News

Skully AR-1 Helmet Delivery Pushed Back, Yet Again

Google+ Pinterest LinkedIn Tumblr

Future Skully AR-1 owners will have to continue waiting for their helmets, as Skully has once again pushed back the delivery date of its heads-up display powered helmet.

The announcement is another blow for the San Francisco based startup, as Skully has gone from the media darling to full-blown vaporware-pusher over the past two years.

We say this because Skully first launched in 2013, with promises of helmets in the hands of consumers by the end of 2014. That date was then pushed back to May 2015, in conjunction with Skully’s Kickstarter campaign launch. That date would be revised again, this time to the end of the year 2015.

Now well into the fourth month of 2016, Skully is pushing back its delivery date again, though it isn’t giving a firm timeline when the production units will finally reach purchasers. It should be noted that as of this date, only a handful of pre-production units have made it the hands of specially chosen evangelists buyers.

Skully’s latest excuse for failing to deliver centers around the circuit boards for its electronics components.

According to the company’s email on the matter, Skully ran into issues when it “tried to transition from first-stage to mass production” and “ran into DFM (design for manufacturing) issues with the electronics.”

For those who don’t speak engineer, this kind of setbacks usually occur when a company designs a component that isn’t optimized for mass production, which means its construction is likely overly complicated or too expensive to produce.

This is normally a signal that a product hasn’t truly beyond the prototype phase of construction, and turned into a product that is marketable to consumers, which is interesting given the stream of promises for delivery coming from Skully over the past year.

Regardless, the manufacturing setback means that Skully’s electronic components will have to be retested, to check for electromagnetic interference, which means that they will have to be certified as FCC compliant once again.

Skully says that starting on April 20th, the company will begin its production run with its manufacturing partner Flextronics, who will integrate Skully’s re-tuned electronic components into the company’s private-label helmet that are being made by China’s MHR Helmet, which usually sells its helmets under the LS2 Helmets name.

Once the Skully AR-1 is certified by the Federal Communications Commission, Skully says it will make deliveries to customers.

Source: Skully

Comments