Donut Lab Solid State - The Internet Did it's Thing...

Donut Labs test six just came out and it wasn't even a test. It fell on April Fool's Day. We kind

of didn't know what to expect. Turned out to be an interview that was a little telling. We'll

get into that, but we kind of expected this to happen. So, I spent the last week researching

everything that the internet has been saying, all the different validation sites, all the theories

and claims and discovery and put it together in this document. So, we'll start really quickly

with what was covered in the interview and then jump right into everything we found. This might

be the most comprehensive report we've ever made. I'm Ricky and this is Two Bit Da Vinci.

We scoured Reddit. We tracked all the different sources that we could find and we have stuff from

a team called TGD that put together a 190 page report that we were actually quoted in several

times which is pretty flattering. And we've also looked at all the different theories out there

and stuff. But first, the CEO interview really quickly. Here's what he actually had to say.

one, he announced a second battery, a version two battery, which is way better,

right? When we're waiting for all the data for the first one, they have a second battery. Now,

this kind of this kind of bugs me because it feels like that classic like shell game where

you're waiting for something and then there's something even better on the horizon. Two,

he confirmed on camera that the 100,000 cycles was never measured. He quotes, "Of course not.

We would have had to literally start testing it a decade ago. It was a projection from his words,

a much smaller number." So test it X times and then extrapolate out. That's all that

was done. Pretty expand. I'd expect nothing less. I mean, I wouldn't have imagined that

they've tested to 100,000 cycles. Three, he claimed columic efficiency above one. Then

immediately caveed by saying there could be other signals showing capacity issues underneath. Now,

we've covered this in previous reports and stuff, and there's there's a little bit there, but we're

going to skip that for now in this video. Four, he again dodged the energy density question. He says,

"You never ask a woman her age and you never ask a battery it's weight funny." But he did let slip

that they've already recorded the energy density video. So hopefully that's coming up in a future

test. And of course there was some funniness. There was some Finnish humor I think in this

video. There's a person off screen saying that engagement metrics require continued ambiguity. So

this is the marketing machine at play and that's fine. So five, he was asked how much of this was

true cuz again it's April Fool's Day. What if B2 is just an April Fool's joke? The ambiguity

clearly is part of their strategy. And then they went on to sell merch. Now, that might not be that

interesting on its own. But one of the funniest things, and that's an homage to Ryan from Zuroth,

our very good friend, is a tinfoil hat. They have a tinfoil hat for sale on their store. Did you

know that? It is a hearkening. He didn't mention him by name, but he said a very famous YouTuber

already was wearing a tinfoil hat in one of his episodes when talking about donut. So,

now they're selling merch. Honestly, if it wasn't for what I've been working on for the past week,

I would have skipped this video. I've kept it very scientific until now on purpose. I didn't want to

get into this, but when there's no test data to review, well, I guess we'll have to do it. Number

10, the factory. So, this is where the world's most advanced battery is going to be manufactured,

right? Donut Lab's investor letters obtained by Finnish broadcaster YLE promised gigawatt

hour production capacity and scaling from 1 to 100 production lines. Donut Lab told

Misco Electric at CES, our very good friend, that they're at 1 gawatt hour of capacity and scaling

up. Reddit and Misco Electric traced the actual production to Nordic Nanog's facility in a mantra,

Finland. Reddit user Ona Liquid Rock drove past it and posted videos. So, this is the active video

that he posted. We'll put links to his his videos as well, but this was a couple of months ago in

the heart of winter. And there it is off here in the distance. You can see right here. Now, this is

interesting because it's a former Laplandia border duty-free shop that went vacant when

Finland closed the Russian border in 2023. The municipality invested €400,000 for a 25% stake.

Now, based on Nordic Nano's financials, it's been assumed that this would be their production line.

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description. Huge thanks to Mammoth and you. Now back to the show. Now, why does that matter? Many,

many great companies have started in garages, right, in very humble beginnings. But CL has

100,000 employees. QuantumCape spent 2.4 4 billion and still hasn't reached full mass production.

When investor letters say gigawatt hours and the reality is three employees in a converted

retail building, that gap is big enough to bring up. We've toured battery lines at QuantumCape

and at LG in Michigan. We're talking billiondoll investments in the cleanest rooms you've ever seen

with the most controlled environments. It's a very difficult thing to make batteries. Now, again,

none of this is exactly confirmed. This just comes from like financial reportings and different deals

that people have pointed out online. I'm not making any claims about validity or truth. I'm

just going through the list of things that people have found out. Okay. Number nine, the fine print.

Donut Labs website says full charge in less than 10 minutes and a CES tomo said zero to full in

as low as 5 minutes. The VTT data says 7 minutes and 57 seconds. It's all over the place. But the

point is it is difficult to nail down exactly what manufacturers mean. You've all seen, oh,

you know, full charge in less than five minutes. Do you mean zero to 100, 10 to 90, 20 to 80?

