Baldy Interviews DAMON Motorcycles CEO Jay Giraud

difference between fighting over the printer driver for your old Microsoft laptop versus getting a Mac and everything works perfectly, that's hardware software. The integration is fully set up to belong to each other, that makes a big difference and as far as safety and driver experience and making things your dropdown video, yeah, sorry, and making things discreet, incredibly concise so as not to increase distraction on a motorcycle, you just can't introduce technology into a bike that you know and a sense of the aftermarket and expect it to work well, so yes, we really realized that you have to reinvent everything the bike and then if you're reinventing the whole bike, do it. you make it gasoline or you make it electric and I think now we have the obvious answer to that, so it must have been, you have to swallow pretty deeply to say who are we going to move forward to building a motorcycle that I think we're actually going to make bees and pickup trucks ago a while, don't you know?

Didn't one of your team like Derek say to build

motorcycles

? You'd think it would be easier, but it's actually harder than an electric car because of its size and weight restrictions um, it's easier and harder, it's a lot easier because crash testing a car the size of your supply chain, all of them. the things that go into making a car, the amount of automation it needs, I mean in dollar terms, a billion dollars. build a car company at the very least, while it costs 50 million to build a motorcycle company mm-hmm, you don't need miles of automated robots building

motorcycles

like you do cars, so you know those kind of capital investments you know if you're if your system is down for a day you're losing millions of dollars a day, whereas with motorcycles it's people you know, a handful of people can assemble a bike in a few hours from an engineering standpoint to build up the power, the energy density that you need to have the kind of range of performance and utility that a motorcyclist expects from a gasoline motorcycle, that barrier from an engineering design point of view has never been achieved until now and that is really very difficult, I mean, you just don't have 2,000 3,000 pounds of space to fit a battery that will give this vehicle the range it needs like it does in a car, whereas on a motorcycle we have to condense 200 miles into 250 pounds of space and that's about as much space, yeah, from here to there and from here to there, you need a couple hundred miles of power and that's really a challenge, yeah, so to accomplish that you ended up hiring Derrick from Alta after he They fell tragically, he is highly respected for his power. trains, is he your type of power train power density?

Johnny has been at this for a long time and where he comes from, he is literally a purebred racer on both sides of his family going back three generations, they have all raced in one type of race or another flat track. Street motocross, yeah, mm-hmm, yeah, pretty amazing, so how did you get there? I mean, you seemed pretty obsessed with the number 200 that's written on your heart. The guys mention like 200 miles per hour. I would be breathless when Hearing that 200 miles of range and 200 horsepower is like, oh, you know, it's easier to achieve than making a motorcycle safe and it's a big part of why you know from 2617 to now to the twenties, really two solid years of development and we are We're not done yet, we just moved on to being a co-pilot, just building the collision warning technology, which is a comprehensive system of fusion sensors, cameras, radars, microphones, sensors infrared humidity, force sensors, all of this interacting in a way with an AI on board the bike to interpret. your behavior to interpret the environment you and the motorcycle face in terms of the traffic conditions on the road wet dry sunny or cloudy how many lanes the truck has but the traffic is the light about to change all that information is it's like contextual information from an autonomous vehicle that we use to interpret the threat or rent the potential threat that a router could face and if I look here and the threats that come from there I need to experience that threat faster than my my brain faster than I can react and see it and that's why we deliver Ford collision warnings through a patented handlebar vibration that's really concise, it's really effective, it delivers the information through the palm of your hand to your brain faster than your eyes could interpret, yeah, so that was my first thought when I saw what you were doing I thought wow, that's like Tesla, you know, there's a front radar and a rear camera and a front camera, as well as a front camera, it's nice, You know, it's quite surprising, there are no mirrors on that bike, no. that's because I don't like mirrors, that's a prototype that we will ship with mirrors although, honestly, with the LEDs, the blind spot LEDs on the left and right with a six-inch LCD screen with a field of view of one hundred and forty degrees , which is about three lanes you don't really need mirrors anymore and eventually, like in Europe, mirrors will be removed from the design homologation requirements in North America like they have been in Europe, but you know until then we'll ship mirrors and that's it.

