HEP-isode 5 brings us our FIRST-EVER guest on the show, Wave's VP of Business Development, Ben Auslander joins Mike and Jo on the Heavy Equipment Podcast to discuss wireless fleet charging, the challenges facing fleet managers using telemetry on a mixed fleet, and the Celina 52's unique approach to answering questions about hygiene etiquette. Also: Large Marge!
HEP-isode 5 brings us our FIRST-EVER guest on the show, Wave's VP of Business Development, Ben Auslander joins Mike and Jo on the Heavy Equipment Podcast to discuss wireless fleet charging, the challenges facing fleet managers using telemetry on a mixed fleet, and the Celina 52's unique approach to answering questions about hygiene etiquette. Also: Large Marge!
Whether we're exploring the latest in trucking technology, talking about the trends that propel the industry forward, or uncovering stories about the dedicated individuals who keep the wheels of America turning, this is where the roar of the engines and pulse of progress come together. It's sublime, it's surreal. That's the Heavy Equipment Podcast with Mike and Joe.
Speaker 2:Episode five. I should note here. One of our listeners made the comment that there's too many words in the English language where the H is silence. We're going to really emphasize episode five. Of course, I'm your host, joe Boris. Mike Schweitzer is going to be with us here shortly, but right now I have the VP of business development of Wave Charging, ben Auslander.
Speaker 3:Ben, thank you so much, hey Joe, Great to be here. Buddy, Episode five. I'm flattered.
Speaker 2:Episode five. You're actually our first official guest on the show. That has less than four legs, because we talked to the cat at one.
Speaker 3:So quick point on that one. I do have a shepherd and the mailman is scheduled to arrive sometime in the next 10 minutes. Not a problem. Man Don't seem to see eye to eye on responsibilities, so apologize in advance.
Speaker 2:That's going to be great, man. My colleagues are all the best. No, it's going to be good Again. This is a new show. We're just getting it off the ground, so I really appreciate you being here. For those of you listening who did not hear the earlier episodes, we talked about Wave real early on. They are doing in-ground high speed DC charging for vehicles that are effectively operating on a standard route, whether that's buses or drage trucks, and that's actually how I came to know about you guys was through your project at the I believe it was the part of Long Beach. So why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, Ben, and how you ended up at Wave and basically what you guys are up to?
Speaker 2:Well, it's really high power charging for commercial vehicles Hi. Let me just no, but that's key to know right, because it's not like a trickle charge, it's not like just a little. I mean this is a revolutionary thing. You're putting the same kind of high speed, high power charging that a lot of people are plugging into and you're doing that very efficiently through an air gap. I mean there's a lot of really smart stuff happening there.
Speaker 3:Very cool stuff and the technology is fantastic, a lot like your phone. So we are charging 250 kilowatts today on existing bus routes, transit, and it allows them to maintain their operations. We'll get into that in a second. Just you asked me the first question of who am I, who is this guy and why is he talking to? Why are you here, ben? Well, I'm here because I heard you guys were a good time Listen you can't believe everything you read on the truck stop terminal bus wall Got it, so the writing on the bathroom walls is incorrect.
Speaker 3:Okay, so first of all, I'm Ben Auslaner and it's great to be here talking to you guys. I'm already having a blast, so that's cool. My background is definitively in automotive. I spent a lot of time with the General Motors and with the Volkswagen, so lots of time with the massive automotive companies. Why?
Speaker 2:does everyone who say I spent time with General Motors have that same like choked pause? I spent a lot of time at General Motors.
Speaker 3:Well, I don't want to get into that. I guess it was just reactionary, so from that we'll just leave it PTSD.
Speaker 2:We'll just leave that. Everybody moves forward. It's fine.
Speaker 3:No, they were very good to me for many years, so I have very few complaints that I will voice on the line. I have an undergraduate degree in marketing and an MBA from Thunderbird School of Global Management. I'll plug my school because I do love my program. Spent some time actually with Volkswagen helping them with telematics.
Speaker 3:I got into the electric vehicle really early in my career. They had an e-golf. I got to drive it before it went out. I helped them arrange the app for the consumer, what type of features and functions they were going to utilize. From there I went to Chargepoint In the early days of Chargepoint, a great company that is doing a lot of EV infrastructure I'm sure you've heard of those guys, oh yeah, and a couple other stops in consulting and working with startups. And I got to meet the team at Ideonomics, which is the parent company, and Wave Charging, which has this wonderful technology and, quite honestly, the opportunity to jump on board and help bring wireless and wired charging we do wired also wireless charging to the market. It was just too much for me to pass up, so I joined the team and here I am today talking to you.
