Police Chase

By: Laurel Furlow

William Santana Li glances at the clock as the phone rings. It's 11 a.m. He has a feeling the caller is Stacy Dean Stephens. Li mentally reviews the email that Stephens, a Dallas-area police officer, sent him the day before. Stephens had outlined an idea of how to lessen the inherent danger of police work--the high-speed chases, the confrontations, the life and death situations. The pitch moved Li. He just isn't sure he can help. The phone keeps ringing.

It made sense that Stephens approached the young executive. Li has an impressive résumé—from graduating in 1991 with a Carnegie Mellon engineering degree in just three years, to being Ford's youngest senior executive worldwide at the age of 28, to securing $250 million for a Ford subsidiary.

Li says he has always had an interest in and fascination with the automotive industry. "Everything comes together in this industry—the creative plus the technical, the rational and the irrational. It's where brands and customers and technology, finance and operations, all come together to an actual product that you can touch and feel and that stirs the emotions of the kid in every single one of us."

Certainly, starting a new homeland security company from scratch, one that would build a vehicle specifically for police officers, would be a daunting and thrilling challenge, a challenge Stephens presented in his email. With more than a little trepidation, Li answers the phone. It's Stephens. Thirty days later, in February 2003, Carbon Motors Corporation is born.

Six years later, Li hasn't second-guessed himself. "The 840,000 law-enforcement first responders get up every morning, and they don't know if they're coming home that night. The least we can do is to give them the appropriate equipment that they so sorely need. We have a duty and moral obligation to these brave women and men in a uniform," he says. "Fire departments have their own vehicles, the hospitals have ambulances, and the military has a huge fleet of purpose-built vehicles. Even your mailman and garbagemen have special vehicles. But somehow police officers drive a vehicle designed in the 1970s meant to take you on a Sunday drive."

But Li, chair and chief executive officer of Carbon Motors, knows that fascination and passion alone don't equal success. From the beginning, he set out to assemble a strong management team, starting with making co-founder Stephens the sales development manager. The company needed a chief financial officer, too. Enter Keith Marchiando.

Li and Marchiando hadn't met, though they probably should have. Both worked at Ford and both attended Carnegie Mellon during overlapping years. Marchiando earned his MBA from the Tepper School in 1990, following in the steps of his parents, Richard Marchiando (IM'60) and Barbara Woods Marchiando (MM'59). While at Carnegie Mellon, he was buggy chair for Phi Kappa Theta fraternity and was one of the last male drivers. "There is nothing as exhilarating as having your chin six inches off the ground going 50 miles an hour," he says. Stephens, in the line of duty, might beg to differ.

(Continued …)

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