Guns.com recently toured TrackingPoint’s Pflugerville, Texas facility where the company’s high tech hardware is assembled and programmed by white-gloved specialists.
Since TrackingPoint launched in 2011, both the company’s Precision Guided Firearms and their applications have evolved. Vice president of manufacturing Nelson Whiting explained that many — including company execs — thought the best avenue for the product was military and law enforcement, but much of the company’s focus has been on hunters.
“We’ve since expanded to the safari enthusiasts, the outdoorsmen … even ranchers, folks that don’t have all day to run the fence line but need to take care of their predator population,” Whiting said. “There’s a lot of use-cases for it in the real world.”
TrackingPoint’s basic product, the PGF, is controlled with a highly specialized scope that locks onto a target and discharges a projectile only when sights re-align. Once a target is tagged, the user depresses the trigger and holds it until re-aligning the sights at which the gun goes boom.
But the rifle systems are expensive — costing some $7,000 to $17,000 — but the company promises premier service for the hefty price tag. The scope is ready to go out of the box, requires little to no adjustments and is accurate up to 1,000 yards, depending on the caliber and model.
“It’s a high-tech product. You deserve that kind of service. It’s not like you’re going to a local store and buying a $100 optic … the product if not used properly will not function the way you hope it will,” said Ken D’Arcy, TrackingPoint’s chief executive.
“I’d like to use the analogy if smart phones we use today were brought out 15 years ago, nobody would have bought it,” he said, adding the feature-rich devices would have been overwhelming and applications superfluous. He continued: “TrackingPoint did the same thing in 2011. They came out with a product that was far beyond what anybody ever expected what anybody ever thought they might want,” and suggested his company is trying to evolve the gun industry.
“Technology … needs to come into the firearms industry. Technology will come into optics and is coming into optics,” he said. Moving forward, D’Arcy said one of the next evolutions of the product is taking it off the gun and making just the optic available. “It will come in the package set to work. You just put it on your gun, zero it the same as you normally would zero any gun and it will do much of the rest, but with your own gun, you will not have trigger control,” he said, but a timeline for its release is unclear.
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