Speed UTV

[Rockwood]

I still believe the design is the best out there. The car has its flaws no doubt. Most were because they chose to not spend the time & money to properly develop it and mounting pressure to get to market caused the majority of design issues. I’m still learning and hearing new stories from people involved and how things were skipped or mislead during the R&D phase.

The next big issue is the agreement with Hisun. Once they become the contract supplier and they own all the tooling and control the sub contract suppliers. Speed was left just being a finish product buyer of their product and not having control or approval of the suppliers. Speed will forever be chasing quality issues as Hisun’s goal is profit over Speed’s quality. Speed needed full time boots on the ground in Asia confirming materials, parts etc.. meet the design specs required.

The last and biggest issue and failure is the structure of Speed from the U.S side. They never built the proper foundation to run a true and proper mass production automotive brand company. Speed has the staff of a small independent Powersport dealership. Not a brand that is controlling and monitoring all facets of the business from purchasing materials to after customer sales.

Honestly the car itself is the least of the issues they have. Most could be fixed with better quality parts & control, and some minor design changes. But without the foundation of the brand it does not matter.

Lots of problems are the direct result of faulty design: cooling, brakes, belt-life, engine failures. Most of this can be traced to scope creep and lack of awareness of design goals (gigantic curb weight bloat from original goal contributing to all of the above).

The original goal and concept were good. Not a game-changer, but solid ideas. What resulted after that was shit. Robby was too interested in beating everyone and “winning” rather than designing a solid car that could do what he originally wanted it to do.

Hisun being involved and Chinesiuming everything was discussed too. Supplier first runs always look great. China gonna China, beware of any deal you have there. No one should be surprised that happened.

Again, the signs were there early. Some chose to ignore it and listen to the salesman.