Start with the plastic. And, no Eoti is not actually on fire.
Not the plastic straw in my drink, which is a respectable glass thank you, but the plastic inside every Battleborn 100Ah lithium battery manufactured since roughly 2016, sitting in your RV, your cabin, your boat, quietly doing what plastic does when you compress it for five years in a hot engine room while the whole universe vibrates around it. Which is to say, it creeps. It thins. It retreats like a bad deal. The aluminum bolt that was snug against the bus bar gets loose. A loose connection in a high-current path builds resistance the way a marina bar builds a tab: slow at first, then all at once, then somebody is on fire and claiming it was your fault.
I have six ReLion RB100 batteries. Group 31 form factor, ten years of service, more amp-hours than any sane offshore sailor deserves, tucked into a battery box that will only accept group 31 and is not interested in your opinions about that. They have kept my refrigeration running through gales and calms from the Chesapeake to the Bahamas and back again, which is more than I can say for several marinas and at least two chandleries. I am, at this particular moment, three drinks past optimal analytical clarity and approximately one drink short of buying something impulsive on the internet, which is exactly the mental state in which major electrical decisions get made aboard vessels operated by people who have PhDs in things that are relevant to this discussion.
Battleborn calls their melting plastic a feature.
The Detective Work, Conducted From a Questionable Angle
I want to be clear that I am not a battery engineer. I am a guy with a doctorate in technology, which means I spent years learning exactly how to design research protocols, evaluate evidence, and identify when a company is feeding me something warm that is not coffee. I know what a controlled experiment looks like. I know what a self-selecting sample is. I know that when a corporation retains lawyers before it retains engineers to address a safety complaint, you are not watching a company solve a problem. You are watching a company survive one.
There are three stories somebody could tell about the Battleborn affair, and a real detective lays them all out before picking one. Story one says Will Prowse earned $162,000 in affiliate commissions from Battleborn over four years, watched that income dry up as the prismatic cell market ate Battleborn’s lunch, lost his affiliate account in October 2025, and published a scorched-earth video series six weeks later with affiliate links to competing products sitting right there in the description. Man loses income stream, man burns the building, film at eleven. Story two says a viewer sent Prowse a destroyed battery, he opened it, found a design that alarmed him, tested more batteries at half their rated current, and they failed after fourteen cycles. Not fourteen hundred. Fourteen. He then obtained fifteen failed units from owners, opened every one, and found the same charred anatomy inside all of them. The design flaw is real, reproducible, and predates Prowse’s interest in it by years. Story three says Battleborn built a product in 2016 that was fine for 2016, scaled it on influencer marketing and SPAC money, watched the stock fall to 0.2% of its IPO price, and is now suing the man with the saw because a recall would kill the company faster than the lawsuit will.
I have poured another drink and concluded that story three survives. The others have holes in them.
The revenge narrative requires you to believe Prowse manufactured failures that molten plastic, fifteen opened batteries, independent electrical engineers, and the forum record going back to 2019 all separately corroborate. You cannot fake creep in a thermoplastic spacer. You cannot persuade a bus bar to arc on cue for a YouTube video. The physics happened before Prowse arrived and will keep happening after the lawyers finish billing. The genuine safety discovery narrative is true as far as it goes but incomplete because it does not explain the company’s behavior, the spec change, the patent application filed retroactively, the canned warranty responses, any of it. Story three explains everything, including why an honest response in 2023 would have been cheaper than a lawsuit in 2026 but is now legally impossible.
What Prowse Actually Found, For Those Keeping Score at Home
He took a battery rated for 100 amps continuous. He ran it at 49 amps. The BMS started disconnecting after fourteen cycles. Let that number sit in the glass and breathe for a moment. Fourteen. Then he bought a second battery from Amazon, ran thirty cycles at the same conservative current, and the case began deforming from internal heat on the negative terminal side. He got fifteen more failed batteries from owners and cut them all open and the insides told the same story every time: loose connection, charred bus bar, plastic that had long since abandoned its structural ambitions.
