The Heavy Equipment Podcast
Whether we're exploring the latest in equipment technology, talking about the trends that propel the industry forward, or uncovering stories about the dedicated individuals who keep the dirt moving, and wheels of America turning, this is where the roar of the engines and the pulse of progress come together. It is sublime. It is surreal. It's the Heavy Equipment Podcast ... with Mike and Jo!
The Heavy Equipment Podcast
HEP-isode 30 | Zero Tolerance, Zeem Solutions, and Lithuanian Zeppelins
On this special 30th HEP-isode, we ask: are zero-tolerance drug policies in the trucking industry outdated?
This episode kicks off with look into the impacts of marijuana legalization on labor policies within the heavy equipment space. Next, we examine the declining demand for diesel fuel and shine a spotlight on Zeem Solutions' day-to-day operations as we delve into the financial intricacies of transitioning fleets to electric vehicles. Finally, we'll discuss the critical role of labor specialization and how outsourcing maintenance and repair services can streamline operations and reduce expenses for modern delivery fleets.
Welcome back for another thrilling episode of the Heavy Equipment Podcast. And man, that last belt of Tito's really got me right between the eyes.
Speaker 2:Let me tell you we're ready, Ripped and ready right here. Biff's in the control room. He's been munching on some kind of weird brownie. I got my tall cup next to me and we're ready to roll.
Speaker 1:He's got like one eye dilated and the other one's just like pulsing. He is ready, ready, that's legal now. And you know we are already off subject. We talk about this a lot, though we do talk about this a lot. This, the rescheduling of marijuana, of hemp, and and the fact that that is legalizing throughout the country and you've got state after state after state making this illegal recreational thing. We really need to set some kind of policy that's going to enable some kind of variance here, because right now, if you talk about the Teamsters and you talk about these other over-the-road truck organizations operators unions, engineering unions their stance is still zero tolerance, like just zero tolerance all the way through. And I don't know how it's easy, but it's not easy because it leads to a shortage of labor. I mean, imagine if they had a zero tolerance policy on alcohol and you couldn't crack open a beer on Saturday with your buddies when you're on vacation.
Speaker 2:Well, it's unconstitutional, that's unconstitutional, Well it's only amendments to protect our alcoholic rights.
Speaker 1:Well, so, so that's there you go, Now that now we're constitutional law professors.
Speaker 2:We didn't say that. We just read the document Our forefathers handed to us and we interpreted as needed. I'm a medical doctor, medically treated let's put it that way Medicinal medicinally treated. You see what I did there. I automatically threw the brownie out there and derailed the whole show.
Speaker 3:This is why everybody loves me. We had a whole plan.
Speaker 2:We talked about it before we even got on here and I just derailed it.
Speaker 1:I've been waiting to do this, If it's gone. He threw his hands up to the left. He went to the bathroom. He's in that dark hallway. He went to the bathroom.
Speaker 2:He's in that dark hallway, if people can see our recording studio it's literally pine walls with a wooden floor and a green ceiling. It's in the forest Right out of the 70s you got orange shag seats sitting over to the right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you got the green C10 Chevy out front. You got to spray ether into it to get it going. People know.
Speaker 2:That's only when it's below 50.
Speaker 1:Let's not curse the truck too bad, below 50 celsius maybe. So let's get back to the plan. Let's talk about this. Diesel demand in the united states and globally has dropped to a 26 year low in q Q1. The Q2 numbers are out and it continues to drop. What's going on, man? Why people don't like diesel no more?
Speaker 2:Well, the problem with diesel is, as everybody knows, that it costs more to operate, it costs more to buy, it costs more to have it. You got a mixed fuel fleet. Then you got gasoline, you got diesel, so you got to deal with that separately. You got that separately. You got filtration, you've got um. You get all of the afterburn treatment, emission stuff that you can't get away from anymore, and you have none of that with gasoline. Everybody has seen this coming for a long time. And look at the pickup truck market with the one ton, three-quarter ton market where everybody's switching over to gasoline. Gmc saw coming a long time ago. They put the allison transmission right behind their big gas motor yeah, that's a great point.
Speaker 1:I thought I was all set and primed because I knew we were going to talk about this. I was all set and primed to start bringing up questions about like I've been primed over to a good pregame. No, but I was. I was primed to talk about like electric and hydrogen and you know, volvo came out with their news that they've logged 50 million electric miles. Freight liners coming up on I think 20 million with their eCascadia. That's not even counting the medium-duty electric things like the Ford Transits. That's got to be taking up a couple million miles. But I think you're right, the big part of that, at least on the consumer end and on that 4,500, 5,500 tow truck and box van market. I think there has been a huge push to gasoline there that you haven't seen before. Even in the RV space. You used to see those E350s and stuff, the class Cs that had the diesel chassis and now those are all running on gas as well, and I think that's probably a much larger component of that than EV and hydrogen.
