And Roush Made it Happen

“We had an idea, and Roush made it happen.”  That’s a phrase often repeated from our partners in diverse industries, including technology startup firms, who rely on our product commercialization expertise – and the curiosity borne from decades of engineering experience – to take an idea from design, engineering, prototyping, testing to production. Roush brings expertise, reliability, and speed to the equation. For our customers, Roush = problem solved.

We give our customers the freedom to focus on their great idea and the end consumer of their product. Consider the tech startup trying to bring a new vehicle to market in the EV/AV/CAV space. Their expertise lies in EV architecture, software and sensing technology. Commercializing their product requires Roush’s expertise in integrating those technologies, packaging them into a vehicle, and understanding what’s required to validate and certify that vehicle to government standards. Roush takes those core competencies and complements them with every aspect of development – including design for manufacturing and a very deep familiarity with the supply chain. The thing that truly sets Roush apart is that we possess those capabilities under one virtual roof. For our customers, that equates to speed – a critical factor when success is defined by being the first to get a viable product to market or in front of funding sources.

Partnering with Roush in the conceptual phase of a project enables us to approach every stage of development with commercialization in mind. We invest a lot of time into understanding what our customers’ objectives are and achieving them in an innovative way. We’re large enough to tackle complete development projects, but we are small enough to be agile and flexible, ramping up and down with customers who prefer to take a phased approach to production that aligns with funding milestones.

The earlier we get involved, the better, but we can jump in at any phase of a project. Often customers have developed a technology and they may have a first prototype that needs to be tested. Roush is not an asset-lite company. We have testing capabilities that are really the most complete outside of an OEM, so our customers will not have to wait for an outside company to get a slot for testing that prototype. We control the timeline a lot closer than a company that does one activity and outsources all the others.

We have learned from dealing with innovators on the west coast – companies like Waymo, Canoo and Nuro. They like to push the boundary between possible and impossible, and we enjoy that challenge. We are very analytical, but we are also very curious. Meeting the needs of customers who constantly push boundaries takes a very special kind of person; someone with ingenuity, determination, resourcefulness, and deep technical expertise coupled with the vulnerability to acknowledge that they might not have all the answers. For example, one of our designers might have years of domain experience in chassis or powertrain systems, but the customer wants something that’s never been done before. At Roush, they can bring other teammates into the equation to work through the seemingly impossible, and the result brings to life a concept that may have started on a whiteboard.

And all of this doesn’t just apply to the mobility market. We work on astonishing projects for customers like Disney and Universal, pushing the boundary between possible and incredible, and explore space with customers like United Launch Alliance. We have a broad set of capabilities to meet a very broad set of customer requests. This company was founded almost 50 years ago by a man who was interested in solving the world’s most technically challenging problems, and that’s still what energizes us today.