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Donut Lab's miracle battery found to be a fraud, investigation claims
(interestingengineering.com)
this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2026
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Technology
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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.