In this exciting, first-ever 19th HEP-isode, we invite you to come along, on an enthralling voyage through the dynamic realm of trucking and construction technology, where Mike and Jo talk about the new JLG mini-dumper, explore the revolutionary new Revoy EV trailer that converts diesel semi trucks to hybrids in minutes, and dissect the meaning behind all those WARN letters the UAW guys are getting from Ford. All this and Marissa Tomei, on the Summer of George!
In this exciting, first-ever 19th HEP-isode, we invite you to come along, on an enthralling voyage through the dynamic realm of trucking and construction technology, where Mike and Jo talk about the new JLG mini-dumper, explore the revolutionary new Revoy EV trailer that converts diesel semi trucks to hybrids in minutes, and dissect the meaning behind all those WARN letters the UAW guys are getting from Ford. All this and Marissa Tomei, on the Summer of George!
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:Welcome to episode 19. I'm your host. Joe Boris, here is Ever with Mike Switzer out on the open road, and we've got some good tales from the road there today, mike, how you doing.
Speaker 3:Well, we're doing good. I got Beth with me in the car today. He's holding two cards up in front of the passenger window, but we'll make it.
Speaker 2:We're all right, I'm going to seize the wheel when you start articulating with your hands?
Speaker 3:He isn't like driving with knees. I can tell you that.
Speaker 2:No well, you can just hit the cruise control, walk into the back of the cab there and have a sandwich right, it's basically autopilot.
Speaker 3:That's correct. We're heading our way back up from West Virginia up into Cleveland. So we're working our way back, but we have a bunch of stuff to talk about. Today we go through some of these articles. I mean a lot of good stuff cracking here. I think this next quarter is going to be busy. There's a lot of stuff coming out.
Speaker 2:We're moving into tier five. We've got a lot of new product coming out just in terms of not just regulation but in terms of technology. Right, because we're at a place now where we've got some true autonomy, some true remote control ability, where guys can kind of program a route into these things and depend on it to do the job. But there's still a place for stuff that an operator gets into, hops into and drives around. And we'll start today with something that came out of World of Concrete last week. This is a track mini-dumper from JLG. I'm not real familiar with these. It's about the size of a side-by-side UTV, like a Kawasaki Mugul or my John DeGator, and this is a cool little thing. I would love to take one of these up down the hobby farm and just take it out on the trails, but I'm sure there's a much more practical use for it.
Speaker 3:Well, there's a ton of uses for it. I mean, there are farmers that have them. The power buggy's been around for a long time Whitman Whitman however you want to say it, they had it, and then JLG's got one that articulates. There's a few other brands. They're versatile. I mean, we use them every day. We have them on jobs.
Speaker 3:We use them for all kinds of small work that we're doing, whether we're pouring material into a corner or trying to just shuttle concrete back into an area where you can't get a shoot or a pump truck into, or just make sense to run some over there. The other thing we use them a lot for is demobing of demo debris. If you're down in there and you're trying to trench some stuff out of a factory or dig a hole in somewhere small, put all your stuff in there, run it outside and get rid of it. No, there's these the JLG has. There's electric ones. A lot of guys overlook them because it's like I don't know what I could put in that, but once you see a couple of them running on a job, they actually surprise you very much.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they're cool looking little things and, like I said, I haven't really been familiar with these, but JLG had a couple of new launches. They've got the 670 SJ. It looks like they can get a forklift loader on it. It's like a, basically a tracked pallet jack. That's a cool looking little vehicle. So again, we're going to start seeing more and more cool stuff.
Speaker 3:Well, jlg. Jlg is a very innovative company. They've bought up over the years you know, great All and SkyTrack and those companies. They constantly evolve their product, they're always working on it. They're sold out. I mean, I heard a rumor that they're sold out all the way through 2025 production. A lot of the rental houses have bought up all their production. We did an article about this a few episodes ago where we're talking about Caterpillar. There's a rumor that Caterpillar was going to move, maybe away from JLG, because JLG couldn't fulfill their orders for the telehandlers that they partnered with and that was kind of coming to an end.