The BMS made things worse. In a properly engineered lithium system, a thermal event produces a clean disconnect, a latch, and a stopped battery that stays stopped until a human being assesses the situation. What the Battleborn BMS does during a thermal event is chatter. On, off, on, off, rapid cycling that prolongs the arcing and allows the owner to believe the battery has recovered when what has actually happened is that the failure is still happening, just intermittently. I live on this boat. My nav gear, my refrigeration, my running lights, the pump that keeps the bilge from becoming a swimming pool, all of it runs on batteries sitting 1 foot from where Sydney and I sleep. A BMS that lies to you about whether a thermal event has resolved is not a safety feature. It is a liability with a case around it.
He tested the 75Ah. The 100Ah. The 270Ah. All failed. This is not a production run problem. This is not a 2018 vintage issue. This is structural, which is the engineering word for baked in from the beginning.
The field complaints go back to at least 2019. Owners were reporting hot positive terminals and mysteriously dead batteries in forums years before Prowse pointed a camera at the inside of one. He did not create the pattern. The pattern accumulated in his forum until someone mailed him a dead battery and said here, look at this, and he looked, and now Battleborn is suing him.
The Uncomfortable Things About Prowse Himself
I am going to give the other side its full due because I have a PhD and the professional obligation to be honest even when I am rum-adjacent and predisposed to root for the man with the saw over the company with the lawyers.
The $200,000 is documented. W-9s, invoices, tax records. Six years of affiliate commissions. Prowse spent those six years recommending Battleborn batteries to an audience that trusted his judgment, and they bought the batteries, and he earned a cut on every one. Then he told that same audience the batteries were dangerous. The timing, affiliate account terminated October 2025, first video December 2025, is the kind of sequence that a jury notices even when the technical evidence is overwhelming.
The sample set problem is real. Fifteen failed batteries tell you what failure anatomy looks like. They do not tell you the base rate of failure across four hundred thousand sold units. Prowse has thoroughly answered the mechanism question. He has not answered the prevalence question, and the way he presents his findings sometimes implies he has.
The 2019 teardown is the most credible piece of the Battleborn case and the one that most needs a real answer. Prowse opened the same battery in 2019, saw the same design, praised it, said it might handle 200 amps, and earned affiliate income on the recommendation. Nobody watching that video, including engineers who reviewed it later, caught the plastic spacer problem either. But a reviewer who calls something excellent and then calls it dangerous six years later without a clear accounting of what changed in his analysis, not the product, his analysis, has a credibility gap that needs addressing directly, not with hand-waving.
And the statement about his financial relationship, the one where he said on camera that the only thing he ever received from Battleborn was four free batteries, sits poorly against the tax records that show $162,000 in commissions. Not because the commissions invalidate the technical findings. They do not. But a reviewer whose authority rests on independence cannot carry a $162,000 discrepancy between what he said and what the documents say and expect it to cost him nothing.
Affiliate Commissions Are Not What Battleborn Is Pretending They Are
This is where the rum and the doctorate converge into something useful.
I shoot on Nikon. I may have a Fuji affiliate link. Those two facts can coexist without contradiction because an affiliate link is passive referral income. When someone clicks the link and buys the product, money comes to me. There is no contract attached to that transaction. There is no editorial requirement. There is no agreement that says I will say nice things about Fuji in exchange for the commissions. The link earns money when the audience buys the thing. If the thing turns out to be garbage I will tell them it is garbage, lose the affiliate income, and keep my reputation, because my reputation is what makes the affiliate income worth having in the first place.
Prowse’s affiliate commissions from Battleborn worked the same way. His audience bought batteries through his link. He earned a percentage. No editorial agreement. No favorable coverage contract. He was simultaneously running forum threads where users complained about Battleborn warranty failures while earning those commissions, which is not the behavior of a man whose silence was purchased.
The forum banner ads are different. Three months, ten thousand dollars a month, Battleborn’s name and image in front of Prowse’s audience. That is closer to what Battleborn is calling a commercial partnership. Prowse did not clearly disclose that arrangement to his audience, which is a genuine transparency failure, and I say that as someone who has disclosed relationships that were less financially significant than thirty thousand dollars. The failure to disclose is fair criticism. It does not make the batteries safe.
