EPISODE 19 - TED MONCURE

Welcome to the Impulse Spotlight where we meet with product development professionals and shine a light on the products they are most proud of.

In this episode we speak with the Vice President of Engineering and New Product Development at Hoonigan, a leading automotive aftermarket products company.

Our guest had an extensive career in the automotive product development space, working with a wide range of products from accessories to complete specialty performance vehicles. He's a proud father of 3 adult boys, a pilot and off road racer, and spends his free time in Baja California with the Long Beach Racers team. 

Ted Moncure was born and raised in Long Beach California where he still lives today with his wife of 31 years. A graduate from California Polytechnic State University, Ted worked at Toyota for 22 years, including 10 years leading Toyota Racing Development's (TRD) performance accessory team. 

After leaving Toyota in 2015 Ted joined Transamerican Auto Parts where he spearheaded the engineering of trucks and off-road products under the 4 Wheel Parts brand. When 4 Wheel Parts was acquired by Hoonigans in 2021, Ted took on the role of VP of Engineering, overseeing a wide range of products from wheels to suspension systems, accessories, and lighting.

In our conversation, we discuss the intricacies of developing aftermarket suspension systems for trucks and SUVs. Ted shares his expertise on the process of measuring vehicles, evaluating safety systems, and fine-tuning suspensions to maintain stability and performance. We also discuss the challenges of staying compatible with vehicle software and how aftermarket changes can impact vehicle performance.

Ted emphasizes the importance of testing and validation in product development, the need for rapid development cycles, and the role of 3D printing in modern engineering. Ted's wealth of experience makes this a fascinating discussion for anyone interested in motorsports engineering.

Show Notes:

To learn more about Hoonigan's products, visit https://www.hoonigan.com/ , https://teraflex.com/ for Jeep suspension products, https://www.readylift.com/ for truck suspension, https://logiqair.com/ for air systems, https://www.wheelpros.com/ for wheels, https://www.morimotohid.com/ for lighting, and https://www.zbrozracing.com/ for UTV products.

Podcast Transcript:

Hey Ted, welcome to the show.

Hey, thank you very much for having me.

Yeah, it is great to have you here. So I tell everybody to start these. I started impulse 25 years ago. I worked for a company out of school for about 3 years. And they had all facets of product development under 1 roof. Kind of saw the writing on the wall that they were not in it for the long haul and I started impulse and, you know, we help companies design products. How did you get into product development?

So I started at Toyota right out of college, out of Cal Poly in a rotational kind of engineering management training program, and I got to work in a bunch of different departments , which was cool, you know, I worked technical quality, I worked at down at the port, I work in lean manufacturing and then I did a stint through the accessory development and vehicle conversions department and, uh, where we developed all the accessories and we actually developed things like silica convertibles . And I am an automotive guy. I have been my whole life and so I just loved the idea of making things. That is kind of what, you know, when I went to college. I kind of wanted to build race cars and then I and ended up working for Toda and I race off road and get to kind of get my age scratch that way, but but, yeah, making cool stuff has been kind of the central focus on my career.

Very cool. So, what are you doing? What is your current role and what kind of products do you develop now?

So right now, I am VP of Engineering and Product Development for Hoonigan. Hunan is a automotive aftermarket company. Many people are familiar with Ken Block who started honing in as a media company and then Ken sold the business to. Wheel Pros, which was the biggest aftermarket wheel company in the United States, and then they rebranded the whole business and they in turn purchased the 4 parts brands, purchased Teraflex, Ready lift, Logiq, Moriomoto lighting. So we have got this big giant collection of automotive aftermarket brands and and basically what I do is I lead engineering and new product development for that for that business and.

Very cool. So tell us about the products that you want to talk about today and why you chose it.

Yeah, well, suspension has been kind of my specialty, you know, because of my offer racing background ever since college and at Toyota was lucky enough to get to run the TRD group for 10 years. The last 10 years I was there. Where we developed the Baha series, Tacoma and the ultimate E. F. J. Cruiser and the TED Pro line of vehicles. And so that is kind of my passion, right? And then when Toyota moved to Texas, I did not want to go. I wanted to stay in the truck and off road space, so I went to 4 wheel parts and then led the engineering for all the suspension and accessories and drive train products that they developed. And then we got acquired by wheel pros, which became Hoonigain. So today we are going to just talk about suspension , you know, truck And off road suspension development , which is what consumes most of my time here here again.

Very cool. I am interested to hear more about it. So normally I would I would ask, you know, tell us more about the product, you know, but what are the features and and the things in the product that we, you know, just looking at it, we would not realize or understand. So can you get into that with suspension with.

