Modal Motors is trying to cut China out of electric motors entirely
Lately, it seems like everyone is talking about bringing manufacturing back to the United States, especially when it comes to hard tech like drones and robotics. Michael Van Steenburg thinks he’s ahead of the game. Van Steenburg spent the last decade building all kinds of electric motors in the U.S. and North America, and now he wants to do it again with his new startup, Modal Motors.
- ▪Lately, it seems like everyone is talking about bringing manufacturing back to the United States, especially when it comes to hard tech like drones and robotics.
- ▪Michael Van Steenburg thinks he’s ahead of the game.
- ▪Van Steenburg spent the last decade building all kinds of electric motors in the U.S. and North America, and now he wants to do it again with his new startup, Modal Motors.
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| Original publisher | TechCrunch |
| Canonical URL | https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/23/modal-motors-is-trying-to-cut-china-out-of-electric-motors-entirely/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 23 Sep 2026 19:05:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-23T19:09:30.795Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-23T19:09:30.795Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | -ya8RYqc7fqv · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Lately, it seems like everyone is talking about bringing manufacturing back to the United States, especially when it comes to hard tech like drones and robotics. Michael Van Steenburg thinks he’s ahead of the game. Van Steenburg spent the last decade building all kinds of electric motors in the U.S. and North America, and now he wants to do it again with his new startup, Modal Motors. This time, he wants to ditch rare earth magnets entirely, in a bid to further separate the U.S. from China’s supply chain. As one of founders in Startup Battlefield 200 who will compete at TechCrunch Disrupt next month, he thinks it’s an urgent pitch to make. “China’s already flexed its muscles a couple times,” Van Steenburg said, referring to the country restricting access to rare earth products.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechCrunch.
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