Fifteen Kilometres: A Map of Where Your Linky Comes From
"Made in Italy" is printed on a lot of things that were made somewhere else and finished here. So rather than claim it, here is a map.
The short distances
The mechanical parts — the structure that makes a folding longboard a folding longboard — are produced by SP PLAST, in Capparuccia. That is about 15 km from where the boards are assembled. Close enough that a problem found on a Tuesday can be discussed standing next to the machine on a Wednesday.
The wheels are designed by us and made about 13 km away.
The electronics — the part that turns a board into a vehicle — are built by R13 in L'Aquila, about 160 km away. Still a drive, not a container ship.
The long ones
The battery pack comes from roughly 500 km away. The motors come from China.
We could leave those two out of the story. We are including them because a map with the inconvenient parts deleted is not a map, it is an advertisement. There is no European supply chain for small brushless motors at this volume that we can currently reach, and pretending otherwise would be easy and false.
Why the distance is not a slogan
Short distances are not a virtue in themselves. What they buy is something more specific: iteration speed and the ability to fix things.
When a supplier is fifteen minutes away, a tolerance problem is a morning, not a six-week email thread. A revision to a moulded part gets sampled and checked in person. The people who make the component have seen the finished vehicle it goes into, which changes the questions they ask.
It also means that when a board needs work, it is repaired in Italy, by people who have the drawings and the parts, rather than being written off because the nearest competence is on another continent.
We have the comparison to draw from. The first generation of Linky was manufactured abroad, and it taught us — expensively — what distance costs when something goes wrong. That is a story of its own, and it is next week's.
What we are not saying
Two things we are deliberately not claiming.
We are not making a general environmental claim on the basis of this map. Transport distance is one input among many, and a slogan built on one input is the kind of claim that deserves scepticism — including when we would be the ones making it.
We are not claiming the materials are recycled. Some questions about our own supply chain are still open, and until we can answer them with evidence we would rather leave the space blank than fill it with an adjective.
The map, in one line
Mechanics at 15 km. Wheels at 13 km. Electronics at 160 km. Battery at 500 km. Motors from far away.
That is where a Linky comes from. It is not a perfect map. It is the real one.
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