Testing A $250,000 Jet Ski Supercar

[dramatic classical music]

This is the Shadow Six Typhoon

[classical music continues]

$250,000. Nought 16, two and a half seconds.

800 horsepower.

This thing is a hyper car for the waves.

Cut to me screaming.

[host screams]

Warp speed!

Oh my Lord!

It's like light bending around you!

[classical music continues]

Blimey! Oh-ho!

Shadow Six. The company that makes crazy vehicles,

including a super special new watercraft,

unlike anything you've seen before.

Let's go inside,

and meet the people that make these monster machines.

Hey.

Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you.

Tell us a little bit about

what Shadow Six actually is.

Shadow Six essentially started out

where I was developing the original Typhoon for myself

and very quickly realized lots

of other people were interested

and that led into quite a few other inventions

and vehicles that we've developed for other individuals

that have bad ideas like myself.

Let's take a look at some of those. Shall we?

Yeah. Let's do it.

Show me a few that you've got here.

You got it.

[Jeremy] Start with this one.

[Ryan] Yeah. What's this?

So this is an autonomous cooler that somebody can ride on

or you can actually use an app

and it knows what beverages are inside.

It's got full surround sound, through wet sounds.

It's a floating cooler. It is.

With propellers.

It is, yeah.

I recognize this. Is it a Ninebot?

It is. Yeah.

So we put tank treads on the back

and we put air inflated tires on the front

and now it's able to climb over all kinds of things

that it wasn't, and it's able to get in the sand and go

and it's able to to travel through the yard

and travel through grass without any problem.

It all started with the Typhoon, didn't it?

That's what, that's the...

And you know, can we get a shot of these?

'cause these are the...

Are these are these the original drawings?

[Ryan] They are.

[Jeremy] Are they your drawings?

[Ryan] They are.

[Jeremy] What were you thinking

when you came up with that? [laughs]

Yeah. I was about two, three months out

from my son's third birthday

and I asked him what he wanted to do for his birthday

and he told me he wanted to go

to Las Vegas for a guy's trip.

And then he explained to me

that the Monster Jam World finals were there.

He saw a billboard on the way home

and it said Polaris Adventure,

where you basically drive a Razor

[Jeremy] On the dunes.

Yeah, out in the dunes.

He absolutely loved it.

And that kind of got me intrigued in the idea

of side by sides, and the suspension.

Fast forward about two months later,

I went to The Bahamas with my wife.

We went out and rode a WaveRunner

and I kind of had this epiphany

that combining the two together

would really make for a fun toy.

So right at that moment you thought, hang on a minute.

If I put two wave riders underneath the body

of a side by side, I could be on to something.

Exactly.

Now that we know the genesis of the idea,

where it came from, I'm dying to see it.

Come on. You got it.

Let's see it. Come on.

Yeah, absolutely. Let's go.

[soft dramatic music]

Here it is.

What do you think?

It's big. [laughs]

[Ryan] It is.

[host laughs]

I've seen it on screen,

but it doesn't quite prepare you

for seeing it in the metal, as it were.

Yeah.

Like it's crazy.

Now the typhoon may be big,

but is it desirable?

And that's what we are here to find out.

What Shadow Six has built does not fit

into the usual realm of luxury gear.

There's no bling here, no collaboration with Hermes

or Ferrari.

What the typhoon does have in spades though is exclusivity.

Only Shadow Six makes it and it's so far ahead

of anything else you might try and compare it to,

it simply blows all competition outta the water.

Tell us a bit about these, what power have they got?

Why are they so long?

Yeah.

I mean, what's going on here?

The hulls ultimately are, size-wise,

dictated by keeping the shape of a triangle.

What that does is it gives you the strongest shape

in the world, but ultimately takes all the force

that would typically be exerted on the bottom of the hull

and sends it up through the suspension

and in through the cage on top of the chassis.

So inside here,

this isn't an electric vehicle, is it?

This is not.

What've we got inside?

We've got two Yamaha, 1.8 liter GP 1800 RSVHL engines,

and each one of these engines

puts out a little under 400 horsepower.

So a total of 800. Yeah.

And they're tuned. Are they?

And they're tuned. Yep, they are. Yep.

Okay. As we go around, obviously the things

that you cannot get away from is this significant cage

that you've got all the way around this.

Now this, is this titanium?

[Ryan] It's all titanium, yeah.

Okay. And that's for weight of course.

So strength, weight,

and also because of the molecular bond structure,

it's very similar to aluminum

in that it's a four-way bond

and because of that it's non-magnetic

and it won't corrode in the ocean.

