Despite the turbulent times we live in at the moment, we have been able to make progress with the VRS DirectForce Pro Wheel Base production and we think we are just a couple of weeks away from opening sales.
The motors, hub adapters and mounting brackets were manufactured all the way back in January, as originally planned, but some of our shipments got delayed. We have had all three of these components in our US warehouse for a month now and we should finally receive them at our EU warehouse next week.
The final piece of the puzzle is the motor controllers. We experienced several delays but we expect to have the first batch ready at our German factory by the end of next week. As soon as this makes it to our EU warehouse, we’ll start inviting people with EU reservations to place their orders. Barring any other unforeseen delays, the first units will ship around mid-April.
We expect the next batch of controllers, going to both our US and EU warehouses, to be ready before the end of April and then another bigger batch before the end of May. The total production through the end of May is enough to meet all current reservations plus another 60% more reservations on top of that. So people who already placed reservations, or who would place reservations soon, are very likely to get their system by May or June.
We intentionally have not done much in terms of promotion as we didn’t want to have too big a backlog of reservations at launch. But once we start shipping, we expect word of mouth to start traveling fast. In anticipation of growing demand, we are already preparing to scale up our production by July / August. At that time we hope to remove reservations for the VRS DirectForce Pro Wheel Base and to maintain sufficient stock levels at both our warehouses.
Many of you ask us about a timeline for the VRS DirectForce Pro Pedals release. We are getting very close to finalizing the design. Once we freeze the design, we’ll immediately start setting up production. We think we’d be able to launch the pedals this summer.
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