Speaker 2:That's awesome, man. I really love everything that Ideonomics does, and I actually had forgotten about that, so I'm going to take a minute there. They have US hybrid, which is a semi truck that they've converted to hybrid, so they have smaller battery packs that can move around the port facilities and all these ZEV locations. Then they get out on the open road and they can run on diesel or natural gas or whatever you throw at it. They can convert it that way, which is really neat. They have Selectrack, which is electric agricultural equipment and heavy duty lawn equipment. I'm still trying to get them to send me Manny Iyer, who's your CEO, over there.
Speaker 2:I love Manny. He's a good dude. I keep trying to get him to send me a tractor because I have a hobby farm.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, you should definitely get one 100% and he goes well.
Speaker 2:So he sent one to Jack Johnson, who's a singer and like a famous guy and everything else. And you know, and we got to go out to Hawaii and we wrote the article, we wrote the PR and took the pictures and everything of that, and I was like we could have just flown out Jack Johnson to my farm and then I could have had this thing.
Speaker 3:You could keep it. We could have done. I would think being in Hawaii with Jack Johnson is probably more appealing than being in the suburbs of Chicago in the middle of nowhere.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I guess that's how I'd spend my budget. Yeah, no shame with the plug, I appreciate you bringing up US Hybrid.
Speaker 3:They are a leader in transformation to electric vehicle or to hydrogen-powered vehicles, to whatever, and they're doing a great job. So if somebody out there wants to convert to cleaner tech, we can put you in touch with US Hybrid. Shameless plug. There it goes. Selectrac also is a great organization. Energica is another company that that IDENOMICS owns. It's Electric.
Speaker 2:Bikes, let's talk about that. These are like high-end electric, go fast, sporty motorcycles and they just I believe it was last weekend they just took their first podium at an AMA road course race against internal combustion bikes and they've been running them for a while. They've been doing okay, but a real podium with a shot at the wind on an electric bike like that. It's been a really big week for them and yeah, I'm a little bit embarrassed. I kind of forgot about the connection to those guys because I was so hopped up on the in-ground charging that it because I have questions. I have an animation of somebody stands on the wrong pad and gets 40,000 volts right up the Brainal cord.
Speaker 3:Well, the bikes are fantastic. If you have never driven one of those, hold on tight, because they're fast and they're really good looking and fun to drive.
Speaker 2:So yeah, no, they're great bikes. So you're really in there with a company that's doing a lot of stuff, and when you are kind of leading edge and you're trying to lead the way in so many fields, I know that sometimes some of that can get lost. But the EV charging thing is so critical to all of the rest of their operations You've got to kind of feel like the backbone of the thing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, you have to plug in the tractor.
Speaker 2:You have to plug in the truck. You got to plug the whole thing.
Speaker 3:Everything needs to plug in and in the future obviously is going to require more and more things every year that requires plug in and we're truthfully excited to be all about getting our technology out to the world.
Speaker 2:Well, and so let's talk about that. So you've got electric trucks that are running Draige at Port of Long Beach and there's a couple of other projects now that are working as pilot programs, that are really proving this out, where you kind of have maybe not a 24 hour shift but you certainly have back to back shifts where you're not losing any downtime to charging right.
Speaker 3:Oh, that is correct, and in fact, we're gonna have a deployment not too far from your house. Oh nice, I'm not quite ready to announce it specifically, but it's with a couple of big brands in the electrification space and the Department of Energy, and we're working on 500 kilowatts being charged wirelessly. So really great. That's so crazy.
Speaker 2:So let's talk about this for a second, because the instinct right, my initial reaction is that putting 500 kilowatts in the ground where, like dogs and cats and kids are potentially walking, is you're gonna zap them. But the reality is that it's so much safer to have this stuff in the ground than it is with cords not only cords that can get stolen, but cords you can trip over. Let's talk a little bit about the safety angle of this, because this really is not only for commercial truck drivers, but for everybody who has to live and interact with EVs. This is so much safer than what we're doing now.
Speaker 3:It really is safe. We've never had an instance. We've got deployments in six different states. Right now. The technology is safe. We haven't fried any cats as of yet and there's no plans.
Speaker 2:At least not on the charger anyway.
