Ex-Logger Aims to Beat Elon Musk in Electric Trucks

of all the boat? Absolutely? If anything, I swear there are more than ever. Yeah. I feel like under every tweet now there's basically someone chilling Bitcoin, I think. Yeah. And then at Tesla and again incredible success story, but like self driving cars, I think that's been promised for a while in some form another at hasn't happened. And one of the things that somewhere on the road map but no one really knows when is there's going to

be an electric truck. Yeah, so I know various companies have talked about doing this, and I think there isn't there a pickup an electric pickup truck. Yeah, there's a few of the electric pickup truck. I mean, you know, there's the four lightning and so that's started to go. But you know, obviously we talked a lot about freight on this podcast, and I think there's a long way

until we get any sort of like electrification. Yeah. I mean that's my perception of it, which is when people think of electric vehicles, it's usually, you know, it's sort of like basic sedan kind of thing, maybbe an suv. The trucks are sort of further down the line, and then when it comes to actual long haul trucks, hardly ever hear anyone talk about it. You hear a lot when when people talk about technology in trucking, it tends to be autonomous driving. Doesn't necessarily seem to be electric

trucks themselves. Yeah, And of course, you know, there's this whole infrastructure right associated with trucking, you know, the truck stops, etcetera. You have these big fleets, they make purchase commitments, etcetera. So even if the technology we're there somehow, and I don't really know if it is, it seems like it's going to be a long way until we get you know,

an electrified trucking fleet if ever. And so while you know, obviously Tesla at some point wants to plan that there are other entities that want that market as well, because it's gonna be really big, right And the other thing that we've discussed on the show is the difficulty of rolling out the actual you know, grid needs or electric vehicles, and I can imagine with long haul trucks that would be even more difficult and potentially extreme, given that a

lot of trucks go to you know, places far off

in the wilderness. You know, think of things like locking trucks, yes, and so you know, there are different types of commercial trucking, and so you know, you think of the highway and the trucks you see on the highway, but you know, it's very different when there's like a truck that's like going up the side of a steep and icy, snowy mountain and getting logs and going back down, different physical demands on the truck itself, given different physical demands on

the driver. Anyway, we're kind of gonna emerge these two topics, like different types of trucks, what can be electrified? Why try to understand a little bit more about the commercial trucking infrastructure, and not just the highway the highway vehicles that we know we're gonna do logging. We're gonna do uh,

we're gonna do electric logging trucks. But you know what, I have an interest in logging out because a tree fell down in my backyard, a big tree, a couple of weeks ago, and I'm trying to figure out how to move it. And once once I move it, i i too will be a logger. Well this is perfect because we have the perfect guess who can probably tell you all about moving your log off of your property. We're gonna be speaking with Chase Barber, who is the CEO of Edison Motors. It's a small startup aiming to

electrify the trucking market. And he was also a logger. He drove trucks that moved logs and so he's familiar with that world trucker, logger, electric vehicle entrepreneur. Chase BARBERA, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots. Oh you bet ya. Thanks for having me on here. Quite a combo there, they are not. I feel like there are not many vehicle entrepreneurs who pivoted from having driven vehicles themselves. I don't professionally, is that it seems rare

to me. Uh, it was really common back in the nineties hundred years ago, super common. Nowadays it is a little bit more rare. Yeah, So what do you actually before we even get to your company, Edison Motors, what do you tell us a little bit about your background and like how you got into trucking and what you did in trucking. Okay, Well, I was one of those guys that I knew, like way back in grade one. Like if you do with those things in like grade

one kindergarten. Uh, They're like, what do you want to be when you grow up? I wrote down, truck driver. That's what I was gonna do after high school. I uh, I actually I was too young. So I joined the army for a couple of years and then went through there, drove truck after it, and drove truck till I was about twenty two twenty three, went to university, drove truck all through the summer because it's a fantastic, well paying job while you're going to university in the summer. And

I did incredibly well. I did a degree in economics and four point o g P a straight a's and I got super angry. After doing four years of straight a's, I got a job offer for forty five thousand dollars and the summer before I was driving truck in the oil patch. I made fifty thousand dollars in four months. And now, and after four years at university doing a incredibly well, I got second place at the Bank of Canada Economic Forecasting Challenge. And that's the job offer you get.

I'm like, I could make more working a third of the year than I did through all this. So we uh went with my buddy Eric, it has been my business partner for the last six years since university. Now and we put the last of our student loans together. We bought a nineteen sixty nine Kenworth that had been sitting in a farmer's field like a fifty year old truck with the last of our student loans for five thousand dollars and we uh we set out as a

trucking company. Oh, I love this already. UM. I have a bunch of questions, but maybe I mean, I didn't know that you had an economics degree. Is that something that's been useful to you as a truck driver? If you're an owner operator, just having an economics background help you think about that business. Oh yeah, one of the reasons I went to school and full full disclosure, I failed my first time when I was twenty one. It was back in two thousand and eight, the financial collapse there.