Yeah. So suspension is a pretty wide ranging business right on the low end of the market. You have got what we call level lifts, which are just spacers that basically basically set the vehicle ride height so you can put a bigger wheel tire on it because most customers when they go by a truck or a jeep, they want it to look cool, they want to put a bigger off road tire on it, a cooler looking wheel. And to do that, you need a little bit more clearance, also the factory, when they did not set up the car, they set it up with the nose a little bit. Low. Which, you know, there is a bunch of reasons for that, right, for a dynamics, fuel economy emissions, coast down testing, you know, just load carrying capacity, etc. But that is not really what looks good, right? What looks good is to have the vehicle kind of sitting more level. And so at the low end, we develop that kind of stuff. But we try to take a little more care than a lot of the cheap, you know, companies that are out there in the aftermarket that are just, you know, putting spacers in without really doing the engineering to understand the effect it has on the rest of the vehicle system. So you end up with, you know, TED ends failing And CV joints failing and things like that because they overstress all those in ball joints and stuff. So so they get a bad rep and then, you know, we move up from there to, you know, people want to go bigger, you want to put a 35 or 37 " tire, so you go with a bigger lift and now we are changing steering knuckles and, you know, shocks and springs and and sometimes we are adding whole cross members to the vehicle frame to lift it up higher. And then there is the whole performance segment, which is where I am, you know, where I live, right as an off road racer and a guy who spends a lot of time camping and over landing and playing around out in Baha pre running. I do not really want it to be tall. I want to get the biggest hire on there that I can with the lowest lift height, but I want the suspension to work. I want to have a lot of articulation, you know, wheel travel, I want to have dampers that are. You know, controlling the vehicle properly so I can go fast. And so there is this kind of emerging premium space that started, I would say started, you know, probably early 2,000 s we started building. Vehicles that had these kinds of suspension on them, you know, on our personal vehicles, desert racers, building prerunners basically have been prerunners for years, but it started to get mainstream the whole performance shock and suspension side. In that in that time. So for the last 20 years, have seen that part of the market growing. So these big 608 " lift kits are still cool for a lot of people in the country, especially people go into the mud or people who just want to look cool. But really where the market is going is in, you know, a performance suspension system, it may add 2 " in height to the front of the car just to level it out and give you the bump travel that you need to be able to go fast. But really high end shock absorbers going beyond where the Oems can go and that is what we did with T RD Pro, right? That is what Ford did with Raptor and now they have a whole range of raptors. And so basically just, you know, getting rid of for years. Trucks came with a 50 mm shock, a twin tube, 50 mm shock that would just boil so you could drive it down a fire road to your fishing hole, but you can not take it down into Baha. You can not take it on a trail and try to go fast. So, you know, now everybody's running 2 and a half inch. Bypass shocks, in some case, 3 in shocks with reservoirs and adjusters and you know, smart technology. So there is there is a ton that is gone on in that development space. Can you see it in the UT V market especially, right? Where they have got 20 " of wheel travel and 25 ", I think on the new pro r razor just, you know, it is the closest thing you can get to a trophy truck that you can buy out of a dealership. So then people want the downside to E T V is you do not you can not really drive it down the freeway, right, you can drive it on local roads and whatnot, but you can not take it for a weekend and go down to BAHA or go out into the desert over landing. With a rooftop tent and go camping and bring your friends and have an air conditioned cabin and all that stuff, so being able to take your truck and then modify its suspension and wheel entire package and be able to use it for those kind of things. And still drive it to work on Monday. You know, it is a really good value proposition. So what we do with our our Terra Flex brand is Jeep specific hard core, you know, rock crawling and trail running. And then our Ready Lift brand is kind of more broad for for everybody in the truck and CV kind of offered space.

Okay. It is very interesting. So I have got a ton of questions. So you sell a kit, right? They do not come, somebody will not come in and just buy a shock. It is a kit for the entire suspension. Is that how it would work?

That is our preference is to sell a whole system. We do sell you know both through our Falcon Shops brand, we will sell individual shops and we also have pro comp shocks and we sell a lot of shocks. But that is typically what happens is people buy a suspension system. And then then they will upgrade their shocks within that system. So but but the right way, the way we prefer to do it is just to buy our whole system because it is all engineered to work together. It is got appropriate clearances and we have done the validation to make sure that the vehicles still compliant with all the safety. Requirements like FMVSS 126 for vehicle stability control, you know that your radar cruise control system still works, so whereas if you piece something together yourself or you go with a company that does not have the sophistication to do that work. You are really kind of a guinea pig. You are going to get what you get and hopefully it will be okay.