Speaker 3:No. So yeah, it's funny because my wife asked me the same question. So aren't you gonna fry a cat on that thing? I'm like no, the technology is fine, it's such that the cat will be fine, you can walk across it. If the bus runs it over, then I can't help it. No, we're right, you really sorry. I went a little dark there, but we do a lot of training to our drivers and that's what allows us to have incident free. We make sure everybody's trained on how to best use the system. And there you go.
Speaker 2:What is the secret sauce here? Because, if you look at, like Tesla's last announcement their last big announcement was that they have acquired a wireless charging company and, from what I've been able to see, your system seems a lot cleaner. Right, because, again, you're not gonna trip over it. There's no cords, this is like in the ground, so how do you get power to it? And how does the power get from the ground to the vehicle?
Speaker 3:Okay, so let me first by going back to something you just said. You know there's a couple of different approaches to the wireless charging market. You've got commercial vehicles which require high amounts of energy transferred to the battery, and then you have low amounts of energy for the passenger market, where the battery isn't as big, it can't take that high level of charge. So I mean, tesla's approach is very clear, that they acquired a company that is, you know, made for a consumer's garage, not for a multi-ton boss, that you know. So our approach is more in the commercial. Where we go in the future that I can't talk to too much, but today our focus is really in the commercial space.
Speaker 3:The second part of your question was the the sort of how does it work? Yes, and so you know we'll use a bus as an example. The bus has to be fitted with what we call a secondary charging pad underneath the vehicle and then it rolls over and parks on a primary charging pad where it is magnetically pulling in energy from the grid, and then the bus is off and running. It really is a similar technology to the phone charging, where it's just using the magnetic energy off the pad and into your phone.
Speaker 2:Let me ask you this you came from ChargePoint, you've been involved with Volkswagen, and would they, you know presumably were in the early stages or late stages of rolling out Electrify America. There has been so much talk about the charging stations being unreliable. If you have it in the ground, under the concrete, it's gotta be more reliable, right Cause you're not susceptible to wind, you're not susceptible to weather damage, you're not susceptible to and I have seen this there was a Tesla super charging station that was going up not too far from here and before they had it live, before it was hot, they had it out there and someone came in the night and cut all the cords and ran off with all the copper. So none of that happens with your system, cause it's all underneath a foot of concrete.
Speaker 3:That is correct. So, yes, we have great reliability. I don't want to bad mouth anybody else's. I've been at many conferences where I hear you know one of the big problems and one of the reasons fleets are less likely to convert is it really is the reliability of charging so that they can maintain their operation. So we know that that's a gap and this obviously, is a great way to solve that gap. And I think you did touch on a point. You know you just have people, when it comes to these charging stations that drive over cords, that they're not maintained well. Weather can really impact them and they're not being maintained to the level that they need to be.
Speaker 2:Well, exactly, especially when it comes to heavy trucks and you're in a you know a work environment or you've got heavy equipment now, like the new Volvo excavators and compactors that are using the CCS wired chargers, it's not going to take much for somebody with their hands full who's on the radio, who's looking at a clipboard, to trip over one of these things and really get hurt and turn it into a you know workers comp nightmare, some kind of expensive case, and then somebody's going to come out of the woodwork and say you should have had all that charging built into the ground Like you shouldn't have had the cables exposed, yeah.
Speaker 3:Oh, and think about how heavy, once you start getting into, like you know, the 500 kilowatt range and you've got to push that much, how heavy these cords are gonna be. Yeah, I'm like ruled, which adds even more weight. Yeah, I mean, there's gonna be a lot of hernias out there.
Speaker 2:That's absolutely. I look at all of that. I look at like the union stuff that's going on now, a lot of the union negotiations. Some of the union drivers are not allowed to refuel the vehicle, so they're not allowed to plug it in. Right, so right. So how are they supposed to plug it in at the end of shift? Now you got to hire another guy to plug it in. That's crazy that town.
Speaker 3:That is a real problem at the ports and that's a huge problem or aggressively trying to allow electrify right now? Yeah, so exactly one of the key places to truly electrify as the ports and the union issues with who can plug it in, who can't. It's really interesting.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, and this is why I love what you guys are doing, because you're solving for a lot of weird problems that most people, and I think even people in the industry they don't think about that problem until it's in front of them, so they may they may already have. Okay, we're gonna work with flow to put in their new 400 mega, 400 watt charger. We may work with, you know, electrify America because they have their new megawatt battery, so we can keep that off the grid, more or less, and make sure that we always have power. Yep, and then you put this all in the ground, you have it all up and running and then it's a question of okay, now who's gonna plug this in? And then, well, we're two and a half million dollars into this project. Maybe somebody should have thought of that already.
