Building a wind tunnel out of leaf blowers. What does this have to do with building an electric vehicle?

Before leaving Axon Enterprises, the leadership team was kind enough to celebrate my 10 years with them. As part of this, the team would stand up in front of the organization and talk about my accomplishments. Of all the success that I had achieved across so many different disciplines and products launched, the one repeated example was building a wind tunnel out of leaf blowers in the first year I was with Axon. At the time, I never thought much about this task or accomplishment until now.

You see, I spent the first few years of my career working on one of the most challenging projects I have ever done. Development of the XREP (eXtended Range Electronic Projectile) for Axon. Think of it as an Axon CEW device contained in a 2 3/4“ shotgun shell and fired from a standard or proprietary shotgun. While I was involved in many different aspects of the program, the one major challenge was developing the flight stability system for the projectile, and I needed a method of achieving this without advanced CAE tools, and without the necessity of firing a one time use $25 projectile down range, sometimes 100’s of times per day, just to solve these problems. Now an expert would start by telling you ”This can’t be done, the flow will be wrong, the pressure drop will be wrong, you won’t have laminar flow in the tunnel, blah, blah, blah.“ Here’s what really mattered; I needed something that would get me close. So close that when we did fire an XREP down range, the remaining problems could be solved through some hand calculations, basic fundamental understandings of the physics behind the problem, and a little trial and error. What we were able to accomplish and develop in the end product was unheard of. A complex electro-mechanical piece of plastic, metal, batteries, and electronic circuitry hardware with intelligent software flying through the air, surviving incredibly high g-loads, and repeatedly engaging a target at 100 feet with about a 5-inch diameter circle of accuracy out of a shotgun no less.

I never realized how much this little thing I did almost 12 years ago would influence how I do things today. This lesson taught me that limited resources and expertise were not a hindrance or requirement to success. The products and projects we developed at Axon were like any other startup; We were always short on resources, always short on expertise, and always trying to do something the experts told us was impossible. I never started a project with previous experience, everything had to be learned.

This is much like what we’re doing at Atlis Motor Vehicles today. An expert will tell you it can’t be done for less than $1 billion. They will tell you that solutions can’t be developed unless you’ve done it before, or someone on your team has done it before. They will tell you that your goals are impossible because it’s never been done and smarter people than you have tried and failed. Well, they’re wrong. If we can only accomplish what an expert or very public figure has said is possible, we will never progress forward.

Today, we’re building almost everything in house. We don’t have a big budget, we, in fact, have a very tiny budget and sometimes no budget, but we need to move forward. We could play by the rules, but our customers don’t want what the rules say they can have. So, we’re going to break a few rules.

Sometimes the most innovative solution is not inventing something new, but understanding what you can accomplish with what exists today, and accomplishing something new. We’re building a vehicle that can charge quickly. 15 minutes or less. Why? Because it matters. That 10% or less use case is when these goals matter most and we can bring real value to the world. We’re rethinking the vehicle architecture, by focusing on new service models, new manufacturing techniques, and long term product visions. We’re building motors in- house, gearboxes, & controllers. We’re building body panels, lights, vehicle frames, suspension components, axles...everything in-house. All with 1/200th of the budget of our nearest competitor. Will it be perfect? No, but it will showcase those key aspects necessary to succeed.

Could we fail? Yep, so we probably shouldn’t try right?

Let’s do it anyway. It needs to be done. Electrification needs to be a leap forward, not a step backward, and that is what Atlis Motor Vehicles is doing today.