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Originally Posted by ZBB
I thought Brammo just licensed the Atom design from Ariel?
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They licensed the name and the right to build something that looks generally like an Atom. In the finest tradition of British car building, all of the UK Atom specs were held in a combination of the employee's heads and the various fixtures they used when assembling cars.
Brammo got a UK Atom and essentially reverse-engineered it. They did make very detailed engineering drawings (I have a few of them) and they used CNC equipment to make parts - very different.
Brammo's license with Ariel UK (as I understand it) required Brammo to make their drawings available to Ariel UK at no cost. That turned into one of the contentious issues between the factories as Craig Bramscher got summoned to Ariel UK to discuss things like my rod end failure (and subsequent 5-digit repair bill), the fact that the Brammo "300HP" cars weren't anywhere even close, etc. and when he got there he was apparently told to hand over his drawings and specs to the people from the new Ariel China who were there at the same time. That is all hearsay of course, but from people I trust.
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Wouldn't think that would require re-engineering things outside the powertrain changes made to conform to EPA regs?
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The Atom was never FMVSS-compliant and could not be made FMVSS-compliant. That's why they were sold for track use only (and some people registered them in states which didn't require compliance). When TMI took over US Atom manufacturing, one of the first things they did was introduce the Spec Race Atom (SRA) which removed all of the "street" things like turn signals.