Weslaco man drives straight again with invention

Ken Southworth, a former part-time dump truck driver, has no problem handling a big rig.

But when he was tired during one RV trip and handed the keys over to his wife, Bana, he couldn’t take it.

“I told her to pull over and let me drive,” he said. “She couldn’t stay on the road.”

That moment of crisis for Southworth gave birth to innovation for the 74-year-old retiree from Maine who now lives in Weslaco.

Shortly afterward, he affixed a piece of tape on the window to show Bana where the white center line on the road was. That piece of tape later evolved into the Lane Seeker, an adjustable, stick-on gauge and light that shows drivers of large vehicles how close they are to the traffic lines.

The Lane Seeker, Southworth said, is the newest invention promising to create a new era of safety in motor homes. Motor homes are almost twice as wide as a normal car and keeping them within the lanes on the road can be difficult, he said.

Similar electronic devices exist, but at a much higher price than his small, battery-operated gadget.

With the prompting of his wife, Southworth applied for a patent in 2002 and has been working at perfecting his invention ever since.

However, as Southworth learned, the path to inventing and selling a new product is long. After getting a patent, he said he paid several thousand dollars for packaging.

“I packaged all the Lane Seekers with my wife in our motor home.”

Now he’s trying to market his invention to various outdoor and RV stores, but unsuccessfully. He said he doesn’t want to dedicate thousands of his own dollars to market a product.

Southworth has sold about 1,000 of the devices, but still has a few thousand left to sell. He has worked with some smaller distributors, but just hasn’t gotten the big break he needs, he said.

“People tell me that this ought to be standard equipment in a motor home,” he said.

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Kyle Arnold covers business, the economy and general assignments for The Monitor. You can reach him at (956) 683-4410.

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This is a corrected version of the story. Ken Southworth's former occupation was incorrect in a previously posted version.