In this special Thanksgiving HEP-isode of the Heavy Equipment Podcast we revisit the hilarious WKRP Turkey drop, delve into some serious discourse around speed governing technology, and discover the all-new JCB Digatron, a backhoe-inspired monster truck that's continuing JCB's legacy of motorsports innovation. Also: Bigfoot, and the day's secret word.
In this special Thanksgiving HEP-isode of the Heavy Equipment Podcast we revisit the hilarious WKRP Turkey drop, delve into some serious discourse around speed governing technology, and discover the all-new JCB Digatron, a backhoe-inspired monster truck that's continuing JCB's legacy of motorsports innovation. Also: Bigfoot, and the day's secret word.
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. It's the heavy equipment podcast with Mike and Joe.
Speaker 2:Welcome back to a special Thanksgiving edition of the heavy equipment podcast. I'm your host, joe Boris, here with Mike Hot, mike Switzer, and we are celebrating the 45th anniversary of the iconic WKRP Turkey drop.
Speaker 3:I can't believe it's been that long.
Speaker 2:That's a shocker, isn't it?
Speaker 3:I know, I know.
Speaker 2:All right, well for everybody under 50,. Mike, you want to give a take a crack at explaining this one, and why?
Speaker 3:it's so funny. It was an advertising thing, right For the radio station, and on the episode, there they were. They were going to drop turkeys upon the city of Cincinnati. That's right, and they did help the people, give them food, drop turkeys for Thanksgiving, not knowing that they couldn't fly, so they turned into torpedoes of death the announcers on the ground talking about.
Speaker 2:they're hitting the ground like bags of wet cement. One just went through the windshield of a car.
Speaker 4:It's a helicopter and it's coming this way. It's flying something behind it. I can't quite make it out. It's a large banner and it says, uh, happy things. Wkr P. What a sight, ladies and gentlemen. What a sight. The copter seems to be circling the parking area now. I guess it's looking for a place to land. No, something just came out of the back of the helicopter. It's a dark object, perhaps a skydiver. It's coming to the earth from only 2,000 feet of the air. Third no parachutes. Yet it can't be skydivers. I can't tell just yet what they are. Oh, my God, they're talking. Johnny, can you get this? Oh, they're crashing to the earth right in front of us. The wind just went through the windshield of a parked car. It's running around pushing each other. Oh, my goodness, oh the humanity. The turkeys are hitting the ground like sands of wet cement. I swear.
Speaker 1:I thought turkeys could fly.
Speaker 3:They'd run in a chopper and everything and just started pushing them out. There's the traffic chopper, yeah. I haven't seen that so long I got to rewatch that.
Speaker 2:Oh, we're going to watch it now. This should be the whole episode which is live streamed the original WKRP in Cincinnati Thanksgiving episode.
Speaker 3:I keep believing. You know, from when we first started talking about doing this podcast till now, and now we're doing, we're doing holiday podcast editions. Who would have thought?
Speaker 2:Who would have thought? Well, I mean, that is my understanding of how linear time works. Eventually, you're going to hit one of the holidays.
Speaker 3:Well, very true, very true. Unless you create some kind of mechanical mathematical device that moves you through rips of time, then you can skirt such events.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we'll have like a. It's like the Dr who TARDIS, except instead of a blue police box, it's like a yellow excavator. You just jam into it, it starts spinning and you just go into the next time zone.
Speaker 3:There are people out there that run equipment every day that believe that that's what, indeed what happens when they get there, because they show up and they climb in that machine and then the next thing you know they're on the microphone going. Yeah, throw out that right there. All right, you put it right.
Speaker 2:They have no idea where they are in life. Speaking of driving into the next time zone, right Back to the news, because that's what we talk about here. So, interestingly enough, there's some fuss going on. This was reported by CCJ. They're talking about the FMCSA and the NTSB, obviously National Transportation Safety Board. They're talking about using software to electronically govern the top speed of medium duty and, eventually, heavy duty vehicles at 68 miles an hour. And I don't know, I don't know if this is something that you know, we can, we can get back to now. I know we've, you know we all did the Sammy Hagar I can't drive 55 when the double nickel was overturned, but I think the days when truck drivers were the white nights of the road and really understood what was going on, and we're really the best drivers out there- those are past.