Speaker 2:It happens more than you think and that's why you know, when I, when I first ran across you guys at the ACT expo last year To see what you guys were doing, and there was like a little animation playing behind you, like how the truck stops here and it gets loaded up and while it's there it's getting a little bit of charge, and then it goes to the depot and it gets a little bit more charge. It just seems. It just seems so smart man and, like the worst part of all of this, don't say thank you.
Speaker 3:Complimenting us. I try to tell my friends and family all the time they're like I don't know. It was alright.
Speaker 2:Ben seems to be smart. He's doing the thing. Yeah, yeah, it really is, though. So, like, who came up with this? Like, who is the founder, the main engineer? Like, is there somebody who, like, came up with this? Or is this like a team of a lot of people iterating on this basic idea Until it gets to something?
Speaker 3:like you have now. There was a gentleman, mike Mascallari, who was a part of the founding team in the early 2010s. Okay, he called it wave, which I think is a really interesting and cool name wireless event as vehicle electrification.
Speaker 2:Oh, I didn't realize it was an acronym. I just thought it was like waves.
Speaker 3:Everything is an acronym.
Speaker 2:All right, so let's do it again.
Speaker 3:slowly we go wave of charging, but yeah yeah, so it's wireless advanced vehicle Electrification Wow that's so good I mean these things take time, right. Right, you know we, we've got iterations, we had, you know, 50 kilowatt stations, we have 125 kilowatts, we've got deployments, so we've got actually some customers we've had for over five years, which yeah, see, I didn't know that.
Speaker 2:I thought you guys were still in the concept state. You have programs out there and people that are out there using us. Tell us a little bit about that. What are some of the use cases that real people are using this in and finding success with it?
Speaker 3:Sure, so we have some an active engagement with a bus fleet in California, okay, los Angeles area, you know. Last I checked they had put our secondary pads on 60 or so vehicles that are utilizing in route charging. So driver pulls up, sits there for five minutes and he's picking up eight, nine miles of range and then he keeps going at 250 kilowatts. So keeps going and allows him to Uh maintain his operations throughout the course of the day.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's really all you need. You need that little bit of juice to get you to the next standstill there. Oh look who decided to join us.
Speaker 5:Sorry about that, guys. I didn't mean to uh, keep everybody.
Speaker 3:You kept us waiting anxiously, I know, we already did the whole interview.
Speaker 2:We don't even need you anymore.
Speaker 5:I know we're done. We're done, we had. Well, joe had it all this out anyways.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, that's true. Yeah, there we go. Ben Mike, mike, ben.
Speaker 3:Nice to meet you. Unfortunately, you hadn't figured that part out. After episode five no, it's.
Speaker 5:This microphone thing is always the best Joe was always like, and my computer has like all these defaults built into it, so like everything, like defaults back to some black hole audio device that it just doesn't work.
Speaker 2:So that's accurate. That's cool. Well, we're still here, we'll start. We're still in the echo chamber, we'll be fine. Ben just gave us the the rundown on wave, kind of what it's about, some of the history of it, and you know, mike, and what you're doing in a lot of the construction fields and other work that you've done in the past, like in Excavation and things like that. I don't think something like this would work in terms of keeping the shift going, but in terms of charging, if you had like a big pad that you can just park Generic machines and vehicles on whatever spot and they would get charged, you wouldn't have cables lying around or anything like that to manage. That seems like it would be something worth having.
Speaker 5:Well, I was thinking about this, that we do a lot of work for first, energy and some of the power companies, and if we had electric equipment on the site and we had a way to park it and absorb, you know, like park it over a charging pad like you're talking about, that would be phenomenal and that, ideally, is like the most ideal situation when we're doing substation rebuilds and grounding work. And that for those guys, to have a system where you can throw it down, unfold it and then get the equipment parked on it at the end of the night. Especially, a lot of a lot of our sites are zero, zero drip, so we have to have full containment over oil and everything like that. So you already have it in a contained area anyways. So it it would be, it would be totally plausible just to have an area set up where you could Put your charging pad down, park it over top of it and, yeah, get ready for the next day, even when you're not using it.
Speaker 3:Do those areas typically have access to power from the grid, or do you have to bring in power?
