Donut Labs Solid-State Battery Could Change EVs Forever…If It's Real!

0:00Hey guys, have you heard of Gold Belly? It's this amazing site where they ship the most iconic, famous foods from restaurants across the country, anywhere nationwide. I've never found a more perfect gift than food. Gold Belly ships Chicago deep dish pizza, New York bagels, Maine lobster rolls, and even Ina Garten's famous cakes. So, if you're looking for a gift for the food lover in your life, head to goldbelly.com and get 20 % off your first order with promo code GIFT. That's goldbelly.com, promo code GIFT. Confronting high credit card debt can feel scary, but the good news is if you owe$10 ,000 or more in credit card debt, financial relief options are now available.

0:38National Debt Relief is currently offering debt relief designed to reduce what you owe and put you on the fast track to becoming debt free. If you qualify for debt relief, you may be able to pay back less than what you owe and save thousands of dollars. Just visit NationalDebtRelief.com. Imagine only paying one low monthly program payment you can afford and saving money as you become debt free. National Debt Relief has already helped bring debt relief to over 550 ,000 U.S. consumers, earning thousands of five-star reviews and an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau. You're stronger than your credit card debt.

1:10Let today be the day you start turning things around. Take the first step and visit NationalDebtRelief.com to see what debt relief you may qualify for. That's NationalDebtRelief.com.

1:32Hello and welcome to another episode of the Everything Electric podcast. This is the battery special. This is just so dense and full of information. Please watch it because it is just an amazing episode. And please listen to just fantastic guests that dived in at the last moment. So we had an unexpected dropout of a cancellation of a podcast guest who is going to be recording a show in a couple of weeks' time, but just, you know, stuff happens. And these two amazing people jumped in at the last minute with very little warning and were just amazing and wonderful. So what we're talking about here is all the incredible developments that are going on in the world of batteries and the impact that that has on our lives.

2:23A little bit of discussion about data centres and their energy use and the potential benefits and negative aspects of that technology. But generally speaking, just fascinating, really generally optimistic discussions about those topics. And I think importantly, both these people are going to be appearing at our show, Everything Electric North in Harrogate, on the 8th and 9th of May. So that's enough of all that waffle. Please do welcome to the Everything Electric podcast, Dave Borlase and Dr Ewan McTuck. Our three free YouTube channels on EVs and clean energy tech are funded by our fun-packed Test Drive-tastic events in the North, West and Greater London and our events down under.

3:12Next up, Everything Electric North 2026. Plus, check out everythingelectric.store for merch and much more. Well, thank you so much, guys, for joining me on this. I think we are travelling through a little bit of a pivot period as regards batteries. I think we ought to, I'll explain to the audience that this is a very battery-heavy episode, I think, and various related technologies, but it is very good to have you here. And, I mean, let's start with Donut Labs, because that announcement, which I don't know what it was, about two or three weeks ago, I knew nothing about the man who presented it until I sort of Googled him and I went, oh, he's got a slightly checkered history.

3:57I can't remember his name, but he's not 100 % undodgy in his past. So it's so difficult because what he's suggesting is this monumental step in battery technology. It isn't a little bit of an improvement or a 10 % better. It's mind-bogglingly better. But, I mean, Dave, can you start with just giving me your take on it? I mean, how do you feel about it? I've only referenced it once in one of my videos. Very flippantly, I said, has a man from Finland with questionable facial hair strategy produced a product made of moondust and angel, and what did I say? Moondust and unicorn tears that's going to disrupt the entire market.

4:35Because from what I've heard from, you know, my Patreon supporters and my listeners and what have you, and some of whom are very knowledgeable, maybe not as knowledgeable as Mr. Turk here, but very knowledgeable people. And also other people like the guy on Xeroth, for example, who's done a bit of a deep dive on it. It's very hard to tally up all the data that they provide, particularly in my mind, particularly the 100 ,000 cycles claim. You can't do all this fast charging that they claim and all sorts of temperatures and then claim 100 ,000. How can you claim 100 ,000 cycles anyway? I mean, how do you test that?

