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.
Solid hype
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.
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