Everybody does this a little bit differently. A common standard is probably like 10% to 80%

because the last 20% you probably don't want to supercharge if you're on a road trip. Donuts tests

were still pretty impressive. They held that full 11C for quite a bit, but the average rate

over the entire cycle was 7.5 C. But here's the bigger gap. We went through all five BTT reports.

every discharge of the healthy cell. Every single one. Discharge. Was it 1 C or 0.5C? The slowest

rate possible. Test five did discharge at 5C, but that was on a damaged cell with a broken pouch as

a safety demo. And it lost 55% capacity. If you're buying a Verge motorcycle, the the first customer

who will actually have these cells, you care about acceleration. You want a motorcycle to be fast.

That discharge rate matters. And that hasn't been tested very much. So, it was a data point

I hadn't really noticed until I started digging into some of these numbers. But charging speeds,

yeah, they've done that very well, but not this charge. Number eight, the detective. Now,

this is some of the best internet sleuththing I've ever seen. User Rectator on Reddit discovered a

Spanish company called Santa Energy making claims identical to Doughut Labs and found references

to two SGS German test reports on their website. Reddit user Signz tracked down the actual PDFs on

a partner website belonging to Next Eco CToding AG sales arm. Now there's two reports in April

and December of 2024 on a 24 amp hour cell. Same capacity class is supply chain as Donut Labs VTT

cells. Now that December cell is where the mass data comes from. Remember that number for later.

Then Signz contacted SGS corporate security directly and the April report confirmed it

was true. So the April report was genuine. The December report SGS flagged as not an original

SGS document. Someone had anonymized names post issuance breaking the digital signature. Now

this matters because in the April report on the eyewitness list, Ernst Holesenbine from CToding AG

is sitting in the same room as Robert Erman from Holivolt. The strongest physical evidence linking

these companies to the same cell technology. This matters because the theory is that Holy Volt

was licensing some kind of a technology from CT codings AG and that was what Donut is now using.

But then that all kind of fizzled and they broke the joint venture and Donut Lab stepped in. Again,

this is uncorroborated and not verified. But Donut Labs has never acknowledged where their technology

comes from. Their own investor letters say acquired access not we developed. Reddit traced

the supply chain the company wouldn't disclose and authenticated the documents that prove it.

So that is interesting. This is the power of the internet. The internet can be good. It's not just

all doom and gloom. Number seven, the deletion. On February 24th, Sana Energy's director,

Javier Cool, appeared on Donut Lab's Reddit page as Hyo Sana username. For three hours,

he answered questions openly. confirm CT coding AG as the IP holder of the technology behind Donut

Lab shared cell dimensions posted a 100 cycle chart and when pressed on energy density admitted

the battery had somewhat more than 300 W hours per kilogram not the 400 that donut claimed within

hours every comment was deleted every LinkedIn post was scrubbed and Santa requested the entire

Reddit submission be removed the moderator's take was this very forthcoming cheerful guy

got told by his very secretive bosses as DT coding to remove the information. On LinkedIn,

Santa had posted the same SGS report claiming 452 watt hours per kilogram. The report measured 297,

which is a 52% inflation on the numbers. And this wasn't isolated. Nordic Nano erased their product

page, the one listing 50,000 plus cycles and 400 watt hours per kilogram. When Reddit user Olgar

Mans found an ESA presentation with CT codings logo on Nordic Nano slides, it was taken down

and user Rectator warned, "Be careful with posting materials not seen before online. Every time the

community surfaces of connection, the evidence gets cleaned up." Now, one deletion might not

mean all that much, but this is kind of a pattern. We're seeing deletions and removals across Reddit,

LinkedIn, corporate websites, ESA presentations, and web archives. and that might tell a different

story. Now, again, I didn't see this actively happen. I didn't see the information and then

refresh and see it disappear. This is just what's been reported. I'm not positive, but it's one of

the interesting stories that I've come across that has a ton of comments and up votes and activity.

Number six, the redaction. Now, this to me is the biggest concern, and this one I can verify

because I actually looked into it myself. In Donor Lab's episode 2 video at exactly 51 seconds they

show the VTT report on screen. Six differences on page 4. Page 5 6 7 8 and 9 and 10 are identical

and then one difference on page 11. So on the left here the video draft is what they showed on screen

in their video and this is the published PDF that we've all been looking at. On screen their report

said conduct independent performance tests on the energy storage devices. What was published?

conduct independent high temperature discharge performance tests on the energy storage device.