I had just started out as an owner operator, bought myself a truck, saved up for like a year and a half, bought myself a truck, did not know enough about business, and got wiped out onto my ass on the phone. I just made enough money that I was able to walk away from the truck with I think I had like twenty grand left in my pocket after selling the truck and working for like six months eight months before doing it. And that's what made me I'll decide.

I'm like, okay, I'm going back to school. At the very least I'll have enough knowledge to not be in this situation. Again, we mentioned in the beginning you're a lagger. You drove truck, specifically hauling lugs. How is that different than typical over the highway freight. It pays a lot better that it's there. You don't find a lot of people willing to do it. It's it is probably one of the harshest demanding jobs on a truck out on the West coast, especially in Canada. We get forty below

in the winter, fifty fort above in the summer. So what's that for negative forty negative fifty degrees fahrenheit in the winter, and then we get up to a hundred and ten degrees in the summer. And we are on steep slopes. So a US a truck in the US is about eighty thou pounds, that's maximum weight limit. A truck up in Canada goes to a hundred and fifty thousand pounds, so we're almost double the weight. You have incredibly steep grades. We're talking on an average highway. A

really steep highway grade is ten. We're running up to grades three times steeper than a steep highway hill with over twice the way it is. And then you're doing that in the snow. Oh my gosh. So you know you mentioned that you bought your first truck. I think you said it was Kenworth from a field somewhere. And one thing I've always wondered is when you're a truck driver, or say you become an owner operator or whatever, how do you actually go about selecting your vehicle and what

are there characteristics that you're looking for. I assume you know, if you're logging, it probably requires a different vehicle too. If you're hauling, you know, retail goods or something like that. But how do you actually make that decision? Well, first you figure out how much money you have. In our case, we had ten thousand dollars and we know that the startup cost were at least half of the truck, so we had a budget of five grants, so that really

narrowed that decision down a lot. We had a pretty good mechanical background, knowledge able to work on things. So my biggest criteria selecting a truck is that I need a truck that I can work on. That was one of the issues I had the first time is that whenever it needed service, it had to go into a shop. I said, Okay, I'll get something that's really old, doesn't have a single computer, and then hopefully I can fix

everything myself. Is there a difference in this sort of like design choices of a truck for logging versus uh typical freight truck. I have to imagine on the way down, particularly you're riding the break a lot more. You know, you have to be able to make turns, etcetera. And then I think maybe maybe I even read it something that you had written about you mentioned, you know, being

able to work on it. I have to imagine that, like up on a mountain, it's much more important to be able to like go in and fix your own truck, especially if you're like not near any sort of truck stop or mechanics stop or or mechanic shop or a toad company or anything like that. Oh, it's incredibly important. When you're up in remote areas in Canada, it's logging beats the hell out of equipment. It's just there's nothing.

You're off highway with twice the legal highway weight, so you're heavy, you're on rough roads, you're in mud rock, and it will just absolutely destroy the truck. And because of that, you need to be able to service it. Your ten hours twelve hours into a bush. You're not getting a tow truck out there. You've got to be able to fix it where it's at. And that's one of the reasons why the trucks tend to be heavier, specked,

thicker frame rails more reinforced suspension, reinforced brackets. They're way more they're more expensive, but they're also built a lot tougher. It's there's a reason why that truck from the nineteen sixties was still able to go back to work. Actually, the guy we bought it off of bought it brand new. His name is Bob Murphy. He bought it brand new back in nineteen sixty nine when he was in his early twenties, and he drove that one truck his entire career.

If that shows you the quality city that these trucks are made to. So this sort of like the bones of the truck, so to speak. It's it's just really important that it be heavy duty. The insides can be upgraded or you know, worked on, but uh, if you have good bones, if it's thick, if it's strong, then you can use them in the log hauling game for a long time. Yeah, good bones strong And then the other the biggest critical thing is that they use a lot of common parts that we've got gotten away from

and manufacturing today. Is that a freight liner, a Western Star, ken Worth, a Peter Belt, All the big brands shared components for their heavy speck trucks. It was the same Vicker steering box across all of them. The gauges were the same. You could have this commonality of parts where you could take parts from one truck and put them into another truck. Actually that was largely in part thanks

to the U. S. Military, But that's a whole other story. Well, this is exactly what I wanted to ask you about, because you book about how it was important that you were able to repair the truck yourself. And I know that in farming equipment there's this whole debate about right to repair, and a lot of farmers are upset that tractors are so computerized nowadays. They can't fix them on their own. They have to take them somewhere, and it's

