ATV SpeedSafe Speed Limiters and QuadCruise Precision Speed Controls
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Deliver increased productivity in business.
Downtime from injured staff, administrative overheads handling safety incidents, increased insurance premiums and lost time dealing with Occupational Health and Safety regulators all conspire to for business to be safety conscious these days. It is simply good for your bottom line!
MCCruise in Australia has long recognised the link between speed and accidents in ATVs and UTVs and has developed SpeedSafe to address that problem. It has also addressed the ergonomic issue of trying to precisely control speed for many hours in agricultural and other applications.
SpeedSafe is a derivative of the QuadCruise product which was born out of the MCCruise motorcycle cruise control products first developed in 1997. The company developing, manufacturing and selling them, MotorCycle Cruise Controls in Melbourne, Australia has quietly developed the perfect range of products to enhance safety on ATVs, reduce fatigue, optimise consumable consumption and increase productivity in all continuous slow-speed applications – under-vine spraying, snail-baiting, fertilizing and minerals exploration, to name but a few.
SpeedSafe –
Large Agricultural companies are really starting to sit up and take notice of the savings to be had using SpeedSafe. Anecdotally, the largest seismic survey company in the States is said to be saving hundreds of thousands of dollars on maintenance alone on their ATV fleet using speed limiters. MCCruise (stands for MotorCycle Cruise) developed SpeedSafe back in 2006. It has been refined and developed to deliver quite sophisticated speed management – mostly in response to the US Railroads. ATVs are used to visually inspect EVERY bogey of (freight) trains before they leave the yard. A typical Honda TRX250 does about 35,000 MILES every year in the freight yard! Union Pacific have been buying SpeedSafe for years and there is no let-up in demand, so they obviously deliver the goods.
Specialist development for the railroads: naturally the riders don’t much like speed limiters. We understand that, but having rolled an ATV over on myself once, I appreciate the dangers
This year (2016) has seen and R&D project deliver a new innovation on Honda Pioneer 700s in New Zealand. LandCorp, a government owned farming corporation has about 120 separate farms. They went to tender for ATVs with speed limiters, but wanted something a bit more sophisticated: a low speed limit when the driver’s seat belt was unbuckled and a higher speed when the belt was done up. Blue Wing Honda (the Honda importer) has just won the tender on the back of MCCruise’ SpeedSafe delivering exactly what they needed.
Late last year, South Valley Farms in California discovered that their fleet of 120x ATVs needed special speed signal generators to fit our SpeedSafe to their older TRX250s without speedos, which cost a bit more. To our surprise, they opted to replace one third of their fleet with new Honda TRX420s for which we had a specific kit. They plan to fitout their entire fleet over the coming years.
And finally….Glenworth Valley ATV Tour operators in NSW, Australia have a fleet of about 40x ATVs fitted with MCCruise’ SpeedSafe. They have been running them for about 4 years and have seen substantial savings in maintenance costs as a result.
QuadCruise –
…were developed and released in 1999. They appeared on the ABC New Inventors (Australia) later that year. Product sold in 2000 is still operating 16 years later! These units are incredibly reliable.
Contract sprayers using QuadCruise say they pay for themselves in about six weeks’ of continuous operation. With consumables (weed spray) at about $150 per litre, it doesn’t take long to save money when the application rate is exactly right. Moreover, you never have to go back and respray as a result of a patchy application. Finally, the risk of overdosing is minimised around headlands and other areas because the spray automatically turns off when the QuadCruise is disengaged – minimising the risk of environmental degradation in adjoining waterways and water table contamination.
A novel application is found in New Zealand where the kiwi fruit pollen is harvested and costs about $150 per gram! (Apparently bees don’t much like kiwi pollen so saturation by beehives was the only way to assure a good crop previously, which must have been very expensive.) QuadCruise now underpins special spray equipment to blow the pollen onto the crop and deliver optimum pollination. Tony Guymer (one of the Directors) said they expected to sell one unit, but they now have well over eighty units and increasing again since a virus (accidentally imported by someone from Chile, where pollen harvesting was supposedly cheaper!) is being overcome in the New Zealand Ag sector.
Mining and Minerals exploration –
Quite a number of QuadCruise units are in service in magnetometer surveys in outback Australia and other areas around the world. SpeedSafe is starting to penetrate the mining industry where RTVs and ATVs are frequently used to get around vast mining and processing complexes.
Agricultural Research –
….many units are now used in Ag Research in both private, Government and University based or organisations. Specialist software delivers extraordinary repeatability day to day and season to season helping produce more meaningful results with one of the core variables taken out of the equation – application rates.
Defence –
Several government and non-Government defence industries have purchased QuadCruise for purposes unknown to MCCruise.
How to buy -
Kubota Australia is now the Australia and New Zealand Distributor of SpeedSafe and QuadCruise for their Kubota range of RTVs.
International Distribution is largely handled by MCCruise themselves saving the often substantial cost of distributors in the chain. You can buy direct online or see your dealer – more often than not telling the dealer such a product exists and asking them to become a dealer on the MCCruise web site to offer a ‘packaged solution’ with sale and installation of the QuadCruise on your ATV.
For more information go to www.mccruise.com Brochures are available for many products on the site and complete instruction sets available in response to email requests. If you have questions, Tony or Frank will often reply personally or even call you to discuss your application and requirements to make sure you get it right. As Tony says, different manufacturers make very different machines, often with very different capabilities. Preferably the application and availability of QuadCruise for that vehicle should dictate purchase of the actual vehicle. The amount of effort it takes to develop and refine product for every ATV necessarily precludes many models and manufacturers being included in the range offered. Access to the vehicles also limits development.
