Liz Allan [00:00:02]:
Welcome to Electric Evolution with Liz Allan. This podcast is about the journey to a more sustainable future in order for us to be able to do our bit to achieve net zero. I'll be discussing a variety of topics with experts in their field in order to educate and increase our knowledge of clean energy, electric vehicles, and the electric vehicle infrastructure. So whether you're an individual who wants to make a difference at home, a small business, or a corporate, this podcast is just for you. On the podcast today, I've got Jeremy McCool from HEVO. Thank you, Jeremy, for joining me. You're out in Brooklyn in the in the US at the moment. So thank you on this this time well, not time delay.
Liz Allan [00:00:44]:
On this, it's kind of 4:4 hours behind us over here, aren't you?
Jeremy McCool [00:00:48]:
Yeah. That's right. But it's okay. It's noon for us, so we're just getting into lunchtime. You guys, still got the rest of the day to go through.
Liz Allan [00:00:55]:
Well, yeah, it's 4 o'clock here. I'm I'm not ready for clocking off yet, but I've got a little while.
Jeremy McCool [00:01:03]:
We're we're really, just happy to be a part of this. So thanks a lot for having me on today, Liz.
Liz Allan [00:01:08]:
Oh, no. It's nice nice to meet you. So tell me a little bit about yourself because when I was looking through your your background on LinkedIn, I I was quite stunned because so you were previously a captain in the US army for 6 years, weren't you? You've been an adjunct I have to pronounce that correctly, adjunct professor. And we had a quick chat about that, what is what that is, but, you know, tell you could tell me all about this anyway. And you're, like I say, you're CEO of Hivo and found founder of Hivo. Just start. Tell me about being being in the army to start off with. What what were you doing? Where were you where were you kind of stationed?
Jeremy McCool [00:01:47]:
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I was in Baghdad. I was I was part of a a force that was sent from this area called Savannah, Georgia in the US here. It's a beautiful town. And there's a specific infantry division that was sent forward. And it was part of the surge program.
Jeremy McCool [00:02:05]:
You might recall that terminology that came around 2007, 2008, when we were trying to figure out how to get an upper hand on the insurgency and the terrorist activity that was happening across the country. Yeah. So I went to Baghdad, spent 15 months there leading troops into combat. I was on the front lines, if you could put it that way, on on the ground. Wore many, many hats. So it wasn't just what you would think running around with rifles all the time, but actually doing a lot of work around improving the livelihoods of the population and the civilians and trying to find new, better ways to help them get on with their lives because so much of it had been broken in that period of time. And so we took that as a big task. And so went from there to Brooklyn in 2008, just in time to catch the great recession that was taking place.
Jeremy McCool [00:03:04]:
So From Baghdad to Brooklyn, but stayed. And went to Columbia University for my master's program. I focused on urban policy and had a little bit of an extra focus on sustainability. Before then, around that period of time, there still wasn't really anything that was entrepreneurial focused and sustainability or what we call climate tech today. Mhmm. So I had to figure out a way to kinda create my own journey there. And thankfully, they were open to that. And HVO quite literally launched as a program of one of the classes I was a part of.
Jeremy McCool [00:03:41]:
Did it? So, yeah, yeah. I got to pitch it. Imagine walking into a group of your peers in 2010 when there was only less than 20,000 electric cars on roadways worldwide, and telling them that you were going to solve a problem, they had no idea that even existed because nobody even knew what an EV was. So it was a lot of fun, though, because a lot of people weighed in about the pitch and what I could do better in terms of preparing for the inevitability of potentially going forward with it, and I did. And I was really out on my own for so long of that because it was one of those things where I didn't start off with investors. I'm not an engineer. I didn't have a team. I didn't even have an HQ.
Jeremy McCool [00:04:27]:
I was operating Hivo out of the library at the teacher's college for the 1st 6 plus months. Yeah. And we magically got ourselves into an incubator, the first one in the Northeast in New England area, for cleantech, and we snuck in. That's probably the best way to put it.
Liz Allan [00:04:49]:
Good for you.
Jeremy McCool [00:04:50]:
Yeah. Sometimes you gotta work your way in a little bit. Just try to bust through the walls or over the walls or around the walls, and people were receptive to it. So in between the period of time from when I started HEVO in 2011 and and now I spent 4 years as an adjunct professor at NYU. And it was focused on clean tech entrepreneurship, so I was able to do that for 4 years and help people learn how to start a clean tech company from scratch and create a team and go through that same process I had gone through, and some of them actually did, which is really incredible. So it's been an incredible journey, as you could imagine, over the last 15 years since it started for me.
Liz Allan [00:05:33]:
That sounds amazing. Oh my goodness. So so just explain to everybody what what HEVO actually does. So so you've come from this embryonic stage, you know, to to what what do you do? What are you kind of, what do you provide? What services and products, etcetera?
Jeremy McCool [00:05:52]:
Yeah. So we're one of the pioneers of wireless EV charging around the world. So what that means is, Tket, as an example of a mobile phone charger, a wireless mobile phone charger. We've taken the the Centric technology around the idea of how that works, improved upon it to make it much, much more efficient, as efficient even as you can get with plug in charging practically at this point, and then improved on how to charge at distances. So different than a mobile phone charger where you have to put the phone directly on the mat. In this case, you can charge over distances of 4, 8, 12 inches and still have a very high efficient charge and have a very high power charge. And on top of that, we've created this entire software ecosystem that helps to improve the entire user experience. One of the biggest challenges, as we were early adopters of of using electric cars ourselves, was that we didn't know where to go find these things.