Speaker 5:No, they typically have a way of providing power for, for certain stuff. It just depends on what they're doing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you might want to bake, and then you know. The other nice thing about this is that they can. They can bake this into the concrete, they can bake this into the road, so there's nobody gonna come, you know, snatch at the middle of night. It's not going to be affected or impacted by weather. It can have ice and snow and sleet above it, and none of that. Because there's a weird thing in physics and math and science, right, because that you cannot insulate magnetic fields, you can't insulate against it. So if there's dirt on the road, rocks on the road, stones on the road, ice on the road, it doesn't matter, you just pull over it and now you've got juice.
Speaker 5:I was gonna ask about that. I didn't. I didn't know how that worked as far as Uh, you know, snow and water and all those things that that created an issue between the barrier of wave, and you know what you're trying to charge.
Speaker 3:Joe, that was pretty impressive. Um, you've should be telling this what are you doing?
Speaker 2:I am uh editing this. Well, no, but it's, it's, I mean, it's absolutely true, right, like when you expose yourself to enough of this stuff and you're constantly around you know the ev charging world and like I'm going to uh move America next week. I've been at fourth and speaking at fourth and, uh, you know I was the mc and electrify expo for a couple years as they were getting that rolling. And, like you, you've been doing enough of these conferences where you hear enough of this and you can sort of figure out this guy's smart, that guy's smart, and then you start picking out like oh, this is this neat advantage that we have about magnetism. This is something that happens with Electricity. This is why it's hard to transmit dc versus ac and why you need to have all this equipment to convert ac back into dc, to get it back in.
Speaker 2:And you know, like we were saying earlier, there's a lot of weird problems and challenges that come up that are not obvious. And they're not obvious because you're not looking at it as an entire system. You're looking at it as I'm a property manager and I need to put chargers in the ground, or I'm a fleet manager, I need to get juice into the vehicles or I'm a utility company, I need to get a substation here to be able to provide and meet these energy needs. But if you look at it holistically and you look at this all the way through, you realize that there's some easy solutions there. And this is what I really like about talking to you guys at Wave and talking to some of the other idea of economics people is that they're really solving for those problems and you kind of have to have a 30,000 foot view of this thing to be able to realize how smart this actually is.
Speaker 3:Yeah, thank you. I started to argue that I'll believe you, Ben's like can I have a copy of this?
Speaker 2:I need to train my sales guys on this. Don't get me started, man. I'll have you putting this thing in your own ground.
Speaker 5:He's gonna have orders today. He's gonna have orders today. I got 16 orders.
Speaker 2:Set up an affiliate link, you know. Go to HEPcom, slash wave and order yours today.
Speaker 3:Feel free to reach out to the city of Chicago on our behalf and set them up.
Speaker 2:So funny. You mentioned that I'm actually going to Austin with one of the fleet managers for CTA, so I'll definitely. Oh no, now we're interested. Oh really, tom, I said hello, I'll be. Like young Benjamin said, you need to give him a call.
Speaker 4:You've made some new friends who live far from you and keeping them closest. So easy to do Reach out, reach out and touch someone. Reach out, call up and just say hi. Reach out, reach out and touch someone. Don't let those new friends get away. A telephone call now and then will bring them closer. They're waiting to hear from you. So reach out and touch someone, give them a call.
Speaker 2:Yeah, see all of the. I was telling Ben earlier I was like we usually record an hour and then whittle it down to about 27 tight minutes, but anyway, so we've made it through our first segment. We're talking about wave and wireless charging. Ben, thank you so much for that, and now we want to get onto this other thing, which is Mike complaining about telematics.
Speaker 5:Wow, telematics is one of the things where all the OEMs are. Basically they've all been competing to try and basically set up a thing for all the fleet managers so you can try and manage your fleet remotely. That works very well in theory, but how they're executing it is been just a nightmare between how they data share. You know they're shared to all the data. None of it's on a single platform. You can't take the data and push it into a single platform. You have to go to their platform. So like, let's say, you have a mixed fleet and then you have four or five different OEMs on your fleet. You have to go to four or five different platforms.
Speaker 2:You can't pull that into one dashboard. They don't give you like the APIs to connect to or anything.
Speaker 5:No, and so Ben knows what I'm talking about. They keep all this separate. It's all proprietary. So when I took over this fleet, we had to go through and then, painstakingly, we installed. We picked one vendor for all of our heavy equipment. We installed their box piggybacked onto the back of the OEM one and that way we were looking at all the data all at once and we had to separate even our vehicle fleet. Because I'll plug them here because we tested a bunch of these companies and Verizon Connect was the only company we could deploy and had it work all over. It was seamless and it's worked nonstop since we put them out there.
