“There’s a problem loading the page.”
Yeah, your overly intrusive advertising.
God damnit, Donut!
New achievement. You’ve been mentioned on a comment on Lemmy.
I love it but you spelt damnit wrong
Who knew donuts had holes?
Ah…the Theranos business plan.
Dang, was just seeing a bunch of YT vids popping up about this, how it was going to be big if true.
If they are really a fraud, how did they think they wouldn’t get caught??
Fake it til you make it
That doesn’t work for products
It actually has a lot of times. Make lots of promises, take investor money, show “working” prototypes, release nothing.
Sometimes, they even get away without lawsuits or criminal charges.
There’s even a word for it: vaporware.
It’s basically the entire business model of kickstarter et al. to facilitate these scammers…
I’ve had a few projects through Kickstarter face delays over the years (once for Covid, definitely don’t blame them for that) but nothing that turns into actual fraud. I know they happen, and it makes the internet news when it does, but calling it “the entire business model” is wildly cynical at best.
As with any investment, don’t go in blind. Look at who’s behind the idea and their experience and values.
No no no sorry: fake it (products) until you make [off with] it (investor’s money)
They didn’t need to keep it secret forever, just long enough to grab more money.
If they need to advertise to promote their product, its trash
I feel the same way up to a point. I think that making people aware of the existence and purpose of your company and product through advertising is very useful for all parties, as a customer cannot demand a supplied item that they are unaware of.
I feel that it crosses over into “its trash” territory when the product is aggressively marketed in a manner that distorts the facts and attempts to artificially drum up demand by inciting FOMO or through other unehical psychological tricks, all of which would be illegal in a sane world.
If anyone ever asks you that old thought experiment about naming a field that would immediately make the world a better place if it ceased to exist, one very high quality answer for this is “marketing”. Advertising is the Siamese twin of marketing, but not the evil twin. Marketing often dresses up and pretends to be advertising, but they are distinct.
Targeted advertising is somewhat misnamed, IMO, and is not just advertising, again wearing a disguise to look like it is. It is actually harassment and stalking, and is only used for advertising. Saying its real name puts folks off for some reason.
If you find out about something through YouTube ad, that’s all the proof you need that it’s a scam
What I don’t understand is YouTube showing me constant ads for something I’ve already bought and like. I’m not buying more earplugs, compression socks, and sports shorts any time soon.
Marketing people are dumb. Their entire major is about the misrepresentation statistical data. Convince the guy paying you the ads work and wont doesn’t matter if they don’t.
If they are really a fraud, how did they think they wouldn’t get caught??
That’s how Ponzi schemes work. See this thing?
Under $50,000! All carbon fiber! Solar powered! 1,600 km range!
This thing has been vaporware since 2009, company started 20 YEARS AGO -4,000 suckers signed up.
It went chapter 11 in 2011.
Bought by a Chinese company, " company stated it would manufacture 5000 vehicles by the end of 2012".
total to date: 0.
On December 8, 2020, the company presented a driveable prototype and started accepting reservations. By December 14 the company had over 3000 refundable preorders for $100 each. Aptera released its 2021 annual report in May 2022, stating they had 103 employees and over 18,000 reservations for their solar electric vehicle. By mid 2022, the company raised a total of $40 million, planning to get to production by the end of the year.They acquired three buildings in Carlsbad, California, with a combined space of over 100,000 sq ft (9,300 m2). In November 2022 Aptera announced they have redesigned the structural components of the vehicle, and it requires more funding before they can get to production.
total to date: 0.
Aptera announced in April 2025 the company raised a total of $130 million through crowdfunding and $10 million from other investors, and the company requires an additional $60 million before it can start low-volume production.
total to date: 0.
Aptera announced in March 2026 it has raised a further $17M, and plans starting low-scale production no earlier than March 2027 pending raising a further $50 million.
It just goes on and on and no one is questioning the utter bullshit claims of range and solar charging and the lack of a single vehicle in 20 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptera_Motors
But when Elizabeth Holmes did this…straight to jail.
Now in 2026, there are serious safety concerns about vehicles that look like cars but are actually motorcycles. There is a Federal bill to ban these on the table.
wild!
