Rewiring mobility and purpose
A Mars Hill company provides life-changing transport for disabled customers.
WORK FORCE
Early in Tommy Ausherman’s studies at Appalachian State, he wasn’t eyeing a start-up
or a way to disrupt transportation.
He just wanted to get to class alive.
Five undulating miles of roads and a heavily trafficked highway separated his Boone apartment and campus. Parking passes were pricey, and buses were unreliable. After twice getting brushed by passing trucks while riding his dad’s Trek mountain bike to class, he figured the safest way wasn’t slower.
It was faster.
A tinkerer from an early age, Ausherman modified the Trek by adding a trolling motor from a boat, powered by motorcycle batteries. It looked like a mechanical dare, but his new 150-pound e-bike hurtled him safely at 45 mph.
Tech- and engineer-minded classmates mocked the design. Before his 2010 graduation, though, Ausherman’s quest for lighter, sleeker and faster had him MacGyvering high-speed helicopter-motor-powered recumbent trikes in his basement for cash, launching the business that became Outrider USA.
The Mars Hill-based company has quietly found a niche in manufacturing adaptive lightweight four-wheel-drive electric vehicles. Its powerful, zippy-fast Coyote model has a range of more than 80 miles and easily navigates most reasonably boulder-free wilderness trails.
And though not initially Ausherman’s vision, 60% of buyers suffer from significant physical disabilities — many with paralysis.
WHITE-KNUCKLING
On a visit to Mars Hill, I strapped into a Coyote for a test run. After trailing Ausherman around the warehouse that’s home to Outrider and nine other businesses, he shifted my machine into the middle power level. Moments later, I was white-knuckling up a long, steep grassy incline at about half throttle, falling far behind Ausherman as his retriever/German Shepherd mix Bruce frolicked along. The Coyote’s stability and low center of gravity made it nearly impossible to flip, but its muscle was unexpectedly intimidating.
When Bruce suddenly leapt in front of me as I gunned through a muddy ditch, I let off the throttle and my “bike” — the common nomenclature for Coyote riders — stopped. Now mired, I was certain I’d need rescuing. But I thumbed the throttle and popped out easily, tackling the climb again with a little more confidence and a lot
more speed.
That my ride was a bit raw and scary was fitting. Outrider’s 17-year history is more rough and tumble than most. The dizzying span between Ausherman’s first builds and the production of Coyote runs through peaks and valleys akin to his Madison County surroundings. Exhilarating ascents include world records and the nearly accidental discovery of providing disabled riders with invigorating transport. But there’s also economic exhaustion, supply chain nightmares, frustration — and faith.
It leads back to Ausherman’s original calling: purpose and meaning, surprisingly found in a market that includes people whose bodies no longer function as designed, but whose desire for movement (really, just feeling wind in their hair again) remains intact.
THIN PAYOFF
Outrider relocated to the collaborative manufacturing site in Mars Hill in 2022 from its first real home in Fletcher, where for five years Ausherman and his two co-founders lived and worked in a windowless 750-square-foot flex space. He often slept in a closet-sized loft.
“It was teeny tiny,” Ausherman remembers. “Our sink drained into a 5-gallon bucket. It was pretty hilarious.”
But early three-wheeled machines they engineered and assembled made headlines and earned performance cred. One won the 2015 Pikes Peak Electric Bike Hill Climb, averaging 32 mph. Another hit 85 mph on the Hendersonville airstrip — setting a world record for under-100-pound vehicles. (Unofficial but uncontested; footing the bill to have the Guinness folks deem it official wasn’t in the budget.)
Ausherman was having a blast. Financially, though, Outrider was barely sustainable. Trikes sold, but customizing each ride was demanding.
“I was like, ‘Oh, people are going to commute to work on these trikes,’” Ausherman says. “They’re going to save money on gas, and it’s going to help them live a healthier lifestyle. It’ll be a win-win. And they’re really cool machines.”
Some Outrider customers, though, were wealthy hobbyists using them as playthings. The payoff felt thin.
“They might run them once or twice a month,” Ausherman says. “You go through a struggle for a meaningful cause, and it’s bearable. But going
through a struggle for someone’s toy is harder to get excited about.”
THE CALL
Nearing a breaking point in 2015, Ausherman slipped into an Asheville coffee shop and spent three hours trying to sketch out a business model that would reconcile purpose and profitability. For a guy who’d always been able to fix things, it seemed a problem without a solution.
Frustrated, he got into his car to drive home.
“I was just sitting there, and I said a really simple prayer,” he told me. “I was like, ‘Lord, I know you made me to make things. I’ll go wherever you want me to go. I’ll stay if you want me to stay, I’ll go if you want me to go. But I just want to make things that make a difference for people.’”
Ausherman, who found his Christian faith while attending App State, got a call days later from Chris Wenner, an inventor from Tucson, Arizona, who’d broken his neck in a diving accident 25 years earlier. Wenner had a recurring dream about a bike he could ride as a quadriplegic and built a prototype he couldn’t bring to market alone. Outrider eventually partnered with him, launched a successful $125,000 Kickstarter project, then committed fully to adaptive vehicles, trading novelty for necessity.
Prayer answered.