really expensive to get stuff fixed. I think in some cases that even have to pay subscription fees for software and stuff like that. To what extent is that happening in trucking. Do you have a lot more computerization and maybe even subscription type services in trucks. Oh, it's the exact same as the tractor issue. In the trucks um you throw fault codes, you get a check engine light,

it'll de rate your motor. So you only have fifty of your power, and you have to take it into a shop where they hook it up to a computer. They charge you three dollars just to hook it onto a computer. They press a button that says clear fault code, and they send you back out the door until it happens again, and it's there's nothing you can do about it. If you want a new truck, you have to deal

with that. There's a ton of sensors over the whole thing, and you, as the owner of the truck, have no ability to know really know what those sensors are saying, no idea to read the fault codes, no way to clear them. You have to go back to the dealership and pay that money. You know. I want to get more into the economics of all this and the manufacturing and all that, in particularly your company. But what was the most terrifying? Do you have the most terrible? Yeah?

Do you have a most terrifying day out on the mountains? Oh? Yeah? Um, So I was coming down this like grade A hundred and fifty thousand pounds on. I had my truck chained up. I didn't have my trailer chained up, and I'm coming down and all of a sudden, even with two sets of chains on, it was so icy that it just starts taking off down this hill. And there is a immediate one degree corner, and it like it's a hundred feet two hundred feet off the bank if you don't

make this corner. And in order to stay ahead of my trailer, the road is only just as wide as the truck. It's a cut block, like they made it just wide enough for a truck to get down. And I'm grabbing gears to try and stay away in front of my trailer. So what I do is like I pull this trailer spike. It starts going off the bank on the left, so I let it go kick it back over until that trailer comes on the right side. And I stuffed my trailer into the snow bank so

that it acted as a big snowplow. That big snowplow snallowed me down enough with drag that as able to make the corner and get down the next thing without going around it. But that was one of the scarier moments I had. I think I'm visualizing that all right now. I just stressed me like listening to that and just envisioning all that. Oh last summer we had one. The road was only like I had six inches on each

side of my truck. It was over a thousand feet down into the lake, blasted into the hard rock, and the road was crumbling down. In order to make it around the corner, you hung the outside duel of your tire off of this cliff face, like the outside duel on the trailer overhung the cliff. That's that's how close we were on that hall stressing. Yeah, this is very stressful.

I have one more logging question, and it might be a basic one, but to what extent is the business of being a logging truck driver tied to the lumber business in Canada? So you know, if if things are booming with the lumber business, if there's tons of demand for wood for housing construction or whatever, does that tend

to translate into more activity for truckers. Oh? Absolutely. If the price the lumber goes up, then the mill wants to make more lumber, produce more lumbers, so the demand for logs go up, which they're willing to pay a better rate so that more trucks get out into the bush. They'll increase the cycle times. When things slow down, like right now, the lumber has fallen. There's a lot of truck drivers who have parked their trucks for the last three weeks just because there is it's a very boom

and bust on that lumber price. Yeah, that's my impression of it. And then the other thing I want to ask you is, when there is a boom in lumber slash locking, do a lot of truck drivers can they switch between being you know, a basic long haul truck driver to going into locking or does it require specialized equipment and trucks like you described and experience. Yeah, so logging does require specialized equipment. These are heavy spec trucks and a lot of the time because you need the

room for logs, they don't have sleepers. You can't really do long haul, so when it goes down, these trucks quite often sit unfortunately. Oh I see. So that what about like, you know, in terms of specialized training, other specific licenses or programs or schools, like, how does one make the switch, especially since, as you point out, because it's specialized, the pay is higher. Yeah, the there's no specialized training to drive logging truck. You basically figure it

out on the job. That's the only way to do it is most people when they're new, they start in the summer without the snow and then they just transition going forward. But it's but because it is specialized and it is a stressful job. I think it's the only job I've ever had where I've been driving at five thinking, holy crap, I'm going waiting. I have one more logging

specific question. Actually, you know, we got your contact from previous guest Gordon McGill, and actually that conversation was kind of largely sent around centered around waiting and waiting for trucks to be loaded and unloaded with logging. Is there a similar phenomenon and it just the driver play a role in loading up his or her truck. Out here, normally the driver doesn't play a low role in loading the truck. We have dedicated loaderman and normally there's not

a big weight time. They know you know what trucks you're getting, and they schedule it. Okay, we want this guy here at five am, five thirty six, six thirty seven. They just give loading times to win all that they want the truck showing up. So unless they're it's taking longer to load or the machine's got to walk a little bit. You normally don't have much of a weight time because it's all about the mill and the logging company is trying to make it as efficient as possible

to get these trucks into the mill. They're paying by the hour, and I've always been a big advocate that's why trucking should be by the hour. When a company is paying by the hour to have a truck, they get trucks out real quick. So let's talk about your company, Edison Motors. So what is it. Yeah, we're a company that's making electric We started out electric logging trucks and now we've expanded into electric vocational trucks the entire vocational industry.