5:13Well, it's just so for me right from the get go, the very first day someone said, oh, there's a thing called donut. And I watched his video. I thought I'm a layman, but I've done some videos on batteries. This sounds like complete BS to me. So I decided from the get go, I'm not in terms of videos. I'm not going to touch this with a barge pole. I'll wait for all the other people on YouTube to see. I actually said until Sandy Monroe physically dismantles one, looks inside it and tells us exactly what it is, because he's looked at it. I'm not going to trust any of it. And then obviously it'd be very interesting to hear what Ewan has got to say about it.

5:46Yeah. No, I mean, I think you're absolutely right that if they'd done the three, if they'd done two of their breakthroughs, which was energy density and I can't remember what they were. There were two things that you go, well, I don't know, but that's plausible. Speed of charge. Speed of charge, energy density and speed of charge, you go, well, that's amazing. If that's true, I'm not sure. You know, I still would have been sceptical. But as soon as I heard the 100 ,000 charges, because I remember, I mean, and you'll get this as well, but the first time I heard that, you know, lithium-ion battery is good for, you know, in the early days of electric cars, 2 ,000 to 3 ,000 charge-discharge, I go, oh, that's not going to be very good.

6:25That's not going to last long. Then you work out how long, how many years. Like 10 years, yeah. And now we're already in sort of 5 ,000 to 8 ,000, you know, the latest CATL batteries are sort of, you know, and we're talking 15 to 20 years useful life. very few people are going to charge and discharge their battery fully every single day. And even if they did, that's 365 cycles a year. So as you say, if you did it every single day, that would be 10 years. And that would be to get, you'd still probably have 80 % capacity left at the end of that. So you could make it stationary energy storage. So I mean, these things are, as you've said many times, and Ewan has, that these batteries now are proving to be so much more robust than the naysayers were trying to convince us some years back.

7:09Yeah. But 100 ,000 cycles is just, it's irrelevant. It's a stupid thing for them to say. Even if it was true, it shoots down their own arguments because you go, well, in 90 years, this battery is still fine. I mean, I've certainly reached an age where in 90 years it's science fiction, you know. I'm not going to be, I could be a brain in a jar, which I've always quite fancied with two little video cameras at the top. but you know i mean just i'm just going to remind our viewers and listeners that you're my you're my battery guru i worship you in the in the temple of batteries because well thank you i mean you're you're you're you know you know more than anyone else i know but i mean what was your take when you first saw it um yeah just like every other electrochemist in the land i was rather skeptical as well um but i was intrigued and i think that you know if we had a quid for every time we see some miraculous chemistry being advertised on popular science articles and so on you know uh us electrochemists could retire quite healthily but um you know this one has an interesting history uh it seems to have attracted some very well respected personnel from within the UK battery sector.

8:27Right. Can't say too much at this point, other than I'm not involved with it, but I know some people who are. So yeah, there's some interesting kind of credibility to it in that sense. But the fact that they have gone from, you know, the usual thing of either kind of tweaking what we've got already today, just small but significant steps. And then, you know, if there is going to be a significant breakthrough, you would normally replace one component at a time. Whereas what they've done is they've seemingly replaced several components all in one. And getting all new components to work together is incredibly difficult to achieve.

9:03You would think that that's a recipe for disaster, but it might actually be that each of them on their own would have been such a disaster to try and get to work with conventional stuff. That if you throw them all together, all of a sudden you've got this chemistry that does work, which is what they claim. So they claim it's not lithium. They seem to be claiming it's solid state and that it's stupidly powerful, etc. etc we've seen the independent test data we know that it can do a five minute charge that's impressive or thereabouts 90 degrees c though wasn't it yeah i mean that said you know obviously yeah the higher the temperature the lower the internal resistance but there was a 25 degrees c test where they did um something like 11 or 12 c charge rate so in other words being able to charge it in five minutes but what was interesting about the high temperature test which shows the resilience of it um well two things one the cell was not charged at those high temperatures it was only held at maximum voltage and then discharged at those temperatures which i thought was kind of cheating but not not necessarily cheating but it's like you know we want to see how it does with with charging charging inevitably gives off more heat than discharging but um we still want to know how well it can go what was also interesting was that the temperature that it was the test was run at.