Jeremy McCool [00:06:55]:
And if we could find them, it wasn't guaranteed that we're gonna find ones that were operable or that were already in use by somebody else and that there would be a waiting line. And so we started to get to work on not only improving this entire charging experience, but understanding all the details from end to end of what a user would go through through that process In the In the United States and I and I could talk a bit about the UK because we are in the UK today. But in the United States, we deal with the problem of about 20% of our public EV charging infrastructure is not operable. And so you show up, and it's kind of a free for all. You don't know who's gonna be there when you get there, so you might have gone when you thought it was gonna be available, and you're stuck. And so we figured out a way to create this unique user charging experience where just like using Google Maps or Waze or something like that, you put in the address or you touch on the map where you want to go. And then our app, like magic, takes care of all the rest for you. So it calculates performance of the vehicle, the type of chargers that it could use, the type of networks you want to use in terms of your preferences, terrain, traffic, weather, all these things that matter to the range of your battery.
Jeremy McCool [00:08:21]:
And then we plot for you along that route where you're gonna stop, how long you're gonna stop for, what kind of charger it's gonna be, how much it's gonna cost you, what the weather's gonna be like when you show up. And we do that all at real time speed for you. So as you're driving, if there are any updates, all of a sudden vehicles are charging at this location that we wanted you to go to, we could redirect you to another location where there's not cars that or not as many cars so you can get a charge more efficiently and in a timely manner. So there's a lot to this product mix that we created, all with the thought of how do we make it better for users and especially our early adopters' fleets.
Liz Allan [00:09:01]:
So so right. Okay. So you've got your you've got the technology that tells people where to go
Jeremy McCool [00:09:06]:
That's right.
Liz Allan [00:09:06]:
When they've got there. So are you so do you actually have a a while wireless charging stations there when they get there? So so what what do they what do what happens? What do you do? Do you drive onto it? Do you drive next to it? Do you
Jeremy McCool [00:09:21]:
Yeah.
Liz Allan [00:09:21]:
What do you do?
Jeremy McCool [00:09:22]:
That's a great question. Right? So you've got options. There's not really, at this time, any public charges. We're installing the first ones in the history of the world of being installed over the next 2 years in New York City in a very meaningful way. We've got over a 100 chargers that will be going into New York City, and they're hybrid chargers. We're we're the only company in the world that offers both wireless charging and plug in charging in one complete kit. Yeah. And the reason why we did that is because the obvious.
Jeremy McCool [00:09:52]:
Everybody has plug in chargers today and have plug in charging requirements for the vehicles. But we are working with several major automakers, and one of those is Stellantis, which is Chrysler, Fiat, Peugeot, Maserati. That entire automotive group, that brand, is part of now the partnerships of several partnerships that we have across the globe to help proliferate wireless charging as a factory built in solution. Drivers will be able to drive with wireless charging factory built in starting in just the next couple of years. And so our one thing about wireless charging that is really cool and really unique, Liz, is that it is universal, unlike plug in charging. Plug in charging is problematic because there's all these different types of cable connectors and standards and use cases and all these other things that are out there. With wireless charging, there's one standard, universal standard that gives wireless charging an edge because you don't have to have all these different connectors and styles or anything. So you asked me, what is the user experience like? Well, it depends.
Jeremy McCool [00:10:56]:
If you pull up to a plug in charger using our Journey software by the way, that's what our software is called, Journey, because that's what we're helping you do. We're we're helping you get on with your journey.
Liz Allan [00:11:05]:
Yeah.
Jeremy McCool [00:11:05]:
So the Journey app will take you to your your next location. If it's a plug in charger, you pull up. You go through the same process you normally do. It's about a 15 step process to start charging with a plug in charger that's public. You gotta activate it. You gotta go through all the validation critiques and all these other things. You plug that in. You go get back in your car.
Jeremy McCool [00:11:25]:
Hopefully, you're not wet from the rain or something else. And then you wait for it, and you get back out. You do this whole unplugging. With wireless charging, we take those 15 steps, and we cut it down to about 2 to 3. It's really remarkable because there's already inside our app, if it is a wireless charging location, especially if it's by Hivo, the app shows you parking limit. So if you could imagine, you're like, there's this pad that's in the ground. You won't be able to see it. And if you can see it, you'll just see the outline of it in the concrete or in the asphalt.
Jeremy McCool [00:11:57]:
So as you pull up, you're not gonna be able to see it because you're you're driving over it. Well, the app is helping you to align your vehicle at real time speed. It's it's like an Atari game. It's like a video game. We've gamified it. So you've got 2 options. You can look at a screen that's actually on the charging station to do that, or you can look at the app that's on your phone. And we are working to help automakers put this into their in dash displays as well so that it's just part of the vehicle ecosystem.
Jeremy McCool [00:12:26]:
So we do see the eventuality of you just having to automatically do it that way. And by the way, by the time this comes around, there's no reason that as you're pulling up to that last 20 or 30 feet or so, you just touch a button, the vehicle automatically parks itself, and it starts charging wirelessly. Right? So we're already working on that today. We we have, we have been working on that with a major tier one for autonomous parking, and they're already starting to show it. It's really cool to see it happen to me because you realize we're not too far away from this future. This is not distant. This is now. It's just a matter of getting all the companies and all the products to play well together now.
Jeremy McCool [00:13:10]:
So it's it's it's coming along quite quick.
Liz Allan [00:13:13]:
Because, you know, it's funny because I was talking to somebody this morning who works for, Motability in the UK. And we were talking about, just kind of like, you know, how the what disabled people need when they're charging their car. And, one of the things we were talking about was the difficulty with the the kind of the the weight of the cables. So we're talking about, you know, kind of having some having a cable that is that's got maybe a balance on it so that it's not difficult or heavy for the that disabled person who's having to get, you know, get out and get in their wheelchair to then plug in their car. But, I mean, for what you're saying, they literally just need to drive the car over the over the wireless charging. What do you what do you call it?
