For what it is worth my impressions of the meeting.
Biggest attendance I've ever seen. The usual intro and 2 videos from Saunders and Heinricy. Heinricy was in town before the meeting, but had to go to a race in Florida where someone said he is racing a new Subaru Legacy. Richard Kaplan seems to be all the things people have been asking for over the years. Articulate, excited about the products, interested in the products and most of all seems to have a plan to make money ASAP from those products.
I liked a couple of things he said about how to move from R&D to profit. He reshuffled the internal organization to clarify decisions and to focus responsibility for results. He has a priority list based on maximum return to the broadest market in the least amount of time. His plan for moving the product from here to there is objective, as in, things will go wrong, nothing is done till the checks clear, and the way into a major deal is to partner with established companies that already supply a similar product. Instead of thinking the only problem is, 'not invented here,' he correctly pointed out that big players need to know they will get large quantities of product with the quality they need by the date they need them.
He handled questions great, even the one about the FTV where he simply said he wasn't going to talk about it. He pointed out the problem with spending too much time and money on limited markets. He has a sense of humor about himself, which is on top of great confidence about Torvec, and a very good business approach. At least that's the way it seemed to me.
A question was raised about how long it would take to make products industry tested. He acknowledged that is usually a long, expensive process, but that Torvec had arrived at a point from years of effort where we were dealing with people at a level in OEMs that could make go decisions faster than starting at the bottom of the engineering chain. He was also excited about the racing success that Torvec had the last couple of years. As a Viper owner he related the story of his Viper skidding almost out of control because of the Chrysler differential issues and the fact that racing Viper went through their differentials after a couple of laps. The Heinricy connection is also expected to take us faster and deeper than normal, he didn't say that directly, but it was implied if I remember correctly. That reminded me about the effort to sell Iso-Torques to the public, so I asked if that wouldn't be an immediate bypass of extensive product testing. He said Torvec was only going to sell you an Iso-Torque for your Corvette/Camaro through a dealer network or an after market customizer. I got the impression this wasn't going to happen unless Torvec could be assured of the minimum number they needed to make it worthwhile. Could be wrong about that. Another related question about the relationship with RIT was answered by saying Torvec expects to utilize them for testing and validation of Torvec results.
Several people seemed excited about the mining deal because the industry really needs a scaled up Iso-Torque. It's amazing the 50 ton coal cars work at all now, so anything that increases their durability will be as welcome as the gigantic tires they use till the bitter end, because they are so expensive and hard to replace. As Torvec's head of engineering told me, that's another problem because the tires are often different dimensions, which puts more strain on the drive train. Considering the cost of downtime for these cars, the industry is highly motivated to quickly install whatever works from Torvec and I would think be willing to pay a lot for it, because a car out of service for a day is something like a loss of $100,000.
Finally, and congrats to those of you who made it this far, General Clark would seem to be the guy to help Torvec get closer to actually putting Iso-Torques or CVTs into all the HumVees that are going to be revamped/upgraded over the next decade or two.
Good meeting, but a very different meeting in that excitement about pumps, diffs, etc. was secondary to the excitement about moving these things into industry in the biggest way possible as quickly as possible. Saying that, Kaplan made no promises about impending deals, only that he expected developments to continue to evolve this year and while that was progressing he would be looking for a revenue stream. He stressed making the world a better place a couple of times, but I got the impression that would come with making Torvec products a money generating part of industry around the world. Probably some other stuff, but that's it for now. EOM