Interesting. So these kits that you design and sell and all that is the car, it is still drivable on the road then?

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, we do have certain Terra Flex has a couple of hard core coil over conversion, long arm suspension kits for guys that, you know, just want tow their rig to the trail. But but for the most part, everything we sell is FMVSS 126 compliance, and it is intended for on road use on an offer of use.

Interesting. So, you know, we have developed literally thousands of products with companies and every 1 of those development journeys is a little bit different. Walk us through like what is the development like for 1 of these suspension systems?

Yeah. So so it varies a little bit by the type of system, whether it is a level lift, you know, we have a thing called an s s t kit which is like a 3 " kit and then you go up to like a 6 " kit. But generally the process is the same. The first thing we do is we get our hands on a development vehicle, we get our hands on all the relevant data that we can so some of the Oems provide CAD data of their vehicles through CA and you will have nominal CAD data and some of them do not like Toyota famously does not share information with the aftermarket. So you have got a reverse engineering . So we will start by measuring our development vehicle to get an idea what the nominal vehicle condition is, what its ride height is. We have an evaluation process where we will go and evaluate all the vehicle safety systems like vehicle stability control, radar cruise control, parking sensors, you know all those things, backup camera vision with an unmodified vehicle, right, and then we will do an alignment suite and we will really understand where this vehicle is with relationship to all the Things that we are going to need to know about it later on. And then we go and we kind of create what are our requirements for this kit? Is it based on a tire size, sometimes our brand manager? We will just say, hey, do what it takes to fit a 35 " tire, and so if that is the case, then you really start with, okay, what is the will well condition look like? Where is the bump stop need to be? What is your stroke look like in your suspension because we want to maximize our stroke? Like I said, a lot of the aftermarket will just stick a big giant bump stop spacer on there and not really take into account that now you have you know, you got rid of all the Jones, travel. And you are so you are limited with, you know, the amount of rebound travel you have because you are lifting it up already so that things ride like **** and lift kits and suspension systems in general get a bad name because of those poorly engineered systems that are out there. So our goal is if we are going to limit Bump, travel. Then we want to add some rebound travel and we have got engineering standards around sorry about that. We have got engineering standards around how much rebound travel you have got to maintain on a on a system in order for it to ride and perform well because 1 of the things when you start to do stability control testing and things like that is you want to minimize. 1 of the requirements is you can not have 2 wheel vehicle lift, so when you get out there, you have got a steering robot on the car and it is turning at 360 degrees per second. You have got to make sure the tires stay in contact with the ground, and so so if you limit your droop travel, it is a very easy way to fail the task to get a tired, you know, get 2 tires to come off the ground. And the reason we are doing it is to maintain our safety for the customer, right. We want to pass the regulatory compliance checks just to do our due diligence as a professional company, but but the point of those are to maintain the safety and stability for, you know, for the customer and there is a lot of customers who have bad instincts when things start to go wrong and a vehicle starts to slide, you know, whether you are in ice and snow, whether you are on the freeway and you have an emergency maneuver, you so making the vehicle kind of confident and natural feeling, making it able to, you know, have stability and recover is really important. So we spend a lot of time working on making sure that, you know, things like spring rates are right. And like I said, your your wheel travel is set up properly so that you have got the the greatest capability in terms of trying to maintain or improve on the OE vehicles capability.

Interesting. So, like stability control and cruise control and things like that, a lot of that is computer assisted, right? So do you is there a balance between like you guys are engineering some of that in and then is there also like are you editing software or firmware too?

Unfortunately, we can’t edit the software because it is all proprietary. This is 1 of the areas where there are a few federal motor vehicle safety standards like 126, and there is a new 1 coming in 5 years for pedestrian automatic emergency braking. So there will be some requirements that the vehicle has to hit. Where there is an objective test that we can do to confirm the vehicle still compliant, but all the Oems have a different way of complying with these and there is no requirement that they have to open up their code to us. So so it is all locked down and proprietary and so we can get in there and reflash the vehicle stability control programming . So our whole thing is to understand where the limits are on the base vehicle and that is why your original evaluation is so important and because we are trying to determine functional equivalence and so then we can tune our suspension system to try to minimize, you know, if the system if the vehicle is really a roll sensitive, then, you know, we can stiffen up spring rate or, you know, you know, change sway bar or something like that to basically allow it to be taller and still have similar role characteristics .

Interesting. So it is it is 100 % engineered , then it is not yeah, you just said you can not change the code so interesting.