Speaker 2:So yeah, I think there was a time where JLG had to partner with some other people because the brand itself wasn't that well known, but they've been around long enough now They've been doing not just the telehandlers, where they've just become well known enough that people are buying them and they don't have any problems selling them at all. This article kind of touches on that when they talk about the demand and the waitlist. They're coming out with new product. People are still ordering the old product. It's not like it's slowing down and they had to come up with something to save the line.
Speaker 2:They're innovating to be innovative.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. They're on a march to constantly evolve the product that they already have, and that is a very rare thing today. They're not trying to come up with gimmicks, not trying to come up with, like you said, ways to sell things. It's sold, so how do we make it better? It's sold. You've got to give them a lot of credit for that. There's a lot of companies out there trying to figure out how to do it cheaper with less. We always joke about it value engineering JLG's out there. They're trying to figure out how to do it right and make it better.
Speaker 2:We don't have enough of that in the industry 100% and there's a lot of people who are innovating right now in that space and they're trying to get some more autonomous job sites, construction sites. We talked earlier today with some of the guys from Mogue Construction. They're going to be on the show next week. They've got some really interesting concepts on how to electrify, modernize and really optimize a job site Not necessarily for electric, but just in terms of energy, and how to start thinking of job sites, whether they're powered by diesel, powered by Nat gas, powered by hydrogen, to try to get job sites to start looking at things in terms of energy spent and better use of the energy that they're using. It's a whole lot of, like you said, it's not value engineering, but it's engineering a better vehicle that's going to return a better value. It's a totally different way of looking at it. And another company that is kind of looking at the market the way it is and coming up with a totally different solution is Revoi EV.
Speaker 2:I don't know if you've seen this. These guys are building kind of an intermediate trailer. What do I mean by that? It looks kind of like a fifth wheel trailer. You back your semi truck into it conventional diesel you hook it up to the fifth wheel and then it's got its own fifth wheel behind it that you hook your trailer to, and this thing carries all the batteries. It has a Dana, you know E-axle drive axle and it basically is like a helper motor, like a pusher motor, and it uses that high torque at low RPM efficiency of an electric motor to get that load moving. And they're saying that it cuts the emissions and cuts the fuel use of a semi truck that has one of these things in half. So if you're getting seven miles per gallon, it's going to double your fuel economy on a full-size rig carrying your maximum GVWR and I think that's really, really impressive. That's a different way of looking at this.
Speaker 3:You know what that reminds me of is I was at two factories, I've been on two factory tours, and they have in their possession the powered trailers which would load a truck so they could do load testing and artificially load the truck down like it was pulling against the force. So it reminds me of that, but it's in reverse, right? So they're trying to power it and add some power and then they get the battery aspect to it. I'm curious about and obviously they've done the research on it and I did a bunch of research on this One of our drivers took a picture of one of these. They saw it and he goes I don't know what this is, but this has got to do with something with electric. And I'm like, well, let me look it up. And then, sure enough, it did.
Speaker 3:It's really like you said, it's a really new take on this. It's like, hey, you got a regular truck. Great, put this between the truck and your trailer, we're gonna help you get a little bit better mileage and, like you said, in some cases twice as good. Yeah Well, how can you argue with that? And you're not doing anything other than coupling it up. And then there's a little bit of an interface, but I don't know. I think it's a great solution to fleets that are like, hey, I just need something to give me buy for a little while. I don't wanna revamp a truck or replace it. It's just another great option.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, I like this thing too because it drives itself right. So it's using cameras, it's using a little bit of autonomous to hook itself into the truck. When you pull into a depot because these things have depots every you know they're planning on doing them every 250 miles between Texas and Arkansas they will essentially deconnect from the trailer, deconnect from your truck, go back and charge, and then another one that's fully charged will come back in and reconnect so that you can you just kind of keep on going down the road and use as much electric power as you can. Otherwise it kind of turns it into a big Prius, where you do get better fuel economy, you get that regen braking, but you're still running on diesel power.
