Mass spontaneous combustion, or so it seems.
It appears there were a number of machines in this building which caught fire, one of them being an UltraMotor A2B Hybrid which is now in my workshop. Evidently the machine was brand new, and still in it's box when the building caught fire, but in the case of the machine which I have, the damage limited to the front control cables and wiring. A nice little restoration project for the winter months.
Of particular interest to me, is the use of the TMM4 torque sensor on both of these machines, as opposed to the archaic rotation sensors normally associated with hub-motored machines. Should independant throttles be banned under the up-coming changes to the legislation, effective torque sensing will need to be adopted to ensure the continuing popularity of hub-motored systems. Without such improvements to their control systems, the Chinese hub-motored machines will lose an even greater share of the market to the more sophisticated center-drives such as Panasonic, Bosch and others.