738
Donut Lab's miracle battery found to be a fraud, investigation claims
(interestingengineering.com)
this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2026
738 points (99.5% liked)
Technology
85342 readers
4616 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
There’s all kinds of red flags that Donut put out, but I disagree that motorcycles were one of them. There were plenty of people like me watching it that thought electric motorcycles were a brilliant first use of the supposed tech breakthrough -semi trucks would be an excellent choice too - and took that as a green flag. It’s really not as random as you think.
Cars got electrified, nobody in 2026 looks at the EV industries success and thinks “what a bad idea”, and plenty of motorcycle companies are like, “we could do that too” but then look into the physics and realize they could only do it badly. The first ones to market that do it well when new battery tech comes out will make a fortune, so it didn’t surprise me in the least that if a magical battery with all the pros and non of the cons got released someone would make electric motorcycles with it on day 1.
That being said, if you live in the west and drive an SUV and your view is that they are dangerous toys for teens and criminals then ya I get why you think it’s equivalent to cold fusion being used in a fridge. The rest of the world, esp Asia leverages motorcycles and scooters like primary transportation devices and they sell like hotcakes.
But plenty of people in the late 90s did when the EV-1 came out with its lead-acid and later NiMH batteries. Modern EV battery tech wasn't built for EVs, it was built for general applications, worked its way into consumer electronics and then from there into EVs. In fact, many modern EV batteries are made up of 18650 cells which were first used in laptops.
The Donut labs thing would make sense if they were also spinning off an energy company and just using the motorcycle business to get attention. Tesla and Ford have already successfully spun off energy branches though in their case it's more to take advantage of their production capacity over any major leap in battery tech.
Random link says global motorcycle sales are $174 billion.
https://www.freedoniagroup.com/industry-study/global-motorcycles
Ford motor company sold $183 billion in 2025 alone.
https://s205.q4cdn.com/882619693/files/doc_financials/2025/q4/Ford-Q4-2025-Earnings-Press-Release.pdf
Motorcycles are just such a small market compared to the application space for a high performance EV battery. It makes no sense to limit a new battery to that.
Well said and my sentiments exactly, thank you.
It isn't that awesome batteries wouldn't be great for electric bikes, it is that they'd be so great and game-changing for so many much bigger things too that it is hard to imagine a technological breakthrough on batteries that many markets are dying for, including massive ones way bigger than bikes, to come from some upstart motorcycle company when literal 1st-world nations have been working on it for ages makes me skeptical. Brilliant heavily-funded labs around the world could not figure it out, but these guys do? Possible, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.