Speaker 2:I think it's really interesting. I really like this idea. I think the concept is great, but I do think it has a fatal flaw, because all of these batteries and all of this electric drive motor is incredibly, incredibly heavy. And you want to talk about the weight of a electric Volvo VNR you know VNR semi at. You know 20,000 pounds, this is 22,000 pounds, this is two Wow.
Speaker 3:so you took a tractor that weighs, you know, 18, let's say, or 20, you add 22 to you got 40, then you have your trailer. Your payload capacity in the trailer is down under 30,000. Oh, less than that If you've got an 80,000 pound GBWR.
Speaker 2:you don't have a special permit, you're way below. So this is where I think it's an issue. Right In hybrid cars like a Prius or anything like that, they have the same problem, where you can get away with a smaller gas engine, you can get away with a smaller battery pack, but at the end of the day you still have two complicated systems instead of one complicated system and that mass builds up. You know, I talked about this. The guy's named the CEO of this company, his guy named Ian Russ. I talked to him.
Speaker 2:I was able to talk to him and interview him a little bit for this article that I wrote it's on electricco, if you want to check that out, and he's got a really good comment. He says that this really only makes sense where drivers are carrying high value loads and they're cubing out before they're weighing out. What that basically means is they're running out of physical space in the container, but they're not necessarily running out of weight within that 80,000 pounds. So if you're, you know, shuttling groceries or you're moving clothing that's not super heavy or dense, this might make a ton of sense because you're never gonna get anywhere near that 80,000 pounds anyway, so you can take advantage of those fuel savings and they're not going to be offset too badly by, you know, the lost payload.
Speaker 3:Another thing that this reminds me of is when you're trucking out west and you get on some of these just grinding hills and then Maryland has a couple 688 is the same way where you just keep pulling and pulling and pulling and that keeps pulling the truck down. You had one of these that helped you get up the hill and actually maintain some road speed. Could be a good safety factor If you've ever been in a SUV and you're barreling down the road 65, 85, whatever you're doing and you come up on a truck doing 19 miles an hour pulling a hill with the four ways.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a big problem.
Speaker 3:It's kind of unnerving, cause you're like, wow, that's incredibly much slower than what I'm doing. You know, and you have this behemoth that's just trying to make it up to the next hill.
Speaker 2:Well, there's another safety angle to this too, because we're talking about going up the hill. Anytime you have a big speed difference, it doesn't matter whether you're, you know, talking about 80 miles an hour to 40 miles an hour, 120 to 80, whenever you have a big speed differential, that's when you things get really unsafe and reaction times start to fall off. But we're talking about going uphill and using it as a safety factor. Uphill, think about downhill, where you can use the regenerative braking of the EV trailer, which doesn't use pads, doesn't use rotors, doesn't build up that crazy heat. You're effectively engine braking the electric motor, you're charging the battery without burning up your pads and your drums. There's a safety feature up the hill and down the hill because of this thing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean you beat me to it. I mean we always talk about this when we're hauling heavy. It's like going down the hill is just as dangerous and guys are like, well, once you get over the top of the hill, well, that's all right, now you're going down the other hill. You can make up time, now you can. Sometimes we're going down the backside of these hills doing 20, 25 miles an hour Because if you get this thing away from you, you won't stop it. That's right. So you're spot on with that. With the three axles that it's got, you got six sets of brakes. Like you said, it's regenerative. It's a totally different type of braking than what you're used to, because you don't have a heat factor. You don't have. You know, while my brakes are going out or they're fading off, you know it's gonna be there to help you with all that. So I think it's a valid point. I think we need to take a look at some of this stuff and how we can use it.
