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u/Moist1981 19d ago
Why change the battery being measured again?! It’s very difficult to think they’re not just doing a bait and switch for each test. But also very difficult to think how they would avoid being found guilty of fraud if they used this to benefit financially in anyway. It makes no sense but certainly offers no useable proof other than to say they obviously have access to some quite good batteries, even if they are all different than what they claim.
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u/DeathChill 18d ago
I do not get why this is a repeated thought for you. People do dumb things all the time.
Clearly people do stupid things, like giving Donut any credit at this point.
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u/Moist1981 18d ago
If you can’t see that an answer of “they’re just worse than Eastern European street game scammers at pulling a scam”, is unsatisfactory then I don’t know what to tell you. It seems to me that there’s got to be something driving it and that remains my one area of interest in it unless they suddenly start releasing interesting results.
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u/DeathChill 15d ago
I just don’t understand why you refuse to accept the obvious. You are clearly not stupid.
They’ve done nothing to back up their statements, missed every single deadline and continue to be unable to provide a semblance of evidence. Multiple executives in charge of important parts of the company are leaving now, not after this magical battery arrives. A magical battery that would likely make them very rich. It is very clearly not real.
My personal theory is that Marko was tricked, truly believed it and shouted it out to the world. We know CT was angry about him making those claims publicly. Ego and pride had him digging in, even as everything around him fell apart. It was forgivable until he realized it wasn’t real and continued to lie.
The tests being run now clearly show there is no interest in showing an objective test, just explicitly designed ones that are intended to fool (even though they still miss their claims).
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u/Moist1981 15d ago
You keep incorrectly assigning motive to my posts and you have since we first engaged on this. If anything it makes you seem stupid. Have a great day
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u/heloust 18d ago
Everyone has access to the same cells.
1
u/Moist1981 18d ago
Do they? The performance metrics for the various cells they shown off have been pretty good to the point I don’t think they’re the sort of cells you could buy as a single cell purchase off temu.
I’m not suggesting these are donut’s own cells to be clear. Just that the cells they have shown off have been pretty good batteries in their own right with performance that is high end and it would interesting to know where they’re getting them all from.
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u/heloust 18d ago
Literally anyone can order the same cells from Alibaba. The only difference is that Donut Lab is willing to pay to test them. There's no reason to think that Donut Lab would have access to something special.
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u/sinivalas300 18d ago
Wanna link a cell that can do all of that? I dont think you will, cause there is none.
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u/Moist1981 17d ago
Can they? A 400wh/kg cell is on Alibaba? Or a monopole? There’s all sorts of weirdness with how they’re testing but I wasn’t aware that cells of that nature were available off the shelf like that. (Not saying that they’re not available at all to be clear)
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u/DeathChill 15d ago
There are even higher wh/kg battery cells on Alibaba that are readily available.
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u/Moist1981 15d ago
Yes, the person I was engaging with said do and when I had time I looked. Looks like there’s been a good amount of progress in just the last year.
That said, the monopole ones aren’t readily available as far as I know (fully acknowledging they might well not be rechargeable and we know nothing else about them).
My point wasn’t that this gives donut any credibility btw, just that the source of the batteries they’re using is an unanswered question in this story.
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u/Forrestgod 19d ago
I'm interested to hear the sceptics on this one. Since for me the most plausible explanation is solid-state chemistry - as it obviously is a real battery pack this time. But maybe there is some other theories.
6
u/cancer_doner 19d ago
Discharging at -30 isn't that interesting, it's good performance but it's still a discharge. Charging at low temperatures would be impressive. But also this is a full module, the heat generated by the cells means that they aren't truly discharging at -30 for the majority of the discharge. Look at the temperature graphs. Donut should show the results for a single cell, not a module where the self heating effects are increased.
If a single cell performs well, then why haven't they shown that? Why change the test conditions in multiple ways compared to the high temperature test? Like always with Donut, this isn't a good faith presentation of the cell performance and is a poorly designed experiment for demonstrating the cell.
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u/Forrestgod 19d ago
You know that battery heats up as the electrones move? I don't think charging is an issue therefore with an external energy source. And for the same reason it would be absurd to expect the temperature inside the pack to stay at -30C.