You know. that's it, everything is a challenge, but we had to know for ourselves that we can make motorcycling safer before we could dive into the 200, which I'll talk about in a second, so we had LAPD, we had West Vancouver . police from Vancouver police, we've had about 50 bikers in Vancouver, we've had general managers and top executives from almost every motorcycle company riding our prototype, we've had people from Psycho World and Forbes magazine riding it and a hundred percent Of them consider this system to be effective and reliable when, in about 10 to 15 minutes, you know that the camera on the front of the motorcycle is recording what they are seeing, you know that you are looking forward and at the end we can review the video and and I correlate it with their interview after the trip where they say you know I was going down this lane and after about 15 minutes of commotion driving a car pulled out of an alley and just cut me off and the motorcycle reacted when I was looking over my left shoulder and I was able to stop in time and then of course there is our video that shows what they described and so we can correlate the results of this quantitative test with their qualitative experience of how the human interprets.

You know your situation versus what the system recorded on the bike and how the motorcyclist swerves or brakes to avoid that situation that the motorcyclist saw, we know with 100% accuracy that the motorcycle correctly interpreted that situation that the motorcyclist you know stored before and so when you see you know it 100 200 times, you know the system works mm-hmm and that's what's been really exciting about it and when we were able to check that very holy box, you can really make motorcycling a lot safer and keep to keep people away from fender hits, which on a motorcycle means you go to the ground, that's when we started focusing our attention on the drivetrain and it was about a year ago that we hired Derrick to start that project, my son, and while you know, getting the density range and all that kind of stuff on a motorcycle is difficult, you can use brute force, I mean, use brute force like lightning, you can take a big fat engine off the shelf and a big battery and slap them together and you can lock a ton of power down a chain to a rear wheel and you can get incredible performance.

I mean, we're not claiming performance beyond what lightning has already achieved, although I think we'll surpass what lightning achieves, but it's been done before mm-hmm. Look, in terms of a kind of mental overload for the pilot, your cut. I thought the best thing about what you're doing is the actual user interface you present to the rider, so the haptic feedback on the handlebars is pretty clever. Talk about the screen. in the line of sight you know, yellow light, red light, the edge at the top of the oh yeah, well, let's try this here, let me see, can I rotate my camera?

I don't know if I can, you can see that this is. It's a Prius, so this isn't the perfect example, but you can see the edge of the windshield here and you can see the screen down there, the screens, I don't know, three inches, it's pretty small now or six inches, but exactly the same. location which is what we have on the bike Damon with this illuminated in amber here illuminated in amber here for your blind spot warnings and read in the middle as a double warning in addition to the vibrating handlebars to allow for a collision warning your line of sight is of them on top of this is about you know the top of that truck may be a little bit higher depending on the type of driving you're doing and so this is down on your lower peripheral, you can't really see it unless you look you know when you're when you're riding your motorcycle you don't see your speed at all times you have to look down at this screen to see your speed or to see your attack very similarly this is down on your bottom line. in plain sight and it's there and you see it when you need it, but it's like it feels like a car, you know, my LED blind spot lights in my car's side mirrors might turn on while I'm driving. down the street but if I don't look because I want to change lanes it doesn't matter if it's lighting it's actually about intention so when your intention is to change lanes then you notice these things and without that intention you don't notice these things , what is the experience of having the rear camera and having a screen that encourages it, it's relaxing, you know, and I have it when I'm riding down the street on the Diamond bike and I intuitively have this awareness. you know, because it's in my lower peripheral.

I can look down if I'm thinking about changing lanes. I just take a quick look at the car right behind me, the car to my left, and sure enough, that car to my left pulls in. my blind spot, the LED lights up and I move on. I know I don't make this lane change. You know, what's not relaxing is doing this. Yes, which many of us do triple check for dogs. I double check. I don't know many. people who don't check twice and why do we check twice because we're scared everything we take our eyes off the road ahead so now I'm not going to take my eyes off the road ahead and I know there's a car there I know there's a car there , I know it's clear, I'm right and I can relax and make easier decisions.