10:15The second one was run at 100 degrees C. And that temperature is so high that the hot melt glue on today's conventional pouch cell laminated pouch melted and it lost its vacuum. Now, if that was a conventional liquid-based chemistry with organic solvents in there, they tend to be pretty flammable. They wouldn't be too happy about being introduced to air at very high temperatures. The fact that they claim that it's solid state, that could well actually be true based on the fact that nothing really happened to that cell vtt didn't say oh and half an hour later it set our battery storage bin on fire you know they said it you know it seemed to withstand it despite the fact that the vacuum was lost so that's promising solid state electrolytes should be non-flammable um so that removes the volatility and the flammability or a worst case scenario flammability of electric vehicle batteries i mean that said you know there'll still be some materials in there that if you're determined enough you could get them to catch fire but that would be because there was a fire around it just like if i was to um you know hold a flamethrower against my wooden office desk just now eventually we go oh are we doing this okay i'll catch fire too but it wouldn't be that exciting so um yeah that seems to be true but we can come back to whether or not it's lithium later on but i mean can you can you charge that sorry but i was just going to ask just i'm curious if they've done one test at those sort of temperatures surely that even though it survived that test there must be some degradation at that temperature so surely that undermines the claim for a hundred thousand or even a thousand cycles but a hundred thousand i mean you're going to be kidding haven't you well with with solid state um they do tend to these electrolytes although they're experimental they do tend to withstand higher temperatures better and it seems to be the electrolyte that does arguably most of the degrading at high temperatures in conventional lithium-ion cells.

12:07So they might not get 100 ,000 cycles, but they still managed to put up more of a fight at elevated temperatures than your conventional liquid-based electrolytes and conventional lithium-ion cells we've got today. But yeah, it's worth pointing out that those high-power tests, as I said, were done at 25 degrees C. The high-temperature test was all about proving its safety in a kind of worst-case heat scenario. that wasn't realistically how they expect it to be used. Although that said, I would imagine that there's Formula One and Formula E teams and other kind of specialist niche applications where you have loads of heat being generated because of the sheer amount of power and potential proximity to an internal combustion engine as well, which of course gets very hot.

12:49You know, dissipating that heat is a complete faff. So if you can just live with that heat for a couple of hours, then that makes it so much easier to deal with. I would imagine they'd be paying very close attention to this. right but i mean the energy density uh argument was that was the one that fascinated me because i've always you know from i think from discussions with you and other people in the battery field the the you know the comparison to my original nissan leaf 24 kilowatt hour battery size and weight you know that that size and that weight would now probably be about 60 kilowatt hours you know that's how much how much it's improved in that 16 year period and and uh you know what the battery i've got in in that nissan now is 40 kilowatt hours and it's the same size i think it's something like four kilograms heavier it's not 100 kilograms heavy it's a little bit heavier and a lot more energy in it um but you know what they were saying because aren't they talking about 400 watt hours a kilogram was that it yeah yeah yeah so that's your your gravimetric energy density per kilogram and what would be what would the to give someone a comparison what would the best sort of byd slash tesla slash catl lithium ion battery energy density yeah you're kind of leading market leading electric vehicle nmc cells so that's your lithium nickel manganese copal oxide used in longer range electric vehicles today you're looking about 270 to 280 watt hours per kilogram for your kind of established market leaders so 400 watt hours per kilogram is a decent improvement it's also of interest to aerospace because weight is so important to them 400 watt hours per kilogram for several years now has been the magic figure that aerospace has been aiming for because that will literally allow electric flight to take off however for electric vehicles that's not the important figure for energy density because you've got a finite amount of space to shove all of that battery into and what they've just said just now is they have a material that's fairly lightweight but for all we know it's the battery equivalent of expanded polystyrene.

