[WarmWash]

Let me clear some things up as I have experience with places like VTT (but not VTT specifically) in my career.

VTT is a company that you pay to run tests for you. You bring them a product, tell them what tests you need done, and then they do them with honesty and expensive well calibrated gear. Frequently you also send engineers along with your product to provide on the spot support for the testing. It's very likely it was a Donut engineer who setup the cell, attached the heatsinks, adjusted the connections, etc. This is pretty standard, VTT just runs verified tests, they're not experts on your product. Then they give you an official honest report recapping the tests done and the results.

VTT is not an auditor for verifying claims, at least beyond the scope of the test you task them to do. They are a friendly business partner that you pay large amounts of money to for getting you verified tests done on your product.

I really cannot stress enough that VTT is not in it to disprove anything. It's incredibly suspect that in a battery capacity test, Donut did not have VTT verify cell weight or dimension. It's also important to understand that VTT would not request to do this either, because VTT just runs the tests you pay them to, as you tell them to do it. So if donut shows up with a different cell for each test, VTT would not skip a beat, because they are not auditing, they are just doing the tests they are paid to do.

Normally places like VTT thrive on compliance testing, where a regulation outlays the tests needed to be passed, and VTT provides the service of being the third party to run and sign off on those tests. Those tests are then submitted to the regulating body and they are the ones who pass/fail you, not VTT. They just do tests and collect money.

So Donut is writing their own "regulations" here, so they are just having VTT do whatever tests they want as they want them done.

The real test would be someone not affliated with donut taking one of these cells to VTT.

[ceoloide]

Since they are testers and not auditors, what prevents Donut Labs from changing the actual battery sent for testing, selecting whatever works best for that specific test? In aggregate each test would seemingly validate their claims, only nobody ever validated and audited the fact that the same exact battery was used in all the tests.

As many have said, so many red flags around something so exceptionally revolutionary that you'd need extremely strong and unquestionably real proof.

[WarmWash]

Nothing, that's why this comes off as largely performative and awfully suspect.

Let me put it this way - these labs are functionally pretty similar to a Qwest diagnostics or Lab Corp. Those places draw your blood and run tests on it. The prescription tells them the tests to do, and the doctor is the one who evaluates the results. The labs are just a dumb tool to do the testing as prescribed.

Donut in this case is writing their own prescription and then posting the results. Just like a lab, they don't interrogate you to see if you are manipulating your blood results. That's the doctor's job. And ultimately at the lab it's just a lowly tech going through the same motions they go through every day.

[zormino]

Nothing prevents that, and the test lab wouldn't bat an eye at that. For all they know or care, you wanted to run different test on different cells. The only thing the lab is verifying is that the defined test was executed as stated, nothing else.

[PoignardAzur]

> It's incredibly suspect that in a battery capacity test, Donut did not have VTT verify cell weight or dimension.

The report does include a few photos, and the battery does look pretty small on them? So I don't think there's foul play there.

[juleiie]

I have seen so much engineering scams over the years and this is precisely the thing that they all do.

It reminds me of E-cat. Anyone remembers cold fusion? They had same modus operandi. Lots of revolutionary claims but testing was so contrived and limited and lots of conditions that in the end no one was allowed to truly confirm it. .

This repeats the exact steps of that purported miraculous energy device.

[WarmWash]

Photos and "looks pretty small" are not technical parameters that you pay tens of thousands for a lab to certify.

There are a bunch of cutting edge cell technologies out there right now with gangbusters specs but have some kind of fatal flaw.

If Donut was serious they would put the full specs of the tested cell in each report, so people could have higher confidence that each tested cell is the same chemistry. VTT would have no issue weighing and measuring each cell before and after testing.

[jlhawn]

> It's incredibly suspect that in a battery capacity test ...

They would probably say this is because it's not a "battery capacity test" but a "charge performance test"

But I agree, when they eventually do have VTT perform a capacity test, how can we be sure that it's the same cell from the charge performance test?

[verdverm]

> how can we be sure that it's the same cell from the charge performance test?

I would imagine they will run the same tests again. Light testing for specific things during development or scaling, increased testing as you feel more confident in the product.