What Is a Solid-State Battery? Inside Donut Lab’s CES 2026 Announcement
CES 2026 has been all about the future, and this year, Nevo was right at the centre of it. While in Las Vegas, we had the chance to sit down with Marko Lehtimäki, CEO and co-founder of Donut Lab, the Finnish startup that made one of the biggest battery announcements of the entire show. We spoke with him exclusively for the Nevo EV News Podcast, diving into how his team believes they’ve cracked one of the hardest problems in electric mobility: solid-state batteries.
A Surprise CES Headline: Solid-State Goes Live
CES 2026 leaned heavily into AI, robotics and next-gen software this year, so when Donut Lab quietly announced that it had a solid-state battery already in production, it turned a lot of heads.
Not a lab prototype. Not a demo cell. An actual working battery, already being used inside real vehicles. Those vehicles? The latest Verge electric motorcycles, which will ship in early 2026, and they’re built around Donut Lab’s battery technology. This makes Donut Lab the first company in the world to publicly claim that a solid-state battery is not only working, but being manufactured and deployed.
Why Solid-State Batteries Matter
Most EVs today use lithium-ion batteries filled with liquid electrolyte. That technology has improved massively, but it still comes with limits around heat, charging speed, lifespan and energy density.
Solid-state batteries replace that liquid with a solid material, which allows the battery to hold more energy in the same space, run cooler, charge faster and last far longer. In theory, it’s the breakthrough that could make EVs feel as convenient as petrol or diesel cars, with fast refuelling times and batteries that last longer than the vehicle itself.
Donut Lab claims its technology delivers significantly higher energy density than today’s best lithium-ion packs and can survive many thousands more charge cycles. That means more range, better durability and less waste over the lifetime of the car.
Why We’ve Heard This Before, And Why This Time Feels Different
The industry has been talking about solid-state batteries for years, but almost every claim has fallen apart when it came time to manufacture them at scale. Major global players have invested billions and still struggled to get beyond test cells.
So how did a small Finnish startup manage what giants could not? Marko Lehtimäki’s believes speed of iteration matters more than size. His team focused on getting a working product into real vehicles instead of chasing perfection on paper. In his words, a small, focused group of engineers can sometimes move faster than a huge organisation weighed down by process.
And crucially, Donut Lab has something previous solid-state projects didn’t: hardware that’s about to go on sale.
Real Vehicles, Real Data, Real Answers
The first vehicles to use Donut Lab’s battery will be Verge’s latest electric motorcycles, arriving in early 2026. They list fast-charging times of around ten minutes and an extremely long battery lifespan compared to today’s EV packs.
Even if those numbers don’t fully match Donut Lab’s most ambitious claims, they are still a massive step forward. Within months, the industry will be able to see how this technology performs in the real world, not just in press releases. That’s when we’ll find out whether solid-state batteries are finally ready for mass adoption.
Why This Matters for Every EV Driver
If Donut Lab’s battery scales to cars, the impact could be huge. Faster charging, longer range, better winter performance and longer battery life would remove many of the remaining barriers to EV ownership. It could also reduce the environmental footprint of batteries by making them last longer and require fewer raw materials over time.
CES 2026 may have been filled with futuristic displays and AI demos, but this quietly powerful battery announcement could turn out to be the most important thing we saw all week.
And Nevo will be following every step of the story.
Hear the full interview with Donut Lab CEO Marko Lehtimäki on the Nevo EV News Podcast