Douglas Ronne
Douglas earned his Masters in Mathematics from Western Washington University in 2001. He worked for Raytheon doing analysis, programming, and integration from 2001 until 2005 when he became an entrepreneur and co-founded a business called Power Control Engineering developing motor controls for golf carts and similar electric vehicles. He did all the embedded software and most of the application software for the project as well as much of the testing.
He moved back to Cape Breton where he was born in 2009. Here he found the exact environment he had always wanted to live in: waterways, mountains, forest all easily accessible along with a fairly temperate climate. He also found his old next-door neighbor and they are getting married!
More than anything, Douglas wants to have a performance electric motorcycle and sports car. He expects this company to help him achieve those goals.
Carl Piehl
When Carl was a small boy, not more than eight, he found himself thinking that if a small toy car with D size batteries could run around the floor for ½ an hour then a larger car could do the same. At age 16 he built his first electric car using a VW bug, a starter generator off of an aircraft and six batteries. It was a fun project but left him wanting to go further. At the age of 21 he started his formal education at WWU and graduated with a BS in Manufacturing Engineering with some extended education in plastic and electronics.
Some years after college and between jobs, he found that he still could not buy a good motor controller for an on-road EV application. After going to the Firebird raceways with a buddy for EV racing, he set out to design and build a motor controller which consumed abut 1.5 years of time and $20k cash. He had some success but found that warrantying larger controllers would take any and all profits. So out of money and time he went to work for Boeing and worked in the planning department on the 747 airplane line for 1.5 years. He moved on to a job working in Bellingham as a design engineer which was a lot of fun working on new project design to determine the amount of leakage a room or building has for fire suppression and energy credits in Europe www.retrotec.com. Being good at many things he found that after the design work was done he ended up managing 14 people and overseeing the production of a 3 million dollar a year company.
This was fun for about one month and when the opportunity came to go back into the design side on golf cart motor controllers he jumped at the opportunity to learn more about the electronics design that had eluded him in the past years. As he has grown a bit Grey, he has found that putting all your eggs in one cart can leave one hungry so he started an online business with his wife for selling the very products he was designing. Over the past two years this has led to a full time job with expectations of expanding to on-road motor controllers www.evdrives.com. In exchange for Carl's help he will receive preferential pricing and be the first to carry the items in his online store.