Yeah. Sadly, I mean, there is we play with sensors a little bit where we can, you know, but but it is all it is all mechanical, we are not we are not es we yeah, we have looked into some canvas work. That is that is another story though, but we have not been able to have not been able to do it in a way that we would feel confident releasing it into the market and the Oems, they own their their software. So they are very protective of it, and you can see it in the vehicle tuning market where they are doing everything they can to stop people from tuning their engines and then so basically the folks that are tuning engines are having to constantly respond. They are in a battle with the Oems and the Oems are changing their algorithms every year and mid year when they can and then the tuners have to go and find a way around it. So it is a it is a whole different business model than than what we are doing.

Yeah, it is interesting. Does tire diameter affect cruise control? Because I know back in the day, if you put a different tire on it, it changed. The speedometer does that.

Yeah, it does. Most most cars are still using a wheel speed based system. And so there are there are calibrators available that many of our stores will install the keep speedometer calibration within 3 %. We also have specialized in doing calibration of like your safety cameras. So, you know, we spent a lot of time in fact 2020. 16 or 17, Toyota had this total safety C system that came out and they put out a letter saying you can not modify your vehicle because it will no longer comply with the total safety. And so that put a real damper on our business with with all the dealers. You know, we 1 of our businesses sells and up fits vehicles for dealers. And so they all of a sudden the tot dealers stopped buying from us and everybody else. So we had to do some research and luckily I had an engineer in my staff who used to work with me at TED and and he knew the calibration protocols and so we went. And worked with a local dealer to modify the vehicle in multiple step apps from level lift all the way up to a 6 " kit and then evaluate the safety systems just like we did, we did all this at T R D and then calibrate the systems, we did uncalibrated , did it calibrated using the Toyota spec, the calibration spec and the total tools, and then we even got a Toto field technical specialist and a to to master tech to come and ride along. As we did this evaluation to gain consensus that, yeah, these vehicles, this these system work, your blind spot monitor still works, your radar cruise works, your emergency breaking works, you know, ABS and new ability control still work, and then I put out a letter. Saying that, hey, this is what we did to validate these systems, and we found that if you buy our systems and you install them properly and calibrate them properly as constructed the systems all still work and so that. That, you know, allowed us to get back in business in this business, but it also motivated Toyota to come up with their own lift kit. So now too has got their own my old group, the T R D group has their own lift kit for certain vehicles. And and you can see the differences in the aftermarket and OEM like their kit costs, triple what our kit costs and has a lot more components because TOE is famously conservative in their engineering standards. And so you know, doing it the total way. This is what it this is what it takes to get it approved by by Japan, you know, so anyway, it is it is a very interesting kind of dynamic.

Yeah, so other than Toyota having their own left kit, you guys kind of have a corner in that market now.

Well, everybody else is just kind of come on in behind us and copied my letter. They have not done the work right but they have just copied my letter and said it all works and, you know, and basically that is what has happened with fmbss1 126 testing as well. We still do real FMVSS 126 testing using a vendor and using an OEM proven ground and we use engineering judgment to decide which vehicles need to be tested. To confirm that it is going to work on a range of applications just like we did at Toyota, right, we did the the shortest and tallest vehicle it that was available on the spec and we use engineering judgment to say if this vehicle passes, then lower and longer vehicles are going to pass, for instance, but what a lot of the upper competitors do is they started hiring simulator companies to basically just do a computer simulation and then make a judgment based on computer simulation that it is acceptable. But we learn a lot through real testing. So it is it is an expense that we have in our budget that we invest in. But it makes me feel like I know a little bit more than our competitors do about what the vehicle what actually happens at the limits and we have found some things, you know, which which which our competitors have not found, right? So I feel like our products are the safest ones out there.

That sounds like they are. Do you how often do you develop a new kit? I mean, I know like a lot of these vehicles are platforms so they do not change a whole lot. Year to year, yeah. How often do you develop a new system?

Yeah. So we we basically try to look out 3 to 4 years at all the platforms we support and find out when the new vehicles are coming and we bake that into our annual plan. So typically in a given year, there is 1 to 2 new vehicle platforms like in the last 12 months. We had the super duty Ford Super Guy had a significant change in 23 and then the 24 total Tacoma came out, that was all new, was on the T. T G I think they call the platform. So it is kind of like the tundra, but it is different. So what we do is speed to market is really important to us. Because of the fact that we are selling to dealers, they want these products as soon as the new car hits a lot because that is the most profitable time for them to sell the product, right in the new product lifecycle and most of our competitors do not invest the resources we do to get to market. First, a couple of them famously do because you get this little blip in sales and then it kind of stretches out and then 345 years after the car launches. When it starts going to the second owner, they start to really accessorize the vehicles. So that is when you get you have a lot of units in operation that is when it gets really lucrative. But our feeling is if we jump on it first number 1, we learn everything there is to know about the new safety systems, the new way things work and that helps us. It gives us a little advantage. And because part of it is new product development and part of it is maintenance and so Toyota may launch a new platform this year. But then they may, you know, on another vehicle, say, well, we are going to update this other system to the same new system that just came out on the new Tacoma.