Battleborn’s legal theory conflates the passive affiliate structure with the active advertising arrangement and presents the blended total as evidence of a loyalty obligation Prowse violated. But loyalty was never the deal. The deal was a link and a percentage. Prowse recommended what he believed in, earned money when the audience agreed with him, stopped believing in it, and said so. That is how honest affiliate marketing is supposed to work, even though it almost never does.
The 2019 Problem Has an Actual Answer
The 2019 question is not flattering to either side, and I am going to give it to you straight because that is what the rum is for.
In 2019 Prowse opened a Battleborn with a saw and looked at what was inside. He was not an electrical engineer. The consumer LiFePO4 drop-in battery market was new enough that there was almost no comparison class. He had no body of field failures to tell him what he was looking for. The plastic spacer was visible in the footage, and the engineers who watched that footage years later said they did not catch it either. The thing about a design flaw that requires five years of vibration and thermal cycling to manifest is that you cannot see it in a brand new battery sitting on a bench. You can only see what the material has already done. You cannot see what it is going to do under load it has not yet experienced.
I have ten years on my ReLion batteries. I know things about those six group 31 cells that I could not have known in year two. I know the one that runs a little warm. I know the cell voltage spread after a hard discharge. I know what the system does at 3 in the morning in a seaway. That knowledge accumulated through time and load and the occasional midnight voltage check with a headlamp and a foul temper. Prowse in 2019 was year two. By 2025 he had torn down dozens of competing prismatic designs and accumulated a reference library that let him look at a cylindrical cell pack with eighty spot-welded connections and say, compared to four prismatic cells and eight busbar connections, this is architecturally fragile in ways I could not have articulated six years ago.
What changed was not the battery. The battery is exactly the same battery. What changed was the analyst, the comparison class, and a forum full of failure reports that finally reached a threshold where the pattern was undeniable.
My Own Situation, Which Is Relevant and Slightly Embarrassing
Six ReLion RB100s. Group 31 form factor. Battery box that will accept nothing else and has opinions about it. Nearly ten years of service across more miles than I am going to count tonight because the rum math gets unreliable.
The honest question facing me is whether to replace them with ReLion again, switch to Battleborn, or look at what Dakota Lithium is offering in a group 31 package because I like making the CEO of Dakota Lithium nervous. Before I answer that, let me tell you something about why this question is funnier than it appears from the outside.
I need six batteries. Not two, not four, six. The reason is the windlass and the inevitability of unrestricted bow thruster use, both of which pull 300 amps or more for the duration of a chain run or a docking maneuver. At that load you want a bank that can deliver the current without stressing any individual cell, which means you want capacity and parallel discharge paths. Six ReLion RB100s in parallel give you 600Ah and 600A continuous discharge capability spread across six separate units, each one handling 100A of that load without breaking a sweat. Four Dakota DL+ 320Ah units give you 1,280Ah and 800A continuous discharge and weigh 260 pounds less than six lead acid equivalents, which is the kind of number that makes a naval architect smile and a helmsman feel the bow lift differently in a chop. Six Dakotas is 1,920Ah and belongs on a vessel with more ambition than I currently possess, or possibly the same ambition and better sponsorship. Hi Ryan!
And then there is the Battleborn option, which is where the rum and the engineering and the lawsuit and the melted plastic all converge into something that would be genuinely funny if it were not also genuinely true. Six Battleborn 100Ah batteries would give you 600Ah, matching the ReLion bank. Each battery carries its full load through an aluminum bolt through an ABS plastic spacer. The documented failure mode, the one in the fifteen opened batteries, the one in the controlled tests, the one that hit 250 degrees Fahrenheit and charred the case, is triggered by high current transients through that marginal internal connection.
A windlass pulling 300 amps for 30 seconds while the chain runs out is precisely that load profile. Every time you drop the hook you would be applying, to the internal thermal fuse that Battleborn calls a feature, exactly the electrical stress that the forum record shows turning it into a failure. The batteries would be sitting in the bilge below the space where I sleep, one foot from the stern berth, in the part of the boat where you occasionally sleep off rum.
That is not a purchasing consideration. That is a scenario description from a marine insurance claim.
