Curious if anyone familiar with Azure/OpenAI could make some guesses on the root cause here. The official OpenAI incident updates seem to be very generic.
These specs could catapult LFP above all other battery chemistries. "400km in 10min" for a 700km range battery would mean 60% charge in 10min, which is about 1.5x the speed of today's fastest-charging NMC batteries. Hopefully there's not too much weight or discharge rate penalty. Excited for the future of LFP!
Sad news. I really wanted them to succeed. Their hardware engineering and design were top-notch. I test rode a VanMoof S3 three years ago and it was incomparable to other bikes. The integration of every single component into the frame and design was unparalleled, the smoothness of the automatic gear shifts felt magical.
But for me these features erred on the side of "nice-to-haves" and I ended up purchasing a "traditional" but more expensive e-bike that had the essential features I valued as a commuter (in New York); namely, more range for winter, more speed and torque going uphill, and a removable battery for carrying.
I had really hoped VanMoof could improve on these areas with newer models but it never happened. They continued to iterate on their strengths of beautiful integration using bespoke components, but didn't meaningfully improve any essential features at all. Currently, I have 3 commuter e-bikes in the family of different brands, drivetrain technologies, and price points. None come close to the level of polish and craftsmanship the VanMoof S3 had; if only it was better at being a bike.
Thinking more broadly about VanMoof's downfall, I think the commuter e-bike market might just too small and too competitive. Anecdotally, I still see about 10x more road bikes than commuter e-bikes today on the road, no change over the past 3 years, but the number of subscription e-bikes (citi bike) has skyrocketed.
Fun read. I found "maidian" more intuitively understood as "embedding dots" instead of "embedding seeds", since tracking dots (or tracking pixels) are often used for analytics and "dian"'s literal meaning is "dot".