Speaker 3:The heavy haul industry for years has had pusher engines in the back of the trailers, pusher trucks Not again, not for only pushing but for also breaking and stopping. Maybe we could. That has a place with this, where you could put a bunch of EV type assist units. You know, this is like. This is like the days of the in the fifties, of the locomotives that had the AB units for the diesel electric locomotives. You had an A unit where the operator was at the engineer, and then you had two or three B units behind him. There was nobody back there. They're just there. That's right. There you go.
Speaker 2:I really liked that angle on this and I'm wondering. The only thing that I'm wondering here is because I'm full angles, Joe Full angles. You are fearful of something.
Speaker 3:He's going off in the pasture seat because I'm getting off target, so sorry, panicking.
Speaker 2:He's like you're talking over each other. We talked about this. I'm mad.
Speaker 3:I imagine if we were in the car together, you and I, nothing would get said Just start, we'd already be fighting.
Speaker 2:We'd be swinging on each other, going down, going downhill, pulling 60,000 pounds, just like fine destination.
Speaker 2:The trees are going everywhere, the logging truck and everybody's dead. We don't even notice. We're recording. No, but listen, we live in an era of container shipping, containerized shipping. Everything's in a container. I don't understand why this doesn't get built into the trailer so that at the port you're dropping your container onto a motorized, electrified trailer that can then get itself to the truck hook up and you guys drive down the road and it uses regenerative braking on the downhill and it uses its battery assist up the hill and it can kind of handle its own braking and do its own thing. I think that that makes more sense than this, because then you're doing it in the same footprint, you don't have an additional two points of articulation and one would hope it would weigh less than 22,000 pounds.
Speaker 3:I mean, I don't know how it couldn't, because you're packaging that into the trailer that already has the axles. The framework, the superstructure is already there.
Speaker 3:But you're packaging it in and you're dead on, because in the container port world, if you're trying to move things and you're trying to get things going, anything is going to help you. Some of those containers are actually really heavy. People don't realize how much weight's in them and because they came over on a ship and then they get a permit and then they on to where they have to go, I think that's a great idea and we need to be talking to somebody about this Once again the episode is up with a great idea.
Speaker 3:We need a patent lawyer. We're going to get it in the house legal next, they're going to sit in the booth with us and make notes.
Speaker 2:Biff, make some calls. We need an attorney.
Speaker 3:He's just nodding. He can't even believe that this is happening right now.
Speaker 2:There's got to be a good movie clip of like somebody get me an attorney or something. My cousin Vinny will find something.
Speaker 3:Oh yes, there you go. I'm here for the two youths. The two youths. To what? To what? Oh, what was that word? Uh, what word.
Speaker 2:To what? What Did you say? Youths? Yeah two youths.
Speaker 1:What is a youth? Oh, excuse me, your Honor.
Speaker 2:Two youths. What is a youth? There you go. You know the kids, the kids, the children. Two youths. That's the one where the entire world fell in love with Marisa Tomei, because she knew what a limited slip differential was, that's how low the bottle was in the nineties. If you were a woman and you had perky breasts and you knew what a limited slip differential was, the entire world would fall in love with you.
Speaker 3:You were getting late. You were getting late.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you were. She got on Seinfeld with that, that was her whole career.
Speaker 3:Yeah, george, went off about this, you were friends with Marisa Tomei.
Speaker 1:That's right. That's such incredible. My cousin Vinny. I loved her. She was fantastic. Yeah, I know you were going to fix me up with her. Yeah, she's just been sitting home, Marisa Tomei's sitting home. Elaine, why don't you tell me that Katie was friends with Marisa Tomei? Oh, I don't know what I was thinking.
Speaker 2:This is already one of the off time classic episodes. Oh Lordy, I don't know where to go with this.
Speaker 3:We have to recognize this. We're on 19. I don't know why, but I thought we were on 190.
