The Verge TS Pro has been on the market since 2022, but this year, the electric motorcycle's manufacturer says it will come with a solid-state battery that charges in less than 10 minutes and has a range of more than 200 miles. (Verge Motorcycles)
If you can believe the ambitious claims in a slickly produced video released Jan. 4 ahead of the CES technology show in Las Vegas, a battery revolution is coming this year that could upend the EV market and eventually usher in a new era of fast-charging, long-range cars and trucks.
The high-end electric motorcycle maker Verge Motorcycles and its spin-off motor company Donut Lab say they're selling the world's first EV powered by a "solid-state" battery -- a much-hyped, long-promised type of battery that packs more power than standard cells, if companies could figure out how to design and mass-produce it.
But Verge and Donut Lab have offered no evidence and few details about their battery claims. The proof, they say, will come when customers start to receive the $30,000 electric motorcycles they are selling now and plan to deliver by the end of March. Scientists are skeptical, and the controversy illustrates the long and troubled history of companies that have tried -- and so far failed -- to develop a technology sometimes lauded as the holy grail of batteries.
Solid-state batteries are similar to the standard lithium-ion batteries found in phones, laptops and electric cars, but they replace liquid electrolytes with solid materials that, theoretically, could allow them to store more energy, charge faster and last longer, while lowering their fire risk. Researchers have struggled to develop solid-state batteries that combine all these benefits and work consistently in the real world. Even if they succeeded, companies would have to spend years and billions of dollars overhauling battery factories to mass-produce solid cells instead of batteries that use liquid electrolytes.
Global car companies including Toyota, Nissan and Hyundai have promised to release long-range EVs with solid-state batteries for years -- but they've pushed back their release dates so many times that it has become a joke in the auto industry. Battery giants including Samsung, Panasonic and CATL, and well-funded solid-state start-ups such as QuantumScape and Solid Power, are also working on the technology, targeting mass production in the next few years and churning out a steady stream of patents and peer-reviewed papers.
Donut Lab, a Finnish start-up with fewer than 100 employees that announced its existence 14 months ago, says it has beaten its rivals with an "all-solid-state battery" that CEO Marko Lehtimäki says makes no trade-offs whatsoever: It stores about twice as much energy per pound as a typical EV battery; charges from zero to 100 percent in five minutes; can last 100,000 charge cycles; loses almost no capacity in the bitter cold of minus-22 degrees or the boiling heat of 212 degrees; uses no rare or "geopolitically constrained" materials; and is cheaper than standard lithium-ion cells.
The start-up has raised nearly $60 million from investors like Risto Siilasmaa, the former chairman of Finnish cellphone giant Nokia, who now sits on Donut Lab's board of directors.
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," said Paul Braun, a professor and director of the Materials Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "While no laws of physics appear to be broken, I need to see a lot more data before I am convinced the battery technology is real."
Kelsey Hatzell, an associate professor at Princeton University who heads a materials science lab that works on solid-state batteries, said the no-downside combination of properties Donut Lab has promised "sounds impossible." She added that if the cells could be mass-produced in Finland, where Lehtimäki said they're starting to be built, "that would be shocking to me."
Lehtimäki declined to reveal any data or details about the battery, arguing that Donut Lab needs to protect its trade secrets. But, he said, manufacturers have been testing his batteries under nondisclosure agreements, and outside groups he declined to name would validate his claims in the coming weeks.
In the meantime, Verge is taking orders in the United States and Europe for an electric motorcycle that starts at $29,900 and promises to charge from zero to 80 percent in under 10 minutes and travel over 200 miles on a single charge thanks to its new solid-state battery. It's an overhauled version of the company's TS Pro motorcycle, whose previous battery had the same range and price but weighed more and charged in 35 minutes. A new long-range version starts at $34,900 and promises to travel 370 miles on a single charge.
The standard TS Pro has been on the market since 2022. It holds a Guinness World Record for the longest electric motorcycle trip on a single charge, reaching 193 miles on a loop around London last year. The promised improvements in the overhauled TS Pro are plausible, according to Braun, but don't require solid-state batteries.
"It might be hard, however, everything stated (except cost) could be done with high-end conventional cells,"
he said in an email.
Whether or not Verge and Donut Lab deliver, scientists and companies will continue to study solid-state batteries.
"There's a real need for energy-dense solid-state batteries,"
Hatzell said.
"I do think they're going to exist one day, and there's been significant progress in the last decade."
She envisions solid-state batteries being used in flying drones, autonomous robots and other products for which consumers might be willing to pay more to pack as much energy into as little battery weight as possible.
Niche, high-performance electric motorcycles also make sense as an early use for solid-state batteries, according to Braun. Eventually, they could take over the luxury EV market or even the mass market for electric cars and trucks—but they may never get cheap enough or good enough to knock out standard lithium-ion batteries, Braun said.
"Regular batteries are getting better,"
he said.
"Maybe solid-state costs never quite get down there, and so they're only [used] at the highest performance regime."
But Lehtimäki, like many battery entrepreneurs before him, insists the solid-state revolution is nigh.
"We would be just stupid to go and say some lies in front of the whole world where, in a matter of weeks, people will be opening these battery packs and scanning these cells,"
he said in a phone interview with The Post.
"We don't need to go and scam people. ... Every single thing I said in the video is not an exaggeration of any kind. It's fact, and people will be shocked."