Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Joe Wisenthal and I'm Tracy Halloway. Tracy, have you
Speaker 1: been following Ellen's Uh, You're gonna have to be more specific,
Speaker 1: you know. I think he kind of has this reputation
Speaker 1: and it's kind of worked out for a well of
Speaker 1: like promising things that you know, maybe take a while
Speaker 1: to materialize, like eventually they come around, whether it's Twitter,
Speaker 1: it's gonna be just like super app and he's gonna
Speaker 1: get rid of all the boats. Did he get rid
Speaker 1: of all the boat? Absolutely? If anything, I swear there
Speaker 1: are more than ever. Yeah. I feel like under every
Speaker 1: tweet now there's basically someone chilling Bitcoin, I think. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then at Tesla and again incredible success story, but
Speaker 1: like self driving cars, I think that's been promised for
Speaker 1: a while in some form another at hasn't happened. And
Speaker 1: one of the things that somewhere on the road map
Speaker 1: but no one really knows when is there's going to
Speaker 1: be an electric truck. Yeah, so I know various companies
Speaker 1: have talked about doing this, and I think there isn't
Speaker 1: there a pickup an electric pickup truck. Yeah, there's a
Speaker 1: few of the electric pickup truck. I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: there's the four lightning and so that's started to go.
Speaker 1: But you know, obviously we talked a lot about freight
Speaker 1: on this podcast, and I think there's a long way
Speaker 1: until we get any sort of like electrification. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: mean that's my perception of it, which is when people
Speaker 1: think of electric vehicles, it's usually, you know, it's sort
Speaker 1: of like basic sedan kind of thing, maybbe an suv.
Speaker 1: The trucks are sort of further down the line, and
Speaker 1: then when it comes to actual long haul trucks, hardly
Speaker 1: ever hear anyone talk about it. You hear a lot
Speaker 1: when when people talk about technology in trucking, it tends
Speaker 1: to be autonomous driving. Doesn't necessarily seem to be electric
Speaker 1: trucks themselves. Yeah, And of course, you know, there's this
Speaker 1: whole infrastructure right associated with trucking, you know, the truck stops, etcetera.
Speaker 1: You have these big fleets, they make purchase commitments, etcetera.
Speaker 1: So even if the technology we're there somehow, and I
Speaker 1: don't really know if it is, it seems like it's
Speaker 1: going to be a long way until we get you know,
Speaker 1: an electrified trucking fleet if ever. And so while you know,
Speaker 1: obviously Tesla at some point wants to plan that there
Speaker 1: are other entities that want that market as well, because
Speaker 1: it's gonna be really big, right And the other thing
Speaker 1: that we've discussed on the show is the difficulty of
Speaker 1: rolling out the actual you know, grid needs or electric vehicles,
Speaker 1: and I can imagine with long haul trucks that would
Speaker 1: be even more difficult and potentially extreme, given that a
Speaker 1: lot of trucks go to you know, places far off
Speaker 1: in the wilderness. You know, think of things like locking trucks, yes,
Speaker 1: and so you know, there are different types of commercial trucking,
Speaker 1: and so you know, you think of the highway and
Speaker 1: the trucks you see on the highway, but you know,
Speaker 1: it's very different when there's like a truck that's like
Speaker 1: going up the side of a steep and icy, snowy
Speaker 1: mountain and getting logs and going back down, different physical
Speaker 1: demands on the truck itself, given different physical demands on
Speaker 1: the driver. Anyway, we're kind of gonna emerge these two topics,
Speaker 1: like different types of trucks, what can be electrified? Why
Speaker 1: try to understand a little bit more about the commercial
Speaker 1: trucking infrastructure, and not just the highway the highway vehicles
Speaker 1: that we know we're gonna do logging. We're gonna do uh,
Speaker 1: we're gonna do electric logging trucks. But you know what,
Speaker 1: I have an interest in logging out because a tree
Speaker 1: fell down in my backyard, a big tree, a couple
Speaker 1: of weeks ago, and I'm trying to figure out how
Speaker 1: to move it. And once once I move it, i
Speaker 1: i too will be a logger. Well this is perfect
Speaker 1: because we have the perfect guess who can probably tell
Speaker 1: you all about moving your log off of your property.
Speaker 1: We're gonna be speaking with Chase Barber, who is the
Speaker 1: CEO of Edison Motors. It's a small startup aiming to
Speaker 1: electrify the trucking market. And he was also a logger.
Speaker 1: He drove trucks that moved logs and so he's familiar
Speaker 1: with that world trucker, logger, electric vehicle entrepreneur. Chase BARBERA,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots. Oh
Speaker 1: you bet ya. Thanks for having me on here. Quite
Speaker 1: a combo there, they are not. I feel like there
Speaker 1: are not many vehicle entrepreneurs who pivoted from having driven
Speaker 1: vehicles themselves. I don't professionally, is that it seems rare
Speaker 1: to me. Uh, it was really common back in the
Speaker 1: nineties hundred years ago, super common. Nowadays it is a
Speaker 1: little bit more rare. Yeah, So what do you actually
Speaker 1: before we even get to your company, Edison Motors, what
Speaker 1: do you tell us a little bit about your background
Speaker 1: and like how you got into trucking and what you
Speaker 1: did in trucking. Okay, Well, I was one of those
Speaker 1: guys that I knew, like way back in grade one.
Speaker 1: Like if you do with those things in like grade
Speaker 1: one kindergarten. Uh, They're like, what do you want to
Speaker 1: be when you grow up? I wrote down, truck driver.
Speaker 1: That's what I was gonna do after high school. I uh,
Speaker 1: I actually I was too young. So I joined the
Speaker 1: army for a couple of years and then went through there,
Speaker 1: drove truck after it, and drove truck till I was
Speaker 1: about twenty two twenty three, went to university, drove truck
Speaker 1: all through the summer because it's a fantastic, well paying
Speaker 1: job while you're going to university in the summer. And
Speaker 1: I did incredibly well. I did a degree in economics
Speaker 1: and four point o g P a straight a's and
Speaker 1: I got super angry. After doing four years of straight a's,
Speaker 1: I got a job offer for forty five thousand dollars
Speaker 1: and the summer before I was driving truck in the
Speaker 1: oil patch. I made fifty thousand dollars in four months.
Speaker 1: And now, and after four years at university doing a
Speaker 1: incredibly well, I got second place at the Bank of
Speaker 1: Canada Economic Forecasting Challenge. And that's the job offer you get.
Speaker 1: I'm like, I could make more working a third of
Speaker 1: the year than I did through all this. So we
Speaker 1: uh went with my buddy Eric, it has been my
Speaker 1: business partner for the last six years since university. Now
Speaker 1: and we put the last of our student loans together.