Can you talk about what the opportunity was that you spotted, Because when you describe logging trucks as these specialized heavy duty vehicles that you know, to some extent people need them to be kind of simple, easy to fix and maintain, it doesn't necessarily scream like opportunity for electrification. So so what's the thought process there? Okay, Well, we've been a big fan of kind of electric vehicles and we reserved

a test less semi a long time ago. Because my thought process was if you're coming downhill like here, you go up the mountain empty and you come downloaded electric vehicle average enitor breaking, So you're recharging your batteries when you're going down in order to power the truck to go back up the mountain empty. You're basically using that stored potential energy of the logs at the top of the mountain to fuel the vehicle to go back up

the mountain. So that was where we first started, and then we started looking into it and the battery wasn't enough. The Tesla semi has a one megawatt battery logging truck. When you do the math on it uses about two point five megawatts of power. So the largest battery in any electric semi you would need two and a half times that weight. And that truck already weighs five thousand pounds. Doubling over doubling that weight is going to put you over legal axle weight. You wouldn't be able to haul

any freight. So then talk to us about how you solve the problem. You've started, Uh, it's still very early days. You've been retrofitting old trucks like electrifying them. Talk to us about like how you solve the problem or what specifically that you do to the old trucks. We basically put in a diesel generator. Is had the idea. In addition to logging, we did a lot of hybrid power systems where we would take solar batteries, bring them up to a mine or a remote community that was running

off diesel and we would optimize their grid. That's part of the other side of our trucking business, and we realized that a truck was a lot of the same of this community. So this one project we did where the AHA moment really came into it is that small place up near the Yukon border First Nations Reserve running off diesel. They were running a nine kilowatt generator because

they had a huge peak load demand. Everyone would get home from work, turn on all their appliances at the same time five o'clock, big peak load demand for an hour or so on that grid. They needed a nine generator to meet that load demand. However, the average load was only like twenty kilowatts. That's a watts. So what we did is we put a large battery bank in there.

That battery took up the peak low demand. We offset that with a lot of solar production for daytime, and then we downsized the generator from ninety to thirty five kilowatts. I think we build them a hundred and forty thousand dollars to do this whole project, and their fuel savings was eighty five thousand dollars in their first year just from using the same amount of power but optimizing that power to work more efficiently. So I was driving back home.

I was actually in that nineteen sixty nine truck and I was starting out at the satellites, and then the Aha moment occurred to me. A truck is a lot like these grids. You have a huge peak load demand. Takes a ton of power to get that truck up to wait. That's why you run a fifteen liter diesel five fifty horse power. To start that truck moving from the line, or to pull that weight up a hill. You need a ton of power. Once you're rolling down the road, you back rate out of that throttle. You're

at throttle and you're just cruising along. So you have this super inefficient system where you have a massive diesel motor that's not needed because you only need that large diesel ten percent of the time. But you're running that full size diesel of the time. So in addition, we're like, okay, this makes sense of the regend breaking logging. If we already have the batteries in there, we can make this

entire thing really efficient get the range we needed. We'll put in a much smaller We'll basically cut the size of the diesel motor in half. That'll recharge the batteries, and those batteries will give you the power you need to roll down the road and meet your peak load demand. M hm. So this kind of leads into something else I wanted to ask you about, which is you know, I realize it's dangerous to generalize here, but how do truckers in general feel about electric vehicles and the prospect

of electric trucks. Is it so long as it cuts down on fuel costs, it's seen as a good thing. Or is there a sort of knee jerk resistance to maybe doing things in a different way. Oh, there's a huge knee jerk resistance, And I don't think it's too doing things in a certain way. A lot of people I've met, they're they're open to new ideas, but truckers aren't dumb. They know how much power their truck puts out in the day, they can fill it up at the end of the day, and they see what their

power loads are. And when you tell them that, hey, this truck at full load ideal circumstances can do four hundred to five hundred miles, they quickly figure out that I do six hundred mile days. And then they think, where am I going to charge this? Where am I going to plug this vehicle in? This isn't gonna work for me. That's one side of the argument, and then the other side. It's like the John Deer tractor thing.

