They should be. The battery, charger, connector, and battery management system are all different components. They work together but they are separate.
The electricity coming from a charger is more or less “fungible”, and the car’s battery management system is the brains that manages the actual charging process, asking for as much electricity as needed at a safe enough rate for any given car’s battery chemistry. The charging profile might differ from chemistry to chemistry, but that’s nothing the electronics can’t handle (and they already do, between different cars and states of charge and such).
Newer EVs might need an adapter to charge with older chargers, but that’s due to changing connector standards (chademo to CCS1 to NACS now), not battery chemistries.
Actually, caveat: What I said applies to level 1 and level 2 chargers (the slower ones). The DC fast chargers do have more brains and sometimes require collaboration between a car’s manufacturer and a charger brand to work, but that’s more of a software and business contracting issue than an electrical one. e.g., only some non-Tesla cars can charge at Tesla Superchargers, but more and more are coming online as Tesla negotiates with the other companies. That’s also not due to battery chemistry differences but just business stuff. Rivian chargers are in a similar situation. This is becoming less and less of an issue over time, thankfully.
Finding a good enough EV charger is a pain in the ass, even today, because you have to check for 1) power output — how fast it is 2) whether it’s compatible with your car 3) whether you need an adapter 4) whether the charger is broken in some way — they very often are and 5) whether they’re available or all occupied. There are apps that help with this but it’s still always kinda a crapshoot.
Now that federal EV assistance has died, I don’t know if the charger situation will get any better. If better chemistries take off but charger networks don’t get better, then road trips will get even harder than before as more EVs come online without a corresponding increase in chargers. It’s up to the states and auto makers to deal with that, I guess.
“The VTT report addresses one claim and one claim only: fast charging. The specifications that drew the harshest industry criticism remain completely untested by any independent party:
400 Wh/kg energy density — (…)
100,000 cycle life — Most solid-state developers target hundreds to low-thousands of cycles at this stage. Factorial’s validated cells showed over 600 cycles. Donut Lab’s claim of 100,000 is orders of magnitude beyond anything demonstrated in the industry. It’s arguably the biggest claim.
Extreme temperature performance — Donut Lab claimed 99% capacity retention at -30°C and stable performance above 100°C. Not tested.
Cost parity with lithium-ion — Not something a lab test can verify, but a claim that strains credibility given that no solid-state battery has reached cost competitiveness at scale.
How it compares to the competition (…) —
None of these established players claim to have a production-ready cell today with all of Donut Lab’s specifications simultaneously. That’s either because the Finnish startup has genuinely leapfrogged the entire industry, or because its full set of claims won’t hold up under comprehensive testing. This first VTT report doesn’t resolve that question.
Electrek’s Take
We’ve been tracking the Donut Lab story since Verge first announced its solid-state motorcycle at CES, and we’ve maintained that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. This first VTT report is a step in the right direction, but only a step with arguably the least impressive metric announced.”
And even if it can do all of those things, can it do them all at once? I would expect, for instance, that a super-fast charge that got the battery very hot would be the sort of thing that would eat badly into battery lifespan.
I’m no expert but I’m finding YouTube videos and discussion on Reddit speculating that the Donut Labs battery is actually just a lithium-ion battery pretending to be solid state.
Lost Hills CA is a typical gas village on I-5, the main highway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. It has four gas stations with about 12 pumps each. In an EV world, to charge a 100 kWh battery in six minutes would require a megawatt. that means that if Lost Hills replaced its gas pumps with fast chargers, it would need 50 megawatts of power. We have places like this every 20 miles or so along the highway. Put them together and you need most of the capacity of a nuclear power plant.