14:52Yeah, it's light, but there's not much of it that you can squeeze in there. So volumetric energy density, watt-hours per litre, is the key thing here. And we've already seen this with another much more established next-generation battery chemistry, which is lithium sulphur, which again is 400 plus watt-hours per kilogram. So aerospace loves it. But it's actually a fairly similar volumetric energy density to leading NMC cells today. So yes, you would get an increase in the range of the vehicle because it's lighter, but not because you've actually squeezed more capacity in. You've just effectively jettisoned the weight of a passenger.

15:29So that is what I'm particularly interested in. And that is what Donut has been conspicuous in their absence of reporting. So for the automotive sector, we want to see volumetric energy density. That's what I'm hoping out for. And these are cell densities, aren't they? Not pack densities? Correct. Yeah. As far as I'm aware, it's cell level. So, you know, once you, as you've alluded to once you you add on kind of bus bars and modules and the overall pack you know that obviously comes down a bit but the same can be said of that 270 to 280 watt hours per kilogram figure that i mentioned earlier incidentally those class leading nmc cells off the top of my head are about 750 to 800 at most watt hours per liter so that's the headline figure you want to be beating you know if you're going above a thousand watt hours per liter it starts you know starts to get pretty exciting right but if it's 700 ish then yeah it's lighter but we're not going to see huge improvements yeah that is very that is so annoying that you're that that you can explain that so so clearly and cleverly because you know i always just think of it i'll just use the metric i've read about which is you know watt hours per kilogram by the weight you know and i think that tells me everything never thought of it about the space so the watt hours per liter is literally the space it takes up in any structure is critically important.

16:47Oh, yeah. When it comes to electric car batteries, watt-hours per kilogram, that's how they sting you. That's the sales pattern. That's what lures you in. But, no, the tech-savvy tyre kickers, they know it's watt-hours per litre that really matters. I know that now. I'm going to have that tattooed on my thumb so I don't forget. But what I think is intriguing about it, and I think you probably agree with me on this, Dave, that it wasn't easy to just instantly dismiss it as a load of old nonsense. There were some little bits of information in all those press releases and in the independent test where you go, oh, hang on.

17:23Oh, I don't know if I quite know where to stand on this. I think, as you said, David, time will tell. We can't be independent. I mean, the very fact that they were prepared to stand up and make videos about a product as a known entity, and especially they've got this motorcycle verge is it um motorcycles yeah but they obviously are very good at making the uh or they are able to make these uh these motors for the back wheel yeah that's their thing um and so and then they're saying we're going to put these batteries in our verge motorcycles for delivery later in 2026 i mean that's a reputational risk if you're talking nonsense if you're lying then you're going to be very easily found out so i suppose it's just that now either they've got the kahunas of uh you know i don't know what brass a brass monkey um and they just don't care they're prepared and they're thinking well we need to give a bit of flannel at the front because we're getting a lot of up front we need the we need the um capex to develop this product and therefore we need lots of deposits on lots of motorbikes which i'm sure they've now got to bring some cash in um that's a possibility and then they thought well we're close we've got a product here that's pretty close we're pretty sure we're going to get get it right within six months so if we can get all this cash in with a nice big glossy video maybe that'll get us across the line yeah now that is that is entrepreneurial risk taking at the nth level that is if that's what they've done or everything they've said is true and it's just a matter of time before they prove it but as ewan says if that was the case if that was the case two things a they would have told us everything and including uh volumetric energy density B, they would have provided any battery samples to the likes of Sandy Munro and anybody else who wants to look at one to verify their details.

19:06And this is three things I lied. Three, CATL and BYD would have bought them already. Yeah, well, that would be, you would think, yes, they would be very keen to find out. There is an argument, but then again, I suppose there's the geopolitics of it as well. There has been an attempt to kind of localise production and to reduce the utter dominance that China has on the battery supply chain. So it could well be that Donut has genuinely done this because they want to try and build up a European powerhouse. Who knows? Maybe that's why. But certainly if this is as good as it is claimed to be, then the EU would be wise to make sure that we support the scaling up of this chemistry because we've seen too many promising startups wither on the vine.