They see these electric vehicles and they're like, there is not a chance I'm going to be able to work on this thing, Like every single thing is completely locked out. As an owner operator or a company owner, how are my mechanics going to service it? Like Tesla when you hear stories of them buying a car, how long it takes to get it serviced? Well, how long are these trucks gonna take? Is where's that technician right now? If I go into a truck dealership, these yards don't have

people trained up to service the high voltage systems. Their normal diesel mechanics we need to go through an entire training process on an entire nearly new mechanics set of industries. So even if I can't service it myself, I can't even take it to a shop anytime reasonably soon to get it serviced. And downtime is one of the biggest most expensive things when your truck. A truck on average makes about two thousand, five hundred to three thousand dollars

a day. Three thousand dollars a day to a truck if you're down for a week, man, does that add up quick? Yeah, so you touched on this just now. But also does the structure of the trucking industry where you have lots of these independent owner operators, is that It sounds like that is also an impediment to electric

vehicle adoption. Can you talk a little bit more about that. Yeah, they want to be able to work on it, they want to be able to service it, fix it, especially like places like logging, where you work your truck on day to Friday. You go out on Saturday and you wrench on your truck and fix what you broke during the week in order to get it back to work on Monday. If they can't service it and they can't fix it. In a lot of the industry is owner operator.

I forget the exact statistic, but it's like of truck drivers are single truck owner operators, one man small businesses. That's almost of the industry. What is Edison Motors doing in the design of your truck? So the retrofitting to assuage the concerns of someone who's up on the hill, up on a mountain and worried that they you know, and the concerns about can you really repair these electrified vehicles? Okay,

So we had a real simple way. We took our experience working on when we got up to like a four truck company. We had all trucks from the nineteen sixties to the nineteen eighties, and we learned about the common core components of these trucks that they put back then, and it goes back to that U. S. Military. We got a touch on it on a brief synopsis of how it worked back then. Basically, in the sixties, the U. S. Military and NATO was worried about the Soviet Union and

they learned from in World War Two. What they did is when they war broke out, they bomb the hell out of the German factories, and they realized that if the Soviets do that and they start nuking our manufacturing hubs, bombing the manufacturing hubs, trucking is so vital for national defense national security that we need to be able to pick parts not manufactured, may be able to pull parts from one truck and put them into another, or people are going to start to death. They won't be able

to maintain their military operations. So what they did is they mandated that if you wanted a contract with the US government as a manufacturer, you had to use a common course set of parts. That's the reason why you see these trucks from the nineteen sixties. I can take the spedometer out of my nineteen sixty two ken Worth and I can put it into my nineteen five Western Star. It is the exact same spedometer, the treadle, valve, the Bendix,

the Type thirty break pots, all of them. The only thing you were buying from a manufacturer that was different was the body. The internal workings of the truck. We're all common because of that national defense industry, so you can service these trucks and these parts really stayed in like the turn signal from my nineteen sixty two Kenworth is the same turn signal that a twenty twelve Western Star has. Isn't that kind of cool? That's awesome? So when did we start moving away from that model is

my next question. They dropped their requirements in them sometime around the mid eighties, around the fall of the Soviet Union wall coming down in Germany. They weren't as worried. They started laxing it, and then you see in the nineties late nineties that manufacturers really start moving away as we get more computerized, more specific like now this is strictly a turn signal for this year and modeler truck, and they realized they could make a lot of money

off of the part sales. It goes back to that theory and economics is that you have a locked in customer, so you could save money by selling a cheaper truck and then making your money on the parts. Is that somebody buys a three hundred thousand dollar truck, they're now locked into maintaining that truck. You're not going to throw out a three thousand dollar truck because of a turn signal goes out. You're you're gonna buy that four or five turn signal, So you went away from having a

turn signal. Right now, that old one in sixty two is about forty dollars, A new turn signal about four hundred and fifty dollars at ten times increase in the amount of parts because it's specifically molded to the truck and only that one component will work. This is so interesting. I hadn't considered like sort of supply chain resilience and in turn change ability as a security concern, just more of like a convenience thing. I hadn't thought about either.

I'm sure there's like some like PhD term paper to be written or probably has been written about like the end of the Cold war, neo liberalism market, you know, diversity and market parts and sort of like a lack of supply chain resilience as government purchasing ceases to be a centralize hitting all the buzzwords, all the buzzwords, but it really does feel like there's like a fairly profound economic story here. So think about it this way, they

have a look at it is. When we hit COVID and the supply chains went down, the trucking industry was massively shortened by parts parts supplies. Now that was just a supply due to COVID and the natural way the pandemic happened. If there was an actual military event where say a incident broke up, but between China and the US, our entire trucking industry would collapse overnight. Without those common core parts and those older trucks, you can't maintain those

