Damon Motors has big plans for revolutionizing the motorcycle and industry. Launched at CES in January of 2020, and based in Vancouver, Canada, Damon was founded in 2017 by serial entrepreneurs Jay Giraud, CEO, and Dom Kwong, COO.

The company is developing what it describes as the world’s safest, smartest, fully connected electric motorcycles employing sensor fusion, robotics, and AI (artificial intelligence). First up is the HyperSport. Underpinning the innovation is HyperDrive, what the company calls the world’s first monocoque-constructed, 100% electric, multi-variant powertrain platform. All HyperSports are outfitted with HyperDrive as well as Damon’s CoPilot 360° advanced warning system, and Shift, which transforms the riding position between sport and commuter modes with the push of a button.

“As we at Damon continue to reinvent two-wheel mobility, HyperDrive lies at the heart of our innovation,” said Giraud. “HyperDrive serves as the nucleus of our creations and will allow us to further evolve our technology and continue to introduce the world’s most exciting and groundbreaking electric motorcycles.”

The company’s first motorcycle, the HyperDrive-based HyperSport, features a 100% proprietary design that results in significantly lower weight than other electric motorcycles, but with more power and energy, and greater performance for less cost than the competition. In Damon’s presentation materials, the company compares its HyperSport with a competitive set of the Ducati Panigale, Energica Ego, Harley Livewire, and Zero SRF.

“Damon is the future of motorcycling because we’re the only one solving the emissions, safety, and comfort problems that plague every motorcycle,” said Giraud, in an exclusive interview with Futurride. “The motorcycle industry contributes more emissions than a car industry does, on the whole, because [motorcycles] outnumber cars two to one, and 99% of them don’t have catalytic converters on them. The motorcycle industry is terribly stuck in the past.”

On top of the benefits that electrification brings, what might be more significant is that all HyperSports are outfitted with CoPilot, Damon’s 360° advanced warning system.

 

Differentiating on safety in a big way

Giraud believes that motorcycle companies have responsibilities for their customers to make safer products. As an example, he cited antilock brakes, which were introduced on cars in the mid-1980s but not on motorcycles until 2006.

“Today, antilock brakes represent 8% of the world’s bikes even though they’ve been around for 15 years,” said Giraud. “I think this is just a terrible failure on behalf of people who depend on motorbikes, which is 1.5 billion people. It’s a huge number of people that need a motorcycle for their family and economic livelihood.”

Damon believes the only way to bring about a major shift in motorcycle safety is through the use of disruptive technology.

“Our goal is an ambitious one; we are committed to building a crashless future,” said Giraud. “We’ve developed what is the world’s only collision-warning system for motorcycles.”

The company’s 360-degree CoPilot system uses radar, cameras, and other sensors to track the speed, direction, and velocity of surrounding objects. Using an onboard neural net, it anticipates a threat to warn the rider through LEDs for blind-spot warnings, vibrating handlebar grips for forward-collision warnings, and a digital rear-view mirror displays rearward threats fed by the motorcycle’s wide-angle rear-facing camera. The onboard system captures and tags incident details, then transmits data to the Damon cloud so that it can learn to detect more threats faster over time.

The system was developed “100% entirely from scratch,” said Giraud.

The company didn’t purchase off-the-shelf technology from existing suppliers because “they make their collision warning system to be as generic as possible to fit on as many customer vehicles as possible, and therein lies the problem,” said Giraud. “We’re not procuring a collision-warning system because none exists for motorcycles the way motorcycles move, but also because they would dumb it down to be as cheap as possible to serve as many customers as possible. And it would be inferior to what is possible.”

Getting into more specifics, Giraud said Damon’s system uses an array of cameras, radars, beam-forming microphones, infrared, humidity sensors, and pressure sensors. The system has a forward view of 150 m (492 ft), rear view of 75 m (246 ft), and wide-angle stereo cameras with the company’s proprietary vision detection.

“We do object detection and segmentation,” said Giraud. “We do the software to deal with lean angles and pitching. We have an onboard modular neural net that’s self-learning, so the bike is constantly learning from the data it collects. Then we push that data into the cloud, so the more you ride a Damon bike, the smarter you’re making my Damon bike.”

Conspicuously absent from the sensor list is LiDAR.

“I don’t think we would ever go to LIDAR,” said Giraud. “Because we want camera data, visual data that LIDAR can’t detect. We want to be able to look at video recording from the bikes and update the algorithms accordingly, and then use that information for other detection capabilities on board with the bike.”

