Image: Trevor Nicols
Kelowna’s David Sullivan is taking on the ATV industry with the Quadbar.
Although many big-time manufacturers are trying hard to make him fail, one local entrepreneur is on a mission to make all-terrain vehicles a whole lot safer.
David Sullivan is the president of Quadbar Industries, the Kelowna company that manufactures the quadbar, a “crush protection” device Sullivan says has the potential to save hundreds of lives.
The Quadbar is a highly engineered, U-shaped piece of pipe that riders can attach to the back of their ATVs. If their machine flips, the bar keeps the rider safe by creating a space between the ATV and the ground.
The Quadbar stops the ATV from completing a full roll when the rider loses control, or even when the machine flips backwards.
It’s a simple design, but one that is incredibly important to Sullivan.
Prior to starting Quadbar Industries, Sullivan worked in the agricultural health and safety field. Seven years ago, he was at a conference that featured a speaker talking about ATV safety.
It was while he was at that conference that he learned a family member had flipped his ATV and severely injured his back.
“I just thought, oh are you frigging kidding me?” Sullivan remembered. “I just thought, there has to be something we can do about this, there has to be something that can be designed for these machines to make them safer.”
Image: Trevor Nichols
He started digging into the statistics, and said he was “staggered” by how many accidents and deaths were caused by ATVs each year.
Although current information is difficult to come by, the Canadian Safety Council has estimated that an average of 182 Canadian die each year while riding ATVs. On top of that, tens of thousands are admitted to hospital with ATV-related injuries.
“If we had Quadbars on those ATVs, we could have reduced those fatalities by at least 40 per cent,” he said. “That’s at least 80 people each year, and who knows how many injuries.”
Sullivan began working with an Australian partner, David Robinson, to design the Quadbar. Today, after extensive safety testing and design tweaks, riders and safety regulators are beginning to take notice.
Sullivan, an experienced rider and former motocross racer, says one of the things he appreciates most about the Quadbar is the fact that it sits lower than the rider’s head, and its light weight means it’s hardly noticeable on most ATVs.
“Once you put on the helmet, you don’t even know it’s there,” he said.
They’ve even designed a special model that folds down in the middle, so riders with their machines in the back of their trucks can still fit through a Tim Horton’s drive through.
Sullivan admits there hasn’t been a ton of interest in his product locally, but in Australia there is a rebate program for people who install a crush protection device, and a few local insurers are offering rebates to customers who install one.
The oil and gas and forestry industries, both in Canada and the US, are also some of his biggest customers.
That’s a good start, Sullivan said, but he wants to see crush protection devices gain a lot more traction, to help make a notoriously dangerous pastime a little more safe.
“We’ve got to protect lives at the end of the day, and right now there’s too many Canadians dying; 185 is unacceptable, and that’s just fatalities, that’s not including injuries, and severe injuries,” he said.
Sullivan says safety regulations in Canada could be much stronger. He also pointed the finger at the big ATV manufacturers, which he says have been actively lobbying against products like his.
“Why manufacturers aren’t doing more about this is beyond me. Why haven’t we stood up and said ‘hey this isn’t right?’”
For more information on the Quadbar, check out Quadbar Industries online.
All Biz Profiles Stories
