Donut Lab Episode 12: One Battery, Endless Configurations?
- Buck City Biker
- 57 minutes ago
- 2 min read
What if a motorcycle was designed first, and the battery came second?
Donut Lab was under fire last week. This week, it’s carrying on as if nothing happened.
After a brief response from senior Donut members on LinkedIn addressing the growing debate around its battery claims, Episode 12 of the IDonutBelieve series doubles down on the company's core message: a highly customisable battery platform designed around the application, not the other way around.
What they're Saying This Week
This week's episode focuses on flexibility. According to Donut Lab, every battery starts with the same baseline chemistry, but the final cell can be tuned depending on the job it needs to do.
Key points from Episode 12:
All battery variants use the same underlying chemistry.
Voltage, energy density, cycle life, charging speed, operating temperature and cost can all be adjusted for a specific application.
Improving one attribute may affect others. For example, increasing voltage could reduce energy density.
The specifications shown at CES were described as baseline figures rather than the maximum capability of the technology.
Donut Lab says the battery can be shaped into almost any form factor, from conventional pouch cells to curved designs.
The company claims cells could be produced in unusual shapes if required, saying that they could even be made into a snowflake shape.
The previously discussed 100,000-cycle lifespan claim was revisited, with Donut Lab clarifying that such figures would depend on optimal operating conditions rather than extreme charging rates or temperatures.
Donut Lab again highlighted its plan to work alongside manufacturing partners across multiple industries rather than build a single large gigafactory.
The core message is simple: instead of forcing products to fit around a standard battery cell, Donut Lab wants to design the battery around the product.
The BCB Take
Most battery manufacturers build cells in a handful of standard formats and engineers design the product around them. Donut Lab is claiming the opposite approach, where the battery is tailored to the application.
For electric motorcycle riders, that could potentially mean better packaging, different voltage options and more freedom for designers to build bikes around the battery rather than squeezing batteries into existing designs.
The catch is, we're seemingly still a long way from throwing a leg over a production bike powered by this technology. The Verge TS Pro Gen 2 has still not landed in riders garages and there's also questions about Verge's visibility in the USA.
Donut Lab talks about impressive levels of customisation, but the questions riders keep asking remain the same: where are the production batteries, who is independently testing them, and how do those headline figures hold up outside ideal conditions?
For now, this episode is less about performance and more about vision. The concept is certainly interesting, but riders want to see hardware on the road before taking the claims at face value. Ride safe, folks..
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