The covers came off the Vanguard Roadster earlier this month at the New York Motorcycle show, launching not only a brawny new bike but also a new brand with big ambitions.
Vanguard reckons it can use the increasing digitization of manufacturing to ride with the pack of long-established bike companies, such as Honda, Yamaha, Harley-Davidson and increasingly Minnesota-based Polaris, which together are set to sell some 500,000 motorcycles and scooters in America this year.
So far, Vanguard has built a grand total of one machine, priced at $30,000. What enables the start-up to aim so high is the way digital technologies are lowering the cost of entry to manufacturers that were once seen as the preserve of giants.
That is especially so in the costly and long-drawn-out process of product development, with the use of three-dimensional computer-aided design. From sketches, to clay models, component engineering and testing, it used to take a carmaker five years or more to bring a new vehicle to market. It is similarly slow-going for bike manufacturers.
Some carmakers can now do the job in just two, with the help of three-dimensional computer-aided design, engineering and simulation systems. In effect, the product — a car, motorcycle or even an aircraft — exists in a digital form where it can be sculpted and tested long before anything physical is built. It is also possible to simulate production methods.
This is the approach taken by Vanguard, which was set up in 2013 by Francois-Xavier Terny, a former management consultant, and Edward Jacobs, a motorcycle designer. Despite lacking the resources of the big producers — for now, the firm has just a handful of employees — it used software (in this case Solidworks from Dassault Systèmes, a French company) to design a digital motorcycle before turning it into a real one. Such systems are benefiting from the falling price and increasing performance of computing power.
"We now have the same level of design and engineering tools as the big boys, which would have been impossible 10 years ago," Terny said.
The digital designs also make it easier for the company to gain access to global suppliers. Design files can simply be e-mailed to a vast network of engineering firms that offer their services online.
Once road-testing and further development is completed, production of the Roadster is scheduled to begin in 2018 at a refurbished industrial unit in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, which is now home to a number of manufacturing companies.
