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"It's easy for a small company to fall into the R&D trap of trying to invent the ultimate product. What typically happens at R&D-driven companies is, work never gets finished. I've known some who've had a great idea, hunkered down to develop it further, and when they finally stood back up, found that the rest of the world had gone past. The rule is, Get it out there, learn from it, and then come out with another version."
-- P.J.B.
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How did VORAD, flat broke and outgunned, attract such big-time spenders? Let's return to the fall of 1990, when the board of directors (since reshuffled) rationalized to Bouchard that the reason there was no product after 20 years was that the radar-sensor element was still too big and too costly. "Freeze this eternal tinkering and make the thing salable now," Bouchard insisted. "We'll find out how to make it $25 cheaper and half an inch shorter later." Not too much later, however. "In order to keep the lead," he says, "we had to be perceived as being in the lead." And that meant finding someone who had both engineering zeal and respect for the exigencies of the marketplace.
Within six months, by mid-1991, with Allstate supplying go-ahead capital as needed, vice-president of engineering and product development Jerry D. Woll, a military-radar expert grabbed by Bouchard from the area's ever-downsizing defense and aerospace industry, had commercially modernized the apparatus. At that point, with VORAD quietly working with the University of California at Berkeley, Bouchard thought the company's automatic-braking technology was field-tested sufficiently to chance inviting then secretary of transportation Samuel Skinner -- in San Francisco to celebrate the region's progress in highway-safety technology -- for a ride.
Hired especially to get IVHS Technologies' and VORAD's names into print as often and as sensationally as possible, high-tech public-relations specialist Ralph Silver delivered a throng of expectant journalists as Bouchard and Woll shined up the trusty Towncar with its new and improved innards (now digital rather than analog, reducing the part count) and drove it to a closed stretch of highway in San Francisco. Fail here, thought Bouchard, who'd been on the job for a mere nine months, and he might as well keep on driving -- off a cliff.
The accelerator was turned over to Skinner, who revved up the engine and, like a gray-suited Evel Knievel, gamely aimed the Towncar at a target car in front of the media entourage. The front page of the July 20, 1991, Chronicle carried an item headlined "Radar Rescue." The piece read in part, "A Bush cabinet secretary risked his life in a demonstration of new safety technology for cars. . . . [The car involved] was equipped with an IVHS system known as VORAD . . . that automatically stopped the swiftly moving vehicle, just in time to avoid what might well have been one of the most publicized crashes in history." Was Skinner scared? "Yeah, I was nervous," the secretary admitted.
And Bouchard? "Terrified," he later confessed. VORAD's daring was calculated to rattle the other would-be market sharers, revealing that some thitherto-unknown upstart was way ahead of them. But being the leader has a drawback, Bouchard discovered. With no one to follow, even a radar developer flies blind.
"We needed to have the system evaluated by honest-to-goodness customers," was how he saw the next step. "It's the nature of engineers to think they know what the thing should look like and how it should work, without ever talking to end-users. But the product stands to invade those cocoons of quiet that Detroit is turning out. Would drivers accept the lights and beeps? Would they allow a machine to operate gears, to apply brakes? And none of us understood the price threshold. What would a buyer be willing to pay for a warning system?"
Seeking fast answers, VORAD approached just-out-of-bankruptcy-court Greyhound Bus Lines, then suffering an unusually high accident rate and itself seeking national PR, to serve as a beta tester for warning-only (not automatic-braking) systems. The company agreed to install prototypes on four buses. The units used bright lights and assertive beeps to advise drivers on such matters as when they were following too closely or when there was a vehicle in the bus's right-side blind spot. They also recorded a running 10 minutes' worth of the given driver's steering, shifting, and other operating maneuvers.
The invention would reduce accidents by 25% to 40%, Greyhound calculated. It would pay for itself within the year. Greyhound retrofitted the remainder of its fleet of more than 1,600 vehicles with VORAD systems at around $2,000 each. It decorated the outside of every bus with a message declaring the vehicle equipped with radar collision-avoidance technology, providing what amounted to free national advertising for VORAD. By now a veteran at promotion, VORAD enticed Bush's new secretary of transportation (this time the gentleman's name was Andrew Card) to a press conference in April 1992 announcing the sale. The first sale to an entire commercial fleet by a developer in worldwide IVHS ranks, it jump-started what was to become IVHS Technologies' first million-dollar year.
"Greyhound was the validator of the application of a collision-prevention device by putting it in its fleet and allowing us to make a big deal about it," Bouchard grants. The unfamiliar trickle of incoming cash inspired Bouchard's post-1992 business-plan assumption that "with a proven warning system in the marketplace (both OEM and aftermarket), we will then seek strategic partners capable of introducing the next-generation product, automatic cruise control and braking."
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"Every entrepreneur thinks he's totally integrated, that he can go from inception to initial public offering in three years without any help. It doesn't work that way when you hope to make it into the big leagues, where the players are the General Motors of the world." -- P.J.B.
