There are days when a vehicle is transportation.
Then there are days when what happens inside it can determine whether a patient receives care, a police department can coordinate an emergency, or a community cut off from normal infrastructure can keep moving. Jared McCauslin thinks about the second kind of day. “Nobody notices the van on a good day,” says McCauslin, Co-Founder and CEO of VanDoit. “They notice it when it didn’t start, when the power died, or when there was nowhere private to talk. We design for the day it can’t fail.” VanDoit is a family-owned American manufacturer in Blue Springs, Missouri, transforming Ford Transit vans into mobile clinics, command posts, crisis units and disaster-response vehicles. Its roots reach back to Kline Motors in 1947, and today the company has built more than 2,000 modular vans for organizations across all 50 states.
“The problem we solve is simple to say and hard to do: the service has to be where the people are.”
Jared McCauslin, Co-Founder and CEO of VanDoit
Most essential services are built around a physical location, with power, connectivity, privacy and equipment inside. During a disaster, or in rural and underserved communities, reaching that building may be the very problem.
“We put the building on wheels,” McCauslin says, “and we make sure it keeps working when nothing around it does.”
THE MISSION DEFINES THE VEHICLE
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But McCauslin doesn’t begin by talking about vehicles.
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