computer sensors. The truck go down. And that's a major issue, is that how do you feed the population? The grocery stores only have two three days worth of food on the shelf. The trucks go down. What do you actually do to these cities? So yeah, oblique thought to say the least, So talk to us like, Okay, you're competing with Elon Musk. Yeah, Like what is the plan here? So I and I know your company is young and you've started off doing retrofitting. But and that's sounds it's

very intriguing, but that's a long way. You know, there's a seems like there's a big gap between retro electrifying a truck from the nine sixties versus actually competing against the biggest or one of the biggest vehicle manufacturers in the world, and eventually creating your own trucks. Like, what is your vision here? Why do you think you have an opportunity? Okay, yes, so we've got an opportunity is we got that market segment. So with those common core parts,

that's essentially all we used. We went, what are those common core parts that are still on the shelf, cheap, easy to install, That's what we built our trucks off of. So that allowed us we didn't have to make any specific parts. You know how fast that speeds up your ability to get to production when you don't have to make any parts. It also simplifies our supply chain logistics is that we partnered with several parts stores. They can

get that they all have those parts and shelves. We partnered with these parts stores and we're like, okay, what are the parts that you always have on your shelf? What are this thing that a trucker is going to go in there and get perfect? Now, we don't need a warehouse for these parts. So we stepped up our production that way. That's how we're now in just a year, went from prototype to production. And when it comes to competing, yeah, we're not going to compete on the freight liner cascade. Yah,

hundreds of thousands of trucks per year. It's just you need a million dollars, a billion dollar facility, two billion dollar facility. But what a lot of Sorry? Is my dog barking in the background, But it's okay, we're a dog friendly show. What kind of dog is it? Border Collie? Look, I have a hurting dog as well. I have a corky. I don't know what it is. When I go on the phone, she's outside. She's just looking in my office window, crying at me. Sorry, but yeah, it's to get us

back on track there. We can't compete with a hundred thousand trucks per year. And that's a lot of where these manufacturers focus on. Like they're going after the there's three hundred thousand of these dry v and trucks sold every year in the US and Canada. We're targeting the heavy vocational market, which is still about five of the truck markets. But what a lot of people don't realize is that when you're into that heavy vocation, I'll say ken worth S five model, they're not built on an

assembly line. Every single one of those trucks is built by hand. There's a small kind of assembly line, but they are so custom it's not like building a car where every Chevy Malibu is basically the same same wheel base,

tires going the same spot. When you get into these heavy vocational trucks and you get into places that have bodybuilders they're putting on tow truck body cement trucks, everything is so customized to what your wheelbase is, where your axles go, does it have twin steering, does it have three drive axles, does it have one drive axle? Where does the fuel tank go? How much room do I need here? It's you can't build that on an assembly line because every single truck is so custom and it's

builed down to the even the engine size. Do you want a seven leader engine? Do you want a sixteen Leader engine? What transmission do you want? Is it going to be an automatic? An eighteen speed to five speed? Is it going to have auxiliary transmissions? Like, there's so many different options that every one of these is basically built by hand. That's why the price tag also jumps way up. You're looking at a hundred and fifty two

d dollars for a highway truck. You're looking great now at three hundred to half a million for one of these heavy vocational trucks because it is still hand built. So two things I hadn't actually I wasn't actually familiar with the term vocational truck before. But you know, now I understand what you're talking about in these sort of like specialized trucks for things like logging or oil fields

and so forth. And I also did not realize that, you know, that there is not an assembly line for these type of vehicles which we see, we see dump trucks things like that. I hadn't realized that they're much more bespoke than the typical semi that you see in the highway. Yeah, and the fancier you get with the truck, the more bespoke it is. Like, think about a crane truck, a large crane truck. Look how custom and bespoke that has to be to accommodate those cranes, those outriggers, tow

truck bodies. It's kind of a cool thing that when you get into the large things like the C five hundred, that they're not assembly line produced, and that makes it a lot easier for somebody, a smaller company like us to really come in there. Is that we can focus on those high end not mass produced, mass produced trucks. We're very cost competitive building these by hand. What's the resale value on these trucks then, you know, if if they're so customized and bespoke, but at the same time,