Speaker 2:We just didn't record the first hundred and 16.
Speaker 3:We must not have. Then when somebody gets those things out of the vault, we're all going to get busted.
Speaker 2:Those are all on reel to reel at Neil's house, running on the back of some old punch drive computer system.
Speaker 3:That crazy SOB. That would be him and he'd be splicing and cutting the tape back and forth and replaying it till he got it just right, and he'd be like that's solid gold and he would just set it on the shelf.
Speaker 2:Solid gold. It's all taped together. He's got like the monocle, that, that one magnifying glass that they used to tape the film together, yep. Then at the end he runs it through backwards. It plays Gallagher and he's like, hmm, that was the old thing, that if you played the record backwards. If you played the record backwards, you could hear Satan. That was like the big panic in the 80s was like oh, the devil is in Ozzy Osbourne's music.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, the 80s and the late 70s. You know you put it on there and you're like who the the Johnny is the devil, who the Johnny is the devil? The same thing, that's exactly right. Imagine putting an ELO record on backwards. It sounds like you got crap coming out of your dishwasher that is going to suck you down the drain, cats and dogs living together Mass hysteria.
Speaker 2:Could you imagine you're playing ELO backwards? You're trying to back up one of these things with the Revo EV hookup on there, so you've got an extra fifth wheel point of articulation. They didn't train you for that in the CDL school.
Speaker 3:No, I'm not Imagine that she pulled up and you're nice, shiny Volvo, and back then it had the crossbar and the grill hanging all over the windows and everything. You got the ELO on there and then you play that backwards and it's like die, kill him now.
Speaker 2:You play, you play it backwards, and the Ukrainians are like I think this is my mother's potato soup recipe. No, no more salt, More salt. Well, this has gone off the rails. Speaking of things that are on the rails, we got some rare good news about California's high speed rail project. Obviously, trains equipment. We always talk about railroad stuff on here because it doesn't get any heavier than railroads. So, California's high speed rail project they've been way over budget, way behind schedule since 2008. But progress actually is being made now and it seems like that's going to go really well there. According to the San Francisco Gate News, they are going to have, like lazy boy recliners, locking luggage storage systems there and roaming bar carts that will go through the train.
Speaker 2:So you know we may not be on time and we may not be on budget, but at least we have recliners and booze.
Speaker 3:If Arnold was still in office, that train would be running. Just going to tell you right now that man would make sure he'd be out there lifting rail today by himself, working with the guys they would have it installed, oh yeah.
Speaker 2:I, you know. I believe that it was funny that you mentioned that because Arnold ran as a Republican but he really wasn't. But I think if you took the average American I'm not talking left or right politics, I'm saying you took the average American and you really asked them what they thought about issue X, issue Y, issue Z you're going to get a very different answer from an individual person than you would get from any politician on either side and I think most people would agree with most other people or at least find a lot of common ground with most other people. So I don't think has anything to do with right or wrong, they would understand what they're saying.
Speaker 3:They may not agree with it, but they would understand where they're coming from.
Speaker 2:Exactly. So, now we're talking now 20 years ago almost that he was the governor. He was trying to put solar panels out there in the Mojave Desert and it couldn't happen. You know, pgd couldn't make it work. Yeah, and he's very famous for saying if I can't put solar in the Mojave Desert, what can I put solar? And this gets back to the bigger problem of just because you can produce energy doesn't mean that you can effectively or affordably get that energy into the grid.