Unlike typical applications, infrared sensing is not used for night vision to detect humans and other living things.

“That’s a future iteration for camera vision,” said Giraud. “We use radar for that; ultimately radar is our ground truth for those objects.”

The patent-pending use of infrared is to collect tire temperature, and the beam-forming microphones to hear the difference between a wet and dry tire, so traction can be adjusted as well as the distance and depth of the collision warning zones, said Giraud.

The pressure sensors are to “know where your body weight is, which that tells us where your mind is,” said Giraud, referring to a rider. “If you are not bracing for a forward braking moment and the bike brakes, you’re just going to collapse into the front of the bike and fall right off the front end.”

High levels of autonomy are a bigger challenge for two-wheelers, but Damon engineers are thinking ahead.

“We’ve thought about how to get to semi-automation—Level 3 collision avoidance on a two-wheel vehicle,” said Giraud. “We think that’s probably 2030.

“We’ve asked ourselves, what kind of data do we need to collect to get there so that a two- or three-wheel bike could actually be steered and controlled autonomously even if the rider is sitting on it without throwing the rider off,” he continued. “If the bike brakes all of a sudden, and you weren’t ready for that, and we didn’t know that you weren’t ready for that, then that’s a problem. So, we’ve worked our way backward to the hardware set and the data set that we need today.”

 

HyperDrive for the HyperSport

The HyperSport sets a new standard in motorcycle safety and connectivity. On the performance end, the company was focused on the number 200. It boasts well over 200 hp (149 kW) and 200 N·m (148 lb·ft) delivered at zero rpm, a top speed of 200 mph (322 km/h), and a highway range of more than 200 mi (322 km).

Its HyperDrive high-voltage powertrain, upon which a range of models and submodels can be built, features a purpose-built kidney-shaped placement of battery cells. There’s a radiator on each side, and the belly—where there would normally be a radiator on a gasoline bike—is where the six-phase inverter and DC-DC converter reside.

Operating at a nominal 450 V, the platform features a high-energy, liquid-cooled battery pack that enables a range of battery capacities for future motorcycle models. For instance, the HyperSport SE with 11-kW·h battery pack has over 100 mi (160 km) of range and 108 hp (81 kW), and the HyperSport SX with a 15-kW·h battery pack delivers more than 150 mi (241 km) of range and 150 hp (112 kW). The HS and Premier have the headlining 200-mi range.

HyperSport models are said to deliver track-ready performance with a greater than 3C (3 A for 20 min) continuous discharge to the ultra-dense, six-phase IPM (internal permanent magnet) motor. The lightweight motor can spin at a peak of 16,000 rpm and only weighs 48 lb (22 kg).

The proprietary fail-operational motor is oil-cooled on the inside and liquid-cooled on the outside. The dual-cooling strategy is necessary because it can ultimately push out 255 hp (190 kW) from a 44-lb (20-kg) weight for a 7.3 kW/kg power-to-weight density, said Giraud.

Developed in-house, HyperSport’s 6.6-kW integrated charger works with home 110-V outlets, can charge at Level 1 and Level 2 public charging stations found around the world, and is capable of 25-kW DC fast charging in under 45 min. A proprietary 150-kW plus inverter is said to allow control of traction, engine braking, and performance “like never before” with proprietary algorithms and unique safety-focused architecture. The inverter is bi-directional, so it can power a home.

 

Battery as a structural element

Optimizing HyperDrive’s final form factor plays a crucial role in HyperSport’s overall performance. The HyperDrive platform is said to include the most energy-dense battery pack in transportation, with an industry-leading 200 W·h/kg pack level density.

“The structural aspects of HyperDrive celebrate the optimization of mechanical design and performance as its central design expression,” said Kwong.

It has helped the company’s focus on aerodynamic design, using extensive wind tunnel testing to reduce drag and enabling Damon engineers to deliver more speed, acceleration, and range than its competitors.

To achieve the slipperiest profile possible, the pack’s total cell count, cell orientation and layout, heat dissipation materials, optimization of liquid-cooling performance, and material selection are all engineered to create the slimmest possible battery pack, without compromising energy density or output.

“We use a 21700 cylindrical cell,” said Giraud. “There’s about a thousand of them in here, and that cylindrical cell is stacked horizontally in four layers with liquid cooling plates for single-sided cooling.”