Speaker 2:Those have passed. I mean, I look at a lot of these guys on the road here and I'm just like I don't know if this dude can read the sign. I don't want this guy going 90 next to me.
Speaker 3:Well, I'm going to tell you that you know, Europe's had this for a while, though oh, yeah. And a long time ago was a disc was around circular thing and it recorded your speed behind the scenes. Literally put ink on paper and if you needed to, the cop would pull it out and be like, well, he were clearly speeding. And then it's evolved, I don't know. But then you know we had the whole revolution.
Speaker 2:So that's why we're not with Europe anymore.
Speaker 3:We could do whatever the hell we want. That's why we're here.
Speaker 2:That's why we're here.
Speaker 3:The same thing. They exiled them all to Australia. And then they now. What do they? Got Five wagon road trains screaming down the highway they do.
Speaker 2:They have like multiple containers on the back of one little cab over Well that thing at 70 miles an hour across the outback 200 K's yeah that's exactly what they do.
Speaker 3:They get the 777 horse power scan your V8. I mean, that thing's getting down the road.
Speaker 2:All I can think of is throwing on a strip on the body.
Speaker 3:But you know, in all seriousness, you're going to hear all kinds of people give backlash to this. But I don't want to drive whatever I want. But you're dead on right, most of the people that are driving today are incapable and this is where the masses hinder the minorities that know what's going on. Where they're gonna be able to, you know they limit it. I don't think it's a bad thing. I think, if you know, we talked about this offline geo fencing and things that didn't exist 15, 20 years ago, that were as accurate as they are today. If it says 50 through the construction zone, slow it down to 50 miles an hour, because last thing you want to have is some guy reach out because something got dropped and he gets killed Because some guys going too fast, the lane shift and everything like that takes them out.
Speaker 2:It happens, oh it happens every day, and I think that that's something that you know we really need to Explore here. And I think you know George Carlin, one of the great comedians of all time he really said it best. He had a whole bit on this where you know, if I'm driving down the highway and Somebody's going faster than me, that guy's a maniac, and if somebody's going slower than me, that guy's an idiot. And I think there's a lot of that happening here, where people just kind of feel like they know what they're doing, they know what's going on, and then when Then tragedy happens, when something does go sideways and somebody gets hurt, someone gets killed, we call it an accident, and I think that that's kind of disingenuous. Like if you're blowing through a construction zone.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's, that's the word of the day. Disingenuous, what do like? Like Peewee's playhouse?
Speaker 4:What's wrong? Cowboy Curtis.
Speaker 1:I just found out I have cancer.
Speaker 4:He said it's malignant. What's malignant? The cancer.
Speaker 2:Eat the log book the bed in the back of the sleeper starts going, lawrence, fish burden leaps out of the glove box.
Speaker 3:Yeah, the cowboy outfit. You're going too fast. Partner.
Speaker 2:But seriously. I mean, we can call in an accident all day long, but if you're going 70 through a construction zone where people are working and they can't hear and they've got their their ear protection on and their helmet on and everything else it's, you know, at some point you got to stop calling in an accident and just call it stupidity, right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean it's. This goes for anything. So you you know you have issues with this on construction sites, with haul trucks, with traffic within the construction site not on a highway, but off, off site too In a lot of industrial facilities would love to have the ability to have somebody totally limited to five or 10 miles an hour, whatever they've deemed it safe. They don't randomly pick those numbers. Generally, those numbers are a result of somebody got clipped and it's just something that I don't know. I think they got to figure it out, but it's, it's inevitable, it's going to happen.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we have the ability to drive faster and more stable than ever with anything medium and heavy. You know medium class and heavy duty, class, class eight you can hold a truck at some serious speed, a lot, a lot faster than you could ever could before. And we joke about that. Now there's going to be people that chime in after this. But you know anybody that was around in the early days or have driven anything original from the early days 75 and 80 mile an hour on an old truck from the 70s you had your hands full. Nowadays, 75 and 80s, nothing you had real skill going that fast.
Speaker 2:Now you just put your foot down and that thing will go right up to 100 and it don't care.
Speaker 3:Eight we we piloted our new Mac Granite to a job in Virginia and back the other day and the first road trip out and the guy drove it and he's like he was. The only thing I don't like about the truck is I have no idea what's going on. And this is an old, older driver and he's, you know, driven manuals and came up through the ranks with twin stick stuff and he's getting ready to retire. He takes every new truck out, loves the truck. I can. It's the exact words where I can see how some of the newer guys can get in trouble with this.