So when we learn about it on Tacoma, then it hits as a mid year, you know, refresh on a 3 year old Sequoia or something. We already know how it works and it gives us an advantage as well or like I said, getting the market first allows our dealers to be able to offer the product because when customers buy even if even if you are buying this car second hand. When the new vehicle came out, you were looking at what everybody was doing, you are going to the see show, you are like, wow, that thing looks badass, right? So then in your brain you are like, I like those wheels, I like that lift kit. I like that roof top 10. I like that bumper. So then 5 years from now, when you actually get to buy a used vehicle in your brain is still what you thought was cool and and, you know, of course, during that time somebody you might have come out with something cooler and you might change it, but by and large, you know, the the pioneers have a first mover advantage.

Yeah, interesting. Is it always like are you able to when when there is a refresh or a new platform that comes out, are you able to just kind of adapt your existing kit or is it pretty much ground up your you are starting over?

It all depends that is that is 1 of the big purposes of the original scanning, 3D scanning and vehicle measurement that we do so for instance, on the super duty, it was they had made 1 big change to the radius arm mounts on the frame. Pretty much the whole rest of the kit carried over. So that was really fast for us to be able to take parts off the shelf and get first to market. The Tacoma was a clean sheet and had a couple of things like I think the control arm spacing. And maybe the ball joint carries over from the new 22 tundra. So the work we did to be first to market on that paid off, but everything else was different. It is a different car, different spring rates, you know, different frame width. So we ended up basically developing all new products for that. But now the land cruises are just hit and probably 80 % of the parts in our Tacoma kit are going to work on the land cruiser. So that is going to give us another advantage and then foreigners coming out in the fall. And I, you know, have it a good authority that that is going to be very similar to the land cruiser, so so we try wherever we can to use parts of B engineering and carry something over to a new platform. And then, you know, it just kind of depends on the Oems and how significant the changes are. And some of them like Toyota will do a whole new platform. Ford will just keep modifying their existing platform every year. And so they will have 9 engineering changes lined up for the next 4 years. And they do not necessarily wait for a model year to introduce them. G M famously did this with knuckles, they switched from steel to aluminum knuckles, but they built both vehicles side by side and they had 2 different ball joint tapers. So there was no rhyme or reason to it that we could determine. So it was very difficult. We had to offer 2 kids and we had to tell the customer, hey, you need to determine if you have steel or aluminum knuckles before you order our kit. So luckily, most of these, you know, bigger kits that use. New knuckles are are installed by a shop who can stock both kits on the shelf, but do it yourselfers that could really hurt, you know.

Yeah. Yeah, that is interesting. When you go to measure the car and scan the cars or the trucks, do you, like, work with a dealer or do you have to buy a 1 or how does that work?

It all depends. So we we set our capital expenditure budget up for the year with all the vehicles we plan to buy, which are the ones I use the automotive news future product pipeline. It kind of gives you an idea when all the manufacturers knew. New vehicles are coming out. And so we look at all the heavy hitters, we say we are going to buy those vehicles and then I am going to sell vehicles from my development fleet to fund it right or to fund most of it. And we do our capital expenditure plan then. When we get vehicles that like land cruisers, not on our plan to buy 1, it is an expensive vehicle. It is not it is only 35,000 units a year. So it is not going to be a huge business for us. So we borrowed 1 from a local dealer. And we have relationships with a lot of these dealers or we can borrow a car, use it for a couple of weeks, give it back to them with a level lift and meals and tires on it and they are happy and we are happy. So we are not as fast though. So my goal I will fly someone anywhere in the country. If it is a number 1 priority vehicle platform, I want to buy the first 1 that I can get my hands on and I will fly someone anywhere they need. They need to you to buy it and drive it across country over the weekend and we will have people waiting to scan it as soon as it pulls in. We have even borrowed cars like 1 time, a friend of mine who is a kind of a famous journalist and podcaster and got a hold of a new vehicle that we could not get a hold of and so I took him to dinner and I have a little race shop. Our Long Beach racers team has a little race shop in Long Beach, so we basically left the vehicle at my shop. I took them over dinner and have a few drinks and my engineers came in, put the thing on the lift, took it all apart, scanned it and thrashed, you know, for like 4 h and put it all back together and then, you know, he took off and went back and handed it back to the OEM and they never knew. That we had the vehicle, but it gave us a leg up. So there is a lot of that going on where everybody's competing for this info and and 1 of the cool things that Ford did on the Bronco was they actually selected our company along with 2 or 3 others to give. OEM candidates to in advance of them releasing it to Seema. So we actually got prototype cat data a year before the vehicle launched and that allowed us to have a full line of suspension bumpers. Everything developed, you know, for that vehicle when it came out the downside to that and we got to go to their manufacturing plant and fit parts up, but we did not get to do a lot of drive evaluation and so the downside of that was like on our bumpers, we did not get our parking sensors oriented properly and and so they picked up the corner of driveways. So our first customers who bought those, we ended up having to 3D print some parking sensor bezels to reorient the corner parking sensors. So that is a case we are trying to do, simultaneous engineering in the aftermarket and Oems without having everything that the Oems have who do, simultaneous engineering always takes some risk.