Speaker 2:And this has been part of the big problem with getting high speed rail into California is high speed rail is an incredible demand on DC direct current and it is not easy to get grid access and high capacity substations and everything else into these areas that people want them to be. Because the price of the real estate is so high that these municipalities and these state governments that cannot print their own money, even if they go in with the eminent domain, a lot of these states can't afford to put those systems in. It has to be something federal where they can print their own money to come in and say, ok, well, this land here in San Francisco is three and a half bajillion dollars. You know, we're going to go mint a coin for that and here you go, don't spend that on one place.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, let me tell you you're going to want to hold on to that one. So no, I don't know, but the high speed rail needs to happen and you're absolutely right. There was so much stuff that has gone wrong with early electrification, early solar, early high speed rail, and then you have countries like China and that they just did it. But here it is A to B. We need to move our people. We're doing it and for some reason, the United States, we trip over ourselves with certain things and we do it all the time. It's just something that we do and we have to break that cycle and that's that is a big part of what we talk about with everything that we talk about with heavy equipment, electrification of the vehicles, semi trucks, anything. We are our own roadblock. Yeah, we do it all the time.
Speaker 3:Look what we just talked about with the container thing and being able to have a motor in there that's electric and work on it. That's a great idea, because you need stuff like that and you know what A lot of people are like. That'll never work. Not all the ideas are gonna work. They never did. We might as well just try them. You're gonna find some stuff and refine it. You're gonna go, yeah this is worthwhile.
Speaker 2:Yeah well, what you're talking about there is called survivor bias. I'm gonna throw this out there. So, as everybody knows, I have a whole bunch of useless information rattling around in here. Now you're gonna get some of it. So survivor bias is the idea that when you look around you at the ideas that have already been had and you go, this is kind of what works, right, this is how this all works.
Speaker 2:What you don't see is the 10,000 different variations of toaster that came into being and failed in the marketplace and were out Darwin by the Proctor, silux two slot and are no longer around. But if you ever get real weird and you wanna go, look at old vintage turn of the century toasters. They had charcoal fired toasters, they had propane toasters, they had whale oil toasters, they had electric toasters that, like, had conveyor belts in them. There was all kinds of different ideas out there until we kind of solidified on one. So when you look at early solar, early electrification, early high speed rail in this country, what you're seeing is all of these early ideas. Remember, at the turn of the century, a hundred years ago, if you go back 100 years, there was 300 American car companies and those eventually got whittled down with the big three and now it's like the big two and a half maybe three and a half if you consider Tesla but we've gone through this whittling down process in these other technologies and these other markets and now we're doing it in solar, we're gonna start doing it in rail and I think we are behind other countries in a lot of ways, not for any shortcoming, but I think because we have had it so good.
Speaker 2:Like let's talk about China. China didn't have interstates and they didn't have a mature interstate highway system with a mobile population that traveled on it and got in their car and went across 1600 miles like it was nothing. 20 years ago there was no Chinese auto market or it was a very limited Chinese auto market compared to what you have today. So when they said we're gonna build high speed rail, they weren't competing with I-95 or I-10 for traffic. They weren't competing with special interest groups and lobbyists and powerful organizations and job creation engines that went into keeping those interstates open and that were invested in those interstates continuing to be the status quo. So in a lot of ways, our success has held us back. But at the same time, we also have a lot of success, and we have a lot of things that do work. So let's not get too crazy with wishing we lived somewhere else.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean well, and that's not really what I meant, but my point to the whole thing was-.
Speaker 2:Not you just like people.
Speaker 3:Right, I know what you're saying. I know what you're saying. We, as a nation, we have to not just be stubborn about things. We have to promote the maturity of technology, not because we've always had it or it's the way we did it forever, but because we know it's right and we know that it at least is propelling us forward. I mean, look at tier four, tier five back when tier one came out, tier two, nobody really thought about it. Tier three started clamping things down and that's a constant thing. Now it's kind of, hey, that's what it is, it's got emissions on it, we're gonna run it. We have to get that way with solar and we have to get that way with electric. I think we have to get beyond the stigma. We will. It just takes time.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's not gonna be us.
Speaker 2:It's not gonna be us, it's gonna be our kids by the time they're growing up. You know it's funny. I was showing my daughter she's about to turn 10 years old. I was showing her how to pump gas in the car and she goes why are you showing me this? I'm never gonna have a car that picks gas. She's 10 and she's like yeah, I'm never gonna have a gas car, why are you showing me how to do this?