Speaker 1: We bought a nineteen sixty nine Kenworth that had been
Speaker 1: sitting in a farmer's field like a fifty year old
Speaker 1: truck with the last of our student loans for five
Speaker 1: thousand dollars and we uh we set out as a
Speaker 1: trucking company. Oh, I love this already. UM. I have
Speaker 1: a bunch of questions, but maybe I mean, I didn't
Speaker 1: know that you had an economics degree. Is that something
Speaker 1: that's been useful to you as a truck driver? If
Speaker 1: you're an owner operator, just having an economics background help
Speaker 1: you think about that business. Oh yeah, one of the
Speaker 1: reasons I went to school and full full disclosure, I
Speaker 1: failed my first time when I was twenty one. It
Speaker 1: was back in two thousand and eight, the financial collapse there.
Speaker 1: I had just started out as an owner operator, bought
Speaker 1: myself a truck, saved up for like a year and
Speaker 1: a half, bought myself a truck, did not know enough
Speaker 1: about business, and got wiped out onto my ass on
Speaker 1: the phone. I just made enough money that I was
Speaker 1: able to walk away from the truck with I think
Speaker 1: I had like twenty grand left in my pocket after
Speaker 1: selling the truck and working for like six months eight
Speaker 1: months before doing it. And that's what made me I'll decide.
Speaker 1: I'm like, okay, I'm going back to school. At the
Speaker 1: very least I'll have enough knowledge to not be in
Speaker 1: this situation. Again, we mentioned in the beginning you're a lagger.
Speaker 1: You drove truck, specifically hauling lugs. How is that different
Speaker 1: than typical over the highway freight. It pays a lot
Speaker 1: better that it's there. You don't find a lot of
Speaker 1: people willing to do it. It's it is probably one
Speaker 1: of the harshest demanding jobs on a truck out on
Speaker 1: the West coast, especially in Canada. We get forty below
Speaker 1: in the winter, fifty fort above in the summer. So
Speaker 1: what's that for negative forty negative fifty degrees fahrenheit in
Speaker 1: the winter, and then we get up to a hundred
Speaker 1: and ten degrees in the summer. And we are on
Speaker 1: steep slopes. So a US a truck in the US
Speaker 1: is about eighty thou pounds, that's maximum weight limit. A
Speaker 1: truck up in Canada goes to a hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: thousand pounds, so we're almost double the weight. You have
Speaker 1: incredibly steep grades. We're talking on an average highway. A
Speaker 1: really steep highway grade is ten. We're running up to
Speaker 1: grades three times steeper than a steep highway hill with
Speaker 1: over twice the way it is. And then you're doing
Speaker 1: that in the snow. Oh my gosh. So you know
Speaker 1: you mentioned that you bought your first truck. I think
Speaker 1: you said it was Kenworth from a field somewhere. And
Speaker 1: one thing I've always wondered is when you're a truck driver,
Speaker 1: or say you become an owner operator or whatever, how
Speaker 1: do you actually go about selecting your vehicle and what
Speaker 1: are there characteristics that you're looking for. I assume you know,
Speaker 1: if you're logging, it probably requires a different vehicle too.
Speaker 1: If you're hauling, you know, retail goods or something like that.
Speaker 1: But how do you actually make that decision? Well, first
Speaker 1: you figure out how much money you have. In our case,
Speaker 1: we had ten thousand dollars and we know that the
Speaker 1: startup cost were at least half of the truck, so
Speaker 1: we had a budget of five grants, so that really
Speaker 1: narrowed that decision down a lot. We had a pretty
Speaker 1: good mechanical background, knowledge able to work on things. So
Speaker 1: my biggest criteria selecting a truck is that I need
Speaker 1: a truck that I can work on. That was one
Speaker 1: of the issues I had the first time is that
Speaker 1: whenever it needed service, it had to go into a shop.
Speaker 1: I said, Okay, I'll get something that's really old, doesn't
Speaker 1: have a single computer, and then hopefully I can fix
Speaker 1: everything myself. Is there a difference in this sort of
Speaker 1: like design choices of a truck for logging versus uh
Speaker 1: typical freight truck. I have to imagine on the way down,
Speaker 1: particularly you're riding the break a lot more. You know,
Speaker 1: you have to be able to make turns, etcetera. And
Speaker 1: then I think maybe maybe I even read it something
Speaker 1: that you had written about you mentioned, you know, being
Speaker 1: able to work on it. I have to imagine that,
Speaker 1: like up on a mountain, it's much more important to
Speaker 1: be able to like go in and fix your own truck,
Speaker 1: especially if you're like not near any sort of truck
Speaker 1: stop or mechanics stop or or mechanic shop or a
Speaker 1: toad company or anything like that. Oh, it's incredibly important.
Speaker 1: When you're up in remote areas in Canada, it's logging
Speaker 1: beats the hell out of equipment. It's just there's nothing.
Speaker 1: You're off highway with twice the legal highway weight, so
Speaker 1: you're heavy, you're on rough roads, you're in mud rock,
Speaker 1: and it will just absolutely destroy the truck. And because
Speaker 1: of that, you need to be able to service it.
Speaker 1: Your ten hours twelve hours into a bush. You're not
Speaker 1: getting a tow truck out there. You've got to be
Speaker 1: able to fix it where it's at. And that's one
Speaker 1: of the reasons why the trucks tend to be heavier, specked,
Speaker 1: thicker frame rails more reinforced suspension, reinforced brackets. They're way
Speaker 1: more they're more expensive, but they're also built a lot tougher.
Speaker 1: It's there's a reason why that truck from the nineteen
Speaker 1: sixties was still able to go back to work. Actually,
Speaker 1: the guy we bought it off of bought it brand new.
Speaker 1: His name is Bob Murphy. He bought it brand new
Speaker 1: back in nineteen sixty nine when he was in his
Speaker 1: early twenties, and he drove that one truck his entire career.
Speaker 1: If that shows you the quality city that these trucks
Speaker 1: are made to. So this sort of like the bones
Speaker 1: of the truck, so to speak. It's it's just really
Speaker 1: important that it be heavy duty. The insides can be
Speaker 1: upgraded or you know, worked on, but uh, if you
Speaker 1: have good bones, if it's thick, if it's strong, then
Speaker 1: you can use them in the log hauling game for
Speaker 1: a long time. Yeah, good bones strong And then the
Speaker 1: other the biggest critical thing is that they use a
Speaker 1: lot of common parts that we've got gotten away from
Speaker 1: and manufacturing today. Is that a freight liner, a Western Star,
Speaker 1: ken Worth, a Peter Belt, All the big brands shared
Speaker 1: components for their heavy speck trucks. It was the same
Speaker 1: Vicker steering box across all of them. The gauges were
Speaker 1: the same. You could have this commonality of parts where
Speaker 1: you could take parts from one truck and put them
Speaker 1: into another truck. Actually that was largely in part thanks
Speaker 1: to the U. S. Military, But that's a whole other story. Well,
Speaker 1: this is exactly what I wanted to ask you about,
Speaker 1: because you book about how it was important that you
Speaker 1: were able to repair the truck yourself. And I know
Speaker 1: that in farming equipment there's this whole debate about right
Speaker 1: to repair, and a lot of farmers are upset that
Speaker 1: tractors are so computerized nowadays. They can't fix them on
Speaker 1: their own. They have to take them somewhere, and it's
Speaker 1: really expensive to get stuff fixed. I think in some
Speaker 1: cases that even have to pay subscription fees for software
Speaker 1: and stuff like that. To what extent is that happening
Speaker 1: in trucking. Do you have a lot more computerization and
Speaker 1: maybe even subscription type services in trucks. Oh, it's the
Speaker 1: exact same as the tractor issue. In the trucks um
Speaker 1: you throw fault codes, you get a check engine light,
Speaker 1: it'll de rate your motor. So you only have fifty
Speaker 1: of your power, and you have to take it into
Speaker 1: a shop where they hook it up to a computer.