Very interesting did. So I was going to ask if you got data beforehand and you just kind of explain that, so in the case where like a Toyota, you have to wait for a car to come out, let us say you get 1 day 1, what is the timeline look like to develop a kit?

So we try to scan and measure the car in 2 days, that is our that is our goal. We have got a pretty extensive checklist, right? And so we try to first do our measurements , alignment sweeps, ride height rate, the springs, do the baseline, drive bow, then take it apart scan parts. And then get started on developing the products and we will have the product staged like we are going to do a level of first because it is the easiest thing to do and we want to get it to market quickly. And then we are going to do like a 3 " SST kit and then we are going to do our 6 " knuckle kit. And so we can get a level lift on we can build a 100 of them in R D and get them on the shelf within 2 weeks of us getting a new car. Including measuring, driving, evaluating and we will actually build them right there with our engineers and fabricators an S S T kit, it is going to take 3 to 6 months depending on if we have to develop a new ball joint or something like that, you know, if we if we can use a ball for another application. And the taper and the length and traveler correct, we can make it an upper control arm springs take a long time, but generally 3 to 6 months we will get to market with that product and then a full 6 " lift kit that has new cross members and new cast knuckles. That steering knuckle takes a lot of engineering , a lot of surfacing. We want to build prototypes and do all of our drive evaluation before we invest in the tooling that it takes for a big casting like that. And so that is going to take 9 to 12 months to get to market.

Wow, that is it is amazing that you are I mean, in 2 weeks you can do a lift kit and, yeah, that is pretty fast.

And then well, the big the big thing that we have been trying to solve since Hoonigan bought us back in the form of heart days with Pro, we would get first to market, we would build a 100 kits out of engineering , but then our manufacturing team was not fast enough to get production quantities. So we would launch beat all of our competitors , get a huge sales spike sell out within days, 2 days. We can only have a 100 kits on the shelf and then we have got a stock for 90 to 120 days while manufacturing got spoiled up. So 1 of the things we have been trying to work. With now in the wheel pros, Hogan world is working with our supply chain and our manufacturing teams so that while we are doing this development as soon as we have not, the materials hammered out. The supply chain team is starting to procure the material that we need and then our manufacturing teams ready for the handoff. And so we have really gotten better at that. So what is powering our success this year on Super Duty and Tacoma is that not only were we able to get to market quick, but we had the volume required to capitalize on the spike in sales that we got at the beginning. And so that is really helped us to really helped our year.

Very cool. Do you guys do all that manufacturing in house or do you do you contract that to vendors?

We do both. Generally, we have got we have got a 100 and 20,000 sq ft, I think manufacturing center in Ogden, Utah for Ready Lift and ZBros, which is our UTV brand. And then we have got TeraFlex in West Jordan, Utah has a pretty big manufacturing facility as well. And then logiq, our air suspension company out in San Luis Vispo has a somewhat smaller manufacturing center all co located with our RD centers. So those products are manufactured locally and eventually we will still source the products or at least components overseas to bring the price down. But we want to get to market quickly. So we will take a gross profit compression to get to market quickly and then we will work with supply chain to try to improve the G P going forward, things like wheels. We have a facility in North Carolina that does really high end machined fill it and multi piece wheels. But for your typical cast wheel, those are coming from overseas. So we do not we are not as quick to market with a wheel, but wheels are generally very standardized . And so we have something in our in our system. That has the right, you know, PCD, the right center board, right width and offset. So we can get to market relatively quickly until, you know, G M comes up with a bigger break caliper or Toyota comes up with a 60 mm offset or something that is non standard. Then you know, we will have to work with our vendors to get those made quickly. We will design it, they will manufacture it. But but the rest of our businesses and then lighting is kind of the same way we design all the lighting here in the United States, but it is all manufactured by vendors overseas and then we basically just have to work with them to get it made as quickly as we can.