Speaker 3:You don't know how fast you're going compared to what the road will handle. Right, because the truck does a lot of things to compensate for it. Now, and those big sleeper cabs it doesn't matter what make you have you kind of lose reality with the road because the whole thing's floating. Yeah, the truck underneath like pull over and shut down, we're going to have a problem. It's like the space shuttle, columbia, but but inside the guys just, you know, whistling away, everything's good, all systems go.
Speaker 2:Right. Well, you've got ride leveling, you've got the air suspension, the body is floating above the chassis. I mean it's made for that. It's made to be more comfortable and more luxurious and be something that you can sit in for eight, 12 hours a day and be comfortable and not have back spasms and, you know, hip dysplasia and all other kind of crazy stuff that these guys have always had for generations. But the flip side of that you lose that sense of contact with the road, just like you know. And for those of you who've never driven a big truck or anything big, you know, think of it like the difference between a Cadillac and a Lotus a lot. You feel every pebble, every crack, every expansion joint, and the little Lotus, the big Cadillac, just kind of floats over everything.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and the big Cadillac will still do 80 mile an hour plus If you give him time. You know it's like a locomotive, try stopping it though. Yeah, exactly right, we'll back up. Though, for the people from GM that may or may not be listening, should you ever look at this, we're not talking about anything current. We're talking about the seventies de Vils that you all know were built off of the downscaled version of the Edmund Fitzgerald. So back to where we're going.
Speaker 2:And a 512 cubic inch V8 front wheel drive with drum brakes in the rear. The did Deion suspension. Yeah, that was a real thing. What was the? What do? What do they call that? That the?
Speaker 3:portion bar.
Speaker 2:Yeah, oh geez.
Speaker 3:That was gonna give her another good crank. She's pulling to the left.
Speaker 2:That's how it used to be. That's exactly how it is. But yeah, I think you're right on this. I don't think we need to spend too much time here. I think it's definitely something that's coming. There's going to be some pushback. There's going to be someone who's going to say oh, it's a slippery slope. Soon they're going to start putting this in cars. And again, if it's 80 mile an hour speed limit and the thing limits you to 80. As long as it shuts off when you pull on to the summit raceway or Joliette auto barn and whatever it is that you're doing and you're in your controlled environment and you can go as fast as you want and kind of take it on your own. Hey man, I am kind of OK with that. I don't need somebody in a big over the road semi doing 90 next to my kids in the minivan, no, and let's think about that.
Speaker 3:There's a huge driver shortage. So imagine if there wasn't a driver shortage, how many trucks would be on the road. The only thing I just thought about is if they do have a electronic speed limiting device, you could end up with the never ending drag race that seems to happen on all three lane interstates, where two trucks get side by side because one happened to have one mile an hour extra in it, and then they're just there side by side staring at each other. I don't know. They will surely figure it out, and if they don't, they'll tell us to use it anyways. They'll tell us to use it anyway.
Speaker 2:But that's something that's worth bringing up now. We don't have this now and you still end up with these two idiots side by side.
Speaker 3:Right, because companies have had feed limiting forever.
Speaker 2:Sure, and they've done it in a variety of different ways. Sometimes it's a RPM cutoff, sometimes it's a spark inhibitor. Where it'll get to a certain RPM, then it'll stop sending signal to the spark plug, which it's just chaos for fuel economy and everything else.
Speaker 3:Hey, when it loads up the muffler and blows it up whatever, let it have at it.
Speaker 2:Well, I just think there's so much better technology out there now, like I think at the very least it should tell you, you know, if it detects that you're in a construction zone and it's 45 miles an hour, it should tell you, like you know, bing, bing, bing, you're going too fast, you're in a construction zone.
Speaker 3:No, I agree, but the problem is, if the people driving the truck don't understand what it's telling them, or don't care, or don't care one or the other, the same result is the same. Yeah, you just put your foot down, but something that will not have a speed limiter on it is this Digitron.
Speaker 2:Digitron.
Speaker 3:I say my brother needs to be on here because he would totally get a hold of this thing.
Speaker 1:He'd be like I mean, he has this whole thing, don't get the whole spitting thing.