Speaker 1: They charge you three dollars just to hook it onto
Speaker 1: a computer. They press a button that says clear fault code,
Speaker 1: and they send you back out the door until it
Speaker 1: happens again, and it's there's nothing you can do about it.
Speaker 1: If you want a new truck, you have to deal
Speaker 1: with that. There's a ton of sensors over the whole thing,
Speaker 1: and you, as the owner of the truck, have no
Speaker 1: ability to know really know what those sensors are saying,
Speaker 1: no idea to read the fault codes, no way to
Speaker 1: clear them. You have to go back to the dealership
Speaker 1: and pay that money. You know. I want to get
Speaker 1: more into the economics of all this and the manufacturing
Speaker 1: and all that, in particularly your company. But what was
Speaker 1: the most terrifying? Do you have the most terrible? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Do you have a most terrifying day out on the mountains? Oh? Yeah? Um,
Speaker 1: So I was coming down this like grade A hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty thousand pounds on. I had my truck chained up.
Speaker 1: I didn't have my trailer chained up, and I'm coming
Speaker 1: down and all of a sudden, even with two sets
Speaker 1: of chains on, it was so icy that it just
Speaker 1: starts taking off down this hill. And there is a
Speaker 1: immediate one degree corner, and it like it's a hundred
Speaker 1: feet two hundred feet off the bank if you don't
Speaker 1: make this corner. And in order to stay ahead of
Speaker 1: my trailer, the road is only just as wide as
Speaker 1: the truck. It's a cut block, like they made it
Speaker 1: just wide enough for a truck to get down. And
Speaker 1: I'm grabbing gears to try and stay away in front
Speaker 1: of my trailer. So what I do is like I
Speaker 1: pull this trailer spike. It starts going off the bank
Speaker 1: on the left, so I let it go kick it
Speaker 1: back over until that trailer comes on the right side.
Speaker 1: And I stuffed my trailer into the snow bank so
Speaker 1: that it acted as a big snowplow. That big snowplow
Speaker 1: snallowed me down enough with drag that as able to
Speaker 1: make the corner and get down the next thing without
Speaker 1: going around it. But that was one of the scarier
Speaker 1: moments I had. I think I'm visualizing that all right now.
Speaker 1: I just stressed me like listening to that and just
Speaker 1: envisioning all that. Oh last summer we had one. The
Speaker 1: road was only like I had six inches on each
Speaker 1: side of my truck. It was over a thousand feet
Speaker 1: down into the lake, blasted into the hard rock, and
Speaker 1: the road was crumbling down. In order to make it
Speaker 1: around the corner, you hung the outside duel of your
Speaker 1: tire off of this cliff face, like the outside duel
Speaker 1: on the trailer overhung the cliff. That's that's how close
Speaker 1: we were on that hall stressing. Yeah, this is very stressful.
Speaker 1: I have one more logging question, and it might be
Speaker 1: a basic one, but to what extent is the business
Speaker 1: of being a logging truck driver tied to the lumber
Speaker 1: business in Canada? So you know, if if things are
Speaker 1: booming with the lumber business, if there's tons of demand
Speaker 1: for wood for housing construction or whatever, does that tend
Speaker 1: to translate into more activity for truckers. Oh? Absolutely. If
Speaker 1: the price the lumber goes up, then the mill wants
Speaker 1: to make more lumber, produce more lumbers, so the demand
Speaker 1: for logs go up, which they're willing to pay a
Speaker 1: better rate so that more trucks get out into the bush.
Speaker 1: They'll increase the cycle times. When things slow down, like
Speaker 1: right now, the lumber has fallen. There's a lot of
Speaker 1: truck drivers who have parked their trucks for the last
Speaker 1: three weeks just because there is it's a very boom
Speaker 1: and bust on that lumber price. Yeah, that's my impression
Speaker 1: of it. And then the other thing I want to
Speaker 1: ask you is, when there is a boom in lumber
Speaker 1: slash locking, do a lot of truck drivers can they
Speaker 1: switch between being you know, a basic long haul truck
Speaker 1: driver to going into locking or does it require specialized
Speaker 1: equipment and trucks like you described and experience. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: logging does require specialized equipment. These are heavy spec trucks
Speaker 1: and a lot of the time because you need the
Speaker 1: room for logs, they don't have sleepers. You can't really
Speaker 1: do long haul, so when it goes down, these trucks
Speaker 1: quite often sit unfortunately. Oh I see. So that what
Speaker 1: about like, you know, in terms of specialized training, other
Speaker 1: specific licenses or programs or schools, like, how does one
Speaker 1: make the switch, especially since, as you point out, because
Speaker 1: it's specialized, the pay is higher. Yeah, the there's no
Speaker 1: specialized training to drive logging truck. You basically figure it
Speaker 1: out on the job. That's the only way to do
Speaker 1: it is most people when they're new, they start in
Speaker 1: the summer without the snow and then they just transition
Speaker 1: going forward. But it's but because it is specialized and
Speaker 1: it is a stressful job. I think it's the only
Speaker 1: job I've ever had where I've been driving at five thinking,
Speaker 1: holy crap, I'm going waiting. I have one more logging
Speaker 1: specific question. Actually, you know, we got your contact from
Speaker 1: previous guest Gordon McGill, and actually that conversation was kind
Speaker 1: of largely sent around centered around waiting and waiting for
Speaker 1: trucks to be loaded and unloaded with logging. Is there
Speaker 1: a similar phenomenon and it just the driver play a
Speaker 1: role in loading up his or her truck. Out here,
Speaker 1: normally the driver doesn't play a low role in loading
Speaker 1: the truck. We have dedicated loaderman and normally there's not
Speaker 1: a big weight time. They know you know what trucks
Speaker 1: you're getting, and they schedule it. Okay, we want this
Speaker 1: guy here at five am, five thirty six, six thirty seven.