Yeah, very interesting. A minute ago, you mentioned having a 3D print. I think there was a parking sensor for the bumper.

The bezzle?

Yeah, what what does prototyping look like? I assume you are not 3D printing a lot of this stuff to evaluate it. I assume you are machining.

Yeah, a lot of the metal a lot of suspension wise will 3 print little parts, you know, just for test fit. But generally speaking, we are making things out of metal. So we have got a laser our R D facility has a laser, a press break, you know, AC NC center, everything we need to make prototype parts really quickly, and then we make our own tooling and fixtures as well. We have got manufacturing engineers who will design those as soon as we finish prototyping the part. So it is a lot of tube bending sheet metal bending, you know, laser welding, and even when we make a knuckle, we will usually make a fixture, take the existing steering knuckle and cut it. And then extend it, the ball driver needs to be put the tire in where it needs to be because tie rod placement is really critical to all your steering, your steering ratios and how the vehicle you know, most cars have steering angle sensors, some of them even have steering rate sensors, so you have got to keep the the ratio between how fast you turn the steering wheel and how fast the wheels turn proportional . So it takes a lot of engineering as you are starting to move your lower control arm down, be leaving your steering rack where it is, you know, considering bumps steer and everything else to make sure that you have that system work right and you do not get a whole bunch of toe change. Or bump steer or other bad, you know, bad things that can happen if you are not careful. So our chunks of steel, depending on how the knuckle works or aluminum for an aluminum knuckle, and then we will get it to the point where you can drive on it. And they give me **** sometimes because I bend and break things because I kind of am hard on everything on purpose to try to make sure it is strong enough, but the knuckles. Yeah, they are very they are a little bit fragile when you when you chopped them all up and they are critical because they are holding the wheel on the car, so you so anyway, that is kind of a part and we have got a couple of guys that are good at it and have done it for quite a while. So the engineers figure out where it all needs to go and then we have got some really good fabricators that can take, you know, a drawing right and turn it into, you know, a part that actually has the right tolerance.

Sure, sure. With with all the products impulse has help design, there is always some kind of challenge that comes up and I know we are not talking specific product here, but what is what is the biggest challenge you have in developing these kids?

I think I think compatibility with the vehicle safety systems is probably the biggest 1. I mean, you are always looking. 1 of the first things I did when I came here was put in a clearance standard because the aftermarket has wildly varying outcomes in terms of quality. So I wanted everybody, every engineer, every fabricator to know what is acceptable and what is not acceptable from the point of view of clearance corrosion, things of that nature. So we have largely solved those problems most of our competitors or many of our competitors still have issues and you can see it, you know, witness marks where things are crashing against each other, steering binds up whatever, but we do not have those problems anymore, right? So so in terms of time long lead components like a ball joint or a spring where we have to create 1 from scratch and then get a vendor to make it for us that takes time, but prototyping a whole system and getting out there and finding out that, you know, something is wrong with it and you are engaging. You know, all of a sudden, when you make a right turn at 35 mi an hour, the vehicle is trying to grab inside brake and rotate the car because it is activating the vehicle stability sensor, you know, like the yaw sensor is not happy. You know, going back, having only mechanical things to solve it with is a pretty big challenge, so that is how we spend so much time on it because sometimes if you do not do a good job baseline in the car these systems, because there are no federal safety standards around most of these systems in each manufacturers doing it their own way with their own vendors. There is a lot of areas where they do not work that well. The Wall Street Journal recently put out an article once. NHTSA, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration mandated that within 5 years, vehicles are all going to need to have pedestrian, automatic emergency braking Wall Street Journal just on the base vehicles, put out an article that said, you know what, these systems do not work very well, especially at night. So that the state of the technology is not as robust as what you expect from your ABS break system, for instance, and so then we will find these little corners where the where it just does not work or it freaks out. And if you do not find those in your baseline development and then you encounter them, you know, in your vehicle development and now you spend time chasing a problem that is a base vehicle problem that you can not fix, and that is the drive line vibration is another 1 of those you are changing all the angles in the drive line. And it is very difficult to to solve those problems, so you really got to understand them at the beginning.

