In 2,000 I purchased my 12 year old son Travis a Yerf Dog 3203 go-kart from Sams Club in Greenville NC. It was a somewhat traditional go-kart with a pull start engine but it did have something new for a go-kart, a roll cage, In 2002 Travis and Barry were shopping at Sams and there was a completely new type of vehicle unlike anything they had seen before. It was a red Yerf Dog 3206. It had a strange looking elongated engine and electric start. It had a more beefy frame and large off road tires and a heavy duty role cage.
Mom was against getting a second go-kart for Travis but Dad got it anyway. And mom was wrong!!! Travis now 14 assembled the go-kart himself. Travis was being home schooled and his go-kart became his school, college, and phd. In a period of five years Travis went from knowing little to nothing about motors, mechanics and go-karts to being self taught and becoming the leading technical expert in the USA on the new GY6 style go-karts and engines and designing and selling parts to fix many of the issues that Yerf Dog had. He has also created a website that he deigned called BuggyDepot.com in 2005 where he was doing $200 per month is sales. See his articles technical articles here. His no spark guide on a typical day gets 500 views. Most of these articles were written while he was a teen--any with dates prior to 2018 he was a teen.
I had been an engineer and business unit manager and business consultant in Fortunate 100 companies for 25 years from IBM to Hughes Aircraft to Cooper Industries and some smaller companies. In 2006 Travis talked me into financing and partnering in Buggy Depot.
By the time he was 20 to 22, with zero college, I could put him up against any engineer from MIT or VA Tech on any electrical, mechanical or programming problem. His Yerf Dog buggy became his engineering school.
His list of technical accomplishments ranged from designing and building a dyno to designing axles, spindles, ball joints, to electronics, to performance engines, to computer programming, to search engine optimization and much more..
We eventually sold Buggy Depot and Travis went on to develop smart technology for electronic fuel injection for small engines at a companies he founded called NanoEFI.com and SuperGY6.com. BDX had been the brand for the product line that Buggy Depot had manufactured for Yerf Dogs and other vehicles Buggy Bepot X or BDX. The new owner did not want the BDX product line and hence BDX Performance was born with me being the owner. Today there is no affiliation between Buggy Depot and BDX Performance.
The same core people who worked at Buggy Depot, who Travis trained, are still with BDX Performance and we are still building many of the products from the buggy depot days in the same building with the same equipment. However since then we have expanded our product offerings and plan to be the premier seller of Chinese vehicles and parts in the coming years based upon our deep experience and our burning desire to bring clarity and honesty to this market.