[The Quality GapBehind the Battery ReportBehind the Battery Report Today, we released Lumafield’s Battery Quality Report, an investigation into the hazards that hide inside the lithium-ion battery supply chain. For this study, I CT-scanned 1,054 cylindrical 18650 cells from ten different brands, spanning the gamut from reputable, well-known battery manufacturers to ultra-discounted cells from Temu and several sources in-between. As battery users, we all intuitively expect alternative-brand cells to be lower quality, but it’s easy to gloss over how much worse they may really be, especially when a cheaper look-alike promises the same or better specs, and the name brands feel overpriced. However, our CT scans revealed much bigger quality gaps than I could’ve imagined, and once we factored …