Speaker 1: They just give loading times to win all that they
Speaker 1: want the truck showing up. So unless they're it's taking
Speaker 1: longer to load or the machine's got to walk a
Speaker 1: little bit. You normally don't have much of a weight
Speaker 1: time because it's all about the mill and the logging
Speaker 1: company is trying to make it as efficient as possible
Speaker 1: to get these trucks into the mill. They're paying by
Speaker 1: the hour, and I've always been a big advocate that's
Speaker 1: why trucking should be by the hour. When a company
Speaker 1: is paying by the hour to have a truck, they
Speaker 1: get trucks out real quick. So let's talk about your company,
Speaker 1: Edison Motors. So what is it. Yeah, we're a company
Speaker 1: that's making electric We started out electric logging trucks and
Speaker 1: now we've expanded into electric vocational trucks the entire vocational industry.
Speaker 1: Can you talk about what the opportunity was that you spotted,
Speaker 1: Because when you describe logging trucks as these specialized heavy
Speaker 1: duty vehicles that you know, to some extent people need
Speaker 1: them to be kind of simple, easy to fix and maintain,
Speaker 1: it doesn't necessarily scream like opportunity for electrification. So so
Speaker 1: what's the thought process there? Okay, Well, we've been a
Speaker 1: big fan of kind of electric vehicles and we reserved
Speaker 1: a test less semi a long time ago. Because my
Speaker 1: thought process was if you're coming downhill like here, you
Speaker 1: go up the mountain empty and you come downloaded electric
Speaker 1: vehicle average enitor breaking, So you're recharging your batteries when
Speaker 1: you're going down in order to power the truck to
Speaker 1: go back up the mountain empty. You're basically using that
Speaker 1: stored potential energy of the logs at the top of
Speaker 1: the mountain to fuel the vehicle to go back up
Speaker 1: the mountain. So that was where we first started, and
Speaker 1: then we started looking into it and the battery wasn't enough.
Speaker 1: The Tesla semi has a one megawatt battery logging truck.
Speaker 1: When you do the math on it uses about two
Speaker 1: point five megawatts of power. So the largest battery in
Speaker 1: any electric semi you would need two and a half
Speaker 1: times that weight. And that truck already weighs five thousand pounds.
Speaker 1: Doubling over doubling that weight is going to put you
Speaker 1: over legal axle weight. You wouldn't be able to haul
Speaker 1: any freight. So then talk to us about how you
Speaker 1: solve the problem. You've started, Uh, it's still very early days.
Speaker 1: You've been retrofitting old trucks like electrifying them. Talk to
Speaker 1: us about like how you solve the problem or what
Speaker 1: specifically that you do to the old trucks. We basically
Speaker 1: put in a diesel generator. Is had the idea. In
Speaker 1: addition to logging, we did a lot of hybrid power
Speaker 1: systems where we would take solar batteries, bring them up
Speaker 1: to a mine or a remote community that was running
Speaker 1: off diesel and we would optimize their grid. That's part
Speaker 1: of the other side of our trucking business, and we
Speaker 1: realized that a truck was a lot of the same
Speaker 1: of this community. So this one project we did where
Speaker 1: the AHA moment really came into it is that small
Speaker 1: place up near the Yukon border First Nations Reserve running
Speaker 1: off diesel. They were running a nine kilowatt generator because
Speaker 1: they had a huge peak load demand. Everyone would get
Speaker 1: home from work, turn on all their appliances at the
Speaker 1: same time five o'clock, big peak load demand for an
Speaker 1: hour or so on that grid. They needed a nine
Speaker 1: generator to meet that load demand. However, the average load
Speaker 1: was only like twenty kilowatts. That's a watts. So what
Speaker 1: we did is we put a large battery bank in there.
Speaker 1: That battery took up the peak low demand. We offset
Speaker 1: that with a lot of solar production for daytime, and
Speaker 1: then we downsized the generator from ninety to thirty five kilowatts.
Speaker 1: I think we build them a hundred and forty thousand
Speaker 1: dollars to do this whole project, and their fuel savings
Speaker 1: was eighty five thousand dollars in their first year just
Speaker 1: from using the same amount of power but optimizing that
Speaker 1: power to work more efficiently. So I was driving back home.
Speaker 1: I was actually in that nineteen sixty nine truck and
Speaker 1: I was starting out at the satellites, and then the
Speaker 1: Aha moment occurred to me. A truck is a lot
Speaker 1: like these grids. You have a huge peak load demand.
Speaker 1: Takes a ton of power to get that truck up
Speaker 1: to wait. That's why you run a fifteen liter diesel
Speaker 1: five fifty horse power. To start that truck moving from
Speaker 1: the line, or to pull that weight up a hill.
Speaker 1: You need a ton of power. Once you're rolling down
Speaker 1: the road, you back rate out of that throttle. You're
Speaker 1: at throttle and you're just cruising along. So you have
Speaker 1: this super inefficient system where you have a massive diesel
Speaker 1: motor that's not needed because you only need that large
Speaker 1: diesel ten percent of the time. But you're running that
Speaker 1: full size diesel of the time. So in addition, we're like, okay,
Speaker 1: this makes sense of the regend breaking logging. If we
Speaker 1: already have the batteries in there, we can make this
Speaker 1: entire thing really efficient get the range we needed. We'll
Speaker 1: put in a much smaller We'll basically cut the size
Speaker 1: of the diesel motor in half. That'll recharge the batteries,
Speaker 1: and those batteries will give you the power you need
Speaker 1: to roll down the road and meet your peak load demand.
Speaker 1: M hm. So this kind of leads into something else
Speaker 1: I wanted to ask you about, which is you know,
Speaker 1: I realize it's dangerous to generalize here, but how do
Speaker 1: truckers in general feel about electric vehicles and the prospect
Speaker 1: of electric trucks. Is it so long as it cuts
Speaker 1: down on fuel costs, it's seen as a good thing.
Speaker 1: Or is there a sort of knee jerk resistance to
Speaker 1: maybe doing things in a different way. Oh, there's a
Speaker 1: huge knee jerk resistance, And I don't think it's too
Speaker 1: doing things in a certain way. A lot of people
Speaker 1: I've met, they're they're open to new ideas, but truckers
Speaker 1: aren't dumb. They know how much power their truck puts
Speaker 1: out in the day, they can fill it up at
Speaker 1: the end of the day, and they see what their
Speaker 1: power loads are. And when you tell them that, hey,
Speaker 1: this truck at full load ideal circumstances can do four
Speaker 1: hundred to five hundred miles, they quickly figure out that
Speaker 1: I do six hundred mile days. And then they think,
Speaker 1: where am I going to charge this? Where am I
Speaker 1: going to plug this vehicle in? This isn't gonna work
Speaker 1: for me. That's one side of the argument, and then
Speaker 1: the other side. It's like the John Deer tractor thing.
Speaker 1: They see these electric vehicles and they're like, there is
Speaker 1: not a chance I'm going to be able to work
Speaker 1: on this thing, Like every single thing is completely locked out.
