Paid-up members of the Old Guard will find a contemporary sports car like a Porsche Cayman a useful measuring stick for a vehicle that acts like a car but is in fact registered as a motorcycle. After a cool, clear afternoon driving the Vanderhall Edison 2, a front-drive lightweight battery-electric trike that offers intimate connection to the physics of motion, I spoke at length with Steve Hall, founder and CEO of Vanderhall Motors.
“We looked into electric because we’re agnostic about powertrain,” says Hall, who has been marketing GM-powered 3-wheelers for a few years with enough success that he has bootstrapped his privately held firm into black ink producing a mere 1000 vehicles a year. “Edison has a motor for each front wheel and two batteries up front. Combined, the batteries have 28.8kW hours on a 100-volt system.” The twin air-cooled motors produce a total of 104kW, which equates to about 140 horsepower, and 232 lb. ft. of torque available from the moment the go pedal is pressed.
Edison 2 can hit 60 mph in 4.4 seconds, matching a 2019 Porsche Cayman S. Each ft.-lb. of torque in a Cayman S must motivate 9.88 pounds. In Edison 2, that figure is 6.25 pounds, resulting in surprising performance at speeds under 60 mph. Surely, a Cayman will leave any Vanderhall far behind on a mountain road or racetrack—no contest. But in marked contrast to most supercars and even sports cars like the Cayman, a racetrack or amazing mountain road is not required to find the magic because performance is not governed by layers of stability and traction control. It’s just you, the pedals, the steering wheel and that internal gyroscope mounted near the base of your spine, which by the way is riding about six inches off the pavement. A smile washed over my face before I reached the end of my bumpy oak-lined country lane and lasted long after I’d parked Edison for the last time.
“Vanderhall is all about hopping in and going wherever you want for pleasure. That’s why we don’t invest money in telematics, in navigation. This is a visceral experience,” says Hall. Cut-down side panels leave the driver’s upper body exposed, out in the breeze. Excepting a Caterham 7, which is worn like a pair of pants, or the most comparable Morgan three-wheeler that is also technically a motorcycle, today’s sports cars offer nothing so elemental, so very 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s. Edison reminded of my father’s 1935 MG TA, and the evening of my drive I pulled down a long-slumbering Evelyn Waugh novel. I also revisited “Wind, Sand and Stars” to relish Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s poetic language about connection between man and a simple, light craft.
“If we ever come out with an Edison R, we can up torque output by almost 30 percent with motors only three-quarters of an inch wider,” says Hall, “but Edison 2 is right on the edge of losing traction.” More torque to the front wheels will overwhelm grip, requiring an invasive layer of electronic intervention between driver and machine that cuts against the Vanderhall ethos of pure engagement. Edison 2 can be a palate cleanser for those who own supercars, and a great way to fetch the mail if you have a winery or gentleman’s ranch with a long driveway. Edison would settle into life in my beachside neighborhood with frequent jaunts to nearby cafes.
“To get under three seconds to 60, we can throw a third electric motor on the rear wheel,” potentially built into the hub yet with limited or no need for traction control. “But we don’t know if there is a market for an R.” My drive was in fact the first of an Edison 2 by anyone outside the company. Jay Leno had it next for his CNBC show.
Vanderhall’s blade-like windscreen offers little protection for taller people. Invest in a newsboy cap and a pair of World War One aviator goggles, or at least shooting range protective sunglasses. Better still, aftermarket companies can provide a lightweight polycarbonate windscreen that is several inches taller, a modest post-sale modification.
Retired NBA star Shaquille O’Neal is arguably Vanderhall’s most famous customer, and no doubt its largest. To fit his 7-foot-plus frame, O’Neal has the frame rails sectioned and lengthened from the cowl back, adding about a foot to the wheelbase. But O’Neal’s size 22 shoes work in the standard footwell. My 13s had room to waltz. It must be liberating for someone O’Neal’s size to clamber into a car with limitless shoulder, elbow and head room, with none of the claustrophobia tall folks can feel in GTs.
Partly due to right-place right-time and a dash of luck, Vanderhall has tapped a growing market. “Two years ago, we could not get into Harley stores. But with the decline in heavyweight cruiser sales, and fixed costs of big dealerships, they need to replace that income. Harley dealers work well because they sell premium products and have the clientele,” says Hall. Even never-die Boomers struggle balancing a 700- or 800-pound Harley or Indian. How many times have I seen these bikes dropped at stoplights on Pacific Coast Highway, the rider needing help from passersby to hoist it up? “They can trade in the Harley, we have financing with Synchrony…an easy transition. Triumph and Indian stores do well, too. ‘Metric’ dealers—Japanese and KTM dealers—have no problem selling in heavily populated areas. In more rural areas the metric stores don’t do as well.”
