Electric Fleets: Why Progress Is So Slow

What are you seeing and, and, and reading and hearing about as it relates to electric fleets and industrial banks? Yeah, it's a whole lot of talk. Yeah. Not a lot of action. Right. Welcome to our Industrial Advisors podcast. You have Bill Condo and Matt McGregor. We have a five minute Friday today and, and talking really about trucking and, and transportation and how it relates to industrial buildings. Yes, an electric I. Primarily, yes. Primarily the electric fleet.

And you study this stuff and look at it a lot. So like what, what do you say? I keep out on a little bit. Yeah, yeah. What are you, what are you seeing and, and, and reading and hearing about as it relates to electric fleets and industrial things. Yeah. It's a whole lot of talk. Yeah. Not a lot of action. Right, right.

So I talked to a lot of developers 'cause I've been waiting, you know, there's like third podcast, we've talked about it in a couple years. Mm-hmm. And if you listen to the one a couple years ago, we would've thought by now you'd be seeing fleets. We're not. Right. And so then you get into it and you go, well, what about the spec buildings? What are they doing? Mm-hmm. Right? What is our spec buildings doing? Right? They're putting conduit in, right?

But they're not running the power for a few reasons. Number one, the power's not there. Right? We're having a power prop that That's right. Yeah. And if you take a 500,000 footer, like we're building the Sumner, and you run the power and you say, Hey, we're gonna need. A ton of employee parking for AV cars. We're gonna need long haul truck drivers to recharge in the future. 'cause remember, when you build these buildings, you don't build them for 10 years, you're building for 50 or 60. Correct.

Okay. So if the current legislation is right, we would be requiring a lot of these to convert over. So you have to look at it. Mm-hmm. Right. So if you. Need a truck fleet plus your delivery feed in fleet into the local market to power that building would be about 16,000 extra amps. Mm-hmm. Okay. So the power companies are already tied in power. They're not gonna just pipe it in there and go maybe, right? You're gonna use it 10 years down the road.

So right now on the spec buildings, they're really putting conduit in. And then I'll say one other thing on that that's interesting is right now, and I've got my first electric car, right? Yeah. Right now on electric cars, there's really two hookups. There's Tesla and everything else. In trucking, there's nine or 10 mm different plugin. So you can't just put a spec one in? No, it doesn't work. No, it doesn't work.

Yeah. I didn't realize that, that there was nine or 10 different Yeah, no. And the infrastructure's not built out for them. So on deliveries, for example, those trucks, you have to go back to power up. Right? That doesn't work. Yeah. And they're saying that they're more expensive than gas vehicles, and that's why Amazon and other people haven't. Totally gone over there because these vehicles are way heavier. Mm-hmm.

And so they're not only worse on roads, they're worse on tires, they're worse on brakes. Brakes are way worse for the environment than gas. All the stuff that gets released from brakes and stuff. Yeah. So for all these reasons, these companies are not just rushing out, changing the fleets over. Right, right.

And we're seeing, so, you know, on the industrial side, when it got super tight, we were obviously seeing some retrofits of existing buildings and we haven't really seen. Shift on retrofit is no fitted buildings at all. But to your point, we're only the car park. It's the car. Yeah. But we're, but not on the trucks. And we're starting to see it a little bit, as you mentioned, on the new spec industrial buildings. But, uh, you just did a good job at describing what that looks like.

Yeah. The final thing I'll throw out there, and it's the sa, it's the same thing on boats. Why people aren't buying, you know, the battery powered boats. You can go buy a Peterbilt. A semi for about a third of the price of that equal semi in electric, but it's way cheaper to operate. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And it's not effective because you, of the charging stations, that's not built out. So it's just not there. So. I guess to close it up, hey, they're building it with the conduit there. Empty.

Yeah. Going out to the truck courts, going to in front of the dock, high doors thing. Building it for the infrastructure. But the question, it's, it's really questionable what that future's gonna hold. Where if you would've asked me two years ago, I would've said yes, all these buildings gonna be built out. But man, it's complex issue. Yeah. And it seems like, you know, Prologis certainly spends. A lot of time and resources and, and into being cutting edge and looking at this stuff.

So if we really wanted to take a deep, deep dive into this and do a full episode, yeah, we could get somebody from Prologis on here and really dive into it. That's right. But talk about the pilot projects. With Walmarts via Highway 10, between the ports of la Long Beach and Phoenix. Yeah. Walmart has been doing stuff down there since 2016, so they started with autonomous trucks, but it would have a driver just sitting there just in case. Yeah. Plus a pilot car in front and back.

Through time, they've released less and less regulation on it. 'cause there hasn't been wrecks. It's been productive. Right? Yeah. But they're still not doing that just by autonomous trucks. So nine years later. They're still testing it, right? But it's still not autonomous trucks delivering even simply from Port of LA Long Beach into Phoenix, which is that route on Highway 10 that is just crazy with trucks right. Coming in and outta the port.

So they still have not progressed to the autonomous trucks.

So what do you think the future looks like on, from, on that topic? I mean, look. I would say it's a slower progression than getting rid of lumberjacks. Right, right. Getting rid of long haul truck drivers. I mean, your dad was one, right? Yeah. It's going to be a longer progression because of the technology and the infrastructure is not there. Right. I could see autonomous gas trucks way in adv because you're seeing that Waymo, you know, taxi stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. We're gonna see that long haul before you see the localized delivery ones. That really impact the areas because the localized delivery ones, the batteries and the vehicles don't make sense yet. Right. So you're gonna see the autonomous ones, but they've been testing it for a long time, but it's such a slow progression. Yeah. I mean, I remember when we were going through Michigan State, getting our masters, like that was a big topic. Totally.

It's autonomous trucking and it hasn't changed much. No, it hasn't. That's my point is it hasn't changed a lot since then. That's right. Slow, really fast, slow progression.

Yeah. Really fascinating to keep an eye on, not only like what is spec build, like development of spec buildings and what that looks like over the next five years as it relates to autonomous trucking and electric vehicles and, and, and trucks as well. It'll be interesting sitting here 3, 5, 7, 10 years down the road to see how that progression looks. I totally agree. Look forward to the next one, but it's a slow progression. Yeah. Happy Friday. Happy Friday.