Speaker 2:We should have done this on Sunday, sunday, sunday, sunday. So Digitron is a backhoe inspired monster truck.
Speaker 3:Yeah, feld Motorsports has taken this on. Yeah, 1500 horsepower, 10 and a half feet tall, 17 foot long, 12,000 pounds.
Speaker 2:This thing is going to be insane. I mean, this is such a smart, smart move because this kind of like you know, monster jam, monster truck deal. This comes into town, people go absolutely nuts. They had it up here in Rosemont, just down the road from us here in Chicago. Last time I saw, about a year ago it was sold out. All the kids flipped out. This is exactly the kind of thing that's there and there's only kind of so much you could do, even if you're a Ford or a Chevrolet or a Ram.
Speaker 3:No, this is totally out of the box.
Speaker 2:This is, this is awesome. Exactly this is going to be everybody's favorite vehicle. Kids who see this are going to love it.
Speaker 3:If Caterpillar and John Deere were smart, they would jump on this bandwagon. They would build a cat haul truck looking one and John Deere would have some kind of combine looking one. But John Deere has that hydrostat drive deal, I don't know, probably just push everybody the other side of the thing and you're nothing but the crying.
Speaker 2:It'd be all right. I love that idea. I mean, this is we're getting perilously close to someone stealing our idea for equipment gladiators. Oh no, we've copyrighted it.
Speaker 3:for anybody that is listening to this or reading it, read the text and follow what I'm about to say. This entire podcast has been copyrighted.
Speaker 2:So not by us, but by somebody. True, true. I love this thing, man. What do you like? These have to be purpose built chassis. They're not modifying anything.
Speaker 3:So felt. Motorsports, them and some other people have built most of the monster jam stuff. Most of the monster jam stuff is highly regulated the days of and I can't remember the guy's name that invented Bigfoot, you know, but he built that truck in a shop and it just kept going on Exactly and it's kind of bigger.
Speaker 3:You know they roll them over, they constantly. You know they do all those tricks with them. There's a lot behind the scenes. On one of these there's remote control ability to shut the thing off or get it out of a problem If the driver becomes, you know, incapacitated. And if you've ever gone to one of these, it's wild to watch them just bounce around, you know.
Speaker 2:You know exactly. I mean you definitely have to check one of these out if you ever have. It's funny. I looked it up. It's Bob Chandler who built the original Bigfoot back in 1975. The original monster truck was built off a Ford F 100 Ranger XLT and if you look at this thing, what's funny about it is it's not that big.
Speaker 3:And really the design was very basic. It was like he lifted the truck, did some body work to it, he put a serious motor under it and then accommodated all the suspension problems he created. And then he kept working with it from there and and he was the beginner, the inventor of it Everybody kind of caught on after the fact.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, and it just got like really, really crazy, eventually culminating in Bigfoot five with a 10 foot tall Firestone Tundra tires, and it just looked absolutely ridiculous. But these things still keep going on. They're still really popular. Right now it looks like the Bigfoot 23 was completed October 7th of this year, rolled out at the Hot Wheels Monster Trucks Live Show in Kansas City, missouri, last month. So this is still something that's going on in terms of the monster truck thing.
Speaker 3:But yeah, you know how many can you really sponsor?
Speaker 2:if you're Ford and you want to get in front of all these kids and get really excited, even if you wanted to sponsor four or five trucks, what are you going to have? Just four or five F 250s?
Speaker 3:Well, exactly Remember the the backhoe that they had, the drag racing backhoe, the JCB piloted.
Speaker 2:Oh, I do. I didn't remember Realize that was JCB. I do remember yeah they built that.
Speaker 3:They've built a couple other you know motorsports type pieces of equipment and the original backhoe was was like a combination of a couple people's idea and then JCB said, yeah, we would get in on that. And then they used to take it around do exhibition runs with it everywhere. That was a huge thing. So I love the fact that this is going to be coming to town and if anybody from Monster Jam does listen to this, we would love to go out and do a podcast from Monster Jam. Oh yeah, we'd have all the drivers lined up. Talk to them, go over what they got. It's heavy equipment.
Speaker 2:It's only is heavy equipment. So check this out. I just Googled this. In 2019., jcb built a road course tractor that hit 135 miles an hour on the top gear test track yeah, that's based off of the JCB fast track yeah, exactly right, those were 2016 horsepower tractor.