Jeremy McCool [00:13:59]:
A pad. You can call it just a wireless charge space. Yeah.
Liz Allan [00:14:01]:
Is it like an induction loop then kind of under the ground? Yeah.
Jeremy McCool [00:14:04]:
You could you could it it is it is in the pad form. It looks It looks actually quite elegant. It's a beautiful design. We're an award winning company. We have an award winning design that was
Liz Allan [00:14:15]:
I see.
Jeremy McCool [00:14:15]:
That's cool. Yeah. It is a real pad, and it can be either surface mounted on top of the ground. So if it's in somebody's garage, they don't have to put it into the ground. But if it's in a public location, it may be better for it to go flush mounted in the ground like a manhole cover, or you can even put it under the asphalt. Interesting that you bring up Motability. That is a very unique company with an incredible mission and an incredible team behind it. They have to electrify all 650 1,000 vehicles under their management to to electric in in the next 7 years.
Jeremy McCool [00:14:51]:
Yeah. They've already started to electrify something like 13,000 of their vehicles already. And the driver input is, love the car. Hate to charge it. And it's it's you could imagine, it's quite complicated to think about it from the point of view of a person with upper and or lower mobility issues. My mother is one of them. There's no way I could give my mother an electric car and expect for her to be able to plug it in. But what I can do is give my mother an electric car.
Jeremy McCool [00:15:17]:
And she can drive up, park it, walk away. And then on her app, it tells her it's charging. She can check-in on it a little bit later on to see what their level is, see what the the total cost is. There's no there's there's no and ifs in this scenario with the wireless. And so the idea for what it does for the 3 primary customers that we're currently focused on, being logistics, transit, and accessibility, AKA disabled drivers, is that those are the ones with the most immediate requirement for wireless charging today. Logistics, you don't have to think too hard about that one because these are centralized depots or decentralized charging locations for anybody that's driving around, whether they're in Lorie's or whatever they might need, these these vehicles that are going to need to charge. And doing that with a bunch of plug in charging is, a, very costly, b, is gonna take a ton of time to get all the electrical hookups put in, and then, c, they're always dealing with a lot of cabling problems. Whether they have to replace those cables and there's a total cost of ownership problem, whether there's standards and safety requirements that they can't leave charging cables laying around, or in the US, we have union labor restrictions for people to plug in even.
Jeremy McCool [00:16:37]:
With transit, actually, our project is an interesting one here that we're doing in New York. It's the first of its kind. It combines transit vehicles that are being used to transport people all throughout the outer boroughs of New York City where there is no mass transit or what we call mass transit deserts, where there's 100 of thousands of people every single day that rely on these these things that we call dollar rights. They're quite literally vans. You jump on, you pay the driver a buck. They kinda go on these loops that are dedicated, and you just jump off where you need to. So now we're gonna have a 100 plus of those become electric vans and electric shuttles, and they're gonna be charging overnight wirelessly at all these little pods that we're gonna have, these these pads everywhere so that they can stop in and charge overnight. But during the daytime, there's plug in charging that we're gonna have at the same location.
Jeremy McCool [00:17:33]:
So anybody else that wants to come get a hamburger or go shopping or anywhere at any of these locations, they'll be able to still stop charge and be able to get a little bit of juice while they're doing whatever they wanna do. So these are the kinds of things right now that are picking up. And in the UK, Liz, The UK is, in my view and in our company's view, in many ways leading the charge on wireless charging. It's amazing to see the reception and the emphasis to cordless charging that is coming out of that country. It's incredible.
Liz Allan [00:18:08]:
I'm really pleased. So so the are you actually targeting the same kind of companies over here as well then?
Jeremy McCool [00:18:15]:
Absolutely. I mean, there is no bigger fleet in all of Europe than Motability. It's the single largest fleet, bigger than any of the transit or logistic companies. They are the single biggest one. And then when you you start to look at some of the other customers and people that we're involved with, it's really remarkable. We've got a couple of companies that we've been running projects with in the background now for about a year plus. And so far, we're getting to a point now where they're starting to market it to their customers and prepare for the next stage of things. And some of those are gonna obviously be fleet focused, but some of those are also gonna be consumer focused because there will be, like I stated, in the next couple years, a couple automakers and especially European ones that will offer wireless charging.
Jeremy McCool [00:19:01]:
And, again, back to that universal nature of wireless charging. You can pick up a HEVO Pad even if you have wireless charging by one of our other competitors on the vehicle. That doesn't matter. This is the the great ease of adoption that we offer. So we've got we've got quite a bit going on actually in the UK and and very proud to be doing it too because people get it. You know? The last thing you wanna do is get out in the rain and and connect a high voltage cable to a big battery pack.
Liz Allan [00:19:28]:
We get plenty of it. We get plenty of rain here
Jeremy McCool [00:19:30]:
in the back. Just a little bit.
Liz Allan [00:19:32]:
Funny enough. I'm looking out the window now, and it's raining.
Jeremy McCool [00:19:36]:
It's it's it's part of the, it's part of the adventure of going and charging in England. Yeah.
Liz Allan [00:19:43]:
I mean, so so what kind of so, obviously, you've gotta put the you've gotta put the wireless charging pad into into the ground anyway. What Yeah. And and, actually, you must I'm assuming you still gotta get all the, you know, kind of all the sign off and everything for all the electrics and things like that.
Jeremy McCool [00:20:04]:
Yeah.