19:54And the same goes for the UK as much as continental Europe. Whereas the incredible support that not just startups, but well-established businesses get in China to weather more kind of turbulent times during kind of suppressed markets and so on so that they can be the most competitive companies in the world. We need to be trying to emulate that. But that's going out of the lab and into the kind of commercial side of things. So probably outwith the scope of this podcast, but it's another thing to consider. Very good point.

20:31This episode is brought to you by Hankook. The Hankook Ion tyre is built exclusively for electric vehicles, engineered to deliver what EV drivers need most, confident grip, quietness, energy efficiency, and long mileage. As the official tyre partner of Formula E, Hongkong proves its EV technology is at the highest level of performance and brings that same innovation to every ion tyre on the road.

21:03Let's just move on because I think one of the weird things that's come up in the same time period, which Elliot has made a video of in Shenzhen, he went to the BYD factory and saw the launch of their flash chargers. this is a 1.5 megawatt charger for cars so they've built they've got one model i think it's the adenza which is their luxury brand which can take that charge and there's about six cars from different companies that can accept a 1.5 megawatt which is just you know it's so funny isn't it because all those things here i remember when i first heard about a 50 kilowatt charger oh my god that's enough electricity for a village, you know, which it is.

21:45We're now looking enough electricity for a major suburb in an urban environment. I mean, 1.5 megawatts, but massive batteries, all batteries, massive batteries on site, and they can do that. I mean, the design and the structure, I don't know if you've seen it, but the T-shaped double charger hub just means, oh, it's such, I mean, it's so simple. Like, why didn't they do that right at the beginning, underneath a cover, not out in the open, in the rain, you know, all those things but I mean that you know it's easy for you know a lot of people are focused on donut labs and the arguments around there which is completely understandable but meanwhile huge companies that make millions of cars have introduced a totally sort of next level charging experience like you know really you're talking in the real world you'd stop there you'd plug in for five minutes get a cup of coffee and go on I mean and you've added probably a couple you know 300 kilometers range in that time.

22:43But for most people, is that genuinely practical? Because as I've discussed so many times before, the fastest form of charging is often paradoxically the slowest, because when I come home from work, plug in my car to my home charge point, and then wake up in the morning to unplug it, that's only taken a few seconds of my time. And also because you don't have those massive grid connection costs, capacity charges, etc. The tariff that you pay as an end consumer is so much cheaper when you go for more conventional high power charging infrastructure plus in the uk the average dwell time as a motorway service station is about 25 minutes so during that today what we do is we pull up at the service station plug in our ev to a 300 odd kilowatt charger go in for a burger king and a whiz and then come back out to a car that's ready to go whereas with these five minute chargers you know the 1.5 megawatt units nightmare which are perfect for i mean they're perfect for for hgvs that need it because they're physically bigger vehicles but you know for for a passenger car there's going to be hundreds 120 kilowatt hours at most for now um you know you're you're looking at turning up probably queuing for it because it will be like a petrol station because it's a five minute turnaround time so there'll be less of them so there'll be a little queue you then stay with your vehicle and then move into a conventional parking space to go in for a whiz in the sandwich rather than having you know saved all that time by getting your car to be busy whilst you are elsewhere.

24:09So, yeah, I must say that I'm sceptical about the use case for cars with the exception of blue light services, emergency responsive vehicles, maybe some logistics. Well, I've already mentioned HGVs, of course, but for car and van size, you might have your sort of DVD. Yeah, maybe delivery vans or something like that. Yeah, but not for most people listening to this podcast. I don't think it's going to be worth your money or your time. is that not a case for future for saying it might be future proofing as though you and when we've got 20 million electric vehicles on the roads of britain is that not going to be more because you're right about home charging of course and i was i'm always staggered by this statistic that something like 63 percent of homes in the uk have off street parking i find that absolutely extraordinary but that does leave 30 odd percent that don't um and uh if if those people want to get into the EV world as well, they need some kind of reassurance.

