Whereas mass manufacturing of the HyperSport will occur at a devoted manufacturing facility close to Damon’s headquarters exterior Vancouver, British Columbia, preliminary manufacturing will start at Damon’s San Rafael, California, engineering facility. The lately acquired house is at the moment filled with placards and carts to visualise the varied levels of the meeting course of; polished concrete flooring and pristine work surfaces look forward to elements.
The meeting portion of the store is on the opposite facet of the wall from the place Damon’s engineers churn out 3D-printed prototypes, machine the alloy parts going by way of ultimate growth, and crimp collectively early wiring harnesses.
Industrial-scale stamping, machining, and casting will finally change the hand-built nature of the preproduction bike you see pictured right here, but it surely’ll nonetheless carry the bespoke parts designed by and for Damon. “Each half on this [bike] is ours. We’ve developed it from scratch,” Dorresteyn claims. That’s not strictly true—industry-standard parts corresponding to wheels, brakes, and suspension are the exceptions.
The prototype Damon HyperSport we visited within the workshop isn’t but road-legal, missing niceties corresponding to flip alerts and purposeful headlights. With early manufacturing scheduled to ramp up in 2024, a lot of the workforce at Damon Motors is concentrated on finalizing all the varied {hardware} prototypes in order that correct manufacturing can start on the HyperSport, which remains to be set to hit these preliminary targets of 200 horsepower, 200 mph, and 200 miles of vary.
New Bike, New Bikers
The targets for the manager workforce are just a little totally different throughout WIRED’s go to. Giraud says the corporate is in the midst of yet one more funding spherical, this time a $50 million increase to hold Damon by way of to manufacturing.
That’s a big hurdle to beat earlier than the corporate can lastly begin appeasing the hundreds of preorders, lots of which got here from events who don’t match into common motorbike demographics.
Certainly, some 75 % of all Damon preorders have come through the corporate’s Instagram, with a mean age of 37. Of the three,700 paid deposits, 1 / 4 are from individuals who don’t even personal a motorbike—increasing the market, actually, however doubtlessly to inexperienced riders that might effectively require CoPilot’s intervention before they’d like.
Giraud is aiming excessive with the HyperSport, however he has plans to supply future fashions (some through partnerships) which might be inexpensive for riders in all places, together with Indonesia, the place most bikes price round $2,000.
“Motorcycling is the most important type of motorized transportation on this planet: 1.5 billion folks each day. If we’re going to make motorcycling safer, one million a 12 months feels like perhaps placing a dent in it,” Giraud says. “And, from an electrification perspective, it’s not even a drop within the bucket.”
Giraud admits it would take Damon not less than a decade to hit that degree of manufacturing, a timeline that appears optimistic for an organization that has but to ship a single motorbike to customers. However, whenever you’ve confronted loss of life and lived to inform the story, perhaps every thing else appears simple.
Lastly, the Journey
As Damon’s prototype HyperSport is not authorized, WIRED’s take a look at journey cannot happen on the street. As a substitute, Damon loaded up the bike and trucked it out to Thunderhill Raceway Park, one other two hours north of San Francisco.
Earlier than heading out onto the monitor on the one purposeful Damon prototype motorbike on this planet, I did a number of warm-up laps on one thing a bit extra acquainted. Extra acquainted, however no much less loopy: a BMW S 1000 RR. That is among the many quickest sportbikes on the planet, making a tick over 200 horsepower and weighing simply 440 kilos. That it will do over 100 mph in first gear and dash to 60 in fewer than three seconds implies that this “warm-up” was fairly scorching regardless of a chilly monitor on a cold, Northern California spring day.