Speaker 3:Because you never know when you're going to be on some back desert road after the apocalypse, trying to soak up gasoline, the precious juice and get away from the wasteland.
Speaker 2:No well, the other thing I showed her how to do is make moonshine, so she'll just be running it off the grain alcohol.
Speaker 3:There you go, exactly.
Speaker 2:Well, let's try to get back on track. You know what? Let's not get back on track, let's get again. Let's have a gansett. There you go.
Speaker 1:Hi neighbor, have a gansett Narrow gansett lager beer. It has straight from the barrel taste, Straight from the barrel taste. That's why you'll enjoy saying hi, neighbor, have a gansett Narrow, gansett lager beer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're not even smooth on these anymore, we just go right into it.
Speaker 3:No, we just dive in, just punch.
Speaker 2:Yeah, all right. So we got two last things here. One of them is real quick. We've got the Liebherr. They have their first ever electric compact wheel loader. That's exactly what it says on the tin. Liebherr makes great stuff. They need a compact wheel loader. It's something that Volvo has. They want to stay competitive, especially in the European market. It has a lot more noise regulations, a lot more emissions regulations than the US does. This makes a ton of sense for them.
Speaker 3:Well, liebherr has always done a really good job. They've had electrification, they have had mining equipment that's electric based, that they've put out.
Speaker 2:Well, they have that big, big mining truck yeah.
Speaker 1:They have that massive mining truck too.
Speaker 2:That's huge, yes. So yeah, this is a natural step for them. You said it exactly right. It looks like it's using the conventional hydraulics. They have not gone the same route that Bobcat has done, where everything is done with electric actuators. It makes an apple-to-apple comparison pretty easy. The thing that they've done here, it's the L507E. It's just like their L507. And all of the options are exactly the same. So what they've done is they've effectively made the electric drive unit an option on the L507. So if you've got a fleet, you've got six or seven of these assets in your inventory. You know how you like to order them. You know how you like to spec them out. You can get the same thing that you're used to. That's going to fit all your implements. Your guys already know how to drive them.
Speaker 3:All of that stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah, just get an electric drive. I think that's so smart.
Speaker 3:Exactly. I mean, they're just taking their normal products, making it electric Once again. How can you go wrong with that?
Speaker 2:Sure, someone will figure out how they can go wrong with that. Well, that's very true, someone will figure it out. What is it? I try to keep making things idiot-proof and they just keep making better idiots.
Speaker 3:That's it. The idiots get stupider.
Speaker 2:That's how it works. I'm from Jupiter, where the boys are stupider. We're going to close this out. You know we're having a good time, but there's a lot of people in the industry right now who are not having a good time.
Speaker 2:There's something called a warn letter. That's a worker adjustment and reach training notification. That's something that goes out to UAW union workers that basically says look, your job is going away. You have some rights in terms of retraining, you've got some bump rights and things like that, so they are given a notice. You know, this is something that if you don't have a union you've never had a union or been a member of a union you don't understand the rights that it gives you. Whether there's this common joke or it's not really a joke, but there's a common thing that goes around tick, tock and Instagram. Where why should I give my company two weeks notice to quit when they would never give me two weeks notice to fire me? Well, when you have a union and you have a good contract, they do have to give you notice to fire you, and that's what this warn letter is.
Speaker 2:This one was dated January 25th 2024. So it's just a week ago and it's basically your two weeks notice that you're going to get fired. And it's from Detroit chassis. And I'll read you exactly what it says, word for word. It says we have very recently been informed by a key customer, ford, that customers projection of their commercial chassis orders for the upcoming year 2024 have decreased 30%. As a result, the company is forced to lay off the number of associates attached, effective Friday, january 26, 2024. Holy crap, ford is telling its suppliers, ford is telling its upfitting partners we are projecting a 30%. A full third of our commercial chassis business is going to go away in 2024.
