NATDA Magazine Sep/Oct 2020 | Page 50

With an erector set in hand , eight-year-old Sonny Shah started solving a problem that would eventually lead him to a patent that would wow the trailer industry - a design that changes how professional and hobby motorcyclists load their bikes .

“ As a child growing up in India , I had neighbors that were into racing motorcycles . They used to load bikes onto a big truck . It always looked like a struggle . They would drop bikes all the time ,” Sonny remembers . “ Even back then , I thought that there must be a better way . What if the deck goes down rather than you lift the bikes ?”
As the years passed , Sonny earned a Mechanical Engineering degree from the University of Michigan and worked for General Motors for seventeen years . Along the way , he built a prototype trailer and perfected it over the span of five years . His ideas , however , didn ’ t come without its hurdles , including a patent battle . Sonny eventually obtained the patents he needed for his inventive design and the potential competitor moved on to another venture . Interestingly , Sonny later partnered with that same competitor to purchase materials and other designs . With patents in hand , Sonny is moving full steam ahead . The lowering trailers that he envisioned as a child are now readily available to the market after a lot of hard work .
“ Before now , we weren ’ t ready to launch because we were still innovating and fine-tuning the trailers . We didn ’ t have the ‘ perfect product ,’ yet ,” shared Sonny . Now that we ’ ve zeroed in on the design , we ’ re retrofitting previous models to our latest design . So , if some had purchased from us in the past , we update it so the customer has the newest version . Our customers love this . We
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