ReLion has been reliable for ten years in a marine environment that is unkind to batteries, electronics, and the optimistic expectations of their owners. I have not had a failure. I have not had a hot terminal. I have not had a BMS that lied to me during a thermal event. Replacing them with ReLion feels like paying for experience I have already bought, which is either the conservative wisdom of someone who has been around long enough to value reliability, or the lazy thinking of someone who does not want to do the research. Probably both.
Battleborn. I have spent three days building the intellectual case that their design has a structural flaw that the company knows about and cannot afford to fix, and their response to public disclosure of that flaw was to file a trade libel lawsuit against the person who disclosed it. I am the kind of person who reads the research before making a $6,000 purchasing decision, and the research is not making me feel good about Battleborn. The fact that I could get them into the same box is not sufficient compensation for the fact that the company’s response to safety concerns is to call their lawyers rather than their engineers.
Dakota Lithium. The 320Ah group 31 option is now a real number rather than a rumor, and the number is interesting. One DL+ 320Ah battery weighs 65 pounds, holds 3,840Wh, and currently lists at $1,599 on sale from $2,299. Two of them would get me to 640Ah and 7,680Wh, which is exactly what six ReLion RB100s deliver, at 130 pounds combined versus the 180 pounds of the ReLion bank, and at roughly $3,200 versus $5,400 to $6,000 for fresh ReLion. The math is close enough that price alone does not decide this.
But then you read the fine print and the rum starts to feel necessary rather than optional. Dakota’s product page notes, right there in the specs, that the battery fits a group 31 footprint at the base but the top measures 15.04 inches long by 7.60 inches wide, which is meaningfully larger than the standard group 31 lid dimensions of 13 inches by 6.8 inches. Their own page says check your battery box compatibility. My battery box was built for group 31 batteries. Whether it will accept a battery that is group 31 at the bottom and something else entirely at the top is a question that requires a tape measure and a clearer head than I currently possess. This is the universe’s way of telling me that major electrical decisions should be made in the morning with coffee rather than at night with rum, advice I have been ignoring successfully for decades.
The 5,000 cycle rating and 11-year warranty are genuinely compelling numbers for a liveaboard application. The internal heating is a feature I do not need in Florida and would have needed desperately in the Chesapeake. The 200A continuous discharge is adequate for a house bank that is not running a bow thruster. All of that is real. The question of whether the case clears my battery box rails is the kind of thing that turns a compelling product into an expensive paperweight that does not fit, which is the marine industry’s oldest and most reliable gotcha.
You know my future aspirations for hot buttered rum warmed on an induction cooktop while cooking popcorn in my microwave and running the hot water heater all at the same time have me looking at six Dakota Lithium batteries. Really, this mouse wants a cookie and a GN Espace electric oven. If that mouse was named Sydney.
The Legal Theory That Honesty Is a Crime
Battleborn’s trade libel lawsuit rests on the proposition that a reviewer who accurately describes a product’s failure mode has committed a legal wrong against the manufacturer.
Trade libel in Nevada requires proving the statements were false, that the defendant knew they were false or acted in reckless disregard of their truth, and that the statements caused measurable economic damage. Battleborn must establish that Prowse’s characterization of their design as a safety hazard was not merely unflattering but actually untrue. This is where the physical evidence becomes the whole game. The melted plastic either exists or it does not. The battery that failed after fourteen cycles at 49 amps either failed within spec or it did not. The BMS either chatters during thermal events or it does not. Engineering questions have engineering answers, and those answers will not be moved by the documented financial history between two parties to a commission agreement.
Prowse got a failed battery in the mail. He found something alarming and tested more batteries and found the same alarming thing. He told hundreds of thousands of people who own these batteries in their RVs and boats and off-grid systems and, in some cases, their sleeping quarters. Whether he previously earned affiliate income from the manufacturer is irrelevant to whether those people needed to know what he found. I know this because I am one of those people, sitting here in a marina in Florida with a battery box full of group 31 cells and a very direct personal interest in whether the people who sell those cells are being honest about failure modes.
Battleborn changed their charge current specifications in the days before filing the lawsuit. If true, and the forum record is specific about this, they retroactively moved the goalposts so that Prowse’s test conditions could be called out of spec. A company that believes its product is safe does not alter the spec sheet before filing the complaint. It produces the engineering documentation and invites independent testing. It does not change the rulebook after the game ends.
