Ten little electric scooters formed up and circled the track. Two of them had nobody on board. Jiangsu TV’s cameras followed them all the way around, and the words “autonomous driving” floated out of the commentary. A week later, a motorcycle maker was asked about it at the Canton Fair. He answered with three words: “A bit ridiculous.”
He was doing some very down-to-earth math. The scooter rolls forward on its own, someone darts out in front, and the system slams on the brakes. Your hands are still in your pockets, and you lurch forward with the scooter. If your hands are already on the handlebars, ready to take over at any moment, then what do you need autonomous driving for? The next day, he posted another video, saying he’d only meant it as a joke.
A joke is a joke. The question still hangs there.
Ninebot’s response was a string of technical terms: “Mole Self-Balancing 2.0.” The claim is that it needs neither a gyroscope nor a flywheel; instead, it uses rear-wheel drive, front-wheel steering, and a bunch of sensor data, with algorithms to correct the scooter’s posture. Sounds pretty impressive. But as of today, it’s not in mass production. From June to September this year, investors chased the company three times on the SSE E-Interaction platform, asking when it would go on sale. Each time, the response was the same: the launch date would be determined based on R&D progress, testing and validation, product planning, and market strategy. In plain English: there’s no timeline. Not one straight answer.
The stores are even more interesting. One investor wrote in a question that some stores’ livestreams kept showing the Mole 2.0 in motion. No one has counted how many days those livestreams have been running. Anyway, nobody’s doing anything about it.
A lot of people think this is two companies bickering, one accusing the other of making stuff up. I spent a few days mulling it over and reread what both sides said. The argument isn’t really about algorithms at all. In a car, a person can be secured as a fixed load, and airbags cushion the impact if there’s a crash. A two-wheeler is different: the rider is part of the balancing system. Let go of the handlebars, and the scooter is still there, but one of the things keeping it stable is gone. No matter how elegant the algorithm, it can’t make up for that gap. That’s just physics.
So when he said “a bit ridiculous,” what he was getting at was control. Who applies the brakes? And who’s responsible once they do?
Here’s my take. Two-wheelers won’t have anything like autonomous driving in the short term. The only thing that can actually make it to market is self-balancing, and even that is only useful for parking, moving the scooter around, and one-button summoning. Anything with the word “automatic” printed on the sales page is probably using a future feature to justify today’s price.
The crypto world knows this playbook all too well. The white paper says “mainnet,” the testnet says “ecosystem,” and a demo video says “daily active users.” Sell first, build later, and use “coming soon” to paper over the gap in between. Sound familiar?
Ninebot is a publicly listed company. A concept vehicle might nudge the stock price around a bit, but if they can’t build it, they can’t build it. The financial reports will tell the story. Crypto is different: the moment the tokens are issued, the deal is done. There’s no one to backstop the roadmap afterward.
Those white papers from 2017 had covers depicting cross-chain architectures and a million TPS. Go look at their websites now, and most have nothing left but a GitHub archive. Back then, nobody kept asking when mass production would begin, because the people buying in never planned to wait.
If you’re holding altcoins, take a look at your portfolio right now. Does the project’s website still say “launching in Q4”? Which year’s Q4? A roadmap has one convenient feature: you can change the dates without issuing an announcement. Guess why they’re so comfortable changing them. And when they do, they don’t even tell you.
Someone asked under Zhang Xue’s video whether he was trying to stir up hype for his own company’s bikes. He didn’t take the bait. As for when Ninebot’s Mole 2.0 will enter mass production, there’s still no straight answer.
$IOTA $HNT $BTC
#DePIN #两轮车 #AutonomousDriving
He was doing some very down-to-earth math. The scooter rolls forward on its own, someone darts out in front, and the system slams on the brakes. Your hands are still in your pockets, and you lurch forward with the scooter. If your hands are already on the handlebars, ready to take over at any moment, then what do you need autonomous driving for? The next day, he posted another video, saying he’d only meant it as a joke.
A joke is a joke. The question still hangs there.
Ninebot’s response was a string of technical terms: “Mole Self-Balancing 2.0.” The claim is that it needs neither a gyroscope nor a flywheel; instead, it uses rear-wheel drive, front-wheel steering, and a bunch of sensor data, with algorithms to correct the scooter’s posture. Sounds pretty impressive. But as of today, it’s not in mass production. From June to September this year, investors chased the company three times on the SSE E-Interaction platform, asking when it would go on sale. Each time, the response was the same: the launch date would be determined based on R&D progress, testing and validation, product planning, and market strategy. In plain English: there’s no timeline. Not one straight answer.
The stores are even more interesting. One investor wrote in a question that some stores’ livestreams kept showing the Mole 2.0 in motion. No one has counted how many days those livestreams have been running. Anyway, nobody’s doing anything about it.
A lot of people think this is two companies bickering, one accusing the other of making stuff up. I spent a few days mulling it over and reread what both sides said. The argument isn’t really about algorithms at all. In a car, a person can be secured as a fixed load, and airbags cushion the impact if there’s a crash. A two-wheeler is different: the rider is part of the balancing system. Let go of the handlebars, and the scooter is still there, but one of the things keeping it stable is gone. No matter how elegant the algorithm, it can’t make up for that gap. That’s just physics.
So when he said “a bit ridiculous,” what he was getting at was control. Who applies the brakes? And who’s responsible once they do?
Here’s my take. Two-wheelers won’t have anything like autonomous driving in the short term. The only thing that can actually make it to market is self-balancing, and even that is only useful for parking, moving the scooter around, and one-button summoning. Anything with the word “automatic” printed on the sales page is probably using a future feature to justify today’s price.
The crypto world knows this playbook all too well. The white paper says “mainnet,” the testnet says “ecosystem,” and a demo video says “daily active users.” Sell first, build later, and use “coming soon” to paper over the gap in between. Sound familiar?
Ninebot is a publicly listed company. A concept vehicle might nudge the stock price around a bit, but if they can’t build it, they can’t build it. The financial reports will tell the story. Crypto is different: the moment the tokens are issued, the deal is done. There’s no one to backstop the roadmap afterward.
Those white papers from 2017 had covers depicting cross-chain architectures and a million TPS. Go look at their websites now, and most have nothing left but a GitHub archive. Back then, nobody kept asking when mass production would begin, because the people buying in never planned to wait.
If you’re holding altcoins, take a look at your portfolio right now. Does the project’s website still say “launching in Q4”? Which year’s Q4? A roadmap has one convenient feature: you can change the dates without issuing an announcement. Guess why they’re so comfortable changing them. And when they do, they don’t even tell you.
Someone asked under Zhang Xue’s video whether he was trying to stir up hype for his own company’s bikes. He didn’t take the bait. As for when Ninebot’s Mole 2.0 will enter mass production, there’s still no straight answer.
$IOTA $HNT $BTC
#DePIN #两轮车 #AutonomousDriving