I guess they're using the common core parts. Well, they're actually getting away from it more and more, even on the bespoke one, which is like even on the logging trucks, it's getting more and more away from it. Is manufacturers don't focus on these trucks. They're not a huge part of their volume. You know, you're selling a hundred thousand

highway trucks a year. There's only five thousand logging trucks in all of BC with normally you keep them for ten years, which means that each manufacturer might sell fifty of these trucks per year. They're not going to tool up an entire assembly line for logging trucks for fifty

trucks a year. They don't care about it. So now you start they're starting to get well, now you're gonna get a highway chassis and we're just gonna send the highway cab, the highway hood into the place that makes the frame rails and they'll do all the extra stuff, so it's getting less bespoke, which is also causing more reliability issue problems is that it's essentially a highway truck cab put into an off highway situation. Can we go back and talk a little bit more. I wanna I

still want to wrap my head around why electric. And I'm also curious about like the supporting infrastructure for vocational trucks, particularly logging trucks for electric vehicles, and you know, I'm do you know there's there is not much of an electric vehicle infrastructure still just for regular cars on the highway, although that's getting built out rapidly, but there's still a

lot of work to do. What does what is the sort of like charging infrastructure look like when you think about your markets, Well, we run that diesel generator, so we don't need charging infrastructure, And that whole charging infrastructure being built up is a bit of a misnomer. The charging stations are there, but if you look about fifteen years ago, we had about four arra wats or four thousand terra wats of power in the US. It was four thousand one. Now we have four thousand one and ten.

We've only increased the capacity of the amount of electricity on the grid in the last ten years by ten like it's it's so insignificant that the amount of electric we have on the grid has not increased at all in ten years. If you compare that to China, ten years ago, China had about two thousand on the grid. They're now at seven thousand, five hundred terra wats of

power on the grid. They've done a three and a half times increase, almost four times increase, and North America has stayed flat lined in the same amount of time. So they say that yeah, we're putting in the charging stations and you see more charging stations, but we're don't have the extra energy and electricity to support those charging stations. And where that comes into real effect is that cars are okay, they increase the gride load where they're at

a little bit. The price of electricity does go up, but the amount of power that a car uses is nothing compared to the amount of semi truck uses. So if we were to make all the logging trucks in British Columbia, Canada all five thousand electric at two and a half mega wants of power per day for five thousand trucks gives you about twelve thou in five hundred megawatts twelve gigawatts of power. Right now, our government has been building a new dam, the site see Dam. It's

been into construction for fifteen years. They've spent twenty one billion dollars on it and it has a one point one gigawatt capacity, which means you would need to build about eight to twelve more of these dams in order to just supply the electricity required four logging trucks in a small province in Canada, a niche industry and a small thing needs at least ten more hydroelectric dams in the twenty billion dollar range. That kind of shows on

where our infrastructure is at. No, it's it's not happening anytime soon unless we have levels of infrastructure investments similar to what China does. It's it's just there's there's not

going to be a smooth, easy transition. It's why I'm still in favor of these diesel electric hybrids, a much smaller, much more efficiently ran diesel that's running at its peak ideal rpm that then just recharge of the batteries, and right now, what we found in our prototypes is that you get about two hours of driving out of the truck and you run the generator for about half an hour to recharge the batteries half hour to forty minutes, so it burns in that half hour about thirty liters

of diesel to drive the truck about two hundred kilometers two hours of driving for thirty liters of diesel. If you consider that same amount of fuel burn, you're looking at a hundred liters of diesel to a hundred and twenty liters of diesel. So if we're trying to reduce emissions, reduce fuel consumption by going diesel electric, you can still have that seventy reduction in fuel mileage burnt much more

efficiently as you go electric. And then as the grid improves, if we do invest in our electrical infrastructure like China does, with that charge and capacity and that electric capacity on the grid, over time, as the batteries get better, you can put more batteries in there, and you can make your generator smaller instead of a nine leader, six leader, maybe a three leader, and then you can get rid

of it all together. And that's the way I believe that we need to transition into this zero emissions electric economy over the next twenty thirty years is by making that hybrid electric drive train more efficient. An evolution instead of a revolution, I guess Chase. There was one other thing I wanted to ask you about, which is how have you been fundraising so far? And what's that been like? So we did. Our first fundraising was off this crowdfunding

we uh we started off. I announced this business on TikTok and within four days we raised about half a million dollars and okay cool. That allowed us to get the first retro fit quote type built. Then we built that, we showed it off, We showed that we people we could build it. Then we had another crowdfunding and we had a goal of one and a half million to start the production of the first production trucks, and we raised that one and a half million in about four days.

And this is one of the nice things that we were trying to stay away from venture capital, because I made a point on that first round of investment to call everybody that don't invested over a thousand dollars into the company. I wanted to make sure that they were okay with the investment. I mean literally, you invested in a tech startup off of TikTok, Are you sure about this? Like? And then what I found out though in that oh god, it took three weeks to do all those phone calls.

But what I found out is that of all their people were owner operators, small fleet owners or truck drivers. Our investors, especially like Annex, stayed true even going into the next thing. Our investors weren't invest thing in us because they wanted a huge return. I can't wait to see that return I'm investing. I mean, yeah, some of them are hoping that, yeah, we're successful, we take the company public, they can see a return on that initial investment.

