Design for manufacture in the USA with URB-E’s electric vehicles
“When I was in college I picked a rice cooker for myself — the cheapest one available. But when you have a kid, you don’t want the stuff peeling off the back of the pot going into his body. You would pay an extra four hundred bucks to get the Zojirushi.”
I’m asking Peter Lee, CEO of URB-E about design for manufacture in the USA, and instead of the engineering tips I was expecting, he’s getting at a deeper truth.
“At the end of the day, people really value quality. They value branding. They value a story.”
URB-E, short for Urban Electronics, is Peter’s urban electric vehicle company. Foldable, compact, and lightweight, it’s not quite a bike — it has three wheels and no pedals.
“We’re not a car, and we’re not a toy. Everything that people were using to address last-mile transportation was a toy. A skateboard is a toy. A skateboard that goes fast is scary! An electric stand-up scooter is dangerous. We wanted to replace a car for trips under five miles and fit on existing public transportation.”
Peter points out to me that cars weigh three to four thousand pounds, so if someone is commuting to work, 95% of the gas burned is to transport the car. The two-wheeled 30 pound products that URB-E offers range from $1400 to $2600, and Peter’s theory that customers will pay more for high quality is proven by the success of his business.
In addition to the Pasadena retail location, URB-E services the University of Southern California, and have a deal with UPS for whom they’re designing additional foldable carts to hold delivery packages. I ask Peter how he landed the deal with UPS.
“They actually came to us! They’ve been looking for last mile solutions for a long time. It’s a subscription. They’re renting the units on a monthly basis, and we handle all the maintenance.”
As for engineering, the process is rather simple. URB-E has a compact storefront in Pasadena, where customers can take test rides to decide if they want the classic Sport or the more full-featured Pro, and choose colors and add-ons for their vehicle. Behind the store is the prototyping lab, with a 3-axis CNC mill. In the back are the office desks, including where the engineers, sales, and support staff sit.
The metal frames themselves are manufactured at a facility 45 minutes away, by machining extruded 60/61 T6 aluminum sourced from Sapa or Kaiser. “If it’s good enough for Boeing, it’s good enough for us!” All the parts are machined, even in production — an expensive process.
“If you’re a smaller company with a smaller order quantity, and you build overseas, it’s very difficult to build a new product exactly the way you envisioned it. It’s like organic food — the stuff you grow in your garden locally tastes amazing. We’re as close to farm to table as you can get when it comes to hardware.”
Peter’s closeness to his customers fuels the company’s product development, as he watches people using their URB-Es to solve their own problems.
“Women bought it because they could carry their heels. I had no idea that women were bringing two pairs of shoes to work! They were hanging the shoes underneath the seat, with a carabiner. This ingenuity comes directly from our customers. We have to innovate quickly, and that’s why we design and manufacture directly in California. We’re addressing really acute pain points that affect people who live in cities. Product fit is super important, and product development is all about solving problems. When you look at a business agnostically, it can desensitize you to the problem being solved. We need a BOM, we need the cost of goods — at the end of the day, you get this product that’s in mediocre land. That’s why we appreciate the Teslas, Apples, Zojirushis, these guys who push the envelope. They understand that the small details, which are very hard to execute in manufacturing, make all the difference in lifestyle.”
URB-E doesn’t take any engineering shortcuts that might compromise quality, but that doesn’t mean they don’t design for manufacture. In fact, since their first models, they’ve made multiple design enhancements to make more parts manufacturable with metal extrusion, to reduce the amount of machining. Having worked for years managing projects with factories both overseas and domestically, Peter is no stranger to the process.
“Anything and everything that can go wrong with manufacturing, I’ve seen. At the end of the day, it’s about expectation and communication. Manufacturing is not like, here’s the file, make it.
It’s like, OK, why does this factory want to work for us? Why are we a priority for them? Why would they support us over another project? How do they know we’ll be successful? Do they buy into our story? The really good factories are savvy about that. It’s not like they’ll take anything and everything. Those are the ones we want to work with. It’s a partnership. You are doing sales and marketing, and they only do manufacturing. They can tell you, don’t do it this way, you’ll save more time. Why are you machining this when you could stamp it? That type of expertise.
Manufacturing is as valuable as a really great attorney or a really great accountant. They are watching your back. If you are beholden to design, then manufacturing will always seem secondary. But the more you integrate design and manufacturing together, the better it gets, and the better the customer has it.
You sell more at a better price. Vertical integration is very difficult in the beginning, but if you can get it down, it changes everything. Designing everything, building your own building, manufacturing, selling, marketing, customer service. In the long term, if you can control that, and you have a product people really like, then you have a lot of freedom to innovate. Getting something cheap per part is not the most important thing. Figuring out what people want, how to make the product really good for those people, and how to serve the best experience possible, is.”
