One of the saddest parts about owning motorcycles is that up to this point, nobody's worked out how to ride them full time. Indeed, they spend most of their lives lying fallow in some garage, making puppy-dog headlights at you every time you walk past without your helmet in hand. It is, to quote this millennium's most influential person to date, "sad."
And it's not like they're much use for anything but riding, for the main part. They're too big to be a paperweight, not flat enough to be a coffee table. Sleeping on them is uncomfortable, most of them won't let you browse the internet, and the exhausts are too hard to clean after you cook sausages on them. So they sit there.
Unless, it seems, you have a Damon Hypersport. You may recall this bike; it's got variable riding positions and 360-degree situational awareness AI built in; it makes a thoroughly silly 200 electric horsepower, and can go as far as 200 miles (322 km) on a single charge thanks to its extremely beefy 21.5-kWh battery pack; and it can charge from zero to hero in three hours thanks to its 25-kW DC charging capability.
And now, it can power your house as well, when you're not riding it. Damon has upgraded the Hypersport's software, allowing it to integrate with a home battery system and provide a nice fat wad of extra energy storage if you need it.
It works with Delta, Tesla and Wallbox systems at this stage, offering up to 3.3 kW of power through an AC system and up to 25 kW if you have a DC system installed at home, with parameters able to be set through the Damon smartphone app.
This kind of V2H (vehicle-to-home) charging is not unique; it's the same in essence as what Toyota has been doing with the Prius since 2012. But it's the first time we've seen it on an electric motorcycle, and adding the Damon's fat 21.5-kWh battery pack to your 13.5-kWh Tesla Powerwall would nearly triple your home battery storage. Very handy in conjunction with roof-mounted solar – indeed, enough for the vast majority of households to go off-grid given enough solar input.
The next step would be to implement vehicle-to-grid reverse charging. All those batteries sitting around connected to the mains could actually be of genuine use to the power grid. As "Electric Terry" Hershner explained in our very entertaining 2018 interview, if electric vehicles are empowered to deliver energy back to the grid, they can respond very dynamically to power usage spikes in a way that could actually help us burn less fossil fuels in our power stations. Getting this up and running is not a trivial exercise, but several trials are underway, and it could give EV owners a chance to make a buck or two here and there when they're plugged in and nearly full.
Can your combustion-powered motorcycle do this stuff? Well, technically yes, but you'd need a dyno generator, and it'd be a lot noisier.
Source: Damon Motorcycles