It really reduces your anxiety as a pilot and increases your performance. Yeah, so someone, Paul D, asks how deep integration works. work, what are the different components that need to be connected together? Oh, that's a great question and I put my Aprilia here in the picture again because I like it, it's not like I've ever had, yeah, okay, such a nice bike and I've had Pattie galleries, oh wow, the integration deep I need more, I need more details to answer that question, you know, it starts with the port OS, the BlackBerry OS, you guys use mm-hmm, well, so that deep integration starts in the cell, you know, we have 21700 battery cells, these are high density lithium ion cells and our software collects data, it's like oscilloscope level data collection.

I can extract data from the cell level to the entire system. to the force sensors on the handlebars and the seat to interpret the behavior of the rider and all that data, all the camera data, the radar data and the conditions around the bike are collected and stored in the cloud and we create algorithms of software that improve the bikes ability to detect the threat, so you'll periodically get a better bike with an over-the-air numerical update. They are all connected to 4G and will allow you to have a safer driving experience as a result of all the others. on a Dana bicycle and vice versa, blackberry QNX is the world's leading operating system for automotive collision warning systems.

I think they just announced that they have cracked 150 million cars in the world that run the QNX OS, yes, they are the dominant leader in a fully self-healing on-board network, it is the core layer software on top of the that run the application layers, so if you have NAVTEQ Nokia, you have GM OnStar, all these types of software systems, all the head units in your car, all running on blackberry QX mm-hm all the warning systems Collision warnings run on blackberry's own eggs and one hour a copilot collision warning system does it too hmm interesting and all, but what happens when you fall?

You're just writing a normal motorcycle. eitherjust oh, no, no, no, no, it can't go down and that's a lot of the work that we're doing with blackberry qnx, you know, in collaboration with the major security standards companies and with the ISO. Establish a new level of fail-safe operating systems with ISO 26262. No motorcycle company has attempted to meet that standard like car companies do and we are doing the same, so we are making sure it is a test. automotive grade. tested and validated by external parties before we ship the motorcycle so it really can't fail I see so let's talk about what you call shifting technology where the writer's position shifts yes in December 2018 we will only see the skeleton of the Dayman bike, I mean, at the time we thought we were going to build a drivetrain inside a frame and we don't do that anymore, so we can talk about that in a second, but we're looking at the skeleton of the Dayman bike it just has a fork, it sends a swing arm and a hollow frame with the handlebars and Dom is standing there, he's looking at this thing and he says it would be cool if we made the bike transform and it was literally like he spoke a different language because he couldn't understand what I wanted to say at the time and we had this 45 minute long conversation.

A couple of engineers came up who had been cooking up this idea together and in the end I thought the last thing we needed was to take on another project and make it more complicated, but you know at some point you learned to trust your partners, so I said how long would it take? find her to kiss good or bad ideas. and how much would it cost and he said hmm, $20,000 in a couple of months and I like to just build a really rough prototype and of course it's a mechatronic system, it's not simple and you have to be able to put hundreds of pounds on one foot. peg, for example, whereas that thing can travel up and down and you have brake lines and all kinds of complexity, so I said, okay, do it and a couple of months later we had it built and put it on a motorcycle and We tried it and at that first moment I pressed the button on the left handlebar and I was going up an on-ramp from city speed to highway speed so I went from thirty to sixty miles per hour I guess I'm converting because I'm Canadian, yeah, the handlebars, you know, they're like a commuter bike, like a monster, Ducati, kind of Monster position, yeah, my feet are low and my seat is low and I press that. button and lifted me off the seat about an inch and a half and my body was dragged down by the weight of my upper chest as the handlebars slid down and my feet were raised into a racing position as I accelerated and it was like It was like merging with the motorcycle, it was a super exciting moment and I thought, oh, we have something good here, let's see if people can figure out what's going on, except I can't see what's going on there, so you're changing the windshield.

Tilt your chain, what's happening here so the toe pegs are rising about three inches, but not up, they're rising from a lower position, like I said, Ducati Monster to a much more aggressive Super Toscana. Mike's position, the handlebars slide down four inches, the windshield goes from a higher angle which will push the wind up over your head if you are sitting upright at a more rearward angle so it will hit your helmet while you are hidden . in and the seed moves about an inch, but it's also changing from a flat angle to a slightly steeper SportBike angle, so it pushes it into the gas tank and makes more of the weight off the top. of your body move towards the front forks.