25:03All of what you said is correct, but nevertheless, we still have people like my neighbor, for example, who still believes the old paradigm that, you know, EV charges don't work, they're too slow, I can't charge my van up and all the rest of it. Is there not a case that these sort of technologies are going to eliminate the last 30 % of naysayers in the future when we literally have got, in a critical density of vehicles on the roads. I mean, yeah, there is an argument that that is true. But that said, if we're able to deploy on-street and sort of off-street car park, AC charge points, large banks of them, and supplement that with vehicle-to-grid capability, having those vehicles plugged in for longer is advantageous to the grid because it means, especially if they're bidirectional, that we would have, I haven't actually sat down and done the maths, but countless gigawatt hours worth of additional storage capacity handy so that at peak times on cold winter nights without much wind, you can power all of the homes that are now cooking dinner and so on.

26:08And then obviously as the wind speed picks up overnight and the electricity demand dies, you can then start to charge those cars again. And you as an EV driver would be financially rewarded for that, even if you're using a public charge point, or at least you should. so that is the kind of ideal utopian future where um you're actually reducing that uh equality gap between people who have driveways and people who don't because you're rewarding people for being able to contribute towards the grid which by the way um i should point out does not affect the battery uh any significant amount vehicle to grid actually some batteries seem to enjoy that so uh yeah i wouldn't be too worried about um you know using up the lifespan of your battery pack by doing vehicle to grid this conversation incidentally is being powered by my nissan leaf so that gives you an idea gives you an idea of my faith in the in the system but yeah um that said you know for people who are genuinely in a hurry then maybe having a handful of these greater than one megawatt car chargers potentially in busy urban hubs and so on uh as well as would it really be necessary for a motorway but certainly for those kind of urban areas densely populated no driveways that could be handy what i would say is it definitely makes sense in china where there is so much um kind of on street well not so not so much on street parking but like apartment blocks that have car parks there's not necessarily designated parking spaces what we have in china is a vast you know just kind of almost fields of high power chargers isn't it so they're treated like a giant petrol station i think it's something like 50 of public charging infrastructure in china is DC rapid as opposed to AC slow stuff like you'd have on your wall at home.

27:45Right. And the other thing about this particular thing is, you know, I read from four different things, then watched Elliot's report, but it was basically they launched it the other day and Elliot was there, that they'd already installed over 4 ,000 of these charges in China. They're installing 20 ,000 this year. But, you know, before they publicly launched it and got the press in to look at them and try them out, they put in 4 ,000 of them. They just operate in a way that we cannot even begin to imagine. But just quickly, Ewan, on that point, because I had an Xpeng G6, which we filmed the other day, and I was driving around in it for a week.

28:27Very nice car, a bit too big for me, but, you know, an amazing car with an incredible range, all that stuff, and 400 kilowatt charging, which I went, oh I've got to have a go at that you know and eventually I found not far from me so I could easily have got home without it but it was a very nice comfort break for me I'd driven a hell of a long way that day uh plugged it in saw it charging I think it didn't do 350 kilowatts you know that's what it says on the tin but it never quite gets it but it was too I think it was 298 and I went oh that's impressive took a picture of it literally sort of trotted because I was desperate trotted into the facilities to relieve myself then bought a cup of coffee got back to the car and it was at 98 percent charging at 110 kilowatts so in that time and i'm talking i think maximum of 12 minutes and it wasn't empty it was like at 40 percent when i plugged it in so it wasn't going from nothing but my god it's fast and then i immediately thought this is too bloody fast I haven't got time.

29:31I was in a panic rush because also it was really busy services with a lot of electric cars. There's 20 electric car chargers there, but there's only four, 350 kilowatt ones, you know, it's all that stuff. And it's next to the car wash, so it's catastrophically complicated to get in and out, all those stresses. But what you say is absolutely right, because what I worked out then was if I'd gone there in a petrol car, I'd have driven up, which was right, it was right next to the petrol pumps. I'd have driven up in the petrol car, got out, stood by the petrol car for maybe two minutes, only two minutes to fill it up.

30:08Maybe three, I don't know. You know, standing there waiting, then put the thing back, then put the cap on, then move the car, because you can't leave it there, park the car, then go back to the garage because you need a wee and you need a coffee. That takes longer than plugging in an electric, already, now, today, you know, without, you know, that 300, essentially I'm with you on your argument. 350 kilowatts is fast enough for the next 20 years. That's right. Until we've got flying cars with 10 ,000 kilowatt hour batteries that weigh four ounces, you know. The thing is this phenomenon is not new.

