What makes an electric scooter a ‘hyperscooter’? To start, a $5,000 price tag

“Hypercar” is a term often used to describe cars with specs and price tags so extreme, so outside the realm of what’s on display at your average dealership that calling it a “supercar” — already a totally fine description that gets its point across without too much hyperbole — somehow falls short.

So what does it mean when the prefix “hyper-” is applied to a vehicle of more modest standing, like an electric scooter? For D-Fly Group, a London-based transportation company, it means “bringing ‘automotive grade’ manufacturing, advanced materials, cutting-edge engineering and technology to the micromobility sector.” The company claims to have done that with its new e-scooter, the Dragonfly.

Sorry, not e-scooter — hyperscooter™.

What makes it a hyperscooter™? Apparently, it’s premium materials, like carbon fiber, 7000 series aerospace-grade aluminum, and paulownia wood. It’s a powertrain with dual motors and a top speed of 38 mph, traction control to give each wheel 1,800 watts, and a generous amount of torque. It’s the option to upgrade to a long-range battery pack for up to 28.5 miles of range. And a patent-pending “Full-Tilt” steering technology, inspired by F1 racing, that uses three-dimensional tilt and twist controls on a central pillar.

The scooter’s 4.5-inch display is ultra-high-definition 4K (of course), and it allows customers to access various apps and view their speed or turn-by-turn GPS directions after pairing to a smartphone via Bluetooth. Speaking of Bluetooth, the Dragonfly also sports a “high quality” sound system because what good is a hyperscooter™ if you can’t blast beats while zipping along at 38 mph.

Here’s a photo of the hyperscooter™ chilling in a cafe.

Photo: Getty Images

But no hyperscooter™ would be complete without a ridiculous price tag, and the Dragonfly has that covered. The base model, three-wheeled version starts at $5,000, with the four-wheeled version creeping up to $6,000. Throw in a few options, and you can see how this starts to get absurd. D-Fly says it will release full pricing closer to the launch date in the mid-2020s.

For comparison, the Segway ES2 will run you about $479 on Amazon. I’ve even seen a few scooters crack $3,000, but never anything like this.

A word of warning before you plunk down (refundable) $100 for a preorder: the electric scooter market is incredibly volatile right now. Many of the e-scooters for sale today are Chinese-made models that are being rebadged and sold to Western consumers at a markup. That’s not terrible by itself, but it has created something of an uneven market for startups. Some companies flop before they even ship a single scooter, leaving customers to scramble to get their money back.

D-Fly was started by Jez Williman, a British entrepreneur who led one of the world’s largest crowd control and queue management companies. (Think: the retractable barriers you walk through for the airport security line or to buy tickets at the movie theater. There’s a good chance those barriers were made by the Tensator Group.) Williman sold the company in 2008 to a private equity group, and now he’s pivoting to scooters.

Sorry, hyperscooters™.