So from plural to singular. We'll talk about why that's important. Change two. Identified a solid

state battery cells. The customer provided three visually identical cells for testing. And what

was in the published document says identified as a solid state battery cell not cells. Three visually

identical cells were provided for testing and labeled DL1, DL2, and DL3. Change four. This

is removed. One cell was subjected to charge performance tests reportedly separately and

another cell was subjected to low temperature discharge tests reported separately. The same

cells were used for high temperature and low temperature discharge tests. Finally, each

cell was subjected to different tests conducted in parallel, all of which began with an initial

capacity test. This report presents the results of the high temperature discharge test performed on

cell DL2. Just to bring this all together on page 11 there's one change to keep the singular and

plural uniform the devices and cells go to device and battery cell singular we have been asking for

that cold weather test because in engineering you want to put bounds on a problem right if

you wanted to know is somebody old or young well how what is the youngest person who is the oldest

person then I can tell you if I don't know who the oldest person is 34 is that old I don't know how

old are the oldest people so that high temperature and low temperature test would have given us that

bound. We don't have the low temperature test. And now we know that they actually did it. In this

report right here, you can see it says another cell was subjected to low temperature discharge

test. It's right there. It's right there in the original report. This is not theory or conjecture.

This is in the video from their test, too. But the final report removes it. Now, when I saw that,

I was really mad and I wanted to make sure that we weren't being duped because if you can't trust the

report, then what are we doing? I've been doing what exactly, right? It does sound to me like

there was a cold weather test and they've either removed it and they're going to share it with us

later or the high temperature test destroyed the cell and the cold test couldn't be done or the

test result that they got from the cold weather test was not favorable and they're decided not to

show it. It's one of those three things. And I'm also a software engineer, so I'm doubly OCD about

this. But when you're going to document, you have to have version control. Revision A, revision B,

right? Version two. Why? Because if I sent out a preliminary report that someone is using and it

has the number 5.2, but then I made a mistake and I fixed it to 7.2 and I didn't change the revision

number, that person might operate with bad intel. They might think that a number in a report is

there, but not be correct. So that's why if you ever look at like code compliance or anything

else, you'll always see like Rev A, Rev B, Rev Z, Rev 52. This is really bad science etiquette. This

bugs me because they've changed their report for some reason and not done that. Now, I didn't have

enough time to do the same kind of everything on screen and not for every single time they've shown

something. So, anybody in the comments, if you've done the same exercise to compare what was in the

report to what was on screen and you see any other discrepancies, let us know in the comments. But

this does bug me. I have to give credit to Reddit user Siron QLED for spotting this first. When he

mentioned it, it sounded like it couldn't be true, so I had to verify it. And yeah, they did change

it. So, why this matters is just trust, right? The trust in the report. If other things have been

doctorred or they've changed things, then we've got nothing. Like if we can't confirm something,

we have nothing like a ground truth, then this is kind of a a moot point. Number five, the cutoff

VTT test one, the safety system cut off at 11C charging at 90° C. That's the standard lithium

ion cutoff. And this could have just been a lab test limitation that they didn't change,

but our friend Ryan Enis from Zeroth who has a PhD in this stuff, he mentioned that that was one of

the first things that told him this might be a lithium ion battery. So that 90° C safety limit,

was that imposed by VTT as just how they operate or was it imposed by Donut? We don't really know.

Donut says that they didn't impose that. But VTT test 2, the cell discharged at 100 plus degrees

CC and the pouch lost its vacuum. Right? The seal was breached. In test 5, the CEO explained, "These

industry standard pouch materials are simply not designed for the 100° C that our batteries can

take." Now, the community tested that claim. John Sullivan heated a 5-year-old off-the-shelf NMC

cell to 100° C for 30 minutes. The pouch survived fine. Reddit user Reddit Mutter cited IEC62133,

a major international battery safety standard which requires surviving 130 degrees Celsius

for 10 minutes for certification. Now, ready user Mixmaster INI, who works with solidstate

batteries, says standard pouching material is stable well above 100°. We use it at around

120 for days. I'm not sure about that, but why would a Donut Lab cell fail where a 5-year-old

generic cell didn't? Either way, they used worse packaging than a commodity cell. In our research

for test two, we came across some data that helped us understand the pouch laminate systems. We don't

know for sure how they did it, but what typically is done is the outer layer is a nylon and it can

withstand 220° C temperatures. Then there's an adhesive polyurethane. It's a cross-link and

it doesn't melt. It's it's rated to bond the nylon to the aluminum and that's also highly

rated. Number three is a barrier. It's aluminum foil rated for over 600° that wouldn't fail. So

the weak link in this train is number four, the adhesive number two, which is a polyolin,

and that melts at 85.4°. So that led us to think that that might have been what happened, and

that might have been the anatomy of their pouch construction that would uh have caused problems,

but clearly that isn't a problem for other cells. We've seen other people reach those temperatures

safely. So that brings into question, how good is their manufacturing process and their knowhow,

right? Their technical knowhow. Building batteries is done by like a handful of companies on Earth