Liz Allan [00:20:04]:
How long how long does it actually take to kind of dig it all out and put the pad in? How different is it compared to putting a normal charge point, you know, kind of one of the ones that you've got in the ground? You know, how how how different time scale wise is it?
Jeremy McCool [00:20:22]:
Difficulty in time, there was really no change. And that's directly reported to us by several major energy companies and contractors that have been installing these now. So they don't see it as any additional lift for them. The time is non denuminous. It's less than 30 minutes, maybe, of extra time, potentially. But at the end of the day, it's really interesting because it doesn't always have to be dug into the ground. And the vehicle needs to have a retrofitted system. Right? Or or I should say, it needs to have a vehicle package system.
Jeremy McCool [00:20:57]:
So just like a mobile phone, a mobile phone can't charge wirelessly without a receiving pad inside of it.
Liz Allan [00:21:04]:
Yeah.
Jeremy McCool [00:21:05]:
So the pad that's on the vehicle side is much smaller, and it's lightweight. And it's actually the ones that, in terms of our company, we've managed to make it very inexpensive. So for an automaker, our targeted price to sell to the automaker is somewhere in the range of $300. So it's not a big extra cost that you're talking about. And then the and then the charger for your home would be in the range and, again, I'm using US dollars in this case. Right? So would be in the range of about 1500 US dollars for the charger at home. And the the great thing about that is now there's no cords or anything that fray, connectors that die off over time that you have to replace. This is built for long lasting use.
Jeremy McCool [00:21:51]:
We've got the technology built to a point where we believe you'll be able to get somewhere around a 150,000 charging hours off of this equipment before you would ever have to potentially place parts, not even the entire piece of equipment, to kinda put that into terms that people can understand. If you're looking at it from a point of view of you charging every single day on average 2 hours per day, this thing's gonna last you for about 30 years. So pretty good. And, you know, it's a good sell on, potentially, for home buying and things as well going forward. But I would tell you one last thing about this is that it really comes down to people being encouraged to use it. Right? We need the customers to say, we want this. And we're getting that, thankfully, from the big fleets. The big fleets have stepped up.
Jeremy McCool [00:22:49]:
They said we have to have it, which has helped us to go to the automakers and create pull and tell the automakers, hey. We gotta get this on.
Liz Allan [00:22:57]:
Yeah. It just it makes sense. It really does. So, actually, I mean, I'm I'm I'm assuming on on the vehicle itself, it's not gonna be a massive big change to the to the vehicle to to add the receiver so that it it you know, universal receiver.
Jeremy McCool [00:23:16]:
Yeah. That's right.
Liz Allan [00:23:18]:
That's amazing. So so how
Jeremy McCool [00:23:20]:
low profile. It's really it's really it fits the design of the vehicle to be right on the flush of the bottom of the of the vehicle. Very low profile. You won't even see it. It's just it snaps on basically onto the bottom of the car.
Liz Allan [00:23:32]:
So just tell me, how long did it take you to develop this kind of proprietary technology? It must is is that since you actually set up Hivo then when you were, you know, kind of at uni college Yeah. That college, don't you?
Jeremy McCool [00:23:46]:
At least yeah. That's yes. But uni totally understand the the point there. So it took about a good year and a half to understand what it was that we needed to build because we had to start from nowhere. There wasn't anything existing out there that we could go, This is actually what we're trying to build for.
Liz Allan [00:24:07]:
Yes.
Jeremy McCool [00:24:08]:
So we had to go figure it out. There wasn't any existing standards. There wasn't any existing automakers out there who had given any kind of suggestions or recommendations or anything that we could use. So we were All the developers and the early ones like ourselves, we're all doing a bit blindly. And it's about a year and a half of start before we got to something that was starting to look like the right way forward. So we originally kicked off, actually, the development with NYU, with New York University and the School of Engineering, and that brought us to Brooklyn. So we went from Manhattan to Brooklyn because of that. And that relationship turned into a long term relationship where we've had people that are still on our team today that started with us at the very, very beginning that we hired in.
Jeremy McCool [00:25:06]:
And so over time, it was about three and a half, four years of work before we started to see the product packaging and see the kind of ecosystem around the software and things that we were actually trying to build from day 1. So it did take some time. And then once we got to a point where we got comfortable to send it out to customers, We sent it out to big customers around the globe, in in 4 continents and and let them respond to us. And we're talking about big ones, automakers and suppliers and big energy companies. And the the responses were all fairly positive, but there was always some things that we needed to work on. We iterated. So by the time we got to the end of 2019, we felt like we were in a leader's position to go out and certify the technology. And in 2020, even during the pandemic, we kicked off the 2 primary certification requirements, UL, which stands for Underwriters Laboratories, and that's a single unifying standard for all grid connected technologies.
Jeremy McCool [00:26:13]:
Anything that has high power usage like this, any EV charging, plug in charging, whatever, they have to get UL certified in order to be sold, especially around Europe and the United States, but typically around the world.
Liz Allan [00:26:27]:
Okay.
Jeremy McCool [00:26:27]:
So we got UL certification, and we got the automotive certification, which was the universal standards, what is called Society of Automotive Engineers, or SAE. So we became the first company and still, as we know of today, the only company in the world to have achieved those two standards. But we do know that there are other companies out there that will certainly achieve them within some short period of time, we'd imagine.
Liz Allan [00:26:51]:
So are there are there other wireless charging companies EV charging companies out there besides yourself then.
Jeremy McCool [00:26:58]:
There are. There are.
Liz Allan [00:26:59]:
Starting. Yeah.