You know, you're looking at exerting

somewhere near 20,000 pounds of static load on any one

of these four corners at any given time.

The roll cage up top, is that for protection

of the passengers inside the drive in the passenger?

It's not. It's actually there for structural rigidity.

So without that cage, because all of the energy from waves

and jumping the vehicle,

gets sent up through the suspension,

it would cause the chassis to crumple on itself

without having the upper portion of the cage.

Wow.

How does the suspension actually work?

The suspension itself is what's actually articulating.

In the front,

the suspension holds both of the hulls identically parallel

through the full range of motion.

And in the rear, you've got a series of joints

and bearings that allow the rear suspension

to actually travel out and up

and then return to center,

once the vehicle's back on the water.

Have you taken the suspension from anything else

or have you come up with this?

Nope. It's entirely proprietary.

Is it patented? It is.

I think we've got around 30 patents now, 30 plus,

between all the different aspects of the vehicles.

That's crazy.

Impressive as it is,

you clearly can't do all this on your own.

Who have you been working with?

You've got some guys here.

Yeah, so I've got two of our head fabricators here.

Wilson is in charge of all of our composites

and carbon fiber and fiberglass.

And then we've got Mike.

Hey.

And it was an awful lot of fabrication.

Well, I've got a million questions really,

but let's start with, it doesn't need the roll cage

in order to protect the passengers.

But how does, I can't...

Can I tip this over if I really tried?

I don't think so,

'cause all the weight is in the bottom.

The weight is all in the...so.

Well hang on a minute.

Most of it, it looks like most of the weight is up here.

Looks like most of the weight's up there,

but all the weight is below the water line

with their four cylinder engine.

So it's like the engine of a small car.

So it's pretty heavy.

The titanium chassis weighs 143 pounds.

And what's below the water line?

Below the water, each jet ski is around like 900 pounds.

[Jeremy] Oh, I see. So like around 80%

of the total vehicle's weight is here.

It's below the water.

[Mike] It's below the water.

And that's why it doesn't tip over?

That's why it won't tip over. Right.

Here's a sample of titanium.

Oh my gosh.

So the entire chassis is made of that.

That, it weighs...That weighs virtually nothing.

So it's stronger than steel. Lighter than steel

Won't corrode And it won't corrode.

That's the main thing, is it won't corrode

With such a bespoke architecture, it's no surprise

that each Typhoon takes nearly 1000 hours to build,

which is why you'll have

to part with a quarter of a million dollars to own one.

And that's more than a Ferrari Roma

or an Aston Martin DB 12 coupe.

And Ryan, this isn't pocket change,

this is a seriously high-end vehicle.

So who are you selling them to?

Probably the lowest net worth I can imagine

of anybody who's really reached out

and wanted to purchase a vehicle is in excess

of a hundred million dollars in net worth.

So the customer that has the least money

that's bought one of these

is worth a hundred million dollars?

Exactly.

And it goes up from there?

And it goes up from there.

Okay. So royalty?

Some, yeah, as a matter of fact, yeah.

[host laughs]

Okay. I've got two more questions.

Did you even consider though,

making this electric rather than TCE?

Yeah, it's definitely something we're extremely

interested in as a company.

The reality of it is, is that electrification is very heavy

and doesn't really offer the performance

that we're getting out of a traditional combustion engine.

Not yet anyway. Not yet at least.

And so I think as hydrogen fuel cells come online

and become more available,

we'll slowly progress into looking at electrification

of these vehicles.

But what was happened in making the typhoon

that you just thought,

I've never thought that was going to be the case?

One of the most shocking things ultimately came

from the adjustments in the suspension

and finding that setting suspension up

for salt water was different

than setting it up for the fresh water.

And that's all based on the buoyancy of the water itself.

You're gonna get a little bit more

of a stiff ride in the ocean

because of the additional buoyancy.

And so we wanna set it a little softer in salt water

than we do in fresh water.

And you know, that gives you a little bit better response

in terms of getting into turns and cornering at high speeds.

How many of these are in the wild right now?

So there were nine pre-production units,

and we kept one of the vehicles, which we're looking at now,

which was the final pre-production unit.

So there's eight out there in the world?

[Ryan] There are. That's it.

And we get to drive this one?

Yep, we get to drive this one.

I've gotta have a go.

[dramatic classical music]

Okay. If the Typhoon is good enough for actual royalty,

it's good enough for Wired.

But to be honest, I was nervous

about getting in this crazy watercraft.

Something Ryan is calling

the world's first aquatic utility vehicle.

