How adult-site OnlyFans helped this high-tech handlebar come to market
We’ve spent years following interesting high-tech developments in the e-bike industry, often while the more traditional non-electric cycling industry has had to make do with comparatively lower-tech leaps. But now all cyclists can rejoice in an interesting new “smart handlebar” that happens to have gotten a friendly helping hand from an unlikely source.
Flitedeck, a tech-infused handlebar for road bikes, is hoping to offer some stiff competition to the otherwise low-tech handlebar market.
Developed by motorsport engineer Sabrina Fischer and her co-founder Mattias Huber, the Flitedeck smart handlebar seeks to bring car-like display features to road bikes, ending the need for riders to strap-on their own displays, meters, lights, and other accessories.
As Fischer explained to WIRED, “We asked ourselves, why couldn’t handlebars function like a car’s cockpit? We thought there just had to be a more integrated, more connected solution.”
The carbon fiber Flitedeck handlebar features a high-resolution touchscreen display measuring a hearty 180mm or just over 7 inches long, which I’m told is well over average. That display is also IP68 waterproof, ensuring smooth operation even when wet.
Features include GPS connectivity for mapping as well as 5G and Bluetooth support, integration with common cycling sensors, long battery life, built-in lighting, and more. A rearview mirror camera had originally been planned, though any rear-focused plans are currently on hold.
In addition to the smart features, Flitedeck is also raising eyebrows and more with its growth story, which relied on a very different style of crowd-funding.
Instead of launching a Kickstarter or offering investors equity to help fund the idea, Fischer turned to the hefty part of the Venn diagram overlap between those who like bikes and those who like women in various stages of undress.
Described as a “slow-burn approach”, Fischer first opened an Instagram page four years ago, gathering interest for her cycling-inspired pinups, often in attire that would logically appear to help one cool down after a long, hot ride. In doing so, she collected a healthy audience of thirsty cyclists, a group already notorious for spending big bucks on their recreations. She then leveraged that dedicated following by expanding onto the adult site OnlyFans, where content creators can charge subscriptions for viewers to see their content — nearly all of it not safe for your work computer.
She has reportedly surpassed the top 0.2% of creators on OnlyFans. For reference, the top 0.1% of creators reportedly earn around US$100,000 per month from their followers. I’m told.
That’s a lot of chain lube.
The novel funding method could be described as a mixture of business and pleasure, taking a hands-on approach to entrepreneurship. But it appears to have worked quite well for Fischer, who has turned those earnings into startup funding to help bring her high-tech handlebar to market. And even while making money hand over fist, she hasn’t had to give up any equity in the company.
While it might sound like a lot of play, it’s been years of hard work, too. Modeling on camera was matched by modeling on CAD as Fischer and her business partner put their engineering experience to the test. With bona fides from past work at BMW and Porsche, they know a thing or two about design work. Fischer even wrote her thesis on racecar electrification while employed at Porsche.
The Flitedeck is now available for pre-order, with the company hoping to pre-sell 500 units ahead of expected delivery in Q2 2026. For folks willing to take the risky first plunge, the reward is a hefty discount. The current early-bird price of $1,685 for the Flitedeck handlebar is marked down from an MSRP of $2,370.
The company is also selling a few unique packages to further round out the funding. The premier option, priced at $26,339, is described as the Ultimate Adventure package. It includes a private ride with Sabrina and “a completely organized luxury package that includes flights, hotel and personal support.”
If that’s a bit rich for your blood, but you’d still like to help support and fund Sabrina’s bike tech, there’s always that other option for just $24.99 per month…
image credits: Flitedeck
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Metro Detroit is about to get a big boost of fast EV chargers, with more than 40 new ChargePoint ports set to come online across multiple sites owned by the Dabaja Brothers Development Group.
The first ultra-fast charging site just opened in Canton, Michigan. It’s owned and operated by Dabaja Brothers, who plan to follow it with additional ChargePoint-equipped locations in Dearborn and Livonia.
“We started this project because we saw a gap in our community – there was almost nowhere to charge an EV in Canton, and a similar lack of charging across metro Detroit,” said Yousef Dabaja, owner/operator at Dabaja Brothers.
Each metro Detroit site will feature ChargePoint Express Plus fast charging stations, which can deliver up to 500 kW to a single port, can fast-charge two vehicles at the same time, and are compatible with all EVs. The stations feature a proprietary cooling system to deliver peak charging speeds for sustained periods, ensuring that charging speed remains consistent.
The stations operate on the new ChargePoint Platform, which enables operators to monitor performance, adjust pricing, troubleshoot issues, and gain real-time insights to keep chargers running smoothly.
Rick Wilmer, CEO at ChargePoint, said, “This initiative will rapidly infill the ‘fast charging deserts’ across the Detroit area, allowing drivers to quickly recharge their vehicles when and where they need to.”
Read more: ChargePoint just gave its EV charging software a major AI upgrade
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Mercedes-Benz High-Power Charging and Starbucks have officially opened their first DC fast charging hub together, off the I-5 in Red Bluff, California.
The 400 kW Mercedes-Benz chargers are capable of adding up to 300 miles in 10 minutes, depending on the EV, and every stall has both NACS and CCS cables – they’re fully open DC fast chargers.
Mercedes-Benz HPC North America, a joint venture between subsidiaries of Mercedes-Benz Group and renewable energy producer MN8 Energy, first announced in July 2024 that it would install DC fast chargers at Starbucks stores along Interstate 5, the main 1,400-mile north-south interstate highway on the US West Coast from Canada to Mexico. Ultimately, Mercedes plans to install fast chargers at 100 Starbucks stores across the US.