Jeremy McCool [00:27:00]:
But no. They've they've been actually at it for a while. Some of them even longer than us. And so a couple of those companies are out of the US. Some are out of Europe. One's out of Israel, even out of Korea. And so we've watched as much as you can because there's not a lot of people out there like us that have been trying to get on with this and to build this and bring it forward. This technology has actually been on electric vehicles that were being sold before.
Jeremy McCool [00:27:30]:
And it's just that the suppliers weren't able to stay up with what the requirements were for the automakers, and so the automakers discontinued it. And so it's had some starts and stops, starts and stops, but our technology has never been factory built into an automaker or tried in any kind of shape or form that you would think of like, oh, I can go buy it from from a a dealership or something. Nobody has really been able to achieve that, And so this is gonna be the first real start of it, and automakers have been incrementally being involved, trying to help encourage us and create support to help get this technology forward, because they understand. People don't wanna get out and plug in. They get it. And there's no way you can do that with autonomous parking. That's it's ludicrous to think that anybody would ever do that. Right? Who's gonna have a car that can park itself and then walk up while it's parking itself and plug it in? That's so that's so silly.
Jeremy McCool [00:28:29]:
It's like walking the dog without the leash on. Right? It doesn't make any sense in this kind of case. So we it's it's just a now they know that they have to have it, and there's a there's a technological advantage for them to do it. Because all of a sudden, car companies went from not having real innovation of any major sort over a 100 year period of time. For the most part, there was advancements in things that were just more like improvements or iterations with with the minus of, you know, electric windows versus rolling down windows, minus the advancement of better windshield wipers and and AC cooling, not a lot more than that that advanced. All of a sudden, electric cars came around, and everybody could turn it into a supercomputer. Yeah. And it changed overnight the performance capability of the vehicles, but they love power.
Jeremy McCool [00:29:25]:
They need that juice. And so that's what they need. They need to make sure that people can do it much more efficiently. And that's what wireless does.
Liz Allan [00:29:34]:
I was gonna say EVs are just amazing technology like you say. It it is just drive it must I like I said, I I said to you before we started, I've not got one yet. I will be getting one soon. But it, you know, it I know it must be dry like driving around in, you know, a computer with 4 wheels.
Jeremy McCool [00:29:53]:
It it feels that way, and it's and it's going that way more and more. Because those those vehicles are are becoming better equipped with inside technology on the display features. It feels like you're riding around in a Jetson's vehicle more and more. And it feels that way too because it really takes off a zip. And you once you've had that acceleration, Liz, you can't go back. Everything is slow.
Liz Allan [00:30:17]:
I was totally gobsmacked. The the first time the first time I took one for a test drive, and I've taken about half a dozen for a test drive. And first time I took one, and I knew it was gonna be fast, but I was just like, oh. Oh, I like this.
Jeremy McCool [00:30:31]:
Oh, yeah. It it
Liz Allan [00:30:33]:
I really like this. So I'm chomping at the bit to actually to to get what I really, really am. So but so we're we're not too far off it yet at the moment.
Jeremy McCool [00:30:42]:
But Your maintenance is gonna go down on the vehicle considerably. Right? Yeah. You also have the fuel taxes that you guys have to deal with much more aggressively than we do. And, I know for a fact, you know, cities like London, you gotta pay that in you gotta pay that toll on the way in, and then that can just be toll on the way out because of it.
Liz Allan [00:31:01]:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Jeremy McCool [00:31:02]:
And so there's all these nice incentives out there too, but at the end of the day, it's a great machine. You know? You just can't get that thrill the same way. And I and I come through that by saying I've always been and my family has always been big gearheads. We've been my grandfather, my great grandfather are retired. He's a GM. My father used to work on jets for the United States Air Force. So we like things that are fast. We like speed.
Jeremy McCool [00:31:31]:
We love vehicles. We this has always been in our in our blood. And, you know, it's funny being that that's part of our legacy and lineage as a family. And here I am trying to destroy it in so many different kinds of ways. But you know what? Maybe for the better because it gives people the ability to move on with some new stuff. And I gotta tell you something, Liz. We haven't even talked about one of the more sexy things about wireless charging beyond the comfort of being able to stay inside your cabin, not get out in the rain, allowing the automated valet parking, which is that you can also drive and charge at the same time. And that technology is being tested around the world today, and we are a part of that group that has got technology that is being tested to begin the process to make this as seamless as possible.
Jeremy McCool [00:32:29]:
You could just be on your commute and not have to stop and pick up as enough charge to not only get to your commute, but have enough energy to even potentially get back. I mean, it's it's not in in the distance. It's it's in the nouns.
Liz Allan [00:32:43]:
Go on.
Jeremy McCool [00:32:43]:
I'm now in the UK.
Liz Allan [00:32:44]:
Alright. How does how would that work then? So because I've seen I've seen something, say, for example, people were giving me examples of, of bosses. So so our our bosses, they all stop at different stops, and there would be a pad on the floor probably same as what you're saying. And, actually, it would be charge charging them like that. But if we're talking about regular vehicles, you know, not just buses and cars and vans, how how's how's that how would that work then?
Jeremy McCool [00:33:14]:
So the same pad that's on your vehicle would allow you to do static stop and charge, stop and go, but also to drive and charge at the same time. It's all built within the same system. And so that kind of flexibility allows you to to to do what we're talking about. So you would have it in a roadway, and you would probably have it in something like a 1 mile long stretch in certain dedicated lanes, and it would only need to be dispersed out every 8 to 10 miles. So every 8 to 10 miles, you have one mile of that stretch that's gonna have wireless charging in it. But in that 8 to 10 mile range, you're gonna get one mile charging that will give you an extra 8 to 10 plus miles. So the the cost efficiency of doing it this way is significantly cheaper than plug in or any kind of stop and charge. And what it does for the user, it eliminates all the other challenges, like stopping and spending 45 minutes at a stop and no charge location.