Speaker 1: As an owner operator or a company owner, how are
Speaker 1: my mechanics going to service it? Like Tesla when you
Speaker 1: hear stories of them buying a car, how long it
Speaker 1: takes to get it serviced? Well, how long are these
Speaker 1: trucks gonna take? Is where's that technician right now? If
Speaker 1: I go into a truck dealership, these yards don't have
Speaker 1: people trained up to service the high voltage systems. Their
Speaker 1: normal diesel mechanics we need to go through an entire
Speaker 1: training process on an entire nearly new mechanics set of industries.
Speaker 1: So even if I can't service it myself, I can't
Speaker 1: even take it to a shop anytime reasonably soon to
Speaker 1: get it serviced. And downtime is one of the biggest
Speaker 1: most expensive things when your truck. A truck on average
Speaker 1: makes about two thousand, five hundred to three thousand dollars
Speaker 1: a day. Three thousand dollars a day to a truck
Speaker 1: if you're down for a week, man, does that add
Speaker 1: up quick? Yeah, so you touched on this just now.
Speaker 1: But also does the structure of the trucking industry where
Speaker 1: you have lots of these independent owner operators, is that
Speaker 1: It sounds like that is also an impediment to electric
Speaker 1: vehicle adoption. Can you talk a little bit more about that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they want to be able to work on it, they
Speaker 1: want to be able to service it, fix it, especially
Speaker 1: like places like logging, where you work your truck on
Speaker 1: day to Friday. You go out on Saturday and you
Speaker 1: wrench on your truck and fix what you broke during
Speaker 1: the week in order to get it back to work
Speaker 1: on Monday. If they can't service it and they can't
Speaker 1: fix it. In a lot of the industry is owner operator.
Speaker 1: I forget the exact statistic, but it's like of truck
Speaker 1: drivers are single truck owner operators, one man small businesses.
Speaker 1: That's almost of the industry. What is Edison Motors doing
Speaker 1: in the design of your truck? So the retrofitting to
Speaker 1: assuage the concerns of someone who's up on the hill,
Speaker 1: up on a mountain and worried that they you know,
Speaker 1: and the concerns about can you really repair these electrified vehicles? Okay,
Speaker 1: So we had a real simple way. We took our
Speaker 1: experience working on when we got up to like a
Speaker 1: four truck company. We had all trucks from the nineteen
Speaker 1: sixties to the nineteen eighties, and we learned about the
Speaker 1: common core components of these trucks that they put back then,
Speaker 1: and it goes back to that U. S. Military. We
Speaker 1: got a touch on it on a brief synopsis of
Speaker 1: how it worked back then. Basically, in the sixties, the U. S.
Speaker 1: Military and NATO was worried about the Soviet Union and
Speaker 1: they learned from in World War Two. What they did
Speaker 1: is when they war broke out, they bomb the hell
Speaker 1: out of the German factories, and they realized that if
Speaker 1: the Soviets do that and they start nuking our manufacturing hubs,
Speaker 1: bombing the manufacturing hubs, trucking is so vital for national
Speaker 1: defense national security that we need to be able to
Speaker 1: pick parts not manufactured, may be able to pull parts
Speaker 1: from one truck and put them into another, or people
Speaker 1: are going to start to death. They won't be able
Speaker 1: to maintain their military operations. So what they did is
Speaker 1: they mandated that if you wanted a contract with the
Speaker 1: US government as a manufacturer, you had to use a
Speaker 1: common course set of parts. That's the reason why you
Speaker 1: see these trucks from the nineteen sixties. I can take
Speaker 1: the spedometer out of my nineteen sixty two ken Worth
Speaker 1: and I can put it into my nineteen five Western Star.
Speaker 1: It is the exact same spedometer, the treadle, valve, the Bendix,
Speaker 1: the Type thirty break pots, all of them. The only
Speaker 1: thing you were buying from a manufacturer that was different
Speaker 1: was the body. The internal workings of the truck. We're
Speaker 1: all common because of that national defense industry, so you
Speaker 1: can service these trucks and these parts really stayed in
Speaker 1: like the turn signal from my nineteen sixty two Kenworth
Speaker 1: is the same turn signal that a twenty twelve Western
Speaker 1: Star has. Isn't that kind of cool? That's awesome? So
Speaker 1: when did we start moving away from that model is
Speaker 1: my next question. They dropped their requirements in them sometime
Speaker 1: around the mid eighties, around the fall of the Soviet
Speaker 1: Union wall coming down in Germany. They weren't as worried.
Speaker 1: They started laxing it, and then you see in the
Speaker 1: nineties late nineties that manufacturers really start moving away as
Speaker 1: we get more computerized, more specific like now this is
Speaker 1: strictly a turn signal for this year and modeler truck,
Speaker 1: and they realized they could make a lot of money
Speaker 1: off of the part sales. It goes back to that
Speaker 1: theory and economics is that you have a locked in customer,
Speaker 1: so you could save money by selling a cheaper truck
Speaker 1: and then making your money on the parts. Is that
Speaker 1: somebody buys a three hundred thousand dollar truck, they're now
Speaker 1: locked into maintaining that truck. You're not going to throw
Speaker 1: out a three thousand dollar truck because of a turn
Speaker 1: signal goes out. You're you're gonna buy that four or
Speaker 1: five turn signal, So you went away from having a
Speaker 1: turn signal. Right now, that old one in sixty two
Speaker 1: is about forty dollars, A new turn signal about four
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty dollars at ten times increase in the
Speaker 1: amount of parts because it's specifically molded to the truck
Speaker 1: and only that one component will work. This is so interesting.
Speaker 1: I hadn't considered like sort of supply chain resilience and
Speaker 1: in turn change ability as a security concern, just more
Speaker 1: of like a convenience thing. I hadn't thought about either.
Speaker 1: I'm sure there's like some like PhD term paper to
Speaker 1: be written or probably has been written about like the
Speaker 1: end of the Cold war, neo liberalism market, you know,
Speaker 1: diversity and market parts and sort of like a lack
Speaker 1: of supply chain resilience as government purchasing ceases to be
Speaker 1: a centralize hitting all the buzzwords, all the buzzwords, but
Speaker 1: it really does feel like there's like a fairly profound
Speaker 1: economic story here. So think about it this way, they
Speaker 1: have a look at it is. When we hit COVID
Speaker 1: and the supply chains went down, the trucking industry was
Speaker 1: massively shortened by parts parts supplies. Now that was just
Speaker 1: a supply due to COVID and the natural way the
Speaker 1: pandemic happened. If there was an actual military event where
Speaker 1: say a incident broke up, but between China and the US,
Speaker 1: our entire trucking industry would collapse overnight. Without those common
Speaker 1: core parts and those older trucks, you can't maintain those
Speaker 1: computer sensors. The truck go down. And that's a major issue,
Speaker 1: is that how do you feed the population? The grocery
Speaker 1: stores only have two three days worth of food on
Speaker 1: the shelf. The trucks go down. What do you actually
Speaker 1: do to these cities? So yeah, oblique thought to say
Speaker 1: the least, So talk to us like, Okay, you're competing
Speaker 1: with Elon Musk. Yeah, Like what is the plan here?