“If it were up to me, it would be performance to the end,” Ausherman says in a video posted on Outrider’s website. “Just go fast. I didn’t ever want to be involved in adaptive wheelchairs in the early days, but it was something that God clearly called me to. And I think he took my passion for off-road stuff to build a new kind of machine, one that has the capabilities to adapt as an off-road wheelchair, but one that looks cool and one that’s exciting to ride, and one that anyone would want to ride.”
Sparked by Wenner’s call, Outrider’s new three-wheeled Horizon model began shipping in 2016. It found a constituency among people with paralysis, cerebral palsy, ALS, multiple sclerosis, spinal cord injuries and others whose conditions limited balance or endurance. Riders largely confined to their homes were suddenly navigating trails, hunting with friends, or simply “walking” their dogs again. Their collective experiences were transformational. Military veterans — many grappling with depression as much as physical injury — reported renewed independence. “Life changing” became the typical review.
Yet the complexity of the builds, compounded by pandemic-era supply chain disruptions, forced another evolution. With users pushing the rear-wheel drive machines beyond what they could handle, Outrider abandoned trikes in 2022 in favor of its Coyote four-wheel drive model. Simplifying manufacturing while expanding capability clarified the company’s identity. No longer chasing records, Outrider was engineering access and serving as a “wingbuilder” in users’ healing process.
No two Coyotes are alike. Controls can be configured for riders with no leg function, no hand function, or strength on only one side of the body. A single platform supports arm-powered hand cycles, throttle-only operation, tri-pin steering for quadriplegics and hybrid setups. Making them modular is easier to manufacture, which was the point.
“People aren’t modular,” Ausherman says. “So the machines have to be.”
KEEPING IT LOCAL
There’s momentum. Outrider was featured at this year’s Armed Forces Bowl college football game in Fort Worth, Texas, where
two wounded veterans received Coyotes. The Department of
Veterans Affairs approved the vehicles for qualifying vets. The Ruby Project, a nonprofit initiative, funded 17 machines for wounded service members.
Outrider also developed a motorized stretcher carrier designed for search-and-rescue operations, capable of transporting a Stokes basket through terrain inaccessible to ATVs or ambulances. It’s a typical Ausherman-like MacGyvering: fire departments along the Appalachian Trail love prototypes, which reduce average rescue times from three hours to one.
Challenges remain. Ausherman would love for Outrider’s staff of 12 to sell and ship more bikes and cut build lead times. Manufacturing in the U.S. in a space he loves (owned by Spark Robotic) means higher expenses. The average retail cost is about $22,000. Full of faith, Austherman believes that Outrider has just scratched the surface for off-road performance, range and adaptability.
“We’re not just putting stuff together,” he says. “We’re changing lives.” ■
Full throttle
Restoring one’s passion for the outdoors
Dillon Duncan’s lone memory of that first week in the hospital is his doctor saying everything had changed.
“He leans over my bedside and says, ‘Your life is different now. You’re going to have to find new hobbies because you can’t do the stuff you used to do. … Good luck.’”
Days before, on Aug. 22, 2010, Dillon drove to meet his father and brother for rifle practice and some hiking near the family’s home in Washington state. In a hurry — “like a typical dumbass, 16-year-old kid going way too fast on gravel roads” — he lost control, overcorrected twice and flipped his truck. Duncan, not wearing a seat belt, was ejected, his pelvis crushed.
That doctor’s visit was his welcome to paraplegia.
“I don’t remember my response,” Duncan says. “According to my dad, I told the doctor to go shove it where the sun doesn’t shine — and used a couple other choice words — and told him not to come back, and to find me a new doctor. I was pretty pissed.”
Now 32 and paralyzed from the chest down, Duncan lives in Texas and works in sales for an Idaho-based onion and potato grower. He speaks matter-of-factly about his determination to keep exploring
the outdoors.
“Everything I had ever loved was outside — riding horses, hunting, fishing, camping, hiking,” he says. “It’s always been a part of who I am. When I wrecked my pickup, things changed fast. It was a huge learning curve getting back out and doing the things I enjoy.”
Various four-wheelers didn’t give him off-road access. When his father forwarded a link about Outrider USA’s Coyote, Duncan barely glanced at it. Six months later, Duncan still hadn’t. And six months after that, his father put down a deposit, insisting the adaptive four-wheeler would be “a game-changer.”
It has been. Duncan rides almost daily.
“The coolest thing with Outrider is that I’m now able to go anywhere you’re legally allowed to walk,” Duncan says. “It’s got a wide enough footprint, and it’s light enough that I can go off-road and reach places I haven’t been able to get to in 16 years.”
That includes a four-day hunting trip in west Texas with buddies just before Christmas. “There was a lot of sand, so I was pretty much full throttle the whole time,” he says. He also took a long hike into the Guadalupe Mountains with his girlfriend, Kayla. “I drove it hard,” he says, “bouncing it off rocks and pushing into stuff I’d get stuck in, and have to figure my way out of.”
When Duncan came home after three months in the hospital and rehab, he says he was “pretty bummed out” for a few weeks. “Then I realized, this is life,” he says. “I can still do things — it’s just different. It’s definitely harder. But that’s where the Coyote comes in. It’s given me a sense of freedom I haven’t had in a very long time.” ■
Bill Horner III is a third-generation newspaper publisher who was an owner and editor of The Sanford Herald and the Chatham News + Record. He and his wife Lee Ann live in Sanford. Reach him at bhorner@businessnc.com