Speaker 3:Those were originally built for shuttling wagons and such back and forth out of fields, Because JCB originally the track, the tractors were great, but then they had kind of an issue where their purpose built JCB said, well, if you have a large farm and you need to be able to just move stuff, then you're going to shuttle it in and out of the field. Well, here, use this. This goes faster than anything that's out there. It'll still pull weight. It's stable. Yeah, I mean you can run implements off of it, but it's really not what it was meant for. But yeah, there was a whole lot of those that were out where I grew up and they're all over the Midwest.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's crazy. I found the dragster. That's cool man. These guys have been doing some really neat stuff for a long time, it looks like. So, yeah, good for them. So this is the latest thing. I think it's absolutely genius. They have a 300 mile an hour Bonneville salt flat streamliner that is a diesel generator.
Speaker 2:use a JCB diesel to power again power and electric motor that pushes this thing to 300 miles an hour. I mean, jcb is like really innovating in this motorsport angle and they're putting their stuff to work. This is why I love doing this show is because this is stuff that I was not aware of and now that I'm learning about it, it's just all I can think of is now what else is JCB doing?
Speaker 3:What else have they done? Well, here's the thing. I mean JCB. You know they're a massive construction corporation worldwide. They're one of the largest in the States. People look at Caterpillar as being the go to and really that's because Caterpillar has done such a great job with their dealership groups. Right, jcb worldwide is bigger. I believe one time they were. They were bigger than Caterpillar from a certain size, class down of equipment. I don't know if they still are, but outside of the US they're huge.
Speaker 3:One of the big things that put JCB on the map in Europe was the backhoe. The JCB backhoe had an innovative vertical outrigger design. So instead of the outriggers swinging down from a single pivot point on a cylinder in narrow streets over in the UK you didn't have that ability, so they built one that had like outriggers, like a crane that slid in and out and up and down. You could adjust it based on where you were and position the backhoe. That was really their claim to fame. And then in the States we didn't really need that because we're, you know, gluttonous and we have all this real estate. We make sure that everything is, you know, 20 feet wider than it should be. So they didn't really take off over here. But what I'm saying? Jcb's ahead of the curve on a lot of things and they always have been. They've invented and piloted a lot of stuff that has become marketplace standard. It's a shame that they don't have a bigger presence in the US.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is actually a really good segue into our next thing. So the next thing that we were going to talk about we have it laid out here is that Kamatsu is buying American battery systems. Kamatsu is a company that had been working with Protera since 2021. They've been working with this other company called Protera Effectively develop and build electric equipment, whether it's, you know, a backhoe or an excavator or a wheel load or anything like that. But the problem is that their partner, protera you know Protera filed chapter 11 earlier this year. They're done.
Speaker 2:So Kamatsu was left holding the bag. They had all this equipment that they had been developing and doing R&D work on and all of a sudden they didn't have batteries. So there was another company, American Battery Systems. Kamatsu decided that, you know, they don't want to necessarily be beholden to a partner that could just kind of leave them high and dry. So they have acquired American battery systems.
Speaker 2:They've got all those patents, they're going to be licensed, they're going to get licensed to start manufacturing the batteries that they designed these vehicles around, I guess the Kamatsu slash Protera designs. So they'll be building that and that's also going to bring with it some energy storage solutions, some generator storage solutions and, you know some on-site charging technology that was kind of unique to ABS, that is now going to be Kamatsu stuff, and I think this is a great idea because there's so much conversation about how we're going to power this electric equipment, whether it's with a hydrogen generator or diesel generator on site, whether it's charging, you know, a large battery on a container truck, sort of like the same way we do diesel now, where you load up diesel into a tanker truck. You effectively charge this big battery truck overnight, bring it up to the job site and plug everything in, so for them to kind of take this into their own hands and become masters of their own destiny. I think that's a smart move?
Speaker 3:I think so too. I mean, I was looking at American Battery Solutions here and they're a Detroit based company. I'm kind of curious how much stuff they manufactured already. I mean, were they already in the forklift market? I mean it would hold true that they have to be in a market already.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they have quite a bit of offerings already. They've got some 48 volt solutions, They've got 700 volt solutions, and where they've been really big in the past has been in the mass transit, like the charter bus system. So city buses have been using electric power now in different markets whether Chicago, California, New York for about 10 years. So these guys have been building big batteries for those systems and also for energy storage solutions. So what does that mean? That's like a big battery backup, Like if you had a UPS system on your computer. It's a big battery backup that goes on hospitals, school data centers, things like that where you cannot have downtime.
