[em500]

Comments from insiders in Swedish[1] and Dutch[2]. Some snippets:

... In the end, they are just in a situation that is almost impossible to save. You have a factory full of machines that are substandard in quality, reliability and documentation. A huge 100% in-house tech stack that largely consists of Go pieces on Lambdas writing to DynamoDB. ...

... A gigantic factory full of mediocre Chinese equipment, what can you do with that? They are not standard things, they are things custom made for Northvolt but unfortunately with incomplete specifications. ...

...The whole market is not doing well in Europe. We don't really have the raw materials here (Northvolt's came mostly from China), we don't have the knowledge (that's in Asia) and we don't have the machinery for production. ...

[1] https://old-reddit-com.translate.goog/r/sweden/comments/1g1x...

[2] https://tweakers-net.translate.goog/nieuws/228816/faillissem...

[viraptor]

The tech stack was a weird quote. This is significant:

> In theory it's microservices, but the reality is that there are so many circular dependencies that it works like a monolith

But lambda/go/dynamodb does not force this situation.

[ExoticPearTree]

True, but it doesn't mean you can code it to be in this situation.

If all your life you coded monoliths, you can code monoliths using Lambda functions too, there's nothing magic that will stop you from doing it.

[leviliebvin]

Pfft. Sure blame the Chinese equipment and not the corrupt and incompetent European management. The Chinese manage to produce batteries just fine.

[smokel]

To be fair, the referenced comment (in Dutch) blames management:

> Helaas is het probleem bij Northvolt echt gewoon te herleiden naar slecht management (ex-Tesla), en bijgevolg een slechte keuze van leverancier van productiemachines (Wuxi Lead).

[em500]

Main equipment manufacture was Wuxi Lead, where naturally everyone speaks almost exclusively Chinese and all docs are in Chinese. Not a problem of course when most customers are also Chinese, much more so when they're European.

[magicalhippo]

He also mentioned they didn't specify certain details when ordering, leaving the Chinese to make choices, and that caused issues they had trouble with once delivered.

This might be a culture thing. At least next door here in Norway, a decent supplier will definitely ask when needed, offer suggestions and even resist if you try to order something stupid.

[ExoticPearTree]

Having a supplier/disti work with you to get the best deal doesn't happen very often. Mostly due to the fact that they could leave money on the table. If you order something with the wrong configuration they can always sell you another thing with the right configuration...

There is also a possibility of cultural differences and who knows what the Chinese thought the Europeans wanted when they did not send complete specs for the equipment. In some countries it is not customary to challenge the client - but I do not know if it applies to China as well.

I've seen how they build stuff in China, and most likely Nothvolt thought it could do some things on their own without understanding what those things would entail. Maybe if they would have asked the supplier to come in and setup the factory and also run the first batches of finished batteries the situation would have been different.

Somehow I think now they're trying to find a scapegoat for the whole debacle and blame on the usual suspects.

[panta]

If you are spending billions, surely you can bring in some people that speak both Chinese and the local language. Heck, there are even real-time translation services now. No, the problem is not technical, it's that it was a scam from the get go.

[ngrilly]

The goal of a scam is to make the scammer richer. Who gets richer in this case? No one. So that’s not a scam. I’m disappointed seeing that kind of accusations stated without evidences on HN, a forum about entrepreneurship and tech, where we used to celebrate success as much as learn from failure.

[panta]

The money from investors went somewhere, there are people that got richer...

[ngrilly]

Most of the money went into the pocket of extraordinary dedicated employees who were paid market salaries (actually often slightly below market), and suppliers as well.

[rob74]

> A huge 100% in-house tech stack that largely consists of Go pieces on Lambdas writing to DynamoDB

Oh, well, that explains everything! Great insight... /s