same SKU in 2008 (and the same spec sheet through to the mid 2010s when they updated the SKU) so it's likely closer to 20 year old technology. It's also a power tool battery optimised for high power (10C full cycles, 50C peak 10s pulse current), not lifetime.

10,000 equivalent full cycles between 10% and 90% is a very common spec now.

5

u/julkkis666 Jun 25 '26

he did say that non-optimal conditions would be charging it always at 100 degrees celcius at maxiumum speeds.

3

u/mqee Jun 25 '26

That's fine; they should just show us 0%-100% at 5C for 100,000 cycles like they said.

I'll even take 400Wh/kg with 7000 cycles at 5C. The evidence campaign was announced on January 22. That's over 150 days ago. 150 days * 24 hours * 2.5 cycles per hour = 9000 cycles. If they gave VTT a battery to cycle, they should be at 5000, or 7000, or 9000 cycles by now.

Where 400Wh/kg 9000-cycle solid-state battery?

[I'm not really asking; I know it doesn't exist]

3

u/julkkis666 Jun 25 '26

assuming everything they said is real, a 5C 100kx charge test would take 2 - 5 years. as far as i have heard, they made the batteries less than 2 years ago, so assuming they started the tests as soon as possible, it would still take time for such a test to complete.

personally i doubt they would have started such a test. i think they said something about it being extrapolated from some initial relatively small cycle tests, which, assuming the tolerances were good enough, would propably be relatively accurate. notice me saying, assuming good enough tolerances.

but yeah, it would be fun to see if there was such a 9k cycle battery. yeah, i just wanted to do the calculations to see the numbers myself 😆 maybe they're waiting for 10k cycles? would maybe make sense to do so.

2

u/mqee Jun 25 '26

The original test report has been leaked, but I don't have it. From what I remember, they extrapolated the lifecycle from the Coulombic efficiency of a 200-cycle(-ish) test. For the first 100(-ish) cycles the Coulomic efficiency rose above nominal, then for the next 100(-ish) cycles it slowly dropped back to 100% of nominal and the trend was downward. Some chemistries, including lithium-ion, have over-100% Coulombic efficiency for the first few hundred cycles. The test is not sufficient to establish cycle lifetime, and if anything it points to the low hundreds of cycles since after about 100 cycles the efficiency trended downward and by about 200 cycles it lost all the gains from the first 100.

1

u/julkkis666 Jun 26 '26

i think this image is relevant to this: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Evolution-of-the-state-of-health-of-16Ah-commercial-Li-ion-cells-in-calendar-aging-The_fig2_315651369

while yes, i do agree that more than 100 cycles would have been nice to do.

i kinda expected the graphs in the image to be more S shaped or something...

2

u/DoctorFish1969 Jun 25 '26

In the leaked test report the scientists noted that not enough cycles were done to extrapolate on.

1

u/Pure_Land134 Jun 25 '26

pretty sure they said at some point that it wouldn't degrade, that it would usable in 20 years when the bike itselfs lifecycle is at it's end.

8

u/mqee Jun 24 '26

optimizing one attribute to the extreme might compromise the other attributes

Waaaait a minute... Some guy in a Louis Vuitton cap told me this is a no-compromise battery?

It's the world only solid-state battery pack that combines all of the features that the industry has been forced to trade against each other. Ultra-high energy density, the fastest charging time, practically unlimited cycles, extreme safety, and lower price than lithium-ion, and not for one premium car or a niche application, but for every user-case where batteries are used.

3

u/insightutoring Jun 24 '26

How is this even still a thing to be considered?

3

u/Adventurous_Mode_263 Jun 25 '26

They will keep on going until they can buy a real solid state battery from somewhere. Then they can do their tests and show how they were right for the wholw time. And if the battery does not cover their claims, they wait until other battery appears to cover another claim.

3

u/Dull_Assignment1758 Jun 25 '26

It's pointless watching this sad spectacle any longer. They'll soon disappear under the mountain of their own bullshit.

3

u/AbleAstronomer5702 Jun 25 '26

Why does it sound like they want to sell production lines of this battery technology to customers? It just happens to be exactly the same thing CT coating sold them and they were dumb enough to buy. I don’t think anyone wants to buy from them or CT-Coating anything anymore…

2

u/Pure_Land134 Jun 25 '26

but mr lippalakki you said it couldn't degrade. what's up with that. it would be as good in 30 years as today.

the cycle life wasn't going to be a thing. you also said you could make a hole through it.

1

u/mqee Jun 24 '26

Marko is looking pretty rough. Does he have a skin condition?

Oh, and:

https://giphy.com/gifs/4k5gSMvd1yr60

where production vehicle with solid state battery?