Get more range when you do it right. I would have to measure that to give you another sensor, but I would expect you to put the window on turbulence, it's a big problem on motorcycles, yes, when motorcycles have terrible drag ratios compared to cars. Yes I actually have a Black Forest zero in the driveway, it's been on loan for about a month and I loved using it electric and everything, but the other day I had a charge in San Francisco and came home and it had the expected range . It was like 65 miles, but when I got on the highway and started doing 75 miles per hour.

Oh a brilliant position, yes there was a giant sucking sound and I got a bit nervous, I might evaporate, yes I was doing that, I think so. it was leaking on the freeway or something, so I grabbed a bat, slowed down, took some back roads and got home with a two percent charge, so since I hadn't charged it all the way in San Francisco, already You know, impatiently. I know I was on a level two charger and I'm just talking about the minimum I could get home and out on the highway, so it's kind of fun like gas motorcycles like this, it's a great bike, it's an awesome bike and I know a lot. of people, we've surveyed thousands of people, we have big, long trials of 4,500 people, I think today, telling us why they like motorcycles and what they don't like about them and everything we've exhausted.

This question, um, people want. riding sports bikes as their travel vehicle they want to look good on them, you know, we all have this alter ego that we express when we get on a motorcycle and it's like going into your superhero mode, you know, we like to put on our leathers and all that kind of thing you want to look tough we want to look tough we want to feel tough the same way the Harley guy and the tassels and the black leather vest wants to feel tough they're not all the same but motorcycles aren't designed to do the job of riding the way they that we do, this one is not designed for commuting and a commuter bike is not designed to be on the road, as you put it, today we need a motorcycle that stands up to the real world conditions that we face when riding a motorcycle that is very congested, i.e. canyons and City Highway and riding in bright city and riding on highway, that's what you know, collapsing traffic on the highway and then expanding again and we need to be able to travel for a couple of hours, be comfortable, be safe and when we arrive. those open roads that are really fun we shouldn't have to go home and change motorcycles to do that and that's really what's at the genesis of reinventing the motorcycle for Damon hmm I find it fascinating.

I was going to ask you why you chose a sports bike, you know? Do you know why not? In fact, we have a question in the chat: will you do well on other types of bikes? Eventually, and we are working very hard right now, we are putting a lot more design and development effort into designing a system that will be extensible to multiple motorcycle models without having to redesign an engine each time, so when your Honda makes a 150 engine cc and then you want to make a hundred 300 cc bikes or a 500 cc bike, you have to redesign everything, it's very complex, it's incredibly expensive, but with electric vehicles you can control things through software and you can have a big engine that is regulated to adapt to different use cases or needs and power levels or inexperienced levels of different users without having to purchase several different vehicles. big motors, you can buy one, take a motor that you designed and extend it from 200 horsepower bikes to a 50 horsepower beginner bike and there is a huge economic benefit there to building a motor company. motorcycles of various models, so we are thinking a lot. about how we design something today that will be extensible to future models over time.

By the way, if I seem distracted, sometimes I look away and grab my keyboards because I'm reading the chat, what kind of questions should I ask them. so let's talk about those two hundred for a minute, yeah, about the scope. You mentioned the 200 mile range, which is amazing and seems to be slipping a bit on your website. I thought I saw it might be 300 in the city and it's actually like 161 or it's 200 if you're going 60 miles an hour if you're going 70 miles an hour it's like 161 something like that, it starts to drop, it's exactly how you experienced it in your motorcycle and then, there is this great blog. think about a guy who built this super aerodynamic fiberglass bubble around his zero srf and he's been riding along with another guy, you probably read that and you know they're measuring how much more efficiency they can get and of course you know that motorcycles son Not very good with the wind, yes, great on a track when you change speed all the time, but yes, it's the exact height and it's all that turbulence around the pilot.

I am surprised to see in MotoGP that they are only like this now. Looking at that, you know enclosing the rear wheel and reducing wind turbulence under the bikes and things like that, and they're doing it because they need that extra gain, it makes a difference and sure enough, you know you take a Damon 70 miles. an hour consistently and you won't get the same kind of range, it's the opposite of city versus highway compared to an electric car. An electric car weighs so much that it starts to stop; actually you're getting all that region but on a motorcycle it's the complete opposite hmm interesting so in terms of charging it has a level two charger or you can plug it in overnight at your house.