Speaker 3:Right. So now I know where I've seen this before. They offer an entire battery solution for the marine industry. Yes, and that's where. Okay, I was looking at that. I'm like I know I've seen it before, but I didn't know exactly where I had but got to give credit to Kamatsu. They once again have said listen, like you said, the rug got swept out from under him, the guy files chapter 11. And then they said, well, we're not going to do this again. So they went out and bought a partner with a company and they're going to take them over. They're not even partnering with them, they're buying them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they're buying them. It's effective December 1st is be a quick purchase, but it's a very straightforward thing. I mean, these guys, they've been around for 10 years, they know what they're doing. People who've bought these batteries speak very highly of them. You know, when you build a battery for emergency response, when you're dropping these things into disaster relief and earthquake zones and things like that, and you've got these things on Coast Guard vessels and they're out there in the salt and the cold and the heat day in and day out and they work. I mean, that's as good of an endorsement as you're going to get for equipment and forklifts and things like that.
Speaker 2:So I think it makes a lot of sense and I think it's maybe smarter to do something like this than what some of these companies are doing, which is partnering with the automotive battery manufacturers. If you look at Tesla, they're partnering with Panasonic Panasonic, obviously brilliant engineers. They've been, you know, at the forefront of electronics and technology for decades. Have they really been on the front lines and the mud and the sand and the grit and the dirt? I don't know. These guys for sure have. So I think this is a smart move by Kamatsu.
Speaker 3:The thing, though, if you look at their advertisement and I was just pulling it up here, looking at this, like for a mini excavator, for example, they've got a charging system very similar to a forklift. The battery powered forklift technology has been out there for ever decades.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, crown's been doing them for a long time and they work.
Speaker 3:I mean, they work really well If you can get the longevity out of the mini excavator with the battery, with the charging pack, and have a portable generator station, which people are going to say well, that's the dumbest thing ever. You're going to run a generator to power an electric excavator. It sounds redundant, but there are so many situations where you need an electric excavator to go into where it's got to go into work. Yeah, can't have the exhaust emissions, you can't have the potential for a fire, you can't have the thing going into regen. Yeah, it's a larger machine, you've got to have this. So I think it's great and I think there's a lot of industrial applications, just like the forklift technology, where we're going to see this come into play.
Speaker 2:Well, and I think the other thing that's worth bringing up and I talk about this all time my other life I do a lot of electric car stuff and conversations about electric cars and electric vehicles. Somebody always says, well, yeah, but you got to plug that thing into a diesel generator when you're out in the forest or like that. And the thing I always say to them is it don't matter, because when that diesel generator is running and it's charging that EV, 100% of that fuel is being put into electricity. Right Now it's not idle, it's not wasted sitting at idle, it's not sitting there in traffic going one or two miles an hour. When the guy comes to a stop, he stops using electrons.
Speaker 2:When you roll to a stop in a diesel truck and you're sitting in traffic for a half hour 30 minutes, you're burning gallons of diesel. You're losing efficiency that way. That's right. So it's still greener, cleaner. However you want to put it, it's just more efficient and smarter to use the diesel in the place that it makes sense, which is in a generator in a high energy gen set. The other thing that was really interesting I was actually talking with this guy from Penta, volvo Penta, and I'll see if I can't introduce some of that into this next show. Maybe we'll do this the next episode with Volvo Penta. They were doing a mixed fuel. They were injecting hydrogen into diesel and they were cutting out 80% of the amount of diesel used. They were cutting out 80% of the emissions and still getting the same power, just adding hydrogen to a gas lean engine.
Speaker 3:Seriously, it's adding efficiency right off the rip. You get the thing running. Once it's up to running operating parameter of whatever is designated, you inject the hydrogen into it and it takes off.
Speaker 2:That's it. That's exactly what he was saying, and he was saying that they're using that in a gen set scenario where it's just putting out a lot fewer emissions. They're using a lot not only fewer emissions, but they're using a lot less diesel, which is crazy expensive right now.