Hall has been on a steep marketing and product planning learning curve. He has adopted a familiar “good, better, best” trim strategy. To radically reduce the customer satisfaction headaches Vanderhall had early on, Hall now limits the range of dealer- and factory-installed accessories. Though Vanderhall offers models that can cost $35,000 or more, the baseline “Black Jack” seems the best deal, with minimal accessories and a price in the mid 20s. After all, it’s about the sensation of driving a light vehicle that can change direction instantly, not an audio system or heated seat.
The firm has experimented with ultra-low-volume carbon-fiber specials that sell for two or three times the price of the more conventional aluminum-framed trikes, but Hall has been unimpressed with carbon-fiber construction beyond its marketing appeal, noting that bodywork of early carbon-fiber supercars can “sweat,” the panels turning wavy. He prefers skinning his folded and welded sheet aluminum frames with ABS, the same pliable material that covers mainstream car bumpers. It may lack cachet, but ABS is easy to repair. At 1450 lbs., roughly half the weight of the Cayman and 900 pounds lighter than a Mazda Miata, Edison 2 is already so light there’s limited benefit to carbon-fiber.
More important than the vehicle itself, and the real story with Vanderhall, is a coherent supply chain that can accept SolidWorks design data and deliver high-quality Vanderhall components in small volumes to his Provo, Utah, assembly facility. The greenfield assembly plant is entering second-phase build-out and when complete will be capable of producing 75,000 vehicles, a capacity to be fulfilled with vehicles reaching beyond trikes. In just a few years, Hall has sorted the design, engineering, component manufacturing and assembly process needed to create a complex consumer product. The trike is merely proof of concept that Vanderhall can rapidly develop a broader range of vehicles in the loosely regulated powersports segment.“We build our own shocks, springs, bell crank, plates, and then all of the upper and lower control arms, the knuckle. Brake caliper is our own design,” says Hall. Bell cranks are a relatively exotic design normally found on supercars, like the laydown dampers of the Lamborghini Aventador S. “We use the bell crank on the front suspension to bring the shock tower height down. With a conventional MacPherson strut, the hood would be about six inches taller,” which would ruin a Vanderhall differentiator, the extremely low ride height—the driver can easily touch the road surface. “If we had gear drive, with gear reduction, we would have to build a battery under the pan and that would raise the seating position up six inches to get 30 kilowatts,” says Hall.
Style is not Vanderhall’s calling card. Hall has explored relations with several world-famous design houses, and there is a design-driven special edition in the works that might attract fashionistas that can help elevate Vanderhall’s profile. The art is in the details of the front suspension, and rear single-sided swing arm. Still, wherever you go, people stare, squeal and wave. It’s the old trick of proportions that are completely out of place in the American landscape, like seeing a tiny 1950s English sports car running like a mouse among elephant SUVs.
Vanderhall is a relative unknown without storied provenance like Porsche, Lotus, Caterham, Morgan or Alfa Romeo. But the Hall family brings the cachet of invention and entrepreneurship.
“My grandfather worked for GE labs on the diamond team,” says Hall. “He invented the synthetic diamond over the Christmas holiday, by himself.” After leaving GE, which awarded Tracy Hall a $10 savings bond for his invention, he designed an innovative press to manufacture synthetic industrial diamonds, and most synthetic diamond powder is now produced using evolutions of that design. He later founded MegaDiamond, and then Novatek, the family’s tech incubator that Steve Hall’s father still runs. “These are industrial diamonds used for down-hole drilling, mainly offshore oil rigs,” says Hall. Grandfather was director of research at Brigham Young and stayed in that position while also managing his own companies. His arrangement with BYU enabled him to retain all patents. Basically, he was encouraged to moonlight. Tracy Hall and his synthetic diamond are mentioned in a season two episode of “Breaking Bad” as an example of how inventors laboring at corporations and think tanks are often stripped of the financial benefit of their genius.
“We have lots of ideas and not enough time,” says Hall, who described vehicles that might bear the Vanderhall name in the next few years. “Currently we are privately held,” says Hall. “We are profitable. I don’t want to go into transportation [meaning four-wheeled automobiles for the road]. In transportation you’re up against autonomy. We like tech, but we are against autonomy. You will see new products, but we will always stay in high-end powersports where we can concentrate on the experience of driving.”