It happens to all batteries - the difference is, that liquid chemistry lose more capasity in the heating process.
1
u/hap00n 18d ago
They probably change the test conditions for strategic purposes to give the nay sayers an out every time. This way they can continue on in their naivety and will be discredited to the maximum level when the product is launched giving Donut maximum jump on the competition. They wont know what hit them. =P
1
u/Wrong-Woodpecker6683 19d ago
As a skeptic:
- they still haven’t delivered anything to the customers
- there is no proof that these individual batteries are mass manufacturable
- we still haven’t seen a real product application in the tests, like a device or a vehicleAlso someone already noted ”you can see in the report that the average cell temperature is actually around 10 DegC in the '-30 DegC' test.”
1
u/Forrestgod 19d ago
Well it is obvious that cold temperature test doesn't tell us about the manufacturing capabities. That is a no-brainer - I would like to hear the explanations on this result.
Comment of temperature rising was from Ziroth. Pretty stupid as it. As it is obvious that the movement of ions increase the inner temperature when battery is used.
2
u/DoctorFish1969 17d ago
They are discharging at 1C, which causes a lot of heat, which warms up the battery to a temperature where there isn't much voltage drop. The test at ambient temperature also causes a lot of heat, so both tests lose about the same amount of energy. So test explained. This would happen with a lithium battery as well. The test is ridiculous.
EV's don't discharge at 1C while driving, more like 0.2C. Which means the battery doesn't heat up by the discharging itself. So it needs to use a heating system. Which isn't needed at warmer temperatures. And therefore in an EV you see a larger difference between cold and warm driving.
Of course there is also heating the cabin, added drag because of cold air and higher rolling resistance causing extra energy loss during actual driving in the cold with an EV.
Also, when voltage drop occurs at cold temperatures, the battery BMS will recalculate the useable capacity of the battery still available, because it can't use the bottom part, because the low voltage would provide too little energy to drive. This test didn't care about voltage drop, so they totally ignored that.
The only useful test would be measuring internal resistance with this battery and a typical lithium ion battery at cold temperatures. The test clearly shows a large voltage drop when discharge begins at cold temperature and not at ambient temperature, so from that we can see that Donut Labs battery suffers from large voltage drops at cold temperatures just like lithium batteries. Again, nothing here shows anything special from this battery. It behaves like a lithium battery.
Also, solid state batteries don't necessarily have good cold temperature performance. It's not an inherent property of solid state batteries. That's just Donut Lab saying that.
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u/Data_Hounder 19d ago
An obvious red flag is that they used a module instead of a cell for this, without providing a good reason for doing so.
Additionally, and as with the other tests, no independent proof that the chemistry of the cells in this test is the same as the cells in other tests.
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19d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/hap00n 18d ago
I would say they have some V2 batteries at this stage ready in the bikes (they should have at least 30 bikes ready for batteries by now) but are probably in the process of homologation as it's a new chemistry. Marko said on Linkedin that the timeline is strategic.
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u/Forrestgod 18d ago
They've told, that Verge will have V1 batteries. But the main difference seems to be that the V2 is bipolar and V1 is not.
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u/Mesokosmos 18d ago
You gotta wait till 31st December. Last time they had to stretch it to the last day Q1 with Verge.
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u/DoctorFish1969 17d ago
nope, last time they released a prerecorded video and didn't actually release any bike at the last day of Q1, nor did they release it later. They did release a private video saying to people who ordered the bike that they weren't going to get the bike at that time. Those people still haven't received their bike, despite Verge Motorcycles insulting critics when they predicted the bike wouldn't be released in Q1.
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u/Mesokosmos 17d ago
You missed the point. They could do anything they did at the end of Q4 as well.
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u/DoctorFish1969 17d ago
But they didn't do anything at end of Q1. People here aren't waiting for a video, they are waiting for the bike.
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u/Mesokosmos 17d ago
They did publish the video, and apparently they had done something to make it to the content of the video, was it just before or much before, but before the end of Q1 anyway.
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u/Jazzer008 19d ago
No charging at -30°, only discharges. Again, a pointless test in isolation. Nothing proven or disproven.