I've been in supercars

that could do nought to sixty in two

and a half seconds and that's petrifying enough on a runway.

Doing those speeds on water in something that looks

like it's driven off a sand dune seems like madness.

And more than a little dangerous.

I've been in fancy cars with worse seats than these.

This is great.

Ah, so this is the wearable.

Yep.

So it's a dead man switch, isn't it?

Yep.

So it's if you go out,

then if it's not in the proximity of the vehicle,

the vehicle stops.

Yep. But it's also a GPS tracker.

You got it. Exactly.

And same thing with the brain inside of the actual vessel.

So it'll tell the coast guard both where you are

and where you've drifted and what the currents are like

as well as where the machine is.

[Typhoon engine revs]

I think we should play this.

Whoa!

[Typhoon engine revs]

[Jeremy exclaims]

Blimey!

Whoa!

How can you see?

How can you see in this thing? [laughs]

This is the impressive bit,

how when you're turning, it's crazy.

[Ryan] It's stable, yep.

It stays perfectly level

and everything actually works on it.

[Jeremy] Whoa! Geez!

Blimey!

And how is it stopping?

So all gotta do is pull up the throttle

and then, you know, essentially

what's happening is it's coming out of the water.

So what you feel is the thing going back down

and laying back in the water again.

So is it just the friction of the water stopping you?

Just the water stopping you, yep.

So it feels like you're putting brakes on.

Nope, that's no brake.

No?

A brake will stop it way faster.

Which, you probably don't want to use it. I mean...

No.

Warp speed!

Hell!

Jesus Christ!

[dramatic classical music]

[Jeremy whoops]

Oh geez.

Oh my god.

[Ryan] That guy's still fishing. Yeah.

Oh geez! Oh my God!

It's like light bending around you!

[Jeremy exclaims]

Alright. Okay. I'm just, yeah, I'm just going to...

I'm just gonna have a bit of dry land.

[Ryan laughs] Just for a sec.

It really is a feat of engineering.

[Ryan] Yeah.

And like, and as I said,

and you know, you guys have done it all.

No one's done this before.

All these patents, you've sorted it all out yourself

and it genuinely delivers on what you actually say.

And I know you're prepared for the speed,

but you're not, you're not really,

Yeah, no, nothing can really prepare you for it.

Just nothing else is like it, in my opinion.

So you ready to give it a try?

I am actually ready to give it a try. [chuckles]

But what I'd like to do is that,

that's an electric jet ski in your shop.

Could we actually race the two?

I wanna see how electric does against this.

[Ryan] You got it.

[Jeremy] I've always been Team Electric

when it comes to Wired's vehicles

and I revel in telling petrolheads

how EV acceleration leaves combustion cars in the dust.

So when I saw the Stealth Evo in Ryan's workshop,

I just had to see how it would hold up

against the Typhoon's fearsome powertrain.

It didn't go well.

[dramatic music]

A hypercar for the water, so they say.

What the hell am I doing?

Alright, they're ready.

I don't know that I'm gonna win

even with a rolling start, so.

3, 2. 2, 1.

Go!

[dramatic music continues]

[Jeremy] Oh my god!

[Jeremy yells inaudibly]

[Birds sing]

[dramatic music]

And again! And again!

[engines rev]

Oh fucking hell!

Glued to the water.

Glued to the water.

[Director] Hi Jeremy, can you hear me?

I can, I can.

Well, electric didn't win that one.

I can hear you, yeah.

[Director] I think you won that one.

[birds sing]

[Jeremy] So we've come to the end of our day

with the astonishing Typhoon.

I've really never experienced anything like it.

It's one of a kind,

well actually, it's eight or nine of a kind,

and that's the only ones that exist.

And it's all come from one guy's head.

And he was told so many times that he couldn't make it

and his team couldn't make it.

And every time they fixed one problem,

everyone else told them,

No, you can't do it, you can't do it.

They end up with a machine

that the super wealthy are clamoring to get their hands on.

They're buying it before they can even try it.

And he's selling them at $250,000 a pop.

It's a hell of an achievement.

But above all, it's realizing this vision that he had

for this sort of Baja truck on the water,

patented up to the eyeballs, it's a real amazing thing.

Now we need to start introducing some sort

of desirability index into the Wired Desired.

And this is incredibly desirable.

You know, it's right up there.

Eight maybe? You know, like, you probably don't want it,

if you haven't got loads of money, it's expensive.

And also if you don't live on the water

like they do here down in Florida.

But if you do have these circumstances, my God.

In fact, I'm gonna have to have one last go.

[dramatic classical music]