Speaker 5:But the heavy equipment OEMs, the data that they're trying to transmit is not that crazy. It has a certain amount of storage, it connects to cellular, it uploads everything that it couldn't get if it's inside of a building or what have you. But they just they don't have a good plan for executing it at the dealer level. When you go to the dealerships and I don't care who it is they've been working on training, they're working on getting their people up to speed, they're working on how to deploy it and as fast as they can get that done, they release a new version.
Speaker 2:Yeah, how are you doing the like? Because some of these are kind of notorious for doing the over the air updates and like breaking machines in the field. They got to send somebody out. How are you handling that if you're using a third party telematics?
Speaker 5:So that's why, again, on the heavy equipment, we use the Caterpillar mainly. It's just. We use Caterpillar's Vision Link. We use that just for monitoring. We only allow John Deere and Kamatsu and Caterpillar to push their software updates over their original box, which is still located on the machine and that works fairly well. I will say that Caterpillar has one of the best setups going right now where you can deploy software and then you can turn around and they can read what's going on with the machine, make changes and then go back and forth with it and they'll do it remotely and they're way ahead of anybody else. One of the best advertising campaigns that's been out there is Comtracts. Comtracts has been pushing that for a long period of time. It's free, it's included with the machines. They have what you need. The big thing is it all relies on your dealer. The dealer is the gateway to whatever you're trying to do.
Speaker 2:Yeah but I mean at least they're keeping the dealer in it right Cause on the automotive side, on some of the vehicle side, the dealer's totally cut out of it and Ben can speak to this cause he's got a background from GM Telematics and Volkswagen as well. That software connection, that over the air update thing, it's cutting out the dealer and I think a lot of dealers aren't really happy about that cause they don't want to give that relationship back up to the OEM.
Speaker 3:So in the past car segment I can tell you that every time someone needs a software update they have to bring it into a dealership and the dealer is able to bill at least an hour of service time back to the OE just for an update, which sometimes can range anywhere from 70 to $90 an hour, and so that is just revenue for the dealership. It's really easy. All they're doing is plugging a cord into the OBD2 port and pushing new software, whether it's an app update or something with the head unit.
Speaker 2:But if you've got a Tesla or you've got now a Jaguar Land Rover, they're doing that over the air while the car's parked, while the guy's at home. So like that's, you know, I can imagine that becoming an issue. I remember when I was at Volvo and we were talking about doing over the air updates, they had reps come out and say, okay, well, the first time that we're trying to do an over the air update at 3 AM and someone needs to drive their kid to the ER but they gotta wait 45 minutes because the car is downloading. Like we're gonna be liable for $900 million and we're not gonna do that. So, like that makes perfect sense to me. Is that what's happening on the dealer level, on the construction side, that they're charging for the updates or no?
Speaker 5:So the dealerships are solely responsible for that. And I'm gonna tell you that if you have a piece of equipment that is out of warranty and the software is out of warranty, you're gonna pay to have them come out and do that on your dime, because what they've done is ingenious. They have told everybody that they have to have this information and you need it to operate your fleet and you will use it, and then it's already deployed on all the equipment that you get. And then, when it runs out of warranty, and then you're like, hey, I got this issue, or my box died or we got too close to a power line and something like that happened they just say, well, this is what it costs.
Speaker 5:It's really not rocket science. They do a hell of a job at putting all the costs back on the fleet owners. It's actually quite well thought out. I mean, it's not that they're not helping you. I don't want to make it seem like that. They are providing a service, but they're not trying to tell you that that service is benefiting you and there's a cost to it.
Speaker 3:Let me ask a quick question because this is interesting. On the commercial side they're pulling data off the vehicle and a lot of that can be used for maintenance and repairs and things like that. That's what they probably want to do. Is there competition to where you would take your commercial vehicle in for those repairs, or is it? Is everybody just take it back to the original dealer?
Speaker 5:There's people out there for that. We get hit up all the time by third party maintenance people that want to come out. We totally stay away from that because of a lot of our work. We don't want to have the liability of having any issue then to come to find out. Well, this guy screwed on an aftermarket filter and it caused a $30,000 problem. We had an issue when I first took over. We had an issue where we had had a third party do some maintenance. They had put the wrong oil in one of the components on an excavator. We had bio oil in there because we were doing work by a waterway. It just basically turned to gel and we had to go through and had the whole thing flushed out. It cost us like 40 grand. You only do one of those one time and then you're like we're not doing that ever again.