Speaker 3:I don't know. This is what bothers me about this whole thing. I'm not a hundred percent sure how they forecasted that, because we can't get enough trucks as buyers. So is this a forced slowdown? Is this a forced way of saying, hey, we're gonna ease back a little bit and we're gonna kind of keep this shortage running Because I can tell you as a buyer, we can't get enough product right now. It's not there. Yeah, it's not just for it, it's all of them, and you know for them to sit there and say, hey, we're gonna have a 30% reduction in sales. I don't know how they can even come up with that.
Speaker 2:Well, let's talk about that because there are real challenges facing the global supply line right now.
Speaker 2:It's just like when that you know, ever clear, ever green, whatever that was ship got stuck sideways in the Suez Canal and everybody had to go around Africa.
Speaker 2:We are back in that state where people cannot go through the Red Sea because of the war and everything that's going on in Israel and Iran and everything else, and I sure as heck do not want to get into that political nightmare and start talking about that, but let's just say politically neutral, whatever side you're on, at the end of the day you have to acknowledge that not being able to move ships efficiently through the Mediterranean, especially when so many of these components, these Bosch components, these Ford components, these GM components are made in Poland, are made in Turkey, the Ford Transit is made in Turkey All of a sudden, if that region is destabilized, they can't get parts out into the world and if you can't build them, you can't sell them.
Speaker 2:You can't sell what you don't have. You can't sell out of an empty cart. So if you're trying to get something sold, if you're trying to sell a dozen eggs, you better have a dozen eggs to sell, and I think that what this is saying, if we're reading between the lines, is Ford doesn't think that any of this is going to slow down anytime soon and it's going to really affect their ability to build product.
Speaker 3:You know what. That's a very good point. I'm glad you brought that up. You can't sell from empty shelves and if they know the shelf is going to be bare, we can't build it. You know, and that's a good point. I didn't even think about it, because I'm looking at it from the part of the buyer, the part of the user, and my frustration is we can't get them fast enough. I'm not worried about how they're going to build them, you know. But you're spot on for all the people that didn't think about everything that is going on out there and the logistics of the world is slowing down production and they know it's going to happen the fact that they're putting that letter out there, and if that is correct, they already know it's happening and they know they're going to run out of supply.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's done deal. It's already happening. You know I saw an article. I can't find it again, but I saw an article that said all this stuff in the Middle East, A lot of retailers, including Amazon, are really concerned about it because they think it's going to impact the 2024 Christmas shopping. So they're already projecting 12 months out.
Speaker 3:Wow, let's. You know, maybe Jeff doesn't need to buy another world somewhere.
Speaker 2:That's so fast. Let's close with this because we're coming to the end of what we do here, so let's close off with this. Jeff Bezos, he knows what we're shopping for. He knows because Amazon has this predictive thing of like you might also like, so he knows what we want. He could be Santa Claus. He can afford it. He can afford to put something under every little Christmas tree in America, and he probably knows if we're naughty or nice based on what the Alexa is recording. He knows if you called somebody a mother. He knows if you've been nice to people. He could be Santa Claus. At this point, he's actively choosing to not be Santa Claus.
Speaker 3:You know what I never thought about the Alexa listening in and I'm sorry, but everything that it's heard is not just the George Carlin record.
Speaker 2:Over at your place. It's like what are they talking about over there? What do you mean? Owl too hard, what is that? Sounds like there's 11 guys in a llama over there. What the fuck is happening over there?
Speaker 3:All I know is a bus pulled up and Alexa turned herself off.
Speaker 2:Alexa Hurdle was going on over there. She says you're naughty and she killed herself Self-destruct in three, two smoke.
Speaker 3:This comes off the nightstand.
Speaker 1:Tune in next week for more heavy equipment podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcast, Google or wherever you find podcasts.