I have discovered that a zero is the maximum comfort. I never go to a gas station, it's just you. plug it into your house if you're within range of whatever you ride around town, yeah, it's like a life changer, you know, yeah, yeah, Lauren and I are fully charged every morning, yeah, and I'm not struggling for Go get gas on the way to work and I'm late because I didn't want to fill it up on the way home last night. You know, none of that anymore. There is always charge and writing on the earth. Actually, I like not to change.

It's just one less thing, cognitive load and all that, but when I pass their range, it's a little annoying because you have to find load level 2 and you have to have an account for them, a card and it has to be available and all that, and I think what you said was 3 hours of level 2 charging for a full charge, but most people don't fully charge it, so yeah, an hour and a half to two, depending and there and then less. 45 minutes at 80% on a 25 kilowatt DC fast charging station, yes the graph describes. I don't really understand what those level twos are.

I get it because I had it figured out for 0 yeah so there are level 3 charging stations all over Canada in the In the US and Europe there is a global standard called Chatham oh and it's a DC charging standard , the holes are much thicker and you can inject much more power into the bike in a much shorter time. It looks a lot like a Tesla supercharger, but it's an open standard that all automakers adhere to and there are quite a few of them, I mean, they're not in every small town, yeah, but that's a really key thing, why and Coming back to the question, why do we build a super sports bike first?

I have to build a motorcycle that restores the potential of motorcycles to go electric and that means drastically exceeding the range of a tank of gas on a comparable motorcycle like this, that means the same performance, the same top speed, no one needs to go to undermine ours, but me. If you know that an electric motorcycle can, then we're not going to displace gas motorcycles because there's a lot of bluster and bragging rights that cause the horse race and the wait rates and the range and the tongue speed race to be able to. continue, you know?

If people didn't want 200 mile an hour bikes these guys wouldn't make them and clearly people want them, we have to start getting over this so we can choose to precipitate this shift from gas to electric motorcycles and if I go from Vancouver to Pemberton, my friends can ride to Pemberton, fuel up and back but I need to get to Pemberton and back before I find a level 3 charging station which means my Damon bike along with a gas bike has to be able to make the trip back and forth and it's until I can do that, so you know, if I ride along with a gasoline motorcycle to a small town, they fill up, I'm stranded, we can't host, we can't, we can't.

It doesn't instill enough confidence in fire to displace gasoline motorcycles if that's a risk, so we have to eliminate that risk and that means with a twenty-one kilowatt hour battery that means putting an extraordinary amount of effort into designing something that be lighter and really save space at very high speeds. density, we are pushing the highest energy density than Tesla in our design and the same kind of power and performance that you expect and that means a super sporty bike, yes, and the weight of the bike is around 450 pounds, yes, well, we still have some more optimization to do, but we know it's a wet wait because there's more to it than just the cooling system fluid.

This is not really a wet bike like we think of gas bikes. Well, I live just a fewmiles from Tesla headquarters, which is by the way. in the horse country and yes, and there are Teslas in all those places, they just seem to be the common car and the level three charging stations are everywhere around here too. It's harder to find a level two and then a level three. No, yes, them. There's level three everywhere, so you have a connector on the bike for level three that you can charge. I see integrated. I see that yes, well, that is integrated.

That's Joey, so you'll be able to go to any level three and get a quick popup. you know, if you're going to go in with twenty five percent is or thirty forty percent whatever, it's going to take you 20 to 30 minutes yeah, yeah, that's good, yeah, we're getting there, so the level to get there, yeah, level two in the zeros. - taking a little longer than I wanted yeah so order mulch so Rudy a DB David Rudolph is asking about your direct to consumer strategy or you don't have distributors it's like Tesla you'll sell direct right now that can.

Sign up and we have been in talks with quite a few dealers to be authorized service centers. I mean, if you look at the business model of a dealership, 80% of the revenue is made on the service side, but only about 20% is made on the floor. the space is serviced, 80% is sales floor, but there is really no money there, the money is in warranties and service, so you know the business model of a dealer as a service center for Damon has a lot sense. I know there isn't that much maintenance. a motorcycle that is electric because there will be gasoline, but people drop their bikes, people you know, they have their sensors to calibrate, maybe from time to time, if you have dropped your bike several times, you know that there will be a guarantee, it is prepared here and there as things progress.