Jeremy McCool [00:34:19]:
People don't wanna do that. We understand that. So You're
Liz Allan [00:34:21]:
constantly topping. You're topping it up as you're going. Yeah.
Jeremy McCool [00:34:24]:
Yeah. You're you're constantly topping up. That's exactly right. And that means you can lower the vehicle cost by eliminating battery requirements. You don't need as much battery. You're not worried about range anxiety. Your your battery is gonna last longer because you're constantly topping up. And on the at the end of the day, it's gonna be, from the infrastructure point of view, significantly cheaper by a huge scale of of multiples.
Jeremy McCool [00:34:49]:
Because in that one mile of of charging, we're talking about, for the equipment cost, somewhere in the range of 250,000 US to 500,000 US dollars of equipment and then the extra cost for layering on the asphalt and all that. And so to achieve the same capabilities of what we can do with 1 mile, you'd have to put in 3 to 5 extreme fast charging systems with plug in charging. Those would range in each around $250,000 A 100 and 1,000 to $250,000 each.
Liz Allan [00:35:28]:
Yeah. Yeah.
Jeremy McCool [00:35:28]:
And then you're only charging 1 card at a time. And people are having to stop and stay for a while, and then people are getting in the line and getting angry about that. So where this really, really matters initially is gonna be certainly This clearly is easy to do with fleets. You brought up buses. Buses could have this in the lane. They could do a stop and go at the individual stops. Same thing with taxis, by the way, with all the LAVC switching over. Perfect example, stop and go charge at their different taxi ranks, at the different bus ranks.
Jeremy McCool [00:36:05]:
But then when they're doing longer travel, they can kick up the charge on the go so they can take people on those longer distances. And then we can start to introduce it into transit, not only, I'm sorry, not only transit, but logistics so that the DHLs and the other companies that are FedExes of the world, they can also start to utilize that. And then as automakers start to put wireless charging on the vehicles, then everybody gets the chance to start using it. At least that's the way it seems like it makes sense to to how it it will roll out given Yeah. Definitely. The data that we have.
Liz Allan [00:36:42]:
No. It's it's the innovation that we need, isn't it, really, to kind of and it's it's about to me, this is about kind of providing the right mix. I can't I can't imagine that that it'll it'll stop everybody from having the regular charge points with the, you know, with the cables.
Jeremy McCool [00:37:01]:
Yeah.
Liz Allan [00:37:02]:
But over time, you want to actually have that mixture of charging, don't you? The ability. And, like, going going back to what we said about people with mobility issues, that totally is take takes away any issue, like you said, with regards to, you know, even home, like, you know, home charging. If you're disabled and you just have to drive over the pad and you've just had to have part of your drive, you know, kind of dug up to put the pad in, once the s belt's on there, then that's all you have to do, isn't it? And then activate the app. It's perfect.
Jeremy McCool [00:37:37]:
And and, actually, you you don't even have to activate the app for that part. You pull up, and the vehicle, once it's aligned, just automatically starts charging. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, there's more to the story too because if we can start to achieve this dynamic charging or or inroad charging so if we can start to achieve this dynamic charging in the next couple of years, how much that will help to proliferate the adoption of electric cars is just unforeseen. Yeah. But we we do all agree, though. Everybody agrees that it will accelerate mass adoption, and it will decrease vehicle cost.
Jeremy McCool [00:38:14]:
And it will also do a few more other things that are on the tangential side of the equation, which is you can also connect renewables directly into it from from the side of the roads or off into the, you know, little pastures nearby, where people aren't really worried about. So you can have solar pumping power renewably right into those roads, so you're charging renewably while you drive. You could literally be driving on sunshine. I know that sounds silly and almost corny.
Liz Allan [00:38:43]:
No. It doesn't.
Jeremy McCool [00:38:44]:
But that's what you could be doing. You could be driving on sunshine and taking that energy back with you home. And now being able to have a wireless charger at your pad at your home means that you could also put that energy back into your home and have it be part of your energy system at your homes. And it's renewable. So now you're driving renewably while you go home or go to work, picking up. You go back home. You go to your workplace or whatever, and these wireless pads can take energy back from the battery and actually put it back into the grid to help the improve the grid with with with energy from from renewable sources. And it's a backup battery for when your power goes out at your home, which we have a lot of in the United States.
Jeremy McCool [00:39:26]:
I don't know how much you have it in the UK. Oh my gosh.
Liz Allan [00:39:30]:
Is it do you have a lot? Oh my goodness. No.
Jeremy McCool [00:39:32]:
So Oh my gosh.
Liz Allan [00:39:34]:
Bizarrely enough, so last last year, you know, we're obviously so when the queen died and I live I so I live I live in a close there's 10 houses on this close. And around the time this is a weird story. I don't think I've ever said on the on the podcast. But around the time that the queen died and they announced it very shortly after, out close got hit by lightning.
Jeremy McCool [00:39:56]:
Oh my. So she did it. The queen the queen the queen did it.
Liz Allan [00:40:01]:
Yeah. Exactly.
Jeremy McCool [00:40:02]:
She she let you know it wasn't over. She was still around.
Liz Allan [00:40:06]:
And then about 3 weeks ago, we had a power cut for about 5 or 6 hours. We've never and we've lived in this house for 12 years now. We've never ever had any kind of power cuts, and then we had to have another. So we've had 3 things. You know? So we had to I've I've kinda like a people digging up the end of the road and trying to get it sorted. So normally we get more guts.
