2024 July :: CEO's Update
A long overdue update to our supporters, partners and customers
Hey guys, it’s been a while since I’ve gotten in touch. We’ve obviously been busy and hard at work. We’re now a team of 11-nationalities and over 130-strong, spread across 8 cities in 4 countries. I would like to take 5 to 10 minutes of your time for my team and I to share a few thoughts with you.
It has been a great privilege to meet many of you in-person over the past 18 months since we unveiled the M1-S at IMOS 2022 and started taking pre-orders. Since then, we continue to obsess over the feedback you have given us, even as we remain motivated by your ongoing support. We had given IIMS 2024 a miss earlier this year in February as we had wanted to focus on shipping the “Mobius” M1-S, but heard concerns from some customers wondering if we were still alive as a company 😅, and figured we’d better show up at GIIAS@ICE BSD. If you’re around, I urge you to stop by GIIAS@ICE BSD from 18th through 28th July, try out the latest build and speak with our team members to learn more about the improvements we’ve made to the M1-S given the extra time we’ve taken.
In recent months, some customers have come up to me to express their frustration at how long it’s taking us to ship the M1-S. Some customers (a handful, and understandably so) have even cancelled their pre-orders with full refunds. Trust me; none of you can be more frustrated than I am at our delays in shipping a quality, production-ready M1-S. Some of you may recall our initial estimate back in November 2022 that we would commence initial deliveries by the end of 2023, which we subsequently revised to April 2024. We’re going to need a few more months of forbearance from you, but we’re definitely shipping the M1-S this year.
For those of you who intend to or are considering cancelling your pre-orders with us; I was told each household can only receive the subsidy for an electric motorbike once. We sincerely believe your best experience with an electric motorbike brand is with us at ION Mobility and the M1-S. We are confident that you won’t find a better designed and engineered automotive-grade electric motorbike that you’d want to bring for your daily commute or for a long (or short) fun ride with your friends than the M1-S; all in one tightly integrated package. We have made the M1-S to be in the practical size of a 155cc ICE motorbike, but with the power and performance of more than a 155cc ICE motorbike (in Standard mode) and even up to a 250cc ICE motorbike (in Sports mode), while having an equivalent total cost of ownership to a 155cc ICE motorbike in a mere 2 to 2.5 years. Think of the M1-S as a cross between the Honda Vario 150 and the Yamaha Nmax 155.
Still, even if you leave us, we hope to win you over down the road once we commence deliveries..
For those of you who are continuing on with us, we ❤️ you 3000! You are the reason we toil tirelessly to improve and ship the M1-S. We’ve improved our rear aesthetics, lightened the bike by 14kg, reduced the seat height by 3cm, upgraded the throttle, added TPMS, honed our on-board charging and cable management experience while adding to our system features; all while continuing our road testing programme. Each change we make cascades into an entire cycle of supplier qualification, engineering validation, part-level testing, integration testing and quality control. We’ve also been receiving strong support from TVS Motors, whose support has been steadfast and invaluable in this critical product maturation phase. This is why we’re taking so long, while others pop new models out of their factories in no time 🥲.
Here at ION, we take our hardware, firmware and software very seriously, and prefer to underpromise and over-deliver. The electric motorbike race is very much a marathon and not a sprint. We uphold ourselves to higher standards - not just because we have heard about the nightmarish experiences from some of our pre-order customers who had previously purchased from other brands who have launched quicker than we have by doing much less in-house and relying much more on design-, white-label and/or ODM partners, or even outsourcing engineering and tooling engineering to their suppliers *gasp*.
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It is not trivial to attempt a full-stack, end-to-end play with only US$25.5m raised, where there’s zero outsourcing across the entire range of industrial and product design, engineering (mechanical parametric and A/B surfaces, vehicle powertrain, electrical, embedded systems, power electronics, control systems, firmware, full-stack software), down to the production of our battery packs and vehicle assembly.
At the end of the day, I think you guys deserve an apology from me. Here at ION, the blame flows upwards and not downwards. It’s my decisions that have led to the delays, and the responsibility is wholly mine. My team and I remain committed and confident in delivering on our M1-S pre-orders to you soon. We’ll push out an app update soon that will help you to better manage your order status and receive delivery updates.
On this day, we as a company are 4 years, 9 months and 20 days old. We started design and development of the M1-S just under 4 years ago. In time to come, we hope to live up to your expectations, while growing into internationally recognised automotive-grade standards that ICE incumbents that came before us have mastered over the past scores of decades.
Enjoy the start of your new week, and feel free to get in touch if you have any other questions in the meantime.
I love the idea of on-board charging! But is it going to be easy to replace the cable when something unfortunate happen to it?
And when are you going to open dealership in other cities? Maybe Surabaya? 🙂