Speaker 1: So I and I know your company is young and
Speaker 1: you've started off doing retrofitting. But and that's sounds it's
Speaker 1: very intriguing, but that's a long way. You know, there's
Speaker 1: a seems like there's a big gap between retro electrifying
Speaker 1: a truck from the nine sixties versus actually competing against
Speaker 1: the biggest or one of the biggest vehicle manufacturers in
Speaker 1: the world, and eventually creating your own trucks. Like, what
Speaker 1: is your vision here? Why do you think you have
Speaker 1: an opportunity? Okay, yes, so we've got an opportunity is
Speaker 1: we got that market segment. So with those common core parts,
Speaker 1: that's essentially all we used. We went, what are those
Speaker 1: common core parts that are still on the shelf, cheap,
Speaker 1: easy to install, That's what we built our trucks off of.
Speaker 1: So that allowed us we didn't have to make any
Speaker 1: specific parts. You know how fast that speeds up your
Speaker 1: ability to get to production when you don't have to
Speaker 1: make any parts. It also simplifies our supply chain logistics
Speaker 1: is that we partnered with several parts stores. They can
Speaker 1: get that they all have those parts and shelves. We
Speaker 1: partnered with these parts stores and we're like, okay, what
Speaker 1: are the parts that you always have on your shelf?
Speaker 1: What are this thing that a trucker is going to
Speaker 1: go in there and get perfect? Now, we don't need
Speaker 1: a warehouse for these parts. So we stepped up our
Speaker 1: production that way. That's how we're now in just a year,
Speaker 1: went from prototype to production. And when it comes to competing, yeah,
Speaker 1: we're not going to compete on the freight liner cascade. Yah,
Speaker 1: hundreds of thousands of trucks per year. It's just you
Speaker 1: need a million dollars, a billion dollar facility, two billion
Speaker 1: dollar facility. But what a lot of Sorry? Is my
Speaker 1: dog barking in the background, But it's okay, we're a
Speaker 1: dog friendly show. What kind of dog is it? Border Collie? Look,
Speaker 1: I have a hurting dog as well. I have a corky.
Speaker 1: I don't know what it is. When I go on
Speaker 1: the phone, she's outside. She's just looking in my office window,
Speaker 1: crying at me. Sorry, but yeah, it's to get us
Speaker 1: back on track there. We can't compete with a hundred
Speaker 1: thousand trucks per year. And that's a lot of where
Speaker 1: these manufacturers focus on. Like they're going after the there's
Speaker 1: three hundred thousand of these dry v and trucks sold
Speaker 1: every year in the US and Canada. We're targeting the
Speaker 1: heavy vocational market, which is still about five of the
Speaker 1: truck markets. But what a lot of people don't realize
Speaker 1: is that when you're into that heavy vocation, I'll say
Speaker 1: ken worth S five model, they're not built on an
Speaker 1: assembly line. Every single one of those trucks is built
Speaker 1: by hand. There's a small kind of assembly line, but
Speaker 1: they are so custom it's not like building a car
Speaker 1: where every Chevy Malibu is basically the same same wheel base,
Speaker 1: tires going the same spot. When you get into these
Speaker 1: heavy vocational trucks and you get into places that have
Speaker 1: bodybuilders they're putting on tow truck body cement trucks, everything
Speaker 1: is so customized to what your wheelbase is, where your
Speaker 1: axles go, does it have twin steering, does it have
Speaker 1: three drive axles, does it have one drive axle? Where
Speaker 1: does the fuel tank go? How much room do I
Speaker 1: need here? It's you can't build that on an assembly
Speaker 1: line because every single truck is so custom and it's
Speaker 1: builed down to the even the engine size. Do you
Speaker 1: want a seven leader engine? Do you want a sixteen
Speaker 1: Leader engine? What transmission do you want? Is it going
Speaker 1: to be an automatic? An eighteen speed to five speed?
Speaker 1: Is it going to have auxiliary transmissions? Like, there's so
Speaker 1: many different options that every one of these is basically
Speaker 1: built by hand. That's why the price tag also jumps
Speaker 1: way up. You're looking at a hundred and fifty two
Speaker 1: d dollars for a highway truck. You're looking great now
Speaker 1: at three hundred to half a million for one of
Speaker 1: these heavy vocational trucks because it is still hand built.
Speaker 1: So two things I hadn't actually I wasn't actually familiar
Speaker 1: with the term vocational truck before. But you know, now
Speaker 1: I understand what you're talking about in these sort of
Speaker 1: like specialized trucks for things like logging or oil fields
Speaker 1: and so forth. And I also did not realize that,
Speaker 1: you know, that there is not an assembly line for
Speaker 1: these type of vehicles which we see, we see dump
Speaker 1: trucks things like that. I hadn't realized that they're much
Speaker 1: more bespoke than the typical semi that you see in
Speaker 1: the highway. Yeah, and the fancier you get with the truck,
Speaker 1: the more bespoke it is. Like, think about a crane truck,
Speaker 1: a large crane truck. Look how custom and bespoke that
Speaker 1: has to be to accommodate those cranes, those outriggers, tow
Speaker 1: truck bodies. It's kind of a cool thing that when
Speaker 1: you get into the large things like the C five hundred,
Speaker 1: that they're not assembly line produced, and that makes it
Speaker 1: a lot easier for somebody, a smaller company like us
Speaker 1: to really come in there. Is that we can focus
Speaker 1: on those high end not mass produced, mass produced trucks.