Jeremy McCool [00:40:26]:
That's probably around when when Spare by Harry came out. So, you know, we've got 2 we've got 2 options there for you. I may I I don't wanna put that in into the to the dialogue too much, but I I I just feel I just feel happy that, Liz, we had a conversation today, and it did get to the queen. That I've never had on any podcast before.
Liz Allan [00:40:48]:
I know. It's a it is a real story. Honestly, I am not I am not kidding you. Honestly, that really, really happened. Bizarrely, and we were so none of us were in the house at the time, and it blew. So we've got brought our broadband plug. It blew, you know, kind of box. Oh, wow.
Liz Allan [00:41:03]:
Blew the whole box off the wall.
Jeremy McCool [00:41:05]:
Okay. That's a big deal.
Liz Allan [00:41:07]:
Yeah. My son my son's messaging me when I'm on my way home, sending me a photo going, should this be on the floor?
Jeremy McCool [00:41:15]:
Well, if if if it is, that's where wireless charging can maybe help you. It's a bit We deal it. We we have a lot of power outage problems in the United States because our, our Oh, our grid is decaying. And it's a lot to do with just the hardware that holds the cables up, as an example. These little hooks, those things are decaying pretty reasonably over time because of the natural elements. They're snapping, and then cables are falling to the floor, to the ground. And often, that might be in in in places like high forested areas, and then all of a sudden, that's just tinder. It strikes a match, basically.
Jeremy McCool [00:42:00]:
And that's what happened in in California, as a matter of fact. And, we've had a a oh, yeah. That's what that's what caused one of the worst Fires. Fires in history, was that thing. It was the damage was supreme. Now, you know, we had to deal with these things more and more. And the facts are, to be able to get the grid systems repaired in a way that would would work and and and bring up to near 100% again the the the way that we hope it would be, places in California, as as an example, Silicon Valley, they know they're gonna lose 2 weeks of power per year. They know that, if not more.
Jeremy McCool [00:42:41]:
And so they now these people that have mansions, they're living in $1,000,000 homes, but they don't have any power to keep the refrigerator on. And they're starting to think about, how do we get these vehicles to start powering our homes much faster than they want it today?
Liz Allan [00:42:55]:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Jeremy McCool [00:42:56]:
And those those vehicles could power our home for days for for days, quite literally. So, without changing anything, you could still have the tube on. You could yeah. Everything's nothing has changed in your in your in in the way you live. But this is where things can still get complicated. And and just the more that you can make that more streamlined and seamless and and and remove steps and remove, ambiguity in it, and you know that your battery is ready to charge because it's over the wireless pad. So you're asleep at night. Power goes out.
Jeremy McCool [00:43:33]:
You didn't have to do anything about that. Your system was automatically set up to turn on from your battery pack on your vehicle to keep the power on. No change to your life. You know? So there's a lot of really unique things that we're gonna be able to do over the next 10 years as we bring this technology forward that's gonna give people the, hopefully, the the interest to electrify much faster.
Liz Allan [00:43:57]:
Definitely. Because so do you know what's the percentage of people in in the states then that have have actually got EVs? Because I mean, ours is I think it's something like I think it's only quite low, about 18% of people in the in the UK. What about what it what's it like in the states then?
Jeremy McCool [00:44:16]:
We're below 10, and it depends on the on the state. We're starting to get to the point where places like California are having annual sales of new cars that are hitting the 10% plus ratio now, which is good. So we're still quite behind. The biggest thing that the US has challenges with is it's such a dispersed country.
Liz Allan [00:44:42]:
Yeah.
Jeremy McCool [00:44:42]:
And and we're built differently. There's only a certain amount of cities like New York that has more of this village style life where you can walk or bike or take the metro or something. Yeah. Everywhere else, for the most part, was built around the idea because we came to be as a country in the industrial age when cars were coming out. Right? And so we built out, very deeply built out all these suburbs. And because of that, that's that's been uniquely, challenging actually to electrification. Yeah. A lot of people would choose to do it if they didn't have to drive more than 50 miles a day round trip.
Jeremy McCool [00:45:25]:
And so that that's where it starts to get a little bit interesting for them. But major cities across the country, mostly in places initially like New York, San Francisco, LA, these have done very well in their early adopters. New York is remarkably moving very fast to electrification. And it's interesting to see how quick this city is starting to adopt in. But the the middle part of the United States is gonna take time just because of how dispersed out it is. It's it we need to have the roadway charging. We need to have dynamic charging to really accelerate mass adoption. We do that, then it becomes very easy for people to start to select electric.
Jeremy McCool [00:46:09]:
And there's one last thing to it. Electric vehicles in the early era were very expensive by about a factor of 40% more expensive than a another vehicle of the same kind of type. That is now decreasing in terms of that gap very fast. A lot of that has to do oh my.
Liz Allan [00:46:30]:
Because I I wouldn't I wouldn't say that it is yet over here. You know?
Jeremy McCool [00:46:34]:
You haven't gotten you haven't gotten that that like that yet?
Liz Allan [00:46:37]:
No. It it doesn't it doesn't actually feel as if we've we've got got to the stage where, you know, where we are where we are looking at that, you know. We're we're not looking at so because what they're saying in the UK, I think they're saying about price parity to be about kind of 2027, 2025, 2027. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know
Jeremy McCool [00:47:00]:
Still not too far away when we think about it. It's it's just it's a a half of years. And, in the United States, as an example, there's there's a lot of new government subsidies and things out there that help to get that price very close, if not even now better. And so people are making those decisions around that. Yeah. Yeah. We had to do it in order to kick off the industry. But now it's gotten to the point where those subsidies don't really need to be pushed as hard for a lot of locations just because the price of the vehicles have have have sharply decreased, Tesla being one of them, they announced significant decreases in in more more cost affordable vehicles for for mass adoption.