Wild. Did they really think they could just hype this up and release something like this and not get found out?
Investors are stupid enough if only everyone else didn’t tell them to be so dumb about this
Reading the article, the investigation isn’t a case of independent labs getting hold of the battery and definitively disproving Donut’s claims. It’s battery experts and researchers looking at the data Donut has released and saying, “these claims are extraordinary and the evidence doesn’t yet convince us. Here’s what we think the battery actually is.” That’s a very reasonable scientific position, especially when you’re talking about 400 Wh/kg, 5-minute charging, and 100,000 cycles all at once.
But without independently tested samples, there are still a lot of unknowns and inferences involved. That’s not to say the skeptics are wrong, but it’s still arguably a case of skeptics being skeptical… reasonably so, but based on analysis of the available evidence rather than direct examination of the battery itself.
This seems to be a smoking gun:
Researchers say the most convincing evidence came from measuring how the cell expanded during charging.
When a battery charges, ions move into the anode, causing it to expand. Graphite anodes have a unique expansion pattern because of changes in graphite’s layered structure. The Donut Lab cell showed this exact pattern.
This finding matters because sodium ions are too big to fit into graphite the way lithium ions do. According to investigators, the graphite expansion pattern clearly shows that lithium is the active ion in the battery.
Yep, that’s a massive argument against Donut. But the question I haven’t seen the battery experts address is whether the expansion pattern is unique to the chemistry they believe it is. Are there other chemistries that could produce the same effect? The investigators clearly don’t think so, but Donut also isn’t claiming to be using previously seen tech.
Either way, it’s not looking good for Donut. The burden of proof is, and always has been, on them, and they have a looooong climb out of the hole they’ve dug.
Regardless, Ziroth and others make a good point that Donut’s marketing games are damaging to the industry. Other legitimate players seeking investment will be tarnished by Donut’s antics. So even if their tech turned out to be legit, they’re still going to be a bad actor.
Technically, they have a very short distance to climb if they wanted to: just give the battery (or preferably multiple batteries) to an independent 3rd party to test to their hearts content. If they aren’t full of shit, that’d clear things up in an instant. If someone can show their claims are true, that’s all they need.
If they are completely full of shit, then there’s no no way out of the hole. I think this is unlikely given the carefully selected tests they’ve already released— they have… something. It likely isn’t an entirely non-existent product appearing only on paper.
If they are only partially full of shit, in that they have a battery that is decent or better than current batteries but not totally fulfilling their claims, then it’s a moderate hole to climb out of. Some egg on the face, but survivable.
If they are substantially full of shit, with batteries that are equivalent or worse than current batteries, then they’re gonna be laughed out of the market real fast. Probably mentioned in the same breath as Peter Molyneux, for similar reasons.
Yes, if they supplied batteries to independent testers, that would quickly prove their technically claims are true or false.
But the hole they’ve dug isn’t just about technical claims. As I said, they’ve relied on dodgy marketing tactics which has caused industry damage, and that wouldn’t just disappear. They’d still have huge business reputation issues regarding things like trust for starters. Businesses are far more than just their technology. Plenty of great tech has failed due to other factors and execution.
I hold that If their claims were true, any sketchy marketing would be forgiven very, very quickly.
However they don’t mention heat threshold. Other analysis showed the battery withstanding well over the temps lithium ion would, even with a punctured vacuum. I personally don’t believe the crazy 400 figure, but I’m not sold either way on it being a lithium ion battery just yet.
I mean these days with all the hyped up scams all over social media including Lemmy… yeah?
That’s how its done now thanks to assholes like this.
That wouldn’t be unprecedented behavior in the battery industry. The mark ups on batteries can be huge and if they fail, unless the battery explodes, most people will just buy a new one. It’s difficult for one customer to see the difference between a defective battery and a battery that failed sooner than expected. It is the kind of industry that attracts con artists.
No one thinks they’ll get caught.
It’s worked for their channel so far.
Except they’ve misled investors, and that will get them into deep shit.
Because fuck consumers Mislead consumers, FTC sleeps Mislead investors…
Ftfy
Because fuck consumers
Mislead consumers, FTC sleeps
Mislead investors…
Also they just need to make a little donation and I’m sure they will be pardoned.
