Incentivizing battery startups to face up to third-party validation is not a small task. “There still aren’t a standard set of metrics,” said Venkat Viswanathan, a battery expert at Carnegie Mellon University and an advisor to QuantumScape.

In the solar industry, for example, one metric rules them all: at what cost can a solar farm generate one unit of electricity? While battery costs are still a topline concern, there are other metrics that matter to those who batteries in a car. How fast can it charge? How many charge-discharge cycles can it survive? How safe is it operate?…

Even if few go public, third-party tests would help investors separate promising new battery startups from the duds. Viswanathan and Singh said that they are working with the wider industry to figure out standardized testing regimes, which could make third-party validation easier to do and simpler to parse.
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