BUILT, GROUND UP

Teralume Industries started in 12V lighting, with a background in designing lighting systems for commercial, fixed and mobile plant.

So many of the canopies we were fitting out with lighting either leaked or cracked in critical places. The mission was clear: build something that doesn’t crack. We would engineer a product to a standard and build it to last.

We needed a name: easy to remember, and good on a bumper sticker. XGO had to mean something too. “Expedition On The Go”: a tray and canopy system that just worked.

We assembled a small engineering team to bring the design brief and the sketches to life.

The first fully engineered sample was produced. I recall sitting in a room with 12 engineers, designers and QC managers for 3 days, 14 hours a day, while we made 483 changes to a fully functional sample. Perfection was in sight.

After hundreds of thousands of dollars, 22 months of 18-hour days and countless revisions, everything we had learnt went into the field, to see what worked and what didn’t.

An industry first when we launched it. It was never about that, though. It was about backing a product we knew was rock solid. Torsion, racking and shear load testing, fatigue testing, material testing: we knew we had it right.

By now we had expanded into a building 13 times larger, our new home on the Sunshine Coast. This is when we knew the XGO product was bloody good.

By this stage we had more than 10 people in the team and needed a new building. This is where many hours of R&D happened, and where we really started to invest in the product range, the team, training and process.

More testing, more engineering. This was our first concept of the power system that puts every feature in one unit. It saves tens of hours of fitting and consumables, so the value stays in the system, not in the labour to fit it.

With everything we had learnt, tested and revised, it was time to become hard to copy. We knew the design was rock solid. It needed to be more our own. The GEN2 design was born, with integrated zone lighting and a bobtail rear.

Word had spread, we think. Fleet partners were paying attention. Fast production, a rock solid guarantee, spare parts on hand and an authorised dealer network all led to some very cool ventures.

By this stage we had outgrown the Sunshine Coast. So much so that we had 2 holding facilities in Brisbane. We moved the entire business to Brisbane on 1 July 2025, along with our family, and sold our acreage in the hinterland. The new building gave us a showroom, 15 offices, boardrooms, more than 30 car parks and thousands of square metres to grow into.

This shot is the official shakedown of our Chevrolet Silverado 2500HD, straight into an 8,000 km show route. The USA truck range opened a whole new scope for us: more space, more room for fitouts, less worry about weight and more customer requirements.