We set out a year ago to design and build a new type of electric motorcycle.
The long hours and late nights are bringing us closer to realizing our first prototype electric motorcycle.
Lets for this first blog post, begin by taking a bit of a trip down memory lane.
This was my first Youtube video upload to begin cataloging my new electric motorbike building venture, and I knew then, what I know now to be true about starting a business. I needed to get ready to fail, a lot. There has been no easy path to creating an electric motorcycle company and there will continue to be twists and turns along the way but I find it the good kind of trouble to be getting into. There is an energy that I get when I think about it building PEV's that are somewhere in the gray space between worlds. Somewhere in between a high end mountain bike and your 250cc class motorcycles. There is a new emerging electric motorbike space that is beginning to take on real definition in the early 2020's that has been really exciting as an enthusiast to be a part of. I am building this new design of motorbike that I have been working over in my mind for going on about 6 years at time of writing. Imagining the way that its going to ride, the way that its going to look, the vibe that its going to unleash on the PEV community. I am so damn close I can taste it.
I am launching this business by myself. And who am I, you might ask?
My name is Clayton Turner Williams,
I founded Turner Motorbikes one late night while sitting at my kitchen table just as most businesses get started. I was working on designing a bike but was not ready to launch an endeavor to do so. I spent considerable time early on doing sketches, in my spare time to beginning to acquire the tools to produce my designs like the rogue tubing bender kit produced up in Sandy OR and building foundational skills like welding and beginning to try my hand at frame modification. Hacking a hoop and making a custom seat for my Suzuki GN400. I'm also a fan of gas bikes as well, but my progression from watching the electric segment become a fledgling industry segment to begin to bloom as it has been, has bee a defining portion of my career to date. I had early on before college years studying product and industrial design had done a gap year down in New Zealand. This will be important cornerstone I would find to come to have ripple effects in my life. I found out that there was some company in Eugene making electric motorcycle and they were from New Zealand. I was really excited and looking for a new endeavor as my career working with bicycles was on a bit of a hiatus. Around August I was able to track them down, and hounded the guys at UBCO for a job. This small New Zealand start up was producing a bike called a 2x2, designed for the rugged territory that New Zealand was famous for and originally targeted at the agricultural industry and dairy farmers of NZ. It was a really neat concept and was gaining some traction in the states when I was the 3rd person to come on board in the US warehouse facility. Starting in September 2020 I spent the first 2 years working for them building up the US manufacturing facility and doing technical service/events/sales/logistics and so on and so on. I've always been a bit of a do "all the jobs" type of employee and with my background in electric bikes I was quick to pick up on the basics and had a ton to learn about the depth of development that went into making the 2x2 a reality. I wanted to do this, and no matter the steep learning curve, I was asked to live and breath it when I go hired and that's exactly what I was primed to do.
When I came to work at UBCO, I didn't know it but they were about to grow massively over the next couple of years and go from a small but super dedicated team of around 40 people to a staggering 120+ employees with massive amounts of cash infused into the operations and were poured int R&D and Marketing. The production run size increased and the building up of a massive US stock of inventory that I was going to be responsible for building, training others to build, keep maintained, tested, washed, packed, and shipped all around the north American continent were about to be cascading across my desk. If you can sense that I am writing this with a bit of hindsight, you're are catching on.
UBCO represented the notion to me that if you can't beat them, join them and that's is precisely why I began knocking down the door to a tucked away facility located off Second and Garfield on the outskirts of the Whitaker neighborhood of Eugene who were quietly plugging away at building these quirky little two wheel drive bikes and becoming a major industry player while carving out the Utility Bike niche as their hunting grounds. Although completely unknown to the majority of the town surrounding them. Who without a beat say, "Arcimoto" is that who makes those? The three wheel motorcycle venture located just 1 block away was know to everybody.
There were only two dudes working in the warehouse when I showed up, Ethan Ralston, and Kevin Rickerson. These two along with a remote sales person Robin Fiori, in California were responsible for building the entire UBCO North America division and bringing the product to dealers and customers all across the US. When I arrived there was at least one dealership in each state and 500+ bikes sold in the US.
You wouldn't believe how much these guys were able to accomplish with a couple of laptops a sprinter van and a mountain of cardboard boxes coming in on container ships. The 2017 models, and Gen4 and 4.5 2x2's were in production and the launch of the Gen5 bikes were just about to drop.
My job has been to build up the production capacity of UBCO US, create the production process that we use to build the bikes and train all the folks who are hired to be able to carry it out at a high level that a motor vehicle manufacturer should be held to. I carry out continuous quality improvements, work with out engineering team as the front line of production issues, and diagnostics. I work with teams across the globe to ensure the technical service and customer services are looked after day to day and am directly involved with keeping the entire North American fleet of thousands of 2x2s in service at dealerships and in customers garages and out in the back country. If there is an issue that occurs on an UBCO bike anywhere in north America I will hear about it within 24hours and ultimately be responsible for its diagnostics, remedy, and customer care.
Let me pause to say that these guys were there to help me learn how to do this, especially Kevin who I worked closest with. These were the people who showed me the ropes and I own them a debt of gratitude. I could not with any good confidence embark on this endeavor if it were not for having worked along side these guys and picked up the skills that I didn't even know I was lacking when I first started working at UBCO.
But for the nearly the past year circumstances in the business have changed, and I no longer get to work along side these gentlemen and its only one of the litany of reasons I think that I am better off striking out on my own and starting a business that directly competes with my current employer.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/CsmhjNouDZM/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==This brings us to the first product I was able to begin building.
The powerful lithium-ion 18650 has been a game changer in terms of energy density and enabled the entire electric bike revolution to occur. That being said, some builders of batteries are better than others and there was a slight issue that crept into the batteries that UBCO has been building into their 2x2's. A BMS quiescent discharge causes only some of the cells in the whole pack to become unbalanced and can continue to discharge until the voltage is driven below the low voltage cutoff rendering the pack unusable.
After the batteries were disposed of I was able to work with an ewaste recycler to recover some of the cells with capacity still remaining in them. I bought some charging/testing equipment and a spot welder and was able to put together some packs are similar to the you will find on this site today.
The packs have been a huge game changer in terms of my ability to begin working out the logistics of launching products on my own and create a useful items that are worth the effort to go into production on. I have since expanded the range of the type of products I can offer and have begun making production runs of bags, and other bespoke cycling accessories. and bringing in friends to help make the mountain of a task in building a business and successful products to market.
That's where we come to the heart and soul of why Turner Motorbikes was founded. I raised some initial funding form friends and family and am using the production accessories to continue to generate the cash flow needed to continue to develop the first prototype that will be come our first production ready electric motorcycle.
Go to the next post where we will begin to break down the development of the electric motorcycle, and take you deeper into the mindset and processes we are using to fabricate a new design of electric mobility.
-Clayton Williams
The founder of
Turner Motorbikes