Speaker 1: We're very cost competitive building these by hand. What's the
Speaker 1: resale value on these trucks then, you know, if if
Speaker 1: they're so customized and bespoke, but at the same time,
Speaker 1: I guess they're using the common core parts. Well, they're
Speaker 1: actually getting away from it more and more, even on
Speaker 1: the bespoke one, which is like even on the logging trucks,
Speaker 1: it's getting more and more away from it. Is manufacturers
Speaker 1: don't focus on these trucks. They're not a huge part
Speaker 1: of their volume. You know, you're selling a hundred thousand
Speaker 1: highway trucks a year. There's only five thousand logging trucks
Speaker 1: in all of BC with normally you keep them for
Speaker 1: ten years, which means that each manufacturer might sell fifty
Speaker 1: of these trucks per year. They're not going to tool
Speaker 1: up an entire assembly line for logging trucks for fifty
Speaker 1: trucks a year. They don't care about it. So now
Speaker 1: you start they're starting to get well, now you're gonna
Speaker 1: get a highway chassis and we're just gonna send the
Speaker 1: highway cab, the highway hood into the place that makes
Speaker 1: the frame rails and they'll do all the extra stuff,
Speaker 1: so it's getting less bespoke, which is also causing more
Speaker 1: reliability issue problems is that it's essentially a highway truck
Speaker 1: cab put into an off highway situation. Can we go
Speaker 1: back and talk a little bit more. I wanna I
Speaker 1: still want to wrap my head around why electric. And
Speaker 1: I'm also curious about like the supporting infrastructure for vocational trucks,
Speaker 1: particularly logging trucks for electric vehicles, and you know, I'm
Speaker 1: do you know there's there is not much of an
Speaker 1: electric vehicle infrastructure still just for regular cars on the highway,
Speaker 1: although that's getting built out rapidly, but there's still a
Speaker 1: lot of work to do. What does what is the
Speaker 1: sort of like charging infrastructure look like when you think
Speaker 1: about your markets, Well, we run that diesel generator, so
Speaker 1: we don't need charging infrastructure, And that whole charging infrastructure
Speaker 1: being built up is a bit of a misnomer. The
Speaker 1: charging stations are there, but if you look about fifteen
Speaker 1: years ago, we had about four arra wats or four
Speaker 1: thousand terra wats of power in the US. It was
Speaker 1: four thousand one. Now we have four thousand one and ten.
Speaker 1: We've only increased the capacity of the amount of electricity
Speaker 1: on the grid in the last ten years by ten
Speaker 1: like it's it's so insignificant that the amount of electric
Speaker 1: we have on the grid has not increased at all
Speaker 1: in ten years. If you compare that to China, ten
Speaker 1: years ago, China had about two thousand on the grid.
Speaker 1: They're now at seven thousand, five hundred terra wats of
Speaker 1: power on the grid. They've done a three and a
Speaker 1: half times increase, almost four times increase, and North America
Speaker 1: has stayed flat lined in the same amount of time.
Speaker 1: So they say that yeah, we're putting in the charging
Speaker 1: stations and you see more charging stations, but we're don't
Speaker 1: have the extra energy and electricity to support those charging stations.
Speaker 1: And where that comes into real effect is that cars
Speaker 1: are okay, they increase the gride load where they're at
Speaker 1: a little bit. The price of electricity does go up,
Speaker 1: but the amount of power that a car uses is
Speaker 1: nothing compared to the amount of semi truck uses. So
Speaker 1: if we were to make all the logging trucks in
Speaker 1: British Columbia, Canada all five thousand electric at two and
Speaker 1: a half mega wants of power per day for five
Speaker 1: thousand trucks gives you about twelve thou in five hundred
Speaker 1: megawatts twelve gigawatts of power. Right now, our government has
Speaker 1: been building a new dam, the site see Dam. It's
Speaker 1: been into construction for fifteen years. They've spent twenty one
Speaker 1: billion dollars on it and it has a one point
Speaker 1: one gigawatt capacity, which means you would need to build
Speaker 1: about eight to twelve more of these dams in order
Speaker 1: to just supply the electricity required four logging trucks in
Speaker 1: a small province in Canada, a niche industry and a
Speaker 1: small thing needs at least ten more hydroelectric dams in
Speaker 1: the twenty billion dollar range. That kind of shows on
Speaker 1: where our infrastructure is at. No, it's it's not happening
Speaker 1: anytime soon unless we have levels of infrastructure investments similar
Speaker 1: to what China does. It's it's just there's there's not
Speaker 1: going to be a smooth, easy transition. It's why I'm
Speaker 1: still in favor of these diesel electric hybrids, a much smaller,
Speaker 1: much more efficiently ran diesel that's running at its peak
Speaker 1: ideal rpm that then just recharge of the batteries, and
Speaker 1: right now, what we found in our prototypes is that
Speaker 1: you get about two hours of driving out of the
Speaker 1: truck and you run the generator for about half an
Speaker 1: hour to recharge the batteries half hour to forty minutes,
Speaker 1: so it burns in that half hour about thirty liters
Speaker 1: of diesel to drive the truck about two hundred kilometers
Speaker 1: two hours of driving for thirty liters of diesel. If
Speaker 1: you consider that same amount of fuel burn, you're looking
Speaker 1: at a hundred liters of diesel to a hundred and
Speaker 1: twenty liters of diesel. So if we're trying to reduce emissions,
Speaker 1: reduce fuel consumption by going diesel electric, you can still
Speaker 1: have that seventy reduction in fuel mileage burnt much more
Speaker 1: efficiently as you go electric. And then as the grid improves,
Speaker 1: if we do invest in our electrical infrastructure like China does,
Speaker 1: with that charge and capacity and that electric capacity on
Speaker 1: the grid, over time, as the batteries get better, you
Speaker 1: can put more batteries in there, and you can make
Speaker 1: your generator smaller instead of a nine leader, six leader,
Speaker 1: maybe a three leader, and then you can get rid
Speaker 1: of it all together. And that's the way I believe
Speaker 1: that we need to transition into this zero emissions electric
Speaker 1: economy over the next twenty thirty years is by making
Speaker 1: that hybrid electric drive train more efficient. An evolution instead
Speaker 1: of a revolution, I guess Chase. There was one other
Speaker 1: thing I wanted to ask you about, which is how
Speaker 1: have you been fundraising so far? And what's that been like?
Speaker 1: So we did. Our first fundraising was off this crowdfunding
Speaker 1: we uh we started off. I announced this business on
Speaker 1: TikTok and within four days we raised about half a
Speaker 1: million dollars and okay cool. That allowed us to get
Speaker 1: the first retro fit quote type built. Then we built that,
Speaker 1: we showed it off, We showed that we people we
Speaker 1: could build it. Then we had another crowdfunding and we
Speaker 1: had a goal of one and a half million to
Speaker 1: start the production of the first production trucks, and we
Speaker 1: raised that one and a half million in about four days.
Speaker 1: And this is one of the nice things that we
Speaker 1: were trying to stay away from venture capital, because I
Speaker 1: made a point on that first round of investment to
Speaker 1: call everybody that don't invested over a thousand dollars into
Speaker 1: the company. I wanted to make sure that they were
Speaker 1: okay with the investment. I mean literally, you invested in
Speaker 1: a tech startup off of TikTok, Are you sure about this? Like?
Speaker 1: And then what I found out though in that oh god,
Speaker 1: it took three weeks to do all those phone calls.
Speaker 1: But what I found out is that of all their
Speaker 1: people were owner operators, small fleet owners or truck drivers.
Speaker 1: Our investors, especially like Annex, stayed true even going into
Speaker 1: the next thing. Our investors weren't invest thing in us
Speaker 1: because they wanted a huge return. I can't wait to
Speaker 1: see that return I'm investing. I mean, yeah, some of
Speaker 1: them are hoping that, yeah, we're successful, we take the
Speaker 1: company public, they can see a return on that initial investment.
