Donut Lab's 'Miracle' Battery Is Just A Fancy Lithium-Ion Scam
The supposedly revolutionary solid-state battery from Donut Lab turns out to be a total fabrication. After raising millions, this house of cards is collapsing under the weight of basic chemistry and some very angry independent experts.
Donut Lab took the stage at CES 2026 with wild claims: a battery that charges in five minutes and lasts for 100,000 cycles. Investors lined up, pouring $25 million into what was marketed as a breakthrough in solid-state tech. It turns out the 'innovation' was just a regular lithium-ion battery inside a different wrapper.
Independent investigators and experts, including those from the Fraunhofer Institute, picked the technology apart. They found that the voltage curves and the way the cell expanded during charging were classic hallmarks of lithium-ion chemistry. Specifically, the graphite anode showed the distinct 'kink' during charge cycles that simply doesn't exist in the sodium-ion technology Donut Lab claimed to use.
The trail of breadcrumbs leads back to a German company, CT Coatings, a firm whose portfolio includes patents for printing patterns on menu folders and sidewalk tiles. Donut Lab and their partners at Verge Motorcycles seemingly bypassed any real engineering validation, preferring internal self-tests that conveniently confirmed their own impossible metrics. Marko Lehtimäki, the CEO, later admitted that the units actually going into bikes weren't even the ones they showed off as their 'revolutionary' product.
This is a masterclass in exploiting the 'green tech' hype cycle to fleece retail investors who didn't know a graphite anode from a hole in the wall. When the promise of 10x returns meets the reality of basic physics, the only thing that actually charges quickly is the speed at which capital disappears into a black hole of corporate obfuscation.
Source: Electrek
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