There you know things happen, people get into accidents, new bikes rebuilt, so there will be service centers for that purpose in major cities in Canada in the US, but as far as getting your bike, we will ship it right to your front door, so we I have more of a comment here than a couple of comments and then a question. Mike ESP 41 says after passing the eye candy. I loved how the bike didn't look like an e-bike, it had a sportier classic look and when I was told the specs. about awareness and distance I was very impressed.

I've been riding for 43 years the same guy I've been riding for 43 years, so I appreciate anything that can help me write situational awareness, which begs the question of I think I've heard. you say in other

interviews

that your target customers are blue-collar, well yeah, I mean that's the target customer of the world today, millennials are a pretty powerful group. I'm right on the cusp of millennials and Generation X, so to speak. Generation back and forth getting college degrees and stuff, but now they're over 40 and they're a quarter of the world's population and in some parts of the world they're half. of the world's population of your country's population, you know they're the ones running the show and while you know Gen X and boomers are much easier to attract to motorcycles, you know they don't care as much about safety .

We love kayaking We grew up riding bikes on the streets Millennials grew up doing this staying safe at home or being in a being in an SUV with seven airbags around it and then three-point harnesses in Fir, you know, they're their their expectations for safety their expectations for technology to improve their life are extremely high and I think motorcycles in general have really lost their product-market fit, you know, the market is no longer genex, baby boomers, by far that we don't want to hear. that the market is Millennials, they are buying a quarter of the world's cars this year, so if you don't make a product for Millennials, you have no future and I think that's an important distinction and the reason we've You put a lot of thought into designing something that appeals to the future of motorcyclists and in some interview you made a comment that Millennials have represented like a third of all used engines or triple the sales of used motorcycles.

I don't remember what this was. Yes, yes, I reflected on motorcycles, so motorcycle sales in the United States think that motorcycle sales are declining and what is happening is that sales are barely declining and have declined about 50% in the last ten years and Harley has had about 50% of the US market. So when Harley goes down, it seems like the entire market, which is shrinking, sales of smaller motorcycles have steadily increased by 7% year over year, as motorcycle companies tried to attract Millennials, who falsely think that only They want smaller, cheaper, lower-powered motorcycles. That's not true, but that's what motorcycle companies can do unless they think about reinventing motorcycling, which is really difficult for them, and conversely, we've been designing something that we think has a product that is adapts to the Millennial market and that is refocusing. in safety, focusing on a lower carbon footprint and focusing on integrating technology to improve their lives and, in the absence of something like a demon, what Millennials have been buying are low-cost used motorcycles on the market, which almost have tripled in the last 15. years, millennials want motorcycles too, if the answer was no they wouldn't buy all these used bikes mm-hmm, okay, you've also said that your potential Custer customers or Tesla customers, yes , today we have several hundred orders we are on. growing at around a hundred a month which is pretty astronomical and over half of them are Millennials which is really interesting, quite a few people are Tesla enthusiasts or own Teslas, often they also own Ducati and/or Ducati enthusiasts, so although these are the people who appreciate you know the good products but also think about their carbon footprint they like technology they are there more than half of them are between 24 and 44 years old, which represents about a generation and a half younger than the average motorcycle buyer outside of Damen, which is incredible, so I think we've found that that crossover point really brings this young demographic into the sport, but not purely for sporting reasons, actually we really want to change. the way people get around and I think in about 10 more years Damon will have precipitated some of that change, as will Kovat.

The UK just said it wants to eliminate the use of ice-cold cars by 2032. The mayor of Paris just won re-election. He is ending 80% of street parking and wants to make the city ideal for walking and cycling. You know, major cities and countries in Europe find that riding a motorcycle is a fairly safe way to get around crowds of people stuck on the subway or bus. So there's a really interesting resurgence going on right now and I think you know when you combine that with zero emissions and safety technology, we have a very different future ahead of us in 10 or 15 years from a community perspective, yeah, that's pretty exciting.