Speaker 3:Yeah, plus the machine couldn't do its job, so there was the downtime cost also. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, that's just horrific. I feel like this show has gotten serious. We need to switch gears here a little bit and make it a little weirder for Ben so that he can decide to never ever come back, so I feel more comfortable.
Speaker 3:I like weird.
Speaker 2:We're getting on here earlier and I was like I have to recognize that this is our hobby and your job, so we don't want to like totally ruin your career here.
Speaker 4:You cause career suicide.
Speaker 2:This is where we'll splice in an old vintage commercial and then we'll come back from it and recover here.
Speaker 4:Ford means business in big trucks. And now Ford announces the CL9000, its new lightweight cabover. Compare the driver comfort of its spacious cab with optional cab air ride. Compare the efficiency of its lightweight choice of engines and aerodynamic design. Compare features like plug in gauges designed to help minimize downtime Ford CL9000. Compare it with any line hauler on the road. Today, ford means business in big trucks.
Speaker 5:It was like revolution Tired of pissing blood and barely making it to the truck stop when you, when you've been on the road for 10 hours, there's a sleeper cab.
Speaker 2:What is piss jugman? What is that?
Speaker 5:Oh piss, jugman, I would till you sent me that I'd never seen. I asked the drivers today. I'm like have you seen this? They're like where the I got to send that guy with the crane.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I got to send this to Ben. Ben is definitely. I only have your work email, so I apologize.
Speaker 3:That's all right, they'll get over it, yeah.
Speaker 5:It's, it's. This is the wildest thing I've seen yet. I mean, I can't even believe. It's like an educational spokesperson for how to to how to dispose of your piss jugs.
Speaker 2:So any environmental?
Speaker 5:impact within.
Speaker 2:Right. So if you are a normal human being and you have no idea what we're talking about, this is in reference to these over the road truck drivers, some of the Amazon drivers that are on a tight deadline rather than stopping and going into a proper, you know, bathroom facility, they will go in a jug. Sometimes it's a formal product that is made for this purpose, that is, sanitary. Sometimes it's like a two liter Pepsi bottle If you're lucky, you're a Gatorade bottle, wide mouth, exactly. And and then what they do with this is, unfortunately, sometimes the less, let's say, charitable of spirit will launch these out the window of the truck. So what this is on the side of the road is what you're saying oh yeah, or the side of the road.
Speaker 3:They'll get to a truck stop and just dump it out of the window and there is Selena.
Speaker 2:It's called Selena 52 truck stop. This is just a truck stop somewhere out there in the flyover states. They have the guy in a suit and it's like a mascot, you know, like Jeffrey the giraffe at Toys R Us, and it's Piss Jugman. He's a yellow inflatable guy and he's going to be at the. He's going to be at Selena 52 till 6 pm tomorrow. He's going to teach truckers the proper disposal practices and he is pissed off at all the urine jugs laying around the parking lot and he's here to say that you're in trouble if you don't dispose of your ways properly.
Speaker 1:So good.
Speaker 2:Got to love the puns. And you can get your picture taken with Mr Jugman for $5 and Jerry will print it out on the company printer for Piss Jugman to sign.
Speaker 5:It's right in the head with a Gatorade jug full, just as somebody's wheeling through the parking lot of 15. They just chuck that thing right at him. How could you not?
Speaker 2:Like I find the whole practice disgusting. I like to think of myself as a productive member of some of the other people. That I think is a part of society that is not a degenerate. I want to throw something at this guy, okay.
Speaker 5:Let's talk about this because one of the things that is a huge problem and we've talked about this before and you have all these drivers on the road today and you have a driver shortage Everybody knows about this Go through it. Do you have people that they don't have any etiquette whatsoever as to what is supposed to happen? It's a sign of how far the industry has degraded to where this was now needed at a specific stop, because there's nothing. I'm going to tell you this right now. When you're on the road and you're hauling we haul a lot of oversized stuff. You're on a dedicated route. It's dictated by the permit for each state. You finally get a place to stop. You got to get fuel. You got to run in and try and find something to eat. You literally get out and on top of the fuel pump and around it is jugs with urine in it.
Speaker 3:What about the humanity? Yes, yes.
Speaker 5:Well this is the point. They're not even chilled for you.
Speaker 4:You can't even drink it, everybody has to clean it up.
Speaker 5:Anyway. So what's the joke?