Jeremy McCool [00:47:48]:
We see companies like Stellantis and Ford and GM and JLR, Jaguar Land Rover, and these kinds of companies doing a lot of work to try to to to get those costs more to closer to parity. Hopefully, you guys can get there soon. I I I bet you will, though. I hope so. I was
Liz Allan [00:48:06]:
gonna say I do see a lot of Teslas around as in and you know that their fleet, you know Yeah. Everybody that I'm or most people that I'm talking to have got if they've got a fleet car, it's mostly a Tesla. And I and I do I do get why. You know, I was talking to somebody a few weeks ago, and he was saying, you know, from 2015 at at Tesla's technology, you know, it was so was so far into the future that some of the some of the OEMs over here haven't actually caught up yet with the technology in a Tesla. Yeah. So
Jeremy McCool [00:48:39]:
Yeah. It took it took them some time. They had to they're they weren't prepared. It was a antiquated kind of industry. It hadn't been challenged in a very long time. And early EV cars that had come out back in the '90s and before then were goofy looking. And so who would They didn't sell well because they didn't look sharp. The Teslas is what made that different.
Jeremy McCool [00:49:05]:
It looked like a beautiful car that people would wanna drive. Of course, it was way more expensive than a normal car, but if you could afford it, you would potentially take it. Now, that's not the same situation. There's so many vehicles out there. If you go to China, China has a surge of EV adoption much more than anywhere else in the world. And they're going to fully electrify within a a leap much faster than everybody else because they have all these car manufacturers that are doing it. You know, I I was gonna tell you this, Liz, as as as it goes. You you should expect to see wireless charging in the UK pretty regularly within the next 3 to 5 years where where it's not it's not a a challenge to find it.
Jeremy McCool [00:49:53]:
No. And the automakers are gonna help make that happen. They're they're very keen on it. You brought up Tesla, and Tesla pushed everybody to get on board with this or either adapt or die. And they realized that within the last couple years, thankfully. So in the last investor day from Tesla in the last couple weeks, they teased wireless charging in one of their slideshows. And so there's an opportunity that Tesla may start to offer that potentially in the next year or 2 years. Yeah.
Jeremy McCool [00:50:31]:
We'll see.
Liz Allan [00:50:32]:
There you go. Exactly. I'm gonna ask you one final question. Right. As an ex petrol head we call you petrol heads because you were saying about the fact of the fact that you you you're into your speed. As an ex petrol head then, what are you driving now?
Jeremy McCool [00:50:48]:
I have a 2015 Tesla and a 2012 Nissan LEAF. K. Looking at my next car, it may not be a car. It may be a truck. But Oh. That's a little challenging in this city. So if I had my choice, it would be a truck. But I'd imagine it's gonna be something that's a little more spacious and mini SUV ish.
Jeremy McCool [00:51:15]:
And I would imagine I wanna do that in the next year or so, maybe 2 years. I wanted to have wireless charging by EVA on it. So
Liz Allan [00:51:23]:
I do right.
Jeremy McCool [00:51:25]:
Those automakers have to jump on board if they want me to plug their vehicles, which the first car that we're working on right now with Stellantis, with Chrysler, is the Pacifica plug in hybrid electric. It's their minivan. And so I don't think I'm ready to drive a minivan yet, but I think I would take one of their other vehicles that I know that they might put wireless on in a hard
Liz Allan [00:51:53]:
Have you have you seen I don't know whether you know Paul Kirby who's who's part of the
Jeremy McCool [00:51:57]:
I do.
Liz Allan [00:51:58]:
Team. Yeah? Have you seen him they they were test driving an ID Buzz, a VW ID Buzz. That looks pretty cool.
Jeremy McCool [00:52:04]:
I saw. And they're they're so lucky. They get attached everything before everybody else. And Paul's such a fun fantastic person.
Liz Allan [00:52:13]:
He is. He is a nice sweet start. There you go. You just have to talk to him going, right. Okay.
Jeremy McCool [00:52:19]:
What Paul, if you're listening to this, put wireless on it next time, please.
Liz Allan [00:52:22]:
Yeah. Yeah. Do it. Do it. Absolutely. Goodness to me. So, right, web web addresses, what how do people find you then? Is it is it hevo.com, or is
Jeremy McCool [00:52:34]:
it is that right? Yeah. That's right. Hevo.com. Hevo.com. Absolutely. Super simple. And if you wanna follow us, we're on Instagram, Twitter. Anything that you need, you can find us very easily.
Jeremy McCool [00:52:47]:
Reach out. There's always some new things that we're working on, and there's always some some new updates and news, and it's coming pretty regularly these days on wireless.
Liz Allan [00:52:56]:
Brilliant. Okay. Well, just I wanna I'm gonna be watching all this with bated breath because it just sounds like it's definitely innovation in the making, isn't it? So I can't wait to see all this happen. So, Jeremy, I just wanna say thank you ever so much for your time. It's been amazing. Real really lovely to talk to you. And yeah. Thank thank you.
Liz Allan [00:53:21]:
I I will let's watch this space, and I'll get you back on when we find out where else it's going in the world.
Jeremy McCool [00:53:27]:
I can't wait, and can't wait to make some major announcements for the UK. Keep an eye out for those. Those are coming very soon.
Liz Allan [00:53:34]:
Fabulous. Well, listen. Thank you again. Thank you very much, and I'm gonna say goodbye to everybody else. I shall see you all later. Bye bye. You've been watching electric evolution with Liz Allen. Don't forget to subscribe and click on the bell icon, and you'll receive all of our weekly videos.
Liz Allan [00:53:52]:
Thanks for watching. See you soon. Bye.