Speaker 3:We were just talking about this at a round table meeting. I was in the other day at one of the unions and they said well, you know, hydrogen is great, but then you have a bomb. And I'm like you have a bomb, no matter what you have you have a bomb.
Speaker 2:no matter what you have, if you can burn something.
Speaker 3:Look at diesel fuel. We carry diesel fuel in plastic, ultra thin aluminum, ultra thin stainless steel containers going up and down the road all over. If you go, look at a truck and you took an. All all you can.
Speaker 2:AWL and all its tool kids.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you could. Actually you could puncture a lot of these tanks, Same with the death. And here's the thing they're working on. I think I think the X 15 engine from Cummins already is talking about this where they're talking about multi fuel, where they're injecting they want to inject hydrogen in there because they can get the emission standard down low enough where we may not have to do as much regen.
Speaker 2:Well, they're not even working on it. It's, it's, it's been shown, they've announced it, they showed it this year and they've switched over to. Not only that, but they've said we can run this thing purely on hydrogen and have an internal combustion hydrogen motor that qualifies. The emissions are so low that it qualifies as a zero emission vehicle. And we can do this with a new head and new software. We can actually retrofit the diesel so you can buy the new 15 liter Cummins as a diesel and run it as a dual fuel hydrogen and diesel and then convert it eventually to run pure hydrogen once that infrastructure is there. So you're investing in something today that will have that long 15, 20 year life, even after the zero emission legislation comes into play. Because it's it's really important to remember that the zero emission legislation A lot of people are going to read that and think it has to be electric. That's not the case.
Speaker 3:No, it's just the yeah, the emissions standard just has to be low enough. You can burn whatever you want. You can be throwing trash through it, as long as it had the ability to get down to where they tell you you need to be. They really don't care what you do. That's it. That's exactly right.
Speaker 3:Electric came out as like a weird stop gap because the electric push was not the easiest but it was the most obvious solution, correct? Well, it's generate power. Let's get it into the thing that is now not being efficient and is creating problems, and then let's put it out there. This is what we talk about all the time. As things evolve, you're going to have solutions like these, like the mini excavator that's electric. You're going to have hydrogen power. We get hydrogen power on some of these large heavy equipment stuff. That's going to be a game changer, because the amount of problems that are out there right now the OEMs know it with the Regen and the emissions technology that's on the machines. Now it's a liability.
Speaker 3:We just had a machine last week go down in a precarious area. We basically went into this limp in mode. We had to get it out of where it was at and it was very simple. It was a sensor change, but here's an interruption and what you have going on and you don't have double of everything sitting around, so you can't just say, well, run another one out there, okay, get the dealer, get the dealer out there. And this holds true in any industry. I'm going to go on a little rant here. They know when there's a problem when they have the stuff on the shelf. Oh yeah, that's absolutely true.
Speaker 3:When you call the dealer and you may go, oh man, this might take a couple of days to get this part, and they go what's the code? Oh, yeah, yeah, that's the sensor. Okay, we'll be out. Yeah, we have them. We'll have somebody out there. We got a guy come out there late. Somebody be there late. They already know. They already know this is an issue.
Speaker 3:There's a service bulletin back there sitting on the pins of the court board. That's my whole point. They know these things are liabilities. They know that they need to get away from it. Kamatsu's taken a huge step with this. Cummins and the other people are taking a huge step with the hydrogen. They can't let up, they're not going to. But we can't do things in this country to railroad this, because all it's going to do is put us behind.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, and we're already behind. There's a lot of ways.
Speaker 3:Well, more so than that. That's what I mean by that. More so than we are now, yeah.
Speaker 2:Exactly right.
Speaker 3:We can have two administration changes, one after the other. They can totally railroad everything that's being put together, which will put us five decades behind by the time the infrastructures are halted or not allowed to move forward.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly right. Well, that's why we're thankful for democracy here in this episode, the Thanksgiving episode set up before it. I'll say it again Democracy just doesn't work.
Speaker 3:Wait, this is just like sitting around the table eating turkey. We're going to throw it out there. We're going to talk politics. We're going to talk battery power. We're going to talk about all the things you shouldn't talk about in front of your fellow man when you're trying to have a nice peaceful evening.
Speaker 1:Tune in next week for more heavy equipment podcast on Spotify, apple Podcasts, google wherever you find podcasts.