Week of Monday, Jan 19, 2026
This week's EV news roundup features a potentially world-changing battery, the state of global EV sales, and a reason why China's EVs are getting closer to reaching the U.S.
How a startup invented the perfect EV battery
In January, Donut Labs CEO and chairman Marko Lehtimäki announced that Donut has invented a perfect battery, which it will bring to market in 10 weeks.
The solution, according to him, offers record energy density, unheard-of fast-charging rates, and longevity of hundreds of years. Plus, he said, Donut's battery uses no rare earth metals and can be manufactured at a lower cost than traditional lithium-ion cells.
By the end of March, the world will know whether Donut Labs and Lehtimäki have come up with a holy grail of EV energy storage.
As our friends at Electrek said, "if this is real, the internal combustion engine didn't just die today; it was buried 100 feet deep, and every other battery is not far behind."
EV sales are booming worldwide — and America is the outlier
EV sales in America may be diving, but elsewhere they're booming. According to the International Energy Agency, while the U.S. saw a 4% drop to 1.8 million in 2025, global sales went up by one-fifth to 20.7 million vehicles.
The biggest adopters? Europe, where sales topped 4.3 million, a staggering 33% rise year over year. China accounted for the lion's share of total sales — 12.9 million — and a rise of 17%. Elsewhere in the world, sales rose by 48% to 1.7 million.
If you live in the northern U.S., you might be seeing Chinese EVs soon
Don't get too excited about the prospect of buying high-quality, low-cost EVs for around $25,000 — but they'll be driven by our Canadian neighbors going on road trips across the border to the U.S.
A high-level meeting between the two countries saw Canada agree to drop the 100% tariff on Chinese-made EVs down to just 6.1%.
Expect a trickle rather than a flood: The initial annual cap on imports is 49,000, increasing to 70,000 in a few years.
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$200 or more 💰 Will it mean change for the U.S.? It's hard to say: President Trump said recently in Detroit that Chinese companies would be welcome to build (as opposed to assemble) their EVs in the U.S. if they hire American workers.
America's public charging network continues to grow
New data shows that there are now over 70,000 public EV charging stalls in the U.S.
Plus, in even more exciting news for an EV-owning public who want to spend as little time waiting as possible, we also hit 10,000 charging ports delivering ultrafast speeds of 350 kilowatt-hours. That's a 56% year-on-year growth.
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