Speaker 2:Well, if there's ever a space that you know this country needed gas, electric, hybrid or alternative methods of fueling. I'm going to put it that way, because you need low maintenance, you need stuff that people can take off and go on their vacations. It's already a cluster when you got somebody wheeling a provost bus down the highway towards Florida, Georgia, Arizona, and they don't even have a CDL, and that's another problem. We've talked about that before. We're not going to go down.
Speaker 1:Guys are 85 years old. They don't even know where they are.
Speaker 2:They don't know where they are. All they know is that they hit some toll booth and some lady's talking to them, and they don't even know what they're saying. The point is, though, is they don't need maintenance, they don't need emissions, they don't need something that's going to turn them in their trip into a nightmare. They need to be able to fire the thing up in the morning and take off, and the other thing that it does, by having alternative fuel sources for RVs, is it keeps them out of what the fuel islands, so you don't have them tying up all this stuff and precious truck stop space, which they already don't have, and then you pull in there. You've been driving for seven hours straight. You need to get fuel in there. There's this RV plugged up, because he's in there trying to read the coffee label and figure out what creamery wants. Meanwhile, they're trying to just get fuel and move on, and we got to get out.
Speaker 1:They are. There's two things I want to bring up here, and I think you touched on two of them. Availability of the fuel is a big issue. Those fuel islands that are out there are tough to get big trailers and rvs through, just like they're tough to get big semi trucks through. They clog it up, that's the problem.
Speaker 2:They just clog it up. There's already not enough space, because you got guys in there trying to shower and they left their, they left their uh, their broken down trucks sitting outside, because they have no etiquette. Now you get an rv plugged up in there and then it's it well, it's more than that too.
Speaker 1:Right, because the guys in the rvs most of those guys aren't truckers. They're not truck stop people, they're not guys who grew up around that stuff who feel more than comfortable pulling into a flying jr loves. They're going to like the 7-eleven and they're blocking eight or nine consumers that try and figure out how to get in there.
Speaker 2:That's a whole other angle. If you ever seen one of them guys trying to wheel that thing around a speedway, oh it's rough, that's when they're leaving on a monday morning for to go on some road trip and all the landscapers are in there and they got all their, all their stuff and they're trying to gas up five million things. Yeah, that's exactly it I mean. And then here comes, you know, mr 40 footer and he comes rolling in there and he's like oh, he's got nothing he's got nothing.
Speaker 1:He's got nothing. Mr 40 footer, I haven't been called that since prom night.
Speaker 3:Whoa, whoa.
Speaker 2:Well then, the other thing, too, is if you ever watched anybody getting a jam with one of those RVs and then try to back it out of whatever jam they got it into, they have no idea where they're going. They can't see anything. They think they got cameras, they got nothing. Got nothing. And then when they take out something, who's standing there wanting to know if they got a card on them?
Speaker 3:The.
Speaker 2:Teamsters. You got a card. You got a union card, buddy, what local are you with you, brethren? No, get out of here, get out, let's go, let's go, let's get out of here.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, I think that's all incredibly valid, also, not just with. You know whether you're talking about CNG. You know Cummins has their new X15 motor that runs on diesel, runs on hydrogen, runs on natural gas. That's a cool motor.
Speaker 1:But regardless of what you've got whether it's natural gas, cng, lpg, electric or anything you need a place to go and get all your maintenance done, make sure it's fueled up, make sure it's ready for work at the end of the shift, and you know, I think, the logistics of that and the newness of some of this technology, because we really are in a place of maximum complexity right now. Right, like there is no. You just pull up to the pump and gas it up, and if you had like a third party that could just come in and support your fleet and get it fueled up, get it charged up, get it up and running and handle all that and you just had a flat fee, I think that would make people a lot braver, make fleet operators a lot braver when it came to trying out some of this new technology, so that we can really finally have a winner and figure out where we're going to go with this stuff.
