jur

The KS bike was more than a concept. It was the culmination of some years of design. It is a fully functional bike and was demonstrated by Peter riding it around. I think it may have not had a rear brake installed but that's it. It was in all respects fully functional and the KS premise was it would be built as-is. But when the KS campaign was successful beyond his wildest dreams, that made other things possible as well as necessary, the most important one being that a serious production facility was needed to fulfill the large volume of orders. He teamed up with a manufacturer in the car industry. The proof of concept was scrutinized by this team for manufacturability. Changes were made with that in mind; that also gave Peter opportunity to scrutinize the hinges and latches. The latches especially were redesigned from scratch; although the original designs worked well enough, Peter cam up with what he thinks are improved designs. The hinges remained substantially the same, as did the rest of the bike. Details were refined such as having replaceable dropouts.

The team-up with the manufacturer did not last as there were differences in conviction as to what is the best way to manufacture - the company wanted castings and glue to be used, but while pursuing this angle, it became clear that the casting process was introducing unwanted constraints and dependencies. That was abandoned and the collaboration dissolved.

Peter went back to welding but found that tube cutting, CNC part manufacturing and welding by subcontractors was far more expensive than he thought it should cost. He then embarked on the long and painful process of procuring everything for a factory from scratch. You might appreciate that this is a HUGE undertaking and he thoroughly underestimated that project.

That seems to be all behind him now. The test bike isn't what you seem to think it is; it isn't a proof of concept, rather it is a bike built using normal production processes, submitted to a 3rd party testing company for testing against various ISO standards for compliance. This is a legally required step by some countries at least as I understand it; most countries only have something like a recommendation or require a self-certification.

A final version of the bike has existed for a long time now, I think perhaps a year. That was obviously welded by a subcontractor so is not suitable for testing. But it is essentially identical to the production bike.

The past 18 months or so has been spent on setting up the factory and if not already finished, is d*mned close.

So far from skipping steps, the opposite is true. The proof of concept which is a fully functional bike except a rear brake was refined, and new patents taken out. Manufacturing processes were explored. The final version which is what I would thoroughly stamp as a pre-production sample, exists. The last 18 months was spent with the single goal in mind of setting up the factory to produce that very same sample with in-house processes to control cost but importantly quality as well.

The only downside of all this history is the huge amount of time it is taking to do all these due diligence steps and Peter's drastic underestimate of doing it.