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Comment by aanet | Hacker News Reader

What the what?! This is so cool. I love everything about the demo. No (spoken) words, just a cool functioning product, in its intended uses cases, in different situations -- on fire, soaked in water, soaked in mud.

Even if the product actually did nothing useful (which is not the case here), the video itself a great marketing copy. <3

As a product person, this excites me.

However... I'm curious. This was launched ~2 years ago (per the YT video [1]). What happened? Is this still working? How is the company doing? Any ideas?? I don't see any other videos on their channel. I see some action on their Twitter [2] but sporadic.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFsnS0Yb1Bs [2] https://x.com/dhruvvidyut

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The mortality rate for amazing ideas is higher in developing countries, for more reasons than incompetent or corrupt governments. For example, there are fewer networking opportunities by virtue of the network being small, or the poverty rate would put a product like this well into the disposable income/toy space.

I would bet this thing would be a mad success if the inventor had won the birthplace lottery.

Except that bicycles as everyday transport are much more common in the inventor's birthplace than in places typically thought of as "winning the birthplace lottery".

Electric bicycles, however, are not.

Cars are rare in India. Motorcycles and cycles- you find them literally everywhere.

Cars in India most certainly are not rare by any stretch of the imagination.

India has 34 cars per 1000 people, that counts as pretty rare. For comparison the EU has 567 and the US over 800.

Well, not in cities, but in rural areas they are a bit rare? :) Also, this is more eco-friendly for small near by errands to be run. What say? :)

This is much better for local journeys, 100%. But I have to disagree that cars are ‘rare’ in any part of India. Source, I am Indian and have travelled a significant portion of the subcontinent.

I am also an Indian, and I, too have travelled widely.

You are only looking at the roads. Look at homes of people. How many garages and cars do you see? Very, very rare.

Think per capita.

In city roads, sure, they are filled with traffic and roads are congested.

But even in cities car ownership is kind of rare. In small towns, cars are very rare. In rural areas, they are almost non-existent.

How did cars enter the discussion?

Interesting observation looking even a little bit beyond the superficial marketing copy. Peel back even one layer and find out there's only a single video, empty Youtube channel, 5000 subscribers (in India), and a product that seems like it never went anywhere. For all the stuff that gets crazy valuations, seems like there's so many of these that might be unicorns that end up falling through the cracks of investment.

The twitter has

>Manufacturing or manufacturing at scale for Bharat requires decisive trajectory and a whole another level of preparation & execution.

>After months of testing and streamlining DVECK... pilot orders

I guess making things is hard. Also having been in developing countries, people tend to buy the cheap Chinese stuff you see advertised on eBay and the like so they are competing with that.

He should be the next Billy Mays

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