We will know one way or another Monday, when the first results video drops. The fact I took from this video was that the Finnish national lab is testing the battery. That lab has confirmed they are testing.
There was a LOT of hate out there. Maybe it's still a scam. Not much longer to find out, eh? If Donut Labs is legit (still TBD), there's gonna be a lot of egg-on-face to go around.
PS: I think the Donut Lab CEO foreshadowed the next skeptical narrative. "OK, you delivered test results. But now can you scale it profitably?". And it's a fair question to ask. I hope they address that in the video series.
If this tech is legit and there is a roadmap for SLATE to integrate Donut packs into their battery modules, I would hold off on buying a Slate. If SLATE plans an upgrade to existing vehicles in the future, I have no reason not to order a SLATE today.
Guys this is very transparently a scam for a long list of obvious reasons. The lab results will come back and they will validate some but not all of their big claims. Building one off solid state batteries is not hard, labs have been doing it for decades. That doesn't prove anything. They will blast the wins and just memory hole the promises that were not validated. They will take a bunch of preorders. They will run with the money. People will forget about it. Don't be one of the people that pre-orders and move on with your life.
Even if everything they claim was true, and they could scale it to production profitably, and cheap for the buyer/vehicle manufacturer, we are talking several years at least before it would make it into full scale full sized production vehicles, and it might be several years after that before they got production to a level where they would be offering a contract for batteries to Slate. There is a lot that goes into tooling up a factory to make a whole new type of battery at scale.