Yeah, that is really interesting stuff. Switching gears just a little bit, as we start to wrap up, this is probably my favorite question that I asked just because everybody comes at it from a little bit different perspective, but what are some of the trends that you see emerging in product development ?

Well, definitely speed speed being a virtue, you know, is has always been important but but I think people are starting to see that the quicker you can develop a new capability that is a capability by itself, right? And and I would say iterative product development . You know, you know, not very often do you get to do a new f35 raptor or something where you are trying to break the boundaries of, you know, every every discipline all at the same time. Really, what I think you are seeing more and more of is do it the way we have always done it. Change 1 thing, you know, Dan Ward in his book Fire talks about 1 miracle per project. And that is how they developed a whole fleet of drones faster than they could develop a fighter jem and each 1 of those drones, none of them can do everything the fighter jet can do, but everything the fighter jet can do can be done by a drone, by an individual drone at a much lower cost and you can get it, you can turn it around much quicker. So that kind of that idea a disciplined product development process that does not get bogged down and that is very clear on what we need to develop. And what we are going to do that is new that we have never done before. So you can invest all your mental resources in. I want to learn how to work with aluminum. So this product to be the same as a steel product we did, but it is going to be lighter. And so we are going to learn everything that we need to know about how to design and manufacture . And weld aluminum. And then we can use that capability on the next project that we do. And it is not a miracle anymore. It is just, you know, part of our normal process. So adaptive learning for your team.

Yeah, very interesting. You have got a ton of experience. So reflecting on all the challenges you have had and the successes in developing products, what words of wisdom would you share with somebody looking to make the significant impact in the product development world?

I the the thing that took me the longest to learn is real innovation are things that customers are willing to pay for. So so as an engineer, I always want to build a better mouse trap. I always want to make something cooler, faster, perform better, you know, sometimes less expensive. You know, those are all the things we try to do as engineers, we optimize things, but if the customer is not willing to pay more for this version of the product and they were for the old version and then you have just put a whole bunch of cost and effort into it and you have not gotten anything out of it. So, Scott, wine for a while, Polaris owned 4 W parts for 5 years and I served on the Players Technology Committee and that is 1 of the things Scott wine drilled into all of our engineers heads was it is not real innovation. Let the customer is willing to pay for it. So it changes how you think about, okay. If I developed this product, how much do I think it will sell for what will it cost and then it changes how you come to market, right? And and it helps focus your team. So everybody has great ideas and I love to, you know, to have a bunch of little skunk works, things that maybe are not on the product plan in the works because it keeps your engineers excited and stimulated and they get to solve problems on the side, but I try to drive them towards thinking about, well, is the customer going to be willing to pay for this or is it just a cool thing that I would like to have?

Mm hmm. Yeah, that is really interesting. Yeah, that is good words. This has been awesome. Is there anything else you want to mention in regards to? You know, what we have been talking about or product development in general?

I do not think so. I mean, I am excited to be here. I love developing new products and I love you know, I think the 1 thing is I love understanding how the customer is going to use the product. So early in my career, because I am an enthusiast, I gravitated toward making things I want, and then somebody told me 1 time, Tom Morris, who is kind of a mentor of mine who used to run the Toto Troy truck team and he said, you are the 1 %. Okay. Most customers are not using things the way you are. You are beating the **** out of them. You know, you got to think about the customer and you got to design for the 99 %. So I do believe in that, but I believe designing products that will work for the 1 %. As long as you can do it and you are not adding a whole bunch of cost or complexity, make them cool, and people will pay more for things that are cool and that are durable, so I try to build that in without totally geeking out and turning into, you know, getting into areas of the market where the customer just does not want to go like my personal truck has a long travel kit has, you know, bypass shocks and air bumps, but I have had to do a lot of cutting on the frame and welding and adding other things. And most customers do not want to go there. So as cool as it is, no one's going to get it. But the things I learned from that allow me to go. All right, let us go down 1 level to a bolt on product the customer wants and put as much capability. From what I have in my truck into this so that they can just bolt it on and make and go, you know, and go down to ba and play around and chase a race or whatever and feel safe and feel like, man, this thing's amazing, that is the sweet spot that is where you want to be as a product developer.

Awesome. This has been great before we finish for somebody that wants to find out more, where can they find out more about the the stuff you guys are working on?

About our products. Yeah, you can go to Hoonigan.com or go to any of our individual brands. So Tera Flex for Jeep suspension, Ready Lift for truck suspension Logiq with a queue for air systems, all the Wheel Pros brands for wheels, Morimoto lighting and Zbros for U T V products.

Thanks Ted. I appreciate it.

Hey, thanks, Troy. Good talking to you.