The Day after Unveiling the ION Mobius
Musings after a whirlwind of activities on a very special day/date
Yesterday was a very special day (date) - 2012.12.02 can also be written as 12.02.2021, and reads as a palindrome and an ambigram. In less nerdy talk, it reads the same way forward, backward and upside down. Apparently, the next such special date won’t come until March 2, 2030!
Yesterday was made extra special because we successfully unveiled the ION Mobius at our birthplace at JTC’s Launchpad@one-north, with Minister for Manpower and Second Minister for Trade and Industry Dr. Tan See Leng as our guest-of-honour. It came on the back of 18 months of hard work and intense gegenpress by our team of over 40-strong across our offices in Singapore, Jakarta and Shenzhen. Also present were a supportive group of media, government officials and representatives from Singapore’s Ministry of Trade and Industry, EnterpriseSG, JTC, A*STAR, Action Community for Entrepreneurship and the Singapore Battery Consortium, alongside investors, partners and friends. Apart from Dr. Tan’s kind words in his speech, he surprised me with his adventurous request to sit on the Mobius. It was an awesome impromptu photo-op that will be a big source of inspiration for our team. He later shared with me that the Mobius is the first motorbike he sat on in the driver’s seat!
For those of you who made it, thank you all for joining us on the momentous occasion, and for all of your well wishes. I take this chance to apologise to those of you who I wasn’t able to spend enough time with or missed greeting; it was crazier than my wedding over 11 years ago! I also apologise for not being able to invite more of our investors, partners and friends; we simply couldn’t accommodate more people in light of the prevailing pandemic constraints.
Yesterday was not quite a full product launch, but definitely an unveiling and also a celebration for our team after our hustle in designing, engineering and assembling the ION Mobius. We began on a blank sheet of paper on 1 July 2020, and our pace really picked up from April this year in this final push as our team grew into 44-strong across Singapore, Shenzhen and Indonesia. It has not been easy for us to pull off an end-to-end, full-stack approach to design, engineer and assemble the ION Mobius in Singapore, with strong support from our Jakarta and Shenzhen teams. Our Singapore team pulled extra hours and toiled over the past few weeks to prepare for the unveiling while completing the commissioning of our Mobius motorbike and battery pack assembly line. Xianyi and I could not have stood on-stage yesterday without your sweat and sacrifices. I know this battle has brought us closer together as a team; no longer “familiar strangers” collaborating over Lark or Zoom, but battle-tested comrades-in-arms regardless of whether we’re doing it in-person or remotely.
And yet, yesterday was just the beginning.
Today, we remind ourselves that a long road remains ahead of us in order to homologate the Mobius for Indonesian and Singapore roads, grow our nascent brand with motorbike riders and launch our pre-order campaign in Indonesia while bringing the Mobius into production. Our team will need to find fresh reserves of energy from within in order to sprint while lasting the marathon, so that we can continue to push the frontiers of the region’s automotive industry as a “hard tech” and “full-stack” company - owning the entire process from design to engineering, production and marketing, sales and after-sales as an Original Equipment Manufacturer - and across hardware, firmware, software and services as an innovative tech-automotive company.
A lot of people tell me that we’re crazy to lead this effort out of Singapore; a country with no prior automotive talent and an industry with no prior EV OEM DNA. What all of them don’t realise is the value that can come from our cross-region talent and supply chain collaboration, working off each country’s strengths to come together and create something that we think is truly amazing amidst pandemic times. By joining hands across Singapore, Jakarta, Shenzhen and future offices throughout Southeast Asia to best-source expertise and supply chains, we’re taking steps to building an integrated and single ASEAN Economic Community that unites through collaboration, by focusing on synergies rather than differences.
We believe technology and new paradigms now permit us to deliver greater value and innovation in product and service delivery across the value chain with this upcoming electric mobility transition.
We’ve already got a diverse set of nationalities in our team - Singaporean, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Malaysian, American, Chinese, Indian, German, Sri Lankan and Kazakhs - and invite you to join our teams across our offices, in support of our mission to create and deliver affordable, desirable, and sustainable mobility and energy storage for everyone.