CES is a land of bold announcements of amazing, innovative products and technologies that will revolutionize the world, often set for release in two years’ time. Twenty-four months seems to be about the right hype window: close enough to generate excitement and investment, but far enough that everyone forgets about your promises before that deadline quietly comes and goes.
It was CES 2018 when Henrik Fisker made such a proclamation, saying that his team of gurus had cracked the code of solid-state batteries. By 2020, he said, those batteries would be in mass production. The car was the EMotion, which never did come to market. By 2021, the company had given up on the solid-state dream, and by 2024, the whole operation went bust.
In Las Vegas at CES 2026, it’s time for another bold proclamation about a small team of engineers that have figured out solid state. This time it’s Marko Lehtimaki, cofounder and CEO of Donut Lab, an EV technology startup that spun off from Verge Motorcycles (no relation to The Verge). Naturally, I’m skeptical, but there’s one key difference that’s giving me hope: Lehtimaki says the Donut Battery isn’t 24 months away. It’s in production right now.
If you’ve not been riding the hype wave around solid state, the promise is for a battery cell that is cheap, light, fast-charging, cool-running, energy-dense, and combustion-free. They’re still conceptually the same battery design as the past couple-hundred years. That means an anode on one side and a cathode on the other, separated by an electrolyte across which charge-carrying ions can scurry back and forth as the cell is charged or discharged.
In a traditional lithium-ion cell, the electrolyte is a liquid of some sort. In a solid-state battery, it is, of course, a solid. That may sound like a small shift, but it has huge ramifications, the biggest being effective durability. Like solid-state electronics, there’s nothing that wears or breaks down, which means a massive increase in durability, charging speed, and energy density.
For its solid-state batteries, Donut Lab is listing some incredible figures. To start with, there’s an energy density of 400 Wh/kg, which is about a third greater than that of a modern lithium-ion pack. In other words, 30 percent more range in an EV with the same weight battery pack.
It has huge ramifications, the biggest being effective durability
Despite that boost, Lehtimaki says these cells are actually cheaper to manufacture. These batteries will appear first in the Verge TS Pro, and Lehtimaki told me that swapping to these hyper-advanced new cells actually reduced cost.
“The bill of materials went down, and it is going down with every other vendor buying at the rate that we are selling them,” Lehtimaki says.
Donut says the batteries can take a full charge in as few as five minutes, which would finally mean an EV that charges as fast as you can fuel up a car.
For this first application, though, it’s a bit slower: 10 minutes in the Verge TS Pro. The company is also being a little conservative when it comes to the lifespan of the cells. Where Donut Lab promises 100,000 charge cycles before the battery is worn out, Verge says 10,000.
Even that is a radical improvement over the roughly 1,500 cycles that you might expect out of a typical lithium-ion EV battery pack. 100,000, though, is a total game changer, creating a battery that will easily outlast the car it was created to power.
“The cycle life, the residual value of the battery, is actually 100 percent after the lifetime of the car. So it becomes the only component that keeps its value, and you can use it as a home battery, or whatever,” Lehtimaki says.
Image: Tim Stevens
There are other implications, too. Lehtimaki says that Donut Batteries are extremely thermally stable, offering nearly full capacity, even down to -22 degrees Fahrenheit. That means it will also require less cooling. I spoke with Neil Yates, founder and CEO at Watt Electric Vehicle Company, an EV platform maker that uses Donut Lab’s hub motors in its products and is looking to adapt the new batteries onto its platform as well.
“There will be no real active cooling requirement at all,” Yates says, thanks to the Donut Battery’s thermal resiliency. “We do a little bit to manage the enclosure in which they are, but that’s enclosure management, rather than specific battery management.” No active cooling means less plumbing required in the car, saving even more weight.
“There will be no real active cooling requirement at all.”
And, again, this is all said to be happening now. Lehtimaki says that the cells are actively in production in Finland, with initial production capacity of roughly one gigawatt-hour. But, he says Donut Lab can quickly spin up new factories in the U.S. if there is sufficient demand from American car manufacturers.
That’s aided by a battery chemistry totally free of any sort of conflict or difficult materials that might be subject to tricky import or export regulations or tariffs.
That might point to something like a sodium-metal construction, but Lehtimaki wasn’t willing to talk specifics. In fact, there are many details that we’ll have to wait for clarity on, including how Donut Lab managed to solve the so-called dendrite issue. This challenge has stymied many solid-state startups, a battery flaw that’s a little like a microscopic stalagmite growing from anode to cathode across the solid-state electrolyte. When they bridge across, you get a catastrophic short and, potentially, a lot of smoke and fire.
How did Donut Lab solve this issue where many major companies have failed? He credits having a small, agile team. “The party that has the capability and then iterates faster is the one that obviously makes the innovation,” Lehtimaki says. “I’ve always said that 20 engineers beat 2,000 engineers.”
There has been speculation online that Donut Lab is using technology from another Finnish startup, Nordic Nano, a renewable energy company that Donut Lab has invested in. Lehtimaki even serves as a board member at Nordic Nano, but says that’s not the source of this product. “It’s not from them,” he says.
Lehtimaki says that Donut and Verge Motorcycles’ engineers have been quietly working on battery designs since 2018, and this is the fruit of all that labor. Where are the patents? They’re coming, Lehtimaki says, and promised to have a lot more details to share within the next few months once they clear.
There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical here. There are some uncanny parallels between Lehtimaki’s claims and those that Fisker made back in 2018, including talk of smaller versions for phones. But unlike Fisker and all the many other solid-state prognosticators and promisers of mega-range, insta-charging EVs, Lehtimaki isn’t giving himself that 24-month window to milk investors before fading into the sunset. He says all will be proven in just a matter of weeks. That alone gives me reason for optimism, but at the very least I won’t have to wait long to be disappointed.
Photography by Tim Stevens
