Nova Cruz Products burned rubber in the personal transportation market with its recently unveiled Voloci, a whisper-quiet electric motorbike designed in SolidWorks three-dimensional computer-aided design software.

SolidWorks enabled Nova Cruz to design parts and sub-assemblies in hours instead of weeks so it could get the super light motorbike to market at a quick turnaround time. Getting innovative products to market first is crucial for smaller manufacturing companies like Nova Cruz that are trying to spark a trend. SolidWorks' quick design time originally helped the company get the Xootr scooter to market quickly .

"We had a tight timeframe. We wanted to set the bar for high-performance electric motorbikes that have a long range, are light, so we needed to get it to market fast," said Nathan Ulrich, Nova Cruz's chief technical officer and co-founder. "SolidWorks' Windows environment and powerful sub-assembly capabilities were integral to helping us quickly develop prototypes that we could test and tweak. That functionality coupled with the ability to transfer SolidWorks designs into a program that automatically machines the parts helped us produce a finished product in a short time."

Nova Cruz first made a splash in January of 2000 when it launched the award-winning line of Xootr kickscooters. The company again turned to SolidWorks when it set out to apply the same concept to a motorised bike and change how the public and the industry view electric vehicles. Nova Cruz took advantage of the extensive SolidWorks Solution Partner Program to streamline production.

It uses Gibbs and Associates' GibbsCAM, a computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) partner product for machining parts based on SolidWorks designs. The two technologies help companies accelerate both design and manufacturing. Nova Cruz also used Structural Research and Analysis Corporation's COSMOS/Works to perform structural analysis on various parts of the bike.

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