Pardoned by whom? We don’t have presidential pardons in the countries they’re operating out of.
What FTC lmao, they’re a Finnish company registered in Estonia. Billionaires don’t get fast tracked court cases here. They’ll move to some other country long before anything happens.
Wouldn’t those countries have more strict regulations than the US? Maybe Finland more than Estonia?
Courts move at snails pace usually. Years for such a thing in Estonia at least. Have to prove fraud and all that.
For debts it’s possible to accelerate things, but the key here is that Donut Labs is the debtor, not Mark. He himself will only be liable when fraud is proven.
My mistake. I forgot other countries exist.
But yeah I dropped that key point I guess between finishing the article and commenting.
You only get in trouble if you mislead rich investors.
If you mislead poor investors, then that’s just business and they should have known better.
That’s why ~Everything is Securities Fraud~
Dammit
Can for once something too good to be true actually be true? :(
Well, the original Li-Ion batteries by John Goodenough are Goodenough
We just need a Dr. John BetterBatteryMan for solid battery tech
Does this mean the technology is impossible at current then? Or just that the company didn’t deliver?
Just this company that didn’t deliver. There’s still a lot of other companies doing research for solid state battery
You can buy a solid state battery right now on Digikey for 5 bucks. Lithium-ceramic. They suck ass. But cool tech.
Who will all have a harder time finding investor money and will meet with more skepticism as development proceeds.
Like all other aspects of our greedy scam culture, the possibility of this new battery chemistry and some of the remaining social trust has been monetized and traded for cash to line somebody’s pockets.
There are several companies making great leaps right now. It is still far from commercially viable yet.
Which it seemed so far fetched for Donut to claim they had this battery without anyone knowing they were working on it. It was immediately suspicious.
It is still far from commercially viable yet.
Solid-state sodium is still in the laboratory stage. People assumed Donut was claiming to have developed a solid-state sodium battery due to their “no lithium” statement, but they never specifically claimed they were using sodium.
All solid-state lithium is a bit further along. Korea has pilot plants producing full-sized EV batteries that are being used for testing before they do the final scale up to production. Chinese manufacturers are also basically at the same stage. Those will likely be available in production EVs by 2030.
Whaaat, who had thought about THAT. /s
I’m shocked, I tell you. SHOCKED!
I’m surprised like the people who Trump fucked over when they voted for him for the second time
Third time for a lot of them.
That’s the electricity in action.
Where can I buy this?
- Step 1: Buy a house.
- Step 2: You are now legally required to buy electricity from the utility company.
- Step 3: Enjoy your new electricity and debt!
You can do that without buying the house.
That’s the joke
People who rent are also required to buy electricity from the utility company.
In fact, even more so, as they have fewer alternative options like solar or generators.
Well we all had high hopes, but if something looks too good to be true, it probably is.
And Elon or Sam are probably hyping it.
Of course it is. If you had the technology to create a revolutionary battery, you wouldn’t waste time with the motorcycle business.
You actually might. Motorcycles are a perfect use case for an energy dense battery technology because current ones are simply too heavy with not enough range to make them viable.
Still, the inventor of cold fusion wouldn’t be also making refrigerators and TVs that will use the power.
I think he’s suggesting that inventing groundbreaking technology is the purview of brilliant scientific work. Applying that science is the purview of merely smart scientific work and is also a different industrial sector. this technology would be useful for motorcycles, sure, but it would also be useful for thousands or more other industries, many infinitely more lucrative, like aerospace, transportation, remote research, energy production/storage, computing, and on and on. Then there’s the near-infinite consumer applications.
It does seem weird that the same people with the ambition to improve on a major scientific technological barrier would do so for the dramatically less ambitious goal of advancing leisure motorsports.
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.
Cars got electrified, nobody in 2026 looks at the EV industries success and thinks “what a bad idea”
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.
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, prior to this, Donut lost most of their host for the YT channel. I’m guessing they saw the writing on the wall and left.
What? Donut Lab is a Finnish company. Donut Media is a YouTube channel company.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donut_Lab
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donut_Media
Is this a bot that just chimes in about Donut Media just because it has the word Donut in the headline?