But what they were mainly invested in is that they wanted to buy our trucks. They believed in the trucks we were building, they believed in how we were doing it. So all our investors themselves, our truck drivers and company owners, that their return on investment isn't the money they're making off of it. Their return on investment is being able to buy a good truck that does the job for

them without the planned obsolescence. With the efficiency of the diesel electric system, So it's kind of put us in this really unique thing is that we don't have venture capital behind us asking for a big return on their investment. We have these small owner operators, these medium sized companies that says our return on the investment is just getting the truck. So I think that's kind of unique in the tech space. Chase Barbera, This is such a fascinating conversation.

I learned a lot in this episode, but I think that's a good place to leave it. It sounds good. I'm I'm glad I could help. There's a lot of information to cover, yeah, super quick, everything about logging work, vocational trucking, the the interchangeability of the parts of the connection there to the military, the fact that these are like, uh, sort of more bespoken, limited run so it doesn't really make sense to stand up an assembly line for most

of these things. None of the sort of uh, the energy systems of like charging on the way down, all things I hadn't really thought about before, but fascinating, very fascinating. Really appreciate you coming on, alts Oh, thanks for having me on. I had a lot of fun talking about this interesting great Tracy. I found that to be really fascinating.

Like I said, this was like totally new stuff. The part about interchangeable parts of I think was like sort of very eye opening, Like obviously I should have rephrased what I said earlier. Obviously, supply chain resilience is a security concern, but I had not considered interchangeability of trucking parts or manufacturing parts more generally as part of that considerations. And the role of the U. S. Army in doing

that was absolutely fascinating to hear. I will say, I have a feeling the way some of our listeners feel about our market structure episodes might be the way I feel about some of the conversation over you know, like engine size and structure and power needed for logging trucks.

But I think I got most of it. I I will admit, even after all of these episodes that we've done on energy and electricity, like I don't have an intuitive sense of like kilowatt hours or you know, some of thes or some of these things, like I haven't

totally internalized them. But like this like basic idea and you know it's come up in multiple times in multiple conversations, which is that when we're talking about electricity, there is always this tension that doesn't really exist, you know, in sort of other forms of like peak versus average, and so you need to have the capacity to deliver at peak, but oftentimes there's like a waste in terms of because

at the average time you don't need that. And so it's interesting this idea that maybe the sort of the diesel hybrid, the diesel hybrid electric solution is one way to address that. And at first, like I didn't really understand like this idea of like how are you gonna have like a truck and company and it's sort of like crowdfunded, like do you need like hundreds of millions

and billions of dollars? But if they're bespoke or if it's if they're certain owner operators as well, where the expectation is for bespoke and it's sort of these interchangeable parts, then it makes a little bit more sense to me. Yeah, the peak versus average use thing is really important, I think. And also I hadn't, you know, listening to Chase talk about the weight of actually moving logs, like I hadn't

really considered it. But that tree that fell down, we have to, um, my husband and I we have to lift it up before we can chop it into pieces because it's flat on the ground. And trying to lift that thing, you start to get a sense of what it must be like to cart around a whole load of logs. They're just incredibly heavy. Just that him hearing him talk about like going downhill turn and then having to like use stress as a plow to sort of like build up resistance and slow down, like having to

wear with all. And I remember the So I think this is something that I'm Gord talked about too, which is that if you want to make more, make some better money and trucking, you have to be you have to specialize in some way. And you can see how specialized knowing how is like knowing how to do that, or like having like half the wheelbase be over the edge, like if I guess if you're going to have like a higher a higher salary and trucking than these are

some of the choices you have to make. Absolutely. The other thing I was thinking about was just this comes up on all thoughts all the time, but the idea of in a very cyclical industry, how do you sort of encourage people to build up capacity that you know, at some point it is probably going to get furloughed, right, And Chase was talking about how when the lumber industry experiences a downturn, a lot of logging trucks just end

up on the sidelines. But at the same time, you don't actually have that many logging trucks when the industry starts to heat up again. Yeah, all right, shall we leave it there. Let's leave it there. Okay. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Allowait. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Alloway and I'm Joe Isn't All. You can follow me on Twitter at the Stalwart. Follow our guest Chase Barber. He's on TikTok. I don't even think he's on Twitter. He's at Chase

Barber on TikTok. If he had lots of videos about all this stuff super interesting. Follow our producers Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armand and Dashel Bennett at dashbot. And follow all of the Bloomberg podcasts under the handle at podcasts and for more odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg dot com slash odd Lots or Tracy and I blog, We push transcripts. We have a weekly newsletter that comes out every Friday. Go there, subscribe to it and check it out, and thanks for listening to do it. E.