They also filed a provisional patent in 2022 and a formal application in 2023 for a thermal fuse design that has been in production batteries since 2016. Under US patent law, public disclosure of an invention before filing typically bars patentability. The design was in hundreds of thousands of shipped products for six years before the application went in. The patent is likely dead on arrival. But filing it created a paper trail suggesting the melting plastic was an intentional engineered feature rather than the consequence of putting thermoplastic ABS in a high-current path and waiting. That is not a patent strategy. That is a litigation preparation strategy dressed up as a patent.
The functional effect of a successful Battleborn lawsuit would be to establish that any reviewer who has ever earned affiliate income from a company cannot subsequently criticize that company’s products without legal exposure. The entire consumer review ecosystem runs on affiliate commissions. Every significant YouTube channel, every major gear review site, every forum where real people compare real products operates in the affiliate economy. If the theory holds, then the financial relationship that makes critical consumer information viable also becomes the mechanism by which manufacturers can silence it. That is a remarkable legal argument to make in public while claiming you support honest product reviews.
What Should Have Happened, and What Happened Instead
A three-dollar conductive metal standoff instead of the thermoplastic spacer. A field advisory in 2023 when the forum complaints were still manageable. A design revision for new production, some acknowledgment that the terminal design needed attention in high-vibration installations, a warranty process that did not require owners to pay shipping and then receive a response blaming their wiring. That is all it would have taken to avoid every subsequent disaster. Three dollars per unit and a little honesty.
Instead, Battleborn told warranty claimants their external connections were loose. They told the public the melting plastic was intentional. They terminated the affiliate account of the person who was starting to ask questions about the failures appearing in his forum. And when he asked the questions publicly anyway, with instruments and opened batteries and documented data, they sued him.
Every honest acknowledgment they could have made in 2023 is now evidence against them in 2026. The more truthful their response to the early reports would have been, the worse their current legal position. So they chose the legal position, which now requires them to simultaneously argue that the melting plastic is an intentional thermal interrupt and that describing it as a safety hazard is false. Those two claims cannot both be true. If the plastic melts by design, it melts. If calling the melting plastic dangerous is false, it does not melt by design. You cannot run both arguments at once and keep a straight face, which is perhaps why they are running them through lawyers rather than engineers.
The lawsuit is not about truth. It is about time. Time for the stock to find some floor. Time for the commercial trucking pivot to gain traction. Time for the statute of limitations to do some of the heavy lifting on warranty claims. Time for Prowse to run out of money or enthusiasm or both.
The Conclusion, Such As It Is From This Altitude
I am going to replace my ReLion batteries when the time comes, probably with ReLion, possibly with something better if the research at drinks four and five produces a clearer picture than drinks one through three have managed. What I am not going to do is put Battleborn batteries in a box six feet from where we sleep on the theory that the company that responds to safety disclosures with trade libel lawsuits and retroactive spec changes has my best interests at heart.
The plastic melts. Independent engineers documented it. Fifteen opened batteries show it. Controlled testing at half the rated current reproduced it in fourteen cycles. The company knows it melts. The company filed a patent application retroactively asserting that it was supposed to melt. The company changed the spec sheet the week they filed the lawsuit. The company called their lawyers before they called their engineers, and now the man who showed the world the melted plastic is a defendant in Nevada state court.
The battery in your boat does not care about any of this. It cares about whether the aluminum bolt through the ABS spacer stays tight under vibration over five years of thermal cycling in a marine environment, and on that specific question, the physical evidence has already spoken. I’m looking to make sure that where I drink rum until my eyes cross is not going to go up in an uncontrollable flaming disaster.
The physics do not settle out of court.
The class action against Dragonfly Energy is active in federal court. The trade libel case against Will Prowse is pending in Nevada state court. The CPSC complaint database is accepting incident reports at saferproducts.gov. The stock is worth approximately nothing compared to its 2022 peak. ReLion RB100s are still available in group 31. The rum is almost gone.
EOTI is at the dock. The house bank has not caught fire. I am choosing to view this as a data point.
About the Author
