Founders of Birmingham’s Motus Motorcycles heading to San Francisco to test, tout bikes
BIRMINGHAM, Alabama — The founders of Birmingham-based Motus Motorcycles will take to the highway next week for a 5,500-mile road trip intended to test the company’s bikes and begin building a sales network.
Lee Conn and Brian Case, the company’s president and design director, respectively, will ride two Motus bikes from Birmingham to San Francisco, down the California coast, and then back. They’ll be accompanied by a van carrying engineers and equipment for monitoring performance on the trip, beginning Monday.
“Each one of the motorcycles is rigged up with sensors on the brakes, clutch, engine … every component on the motorcycle will be monitored,” Conn said.
About 10 of 13 scheduled stops along the route are at motorcycle dealerships where the Motus team hopes to establish relationships with dealers and show off the bikes to potential buyers. The company this week began reaching out to potential buyers using social media, and hopes to draw crowds along its route.
“We’re a brand new company doing something that’s unimaginably challenging,” Conn said. “The best way for us to create some credibility is for people to walk up to the owners of those stores and say ‘I want that bike.’”
Motus was founded in 2008 with the goal of producing a touring motorcycle that will compete with the foreign brands that now dominate that market. The Motus bikes have a direct injected V-4 powered, liquid-cooled engine designed for Motus by Pratt & Miller and Katech Engines of Detroit. Most street bikes today have air-cooled, V-twin engines. Retail prices will be announced later this year, Conn said.
The company is working out of offices in downtown’s Innovation Depot business incubator, but Conn and Case hope to open an assembly facility and be producing motorcycles early next year, Conn said.
The company will outsource production of parts, and focus on design and assembly, Conn said. “It’s a very automotive-type model,” and some of the company’s investors work in the auto industry, he said.
Motus this week also launched a website selling Motus-brand apparel. Initially the site will sell only T-shirts and caps, but eventually it likely will offer co-branded riding leathers, helmets and other gear.
They felt uncomfortable selling gear before having motorcycles on the street, Conn said. But people kept asking about T-shirts.
“I doubt we’ll launch any of the riding gear until the bikes are in production,” he said.
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