30:44When Tesla unveiled their V3 superchargers and started rolling them out in North America, the complaints from the new Tesla Model 3 drivers were that the superchargers were too fast. they were literally kind of running out of the service station doing up their fly like god damn it you know i have to get back to my car before i get fine you know for for staying too long so uh yeah it we're already at this stage um yeah and i mean i've i've seen that with my own car i've got an ionic five these days for kind of cross-country stuff um it hooks it up to a 300 kilowatt rapid charger and it was topping out at like 220 and that seems like a heck of a lot to me and it was something like 13 % to 84 % in 18 minutes, something like that.

31:25It would have been so much faster to me if the car park it was in had anywhere nearby to get a whiz in the sandwich. Unfortunately, it didn't. So I was sat in my car going, you know what? A whiz would be getting mint right now. So that was the longest 18 minutes ever, but it was an impressive 18 minutes from the car's perspective. Yeah. The thing I love is when you, you know, I try and explain this to people who've never driven electric cars, but I was driving in France the year before last to go and visit a friend. It was a big birthday party, and I wanted to take some wine and cheese, but I didn't want to take English wine and cheese.

32:01So we stopped at a big supermarket, and that was why we stopped. We had ample range to get to where we were going. And in that supermarket were 18 350-kilowatt chargers of some French thing and 26 Tesla chargers just like there, just in the car park. And the whole car park was covered in solar panels from one end. It was huge, you know, out-of-town, you know, shopping centre thing. That's legislation in France now, isn't it? It is, yeah. I think it's over 90. If you can park more than 90 cars, it has to be covered in solar. Yeah. So we plugged the car in. So when we arrived at our friend's house where I'd said, oh, maybe we might try and plug in your house, I said, don't worry about it.

32:42we were sort of we were like 85 percent when we got to their house it was you know that stuff when it when it arrives when you don't know that's the best experience that's the exact opposite of arriving at two charges one of which might not be working and the other one has got a an eon van plugged into it for two hours um i'm just checking oh no the other one i'm interested in because i saw this last year in real life and i feel now you and i was it was so wasted on me so i was at catl's reset r &d department where we were very kindly invited and i think we saw what they wanted us to see you know they made a couple of announcements about a month later i went oh then tell us about that but but their sodium ion they did show us the sodium ion batteries which they're talking about, it was really the cost, I think, was fascinating.

33:36So$40 a kilo hour cell cost for sodium ion batteries has got to be a kind of economic game changer, if nothing else, regardless of how good or bad the batteries are. Is that something you've discussed with your peers, how that's possible? Yeah, I mean, sodium ion at scale, that is entirely possible, but not immediately. So if we have a look at how it's possible, there are three, I mean, just like lithium-ion, sodium-ion is a broad church of chemistries. And there are three main families and there are numerous variants of them. Just like, for example, when we say NMC, are we talking NMC 111, 622, 811, 523, all these different teams?

34:21Well, yeah, I've always thought that. I mean, you've always been telling me that, Dave. I'm chuckling. and like you know your hardcore electrochemist will go all right that one's going to be less thermally stable but it will have better energy density or oh well you've copped out a bit for stability but you've used a bit more cobalt you know there's that kind of thing going on with sodium it's highly unlikely that any of those chemistries will use cobalt some of them might use nickel but they generally don't so i mean they told us they don't use cobalt they don't cobalt i don't remember about nickel yeah so catl's chemistry from what we've been able to glean from it so far if it's what we think it is it's particularly interesting so um the most expensive sodium ion chemistry and this is relatively speaking so it's still if you were to produce it with the same kind of scale of supply chains as lithium ion has today it would be cheaper than the cheapest lithium ion cell easily so you're looking at layered oxides those are the closest to what lithium ion is today you're typically looking at um you know Very, very cheap materials like iron and phosphorus and so on.