In fact. I've been surprising myself a little. You know, I have a background in earth sciences which was oil exploration for a while. Well, isn't it possible that we couldn't find enough oil? I was involved in the large Canadian gas field that was discovered. Oh, actually yeah, the fourth Canadian hunter was an independent company, so, you know, I thought the vehicles would get a lot smaller and the motorcyclists, you know, we'll take over the road and the cyclists, and so on and a half and a lot. The capital cities of Europe, especially where the population is dense and the roads are small, etc., and Denmark, etc., have continually provided more for pedestrians and cyclists, but our vehicles have gotten bigger here in the United States and then the trucks, yes, huge. quantities per gallon that have basically been a flat line, yeah, you know, I think there are really big changes, you know, the size changes of the Titanic, like using the Titanic, can't change the analogy here, really big social changes need a massive disruption that is outside anyone or anyone.

Any organization comes out of governments, out of the hands of billionaires and, really, that comes in the form of existential threats, no matter how strange they may seem, and without them, without this type of rebirth, if you will, things remain As it is, it's too difficult. bringing too many interest groups, too many parties, too many decision makers together to affect any change, I mean the climate agreements, the Paris Agreement, which we have been trying for decades, so you know, to make these emissions reduction standards and fuel. consumption deductions and improvements in lead standards and if we are barely crawling towards these goals, we often exceed them without even reaching them and have to reset new new goals, so now coab is for better or worse, forcing for part of that change to occur.

Yeah, yeah, you know, Mike and Kimber Botan asked me what Jay thinks about motorcycle airbag technology. Will the games consider airbags like in Vince? Yeah, well, ask me a couple of things. I'll rewind a second here. In a way, I simplify security. technology in motorcycles in two categories we have reactive systems and we have proactive systems another way of saying it is we have systems that protect the rider as much as possible or the driver and we have systems that protect the entire vehicle and the entire situation Damon This is really what last. I prefer to keep it out of harm's way so the vehicles don't crash and then have them crash and then try to reduce the damage to the driver.

We have suits with air bags that are quite effective. We have the best airbags, now they are rear jackets thanks to Dine Easy and a few other companies that will protect you from you, you know, reducing the damage in case you fall off your motorcycle, but I prefer First of all, we work to avoid the motorcycle and the car collide. Data shows that more than two-thirds of all motorcycle accidents occur at intersections and approximately three-quarters of accidents are caused by the driver and it is always a t-bone. being hit from the front or rear at or near the intersection and, in many cases, drivers are interviewed saying I just didn't see them and then about half of all motorcycle accidents show that the drivers didn't take any action. evasive measure before the accident occurred, meaning they may have seen you, but didn't have enough time to pull on the brake, so if you have a reactive system like anti-lock brakes or traction control, but no If you don't have time to hit the brake, what's the point?

So you know when you look at collision warning technology, and in our case we're moving towards collision prediction, it's about time that the more time you can give the driver, the more warnings there are. The more awareness you have, the more likely you are to prevent that accident from happening. The other one and you know I worked for Honda. I've seen the airbag systems I wrote with them, fortunately they didn't deploy on me, but I wonder why. they haven't been put on other motorcycles, other than maybe space and weight, which is enough of a challenge in itself, but yes, I questioned it, so as Kawasaki asks, I don't know how to pronounce Kawasaki and I'm sorry a lot, but I really like that pronunciation anyway, are you planning on building these bikes in Canada or will they be able to build them overseas with Canadian design, which is pretty much how everyone else does it these days?

I am very grateful for that question. I know we are building them. in Canada right there and blind development made in Canada in Vancouver TBD the first few hundred units at least in our office in downtown Vancouver and we are looking for other locations because you know various economic and personal reasons to create high tech jobs and all that . mm-hmm yeah, no, we're doing it in Canada, although the battery pack, the final assembly, all of that, yeah, okay, this has been extremely fascinating. Do you have any question for me? Something interesting to say about that that I didn't ask, well, we did.