Mercedes-Benz HPC opened its first North American charging site at Mercedes-Benz USA’s headquarters in Sandy Springs, Georgia, in November 2023 as part of an initial $1 billion charging network investment. As of the end of 2024, Mercedes had deployed over 150 operational fast chargers in the US, but it hasn’t disclosed an official number of how many chargers are currently online.
Andrew Cornelia, CEO of Mercedes-Benz HPC North America, is leaving the company at the end of the month to become global head of electrification & sustainability at Uber.
Read more: Mercedes-Benz is deploying 400 kW US-made EV fast chargers with CCS and NACS cables
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The race for autonomous driving has three fronts: software, hardware, and regulatory. For years, we’ve watched Tesla try to brute-force its way to “Full Self-Driving (FSD)” with its own custom hardware, while the rest of the automotive industry is increasingly lining up behind NVIDIA.
Now that we know Tesla’s new AI5 chip is delayed and won’t be in vehicles until 2027, it’s worth comparing the two most dominant “self-driving” chips today: Tesla’s latest Hardware 4 (AI4) and NVIDIA’s Drive Thor.
Here’s a table comparing the two chips with the best possible specs I could find. greentheonly’s teardown was particularly useful. If you find things you think are not accurate, please don’t hesitate to reach out:
| Feature / Specification | Tesla AI4 (Hardware 4.0) | NVIDIA Drive Thor (AGX / Jetson) |
|---|---|---|
| Developer / Architect | Tesla (in-house) | NVIDIA |
| Manufacturing Process | Samsung 7nm (7LPP class) | TSMC 4N (custom 5nm class) |
| Release Status | In production (shipping since 2023) | In production since 2025 |
| CPU Architecture | ARM Cortex-A72 (legacy) | ARM Neoverse V3AE (server-grade) |
| CPU Core Count | 20 cores (5× clusters of 4 cores) | 14 cores (Jetson T5000 configuration) |
| AI Performance (INT8) | ~100–150 TOPS (dual-SoC system) | 1,000 TOPS (per chip) |
| AI Performance (FP4) | Not supported / not disclosed | 2,000 TFLOPS (per chip) |
| Neural Processing Unit | 3× custom NPU cores per SoC | Blackwell Tensor Cores + Transformer Engine |
| Memory Type | GDDR6 | LPDDR5X |
| Memory Bus Width | 256-bit | 256-bit |
| Memory Bandwidth | ~384 GB/s | ~273 GB/s |
| Memory Capacity | ~16 GB typical system | Up to 128 GB (Jetson Thor) |
| Power Consumption | Est. 80–100 W (system) | 40 W – 130 W (configurable) |
| Camera Support | 5 MP proprietary Tesla cameras | Scalable, supports 8MP+ and GMSL3 |
| Special Features | Dual-SoC redundancy on one board | Native Transformer Engine, NVLink-C2C |
The most striking difference right off the bat is the manufacturing process. NVIDIA is throwing everything at Drive Thor, using TSMC’s cutting-edge 4N process (a custom 5nm-class node). This allows them to pack in the new Blackwell architecture, which is essentially the same tech powering the world’s most advanced AI data centers.
Tesla, on the other hand, pulled a move that might surprise spec-sheet warriors. Teardowns confirm that AI4 is built on Samsung’s 7nm process. This is mature, reliable, and much cheaper than TSMC’s bleeding-edge nodes.
When you look at the compute power, NVIDIA claims a staggering 2,000 TFLOPS for Thor. But there’s a catch. That number uses FP4 (4-bit floating point) precision, a new format designed specifically for the Transformer models used in generative AI.
Tesla’s AI4 is estimated to hit around 100-150 TOPS (INT8) across its dual-SoC redundant system. On paper, it looks like a slaughter, but Tesla made a very specific engineering trade-off that tells us exactly what was bottling up their software: memory bandwidth.
Tesla switched from LPDDR4 in HW3 to GDDR6 in HW4, the same power-hungry memory you find in gaming graphics cards (GPUs). This gives AI4 a massive memory bandwidth of approximately 384 GB/s, compared to Thor’s 273 GB/s (on the single-chip Jetson config) using LPDDR5X.
This suggests Tesla’s vision-only approach, which ingests massive amounts of raw video from high-res cameras, was starving for data.
Based on Elon Musk’s comments that Tesla’s AI5 chip will have 5x the memory bandwidth, it sounds like it might still be Tesla’s bottleneck.
Here is where Tesla’s cost-cutting really shows. AI4 is still running on ARM Cortex-A72 cores, an architecture that is nearly a decade old. They bumped the core count to 20, but it’s still old tech.
NVIDIA Thor, meanwhile, uses the ARM Neoverse V3AE, a server-grade CPU explicitly designed for the modern software-defined vehicle. This allows Thor to run not just the autonomous driving stack, but the entire infotainment system, dashboard, and potentially even an in-car AI assistant, all on one chip.
Thor has found many takers, especially among Tesla EV competitors such as BYD, Zeekr, Lucid, Xiaomi, and many more.
Electrek’s Take
There’s one thing that is not in there: price. I would assume that Tesla wins on that front, and that’s a big part of the project. Tesla developed a chip that didn’t exist, and that it needed.
It was an impressive feat, but it doesn’t make Tesla an incredible leader in silicon for self-driving.
Tesla is maxing out AI4. It now uses both chips, making it less likely to achieve the redundancy levels you need to deliver level 4-5 autonomy.
Meanwhile, we don’t have a solution for HW3 yet and AI5 is apparently not coming to save the day until 2027.
By then, there will likely be millions of vehicles on the road with NVIDIA Thor processors.
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