Speaker 2:I am so grateful Ben missed that one. We're still we're trying to have a civilization here, but it is what it is, yeah, so I'm so glad I found this, to share this, but I feel like this has to be fake. I'm not saying there's not a need for it and I'm not saying it's not convincing, but it has to be fake, right, because there's no way that someone would make this suit, draw it out on a napkin, show it to someone else and have them go.
Speaker 5:Yo, I'm going to tell you that's a great idea. Just in my experience, I have a whole file of you can't make this and I'm telling you this is somewhere. Somebody thought this was a good idea because they were tired of going out. And where's this at? This is in Selena, yeah.
Speaker 2:We got to get this. What was the temperature there today? Look this up the Bommie 76 degrees. Okay.
Speaker 5:Yeah Well. So imagine when it's 105 and you and then someone's out there cleaning up the fuel islands and she's got all these jugs laying around. Yeah, this jug one's going to come and save her day.
Speaker 3:Who pays for this? That's where. Where does the funding for this guy come from?
Speaker 2:Well, it's $5 to get your picture taken with him.
Speaker 3:Got it. That's not. That's not favorite Some company had to have been like, whether it was like Exxon or loves or somebody like. I'm sure it wasn't one of them, but, right, somebody had to like start this.
Speaker 2:This is like the gorilla on top of the used car dealer. Like could you?
Speaker 5:okay, could you imagine working in the tire shop with the back and a lot and the owner of the truck stop comes going back there and he's like Bob get over. What what are you about?
Speaker 4:36 in seem.
Speaker 2:Try this on.
Speaker 5:Tomorrow show up at my office. I got something for you. Now he thinks he's going to, you know, get the regular routine and the next thing you know he's got a damn suit he's got to put on and he's contemplated quitting, but he knows he can't go anywhere else. That's what's going on.
Speaker 2:They're going to get Enrique. You're going to put this on, or I'm going to call ice and you're going to be gone.
Speaker 5:Oh, this jugman.
Speaker 2:The accent the accent sells it. Why is this a real thing? But yeah, so. And then, finally, I think we're going to do this because, ben, you're our first guest, so before I let you go, I want to ask you what is your favorite famous truck from movies or popular culture?
Speaker 3:My favorite. That's a new question. Never thought about what is my name is we stump them.
Speaker 2:I think Mike is the pork chop express from big trouble, little China, that's a good one.
Speaker 3:Oh my God, I can't even tell you the first one that came to mind. I like the trans medic ambulance Cannonball run big top, pee, wee, pee, wee, herman, where he was, yes, with large marks. Oh, that's a good one, that is so good. Yeah, I didn't know where my brain didn't? That's where it went and I tried to come up with it quick and I couldn't, that would mean you couldn't.
Speaker 2:That's amazing.
Speaker 5:It sounds like a garbage truck.
Speaker 2:What kind of truck was she in?
Speaker 3:She was in some sort of class eight, for sure 100%.
Speaker 2:Yeah, tell them, large Marge sent you. Oh man, I'm like looking it up Large Marge truck. There's nothing on Google. It's like I know I'm looking at the same thing.
Speaker 5:Right now it's a P, it's a Peterbilt, yeah, it's a 359 or 379 P, depending on. It's a 359 from 1985.
Speaker 3:It's good enough for large Marge. It's good enough for me. That's right, that's right.
Speaker 2:This is the best question we've ever asked anybody. We should definitely make this a right. We're going to bring that back. I don't think that's what it is, man. I think it's a Ford CLT 9000. It's one of the old Sterling models. Oh is it? Yeah, that's what I think, so.
Speaker 5:It's hard to tell yeah, it's hard to tell it's either a.
Speaker 2:Ford or Sterling it is.
Speaker 5:It's a Ford. Cl9000 Gabbo it's a Ford.
Speaker 1:Company.
Speaker 5:It's a Ford Company, for sure it's a Ford Company. All right, right, I'm sorry, look at it.
Speaker 2:I actually just downloaded the clip, so yeah, we'll play the clip at the end, then we'll finish off with the air. Thank you so much for people who want to follow along with what you're doing and who want to learn more about wave and Try to understand why Ben would come on this show and trust us, it's because of my other show that actually has listeners.
Speaker 1:But it's like I thought this was clean.
Speaker 2:Technica. What the hell is this? More about Wave and find out about what you're doing and follow along.
Speaker 3:Come visit our website wavechargingcom, and you can. You know, you can click on something and it'll connect to me, or you can just look at the tech.
Speaker 2:You can buy it Exactly and remember whenever you get Ben on the phone be sure and tell him large marge sent ya.
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