Whereas mass manufacturing of the HyperSport will occur at a devoted manufacturing unit 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 presently stuffed with placards and carts to visualise the varied phases of the meeting course of; polished concrete flooring and pristine work surfaces await 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 via ultimate growth, and crimp collectively early wiring harnesses.
Industrial-scale stamping, machining, and casting will finally substitute the hand-built nature of the preproduction bike you see pictured right here, nevertheless it’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 resembling wheels, brakes, and suspension are the exceptions.
The prototype Damon HyperSport we visited within the workshop isn’t but road-legal, missing niceties resembling flip indicators 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 chief workforce are just a little totally different throughout WIRED’s go to. Giraud says the corporate is in the midst of one more funding spherical, this time a $50 million increase to hold Damon via to manufacturing.
That’s a major hurdle to beat earlier than the corporate can lastly begin appeasing the hundreds of preorders, a lot of which got here from events who don’t match into common bike demographics.
Certainly, some 75 p.c 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, definitely, however probably to inexperienced riders that would properly require CoPilot’s intervention earlier than they’d like.
Giraud is aiming excessive with the HyperSport, however he has plans to provide future fashions (some through partnerships) which are inexpensive for riders in every single place, together with Indonesia, the place most bikes price round $2,000.
“Motorcycling is the biggest type of motorized transportation on this planet: 1.5 billion individuals day by day. If we’re going to make motorcycling safer, 1,000,000 a 12 months seems 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’ll 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 bike to customers. However, whenever you’ve confronted demise and lived to inform the story, perhaps the whole lot else appears straightforward.
Lastly, the Trip
As Damon’s prototype HyperSport is not authorized, WIRED’s take a look at journey cannot happen on the highway. As an alternative, 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 bike on this planet, I did a couple 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 signifies that this “warm-up” was fairly scorching regardless of a chilly monitor on a cold, Northern California spring day.