MKII
Vehicle Recovery Device
You’ve been driving off-road, somewhere isolated and remote. You’re alone, and now you’re stuck. You’re bogged hard and help is miles away. It’s all up to you. What now?
Brad McCarthy founded MAXTRAX in 2001 after hearing one too many stories of this potentially life threatening situation. When we first started talking to Brad, he was looking for a simpler way for one person to extract their bogged vehicle. From that partnership was born the MAXTRAX MkI 4×4 recovery board. This innovative product created an entirely new way of self-extracting your bogged vehicle, and a new market category as well.
By 2009, Brad and the market-leading MkI product had led MAXTRAX to a national reputation for quality design, engineering, manufacture and service. The MAXTRAX product range commanded a premium price, and serious users were more than happy to pay. However copycat competitors were starting to enter the market MAXTRAX had created, pushing lower quality solutions at cheaper prices.
In the best design projects, there’s no “us” and “them” – no divisions between consultant, client and the client’s customer. It’s about forming one design team. We were fortunate to have always had this relationship with Brad. The trust there allowed us to explore some tough questions together. Have we created a market for others to take? How do we continue to out-innovate these new low-cost competitors? How could we design a complete solution and experience, not just a board? We started this journey asking how we could save lives in challenging environments. How could we design a solution for the most extreme environments? Who might be the most extreme users we could design for? What about a special forces unit?