To further reduce weight, HyperDrive is engineered to act as a structural component of the motorcycle. The battery enclosures not only optimize weight distribution for high-speed stability and handling but also act as the motorcycle’s load-bearing frame. This saves both weight and cost and further reduces bulk compared to conventional framed motorcycles.

“The shell of the battery pack is also the frame,” explained Giraud. “A frameless design significantly reduces weight and increases the available energy density. And the fairing-less architecture is really key to optimizing the amount of energy we can fit in a given volume.

 

Weight control

The total weight of the HyperSport at 440 lb (200 kg) is close to “the best motorcycle in the world” and gasoline-fueled Ducati Panigale at 436 lb (198 kg) and compares favorably with the electric competition of Energica Ego at 616 lb (279 kg), Harley Livewire at 549 lb (249 kg), and Zero SRF at 498 lb (226 kg).

How did Damon engineers keep the weight so close to that of the Ducati?

Giraud chalks it up, first and foremost, to achieving a high level of energy density at the cell level, thanks to the unnamed cell supplier.

“We couldn’t use the Tesla cell,” said Giraud. “We tried, but it was insufficient. We need really high amperage, but we also need really high continuous output. So, we need a combination of high power and energy density.”

Weight was also kept in check with highly optimized liquid-cooling strategies.

“The vast majority of battery manufacturers run liquid cooling around the entirety of the cell when really 90% of the heat is in one little area,” said Giraud.

Eliminating the frame had a big impact on the weight.

“We did a lot of things to reduce weight,” he said. “Really, just building it from scratch and optimizing every nook and cranny of space.”

The weight is impressive given that the HyperSport also features the Shift system, which can transform the riding geometry between sport and commuter modes—even while in motion.

“We have a patent on the only motorcycle in the world that can transform at the push of a button,” said Giraud. “The reason why we did this is because commuter bikes are terrible on the highway because of all the wind buffeting and sport bikes are terrible in a city because you’re pushed over so much.”

The system adjusts major items like handlebars, windscreen, and footpegs.

 

Recovering from the COVID slowdown

Since launching at CES in January 2020, Damon has had a lot of press coverage, raised a significant amount of money, and grew from 13 to 70 people.

“We have a world-class design team in two countries right now,” said Giraud. “We’ve grown the strength of the management team quite significantly.”

Helping Giraud and Kwong lead the company are chiefs Derek Dorresteyn, CTO; Mike Galbraith, CFO; Doug Penman, CMO; and Broc Tenhouten, CSO.

The company has committed to a factory. The 110,000-ft² (10,200-m²) facility it is building in Vancouver is expected to produce 40,000 bikes a year.

However, the last year and a half came with some challenges.

Since early 2020, “we lost a year of engineering time,” said Giraud. “So, we’re spending all of 2021 catching up.”

The company has 30 engineers working in seven different countries on the HyperSport.

Since CES 2020, Hyperdrive has gone through about three generations of redesign. It is now at a pre-production prototype stage, with validation of all systems in progress.

The bike’s physical design has gone through three generations of design too.

“It’ll still change a fair bit, but very subtly,” said Giraud. “Right now, we’re doing a lot of subtle changes to improve aerodynamics. We’re on track to have a 0.27 coefficient of drag, which is better than any gas-powered motorbike you can buy. It’s in fact better than some Moto GP superbike’s coefficient of drag.”

“I think the part that excites me the most is that we have this rabid following,” said Giraud, referencing all of the people making Damon shirts, music, and videos. “We have millions of views of videos that we didn’t even make that are talking about Damon products. People have made third-party Damon videos out of our social media imagery and stuff, and they’ve gotten over millions of views.”

 

Going to market

Damon’s family of HyperSport motorcycles includes the SE (MSRP $16,995), SX (MSRP $19,995), HS (MSRP $24,995), and Premier (MSRP $39,995).

In partnership with FreedomRoad Financial, Damon has announced a revolutionary subscription offering for HyperSport models. Customers can choose from 24-, 36-, or 48-month plans with a guaranteed residual value, providing customers the freedom to exchange their HyperSport for updated models at the end of the term. As hardware gets updated, customers can always expect next-generation technology without the hassle and trade-in losses that occur with legacy dealerships and brands.

Look for more product and market news soon. At CES 2022, Damon will be unveiling the production-intent HyperSport and its next bike.