I doubt they'd sell to endusers, but not having any partnerships with established brands with sales figures is a big red flag.
No mention of manufacturing capabilities either so I think it's just hype (or worse a rug pull for early investors)
Whittingham worked for ExxonMobil. Akira Yoshino worked at a joint venture of Toshiba and Asahi Kasei. And Yoshio Nishi worked at Sony.
They were all giant well-established companies.
They were founded in 2011 as a spin-off from ATL, itself founded in 1999 by a Chinese billionaire (Robin Zeng). They definitely didn't pop up out of nowhere.
Base price $35,000 with the good battery.
Solid state batteries have been working for a while now, but they're still far too expensive. Mercedes has one demo car. Ducati has one demo motorcycle. Maybe they just decided to accept the high cost and sell a high-end product.
If the product is on the market and you can buy one and walk out the door, I feel like claims can easily be validated or invalidated with a tear down.
I've had a brief test ride on a pre-production version of the Verge TS. All seemed OK but I thought the handling seemed weird - maybe due to the rear tyre size and geometry.
Robbie from SAE International, who is of the hosts, and an avid motorcyclist, is impressed with the bike and the promise of SSBs. I only ride bicycles, can’t comment on the bike itself, but thought to share and widen their audience. It was kind of a mini shallow yet “deep dive”. It doesn’t seem to be mentioned on their own site for this episode, but the chapter in Overcast is the last one, linking to https://sustainablecareers.sae.org/article/donut-lab-verge-s...
I hope this battery tech and the statements on the web page are true (370-mile range from an electric motorcycle!), but I'm not writing any checks just yet.