Let's not talk about vehicle-to-home technology, oh yeah, let's talk about that because yeah, when it first came out I thoughtIt sounded kind of clever and someone wrote one of the comments and techCrunch that's really clever and then I was talking to someone on the phone. Earlier today and they said, Oh, I'm here in Vermont, the power goes out three times a year and that sounds really cool. I want to talk about that. Well, this goes back a little bit to acceleration technologies. You know, I'm coming for the first time. my first technology company where we were using these SUVs and trucks that we were developing to support all the military bases and in fact we're even putting power back into the Midwest ISO in partnership with Chrysler and the next power in Detroit in 2011. and we showed that We could synchronize the energy in such a way that the owner of the vehicle could earn about three hundred dollars per month and this has to do with two types of energy.

Is this lawnmower really distracting? Although it is fine with two types of power supplies. All over the world you have ancillary energy providers that supplement the supply and demand changes on the grid throughout the day and you have the big energy producers that you know, like hydroelectric dams and coal plants and all that, and on a micro case of your home, you know if you have a power outage like we've seen some really bad ones in California recently natural disasters hurricanes weather storms you know downed trees or snow you probably won't get your motorcycle out that day if you're for a lot of us in North America, Your primary vehicle is your car and you probably don't want it to have power to support your home, while the motorcycle you know, unfortunately for us motorcyclists who are obsessed with you, the motorcycle sits in the garage and you have twenty one kilowatt hours there, if you cut the power like people do during the blackout, you're going to run your house for two and a half days, three days without riding a bike and it's no different than having a gas generator, it's the same hardware needed to insulate the house and connect the grid power to some type of local power supply.

We have a question about how much you think it will cost. Well, it's your energy that you've already paid for. or produced from your solar panels, it won't cost anything, you'll just have the hardware available, which is why we have a lot of the systems built into the bike. Congratulations on the home connection, so there are your suppliers, like Delta box power. There are a couple more that sell these charging systems, these external charging systems are the same ones that you use, you know, an external battery bank or a solar system that will effectively isolate your house safely from the electrical grid, so that you're not leaking power into the grid or dealing with different interference and allowing that power to flow freely from the bike to the house, but today I think it's about three four thousand dollars and I'm sure it's I'm going to go down there, they are pretty new today mm-hmm okay yeah no dealers just service centers how come Tesla has showrooms?

They have a couple here. I could go drive a Tesla, how do I get there? Yes, these and see If it suits me during the early years of Tesla, they did not have showrooms and of course they arrived very slowly. We will work with us. We have spoken to a company at some of the Dinies II stores, so I will be rolling out test drive options at the dine easy stores. I think they are great. I think there's a lot of brand alignment between Damon and 9ez. You know, we focus on sport, fun and performance, but safety is the main job.

That's the first priority, safety, so you'll be able to go and do test rides at different types of pop-up shops, you know, get the gear you need, they'll lend you the helmet, they'll lend you the leathers, which is a

damon

bike go out for a test ride and come back order right there on mobile or

damon

app mm-hmm I've been to the dinies II store and downtown New York in Manhattan beautiful style and that's crazy great Yeah, good friends from the Dainichi stores in Seattle in San Francisco and Joe in the Las Vegas store, all very excited about what we're doing and we coordinate to have that kind of you know the mobile traffic that comes to the store to see Damon , so the last question is a big question about when it will end next year, so waiter 20 unfortunate delays, you know, another 20 21, we have the top tier founders edition bikes with hyper support that sold out at the end. from CES in January, those will go up first and then whatever is out of stock, thanks, that means a deposit was placed on them to reserve them in warehouses, yes, and there will probably be a waiting list in case someone drops out or something that let's have.

I have not created a waiting list, no, consider that we have created two new Hypersports from your options which, as I know, are not unique. These 25 unique calendar edition bikes will be, you know, future classics. and you've already announced something like 16 million in pre-orders, how's that? Yes, depending on the deposits that people make, it is based on the price of the bike, yes, which varies between 25,000 for the HS or 40,000 for the Premier. you're like taking a page out of Ilan's book about your service site, did you book a cyber truck? I had a truck in your driveway, yeah, yeah, you can replace it with a truck driver, definitely can't wait, yeah, great, good.

Thank you so much Lee but it's cool yeah they're all but it's cool yeah as far as I can tell I haven't seen any in person but they look pretty cool so yeah thank you so much for your time it's been a great interview. We'll talk to you later. Thank you so much. OK, bye. I have to figure out how to end the broadcast. Here we go.