Speaker 1: But what they were mainly invested in is that they
Speaker 1: wanted to buy our trucks. They believed in the trucks
Speaker 1: we were building, they believed in how we were doing it.
Speaker 1: So all our investors themselves, our truck drivers and company owners,
Speaker 1: that their return on investment isn't the money they're making
Speaker 1: off of it. Their return on investment is being able
Speaker 1: to buy a good truck that does the job for
Speaker 1: them without the planned obsolescence. With the efficiency of the
Speaker 1: diesel electric system, So it's kind of put us in
Speaker 1: this really unique thing is that we don't have venture
Speaker 1: capital behind us asking for a big return on their investment.
Speaker 1: We have these small owner operators, these medium sized companies
Speaker 1: that says our return on the investment is just getting
Speaker 1: the truck. So I think that's kind of unique in
Speaker 1: the tech space. Chase Barbera, This is such a fascinating conversation.
Speaker 1: I learned a lot in this episode, but I think
Speaker 1: that's a good place to leave it. It sounds good.
Speaker 1: I'm I'm glad I could help. There's a lot of
Speaker 1: information to cover, yeah, super quick, everything about logging work,
Speaker 1: vocational trucking, the the interchangeability of the parts of the
Speaker 1: connection there to the military, the fact that these are like, uh,
Speaker 1: sort of more bespoken, limited run so it doesn't really
Speaker 1: make sense to stand up an assembly line for most
Speaker 1: of these things. None of the sort of uh, the
Speaker 1: energy systems of like charging on the way down, all
Speaker 1: things I hadn't really thought about before, but fascinating, very fascinating.
Speaker 1: Really appreciate you coming on, alts Oh, thanks for having
Speaker 1: me on. I had a lot of fun talking about
Speaker 1: this interesting great Tracy. I found that to be really fascinating.
Speaker 1: Like I said, this was like totally new stuff. The
Speaker 1: part about interchangeable parts of I think was like sort
Speaker 1: of very eye opening, Like obviously I should have rephrased
Speaker 1: what I said earlier. Obviously, supply chain resilience is a
Speaker 1: security concern, but I had not considered interchangeability of trucking
Speaker 1: parts or manufacturing parts more generally as part of that considerations.
Speaker 1: And the role of the U. S. Army in doing
Speaker 1: that was absolutely fascinating to hear. I will say, I
Speaker 1: have a feeling the way some of our listeners feel
Speaker 1: about our market structure episodes might be the way I
Speaker 1: feel about some of the conversation over you know, like
Speaker 1: engine size and structure and power needed for logging trucks.
Speaker 1: But I think I got most of it. I I
Speaker 1: will admit, even after all of these episodes that we've
Speaker 1: done on energy and electricity, like I don't have an
Speaker 1: intuitive sense of like kilowatt hours or you know, some
Speaker 1: of thes or some of these things, like I haven't
Speaker 1: totally internalized them. But like this like basic idea and
Speaker 1: you know it's come up in multiple times in multiple conversations,
Speaker 1: which is that when we're talking about electricity, there is
Speaker 1: always this tension that doesn't really exist, you know, in
Speaker 1: sort of other forms of like peak versus average, and
Speaker 1: so you need to have the capacity to deliver at peak,
Speaker 1: but oftentimes there's like a waste in terms of because
Speaker 1: at the average time you don't need that. And so
Speaker 1: it's interesting this idea that maybe the sort of the
Speaker 1: diesel hybrid, the diesel hybrid electric solution is one way
Speaker 1: to address that. And at first, like I didn't really
Speaker 1: understand like this idea of like how are you gonna
Speaker 1: have like a truck and company and it's sort of
Speaker 1: like crowdfunded, like do you need like hundreds of millions
Speaker 1: and billions of dollars? But if they're bespoke or if
Speaker 1: it's if they're certain owner operators as well, where the
Speaker 1: expectation is for bespoke and it's sort of these interchangeable parts,
Speaker 1: then it makes a little bit more sense to me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the peak versus average use thing is really important, I think.
Speaker 1: And also I hadn't, you know, listening to Chase talk
Speaker 1: about the weight of actually moving logs, like I hadn't
Speaker 1: really considered it. But that tree that fell down, we
Speaker 1: have to, um, my husband and I we have to
Speaker 1: lift it up before we can chop it into pieces
Speaker 1: because it's flat on the ground. And trying to lift
Speaker 1: that thing, you start to get a sense of what
Speaker 1: it must be like to cart around a whole load
Speaker 1: of logs. They're just incredibly heavy. Just that him hearing
Speaker 1: him talk about like going downhill turn and then having
Speaker 1: to like use stress as a plow to sort of
Speaker 1: like build up resistance and slow down, like having to
Speaker 1: wear with all. And I remember the So I think
Speaker 1: this is something that I'm Gord talked about too, which
Speaker 1: is that if you want to make more, make some
Speaker 1: better money and trucking, you have to be you have
Speaker 1: to specialize in some way. And you can see how
Speaker 1: specialized knowing how is like knowing how to do that,
Speaker 1: or like having like half the wheelbase be over the edge,
Speaker 1: like if I guess if you're going to have like
Speaker 1: a higher a higher salary and trucking than these are
Speaker 1: some of the choices you have to make. Absolutely. The
Speaker 1: other thing I was thinking about was just this comes
Speaker 1: up on all thoughts all the time, but the idea
Speaker 1: of in a very cyclical industry, how do you sort
Speaker 1: of encourage people to build up capacity that you know,
Speaker 1: at some point it is probably going to get furloughed, right,
Speaker 1: And Chase was talking about how when the lumber industry
Speaker 1: experiences a downturn, a lot of logging trucks just end
Speaker 1: up on the sidelines. But at the same time, you
Speaker 1: don't actually have that many logging trucks when the industry
Speaker 1: starts to heat up again. Yeah, all right, shall we
Speaker 1: leave it there. Let's leave it there. Okay. This has
Speaker 1: been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Allowait.
Speaker 1: You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Alloway and
Speaker 1: I'm Joe Isn't All. You can follow me on Twitter
Speaker 1: at the Stalwart. Follow our guest Chase Barber. He's on TikTok.
Speaker 1: I don't even think he's on Twitter. He's at Chase
Speaker 1: Barber on TikTok. If he had lots of videos about
Speaker 1: all this stuff super interesting. Follow our producers Carmen Rodriguez
Speaker 1: at Carmen Armand and Dashel Bennett at dashbot. And follow
Speaker 1: all of the Bloomberg podcasts under the handle at podcasts
Speaker 1: and for more odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg dot
Speaker 1: com slash odd Lots or Tracy and I blog, We
Speaker 1: push transcripts. We have a weekly newsletter that comes out
Speaker 1: every Friday. Go there, subscribe to it and check it out,
Speaker 1: and thanks for listening to do it. E.