Speaker 2:Well, the stuff's changing fast enough that people in the industry that manage it we don't have a level of comfort anymore that says, yeah, I got a grip on what's going on. We had that going for a while because the OEMs led us down the path of knowledge and then they told us what we needed to hear, and then they did all this stuff. But now we're in this crossroads of where we're going to go next as technology becomes more readily available and becomes more refined. Because now we have see, now we have a technology that's available at exponentially growing rate, right. And then, as as we develop more and more technology, we develop more and more ways of using the technology. So now it's available for us to figure out ways to do stuff.
Speaker 2:That is creating this weird riff where a lot of fleet managers, a lot of mechanics, a lot of the dealership groups that I talk to I talk to a lot of senior management and dealership groups across the country throughout the weeks they don't know where to go, they don't know what to do, they don't have a good preparation and all they're trying to do is hang on. And they used to see this other thing to dealership groups a long time ago. You still take in all kinds of what they considered foreign work, stuff that was not under their umbrella of the OEM magistrate. They would bring in all this customer pay work which was great customer pay work for the franchise, right, and it was. Here's somebody that trusted them said, hey, I know this isn't Cat or John Deere or Hitachi or Volvo, but can you work on it? And they go yeah, bring it down, we'll take a look at it. And they're like yeah, we got it, we downloaded a manual.
Speaker 2:Or back in the day, they're like we ran over to a buddy and we got the manual and we took care of it. That's a trust level thing, right. Oems are getting to a point where they can't do that anymore, cause they're basically at the point where they're like listen, we're trying to keep up with what we got already. We're short staffed, we've only got enough people to keep what we got moving through there, let alone try to come up with some five-month wait time, because we can't get parts, can't get people. So there's a space out there that's needed for people that can provide a service that is finitely pinpointed to what you need.
Speaker 1:Well, I like that and I like what you're saying there about this idea of a partnership, that you used to have a partnership with your dealers. The dealers had a partnership with each other and there was some kind of code there. Fleet managers today are looking for some kind of partner to help guide them through a lot of this uncertainty and maximum complexity, and they don't have it. One guy who seems to think that he's the ideal partner for this kind of thing is Paul Giapas. Paul is our guest today. He is the CEO and founder of Zima Fleet Solutions and Paul, thanks for being on the show. Thanks for having me. Joe, really looking forward to it. Yeah, and Paul, you and I hit it off real well at ACT, so I expect that this is going to be a pretty tight interview. But for people who aren't familiar with Zim Solutions, what is it that you guys are doing? What's the elevator pitch?
Speaker 4:Appreciate that, joe, what Zim does. First of all, we started back in 2017. What we do is we design, construct and operate EV infrastructure for light-duty, medium-duty and heavy-duty fleets, mainly focused on medium and heavy-duty fleets. We're doing that at ports, we're doing that at airports and directly right at customer sites.
Speaker 1:Our first depot is here in LAX and we're starting to roll these out across the country Now what is life like at your LAX facility For somebody who wants to use that, for somebody who doesn't really understand what this kind of infrastructure as a service thing looks like? What's a day in the life there is.
Speaker 4:If I start at midnight, at midnight our team is very much charging all of the domicile vehicles that park there overnight. We're also performing service and maintenance work. So one of the big benefits of working with an as a service like us is that we make sure we keep the uptime. So we're doing that service and maintenance work at night. Very, very busy after midnight doing charging and service and maintenance. Starting at about four o'clock in the morning we get a lot of the airport operators that start to come and pick up their vehicles. So between four and five is quite a bit of that activity. The ports don't start opening up and getting active until about 6 am. So a lot of our tractor customers and box trucks they'll start queuing up there at about five to six o'clock in the morning and then sort of post seven o'clock all those fleets that are domiciled and park with us overnight are out doing their business.
Speaker 4:Then we start to bring in what we call our contract charging customers. Those are customers that just come in charge and leave. So we work with a number of car rental companies, a bunch of different ride share companies, and what we do is we perform charging for them throughout the day as well and then at nighttime service that domicile vehicle. The one thing that happens throughout the day, joe, is between four o'clock and nine. At night is our peak time here for our electricity usage. So we try to dial down to literally no charging between four and nine o'clock, and so there's a nice little lull between four and nine where we'll stagger vehicles up that as soon as nine oh one comes on, we turn the energy on and start the process all over again and charge from one nine oh one right to that. Midnight started back all over again.
Speaker 1:That sounds like an incredible operation, man. So there's a ton of complexity, a ton of moving parts there. When you mention that you're doing all the service and you're doing all of the let's call it maintenance, right, Not service? There's a pretty broad variety in terms of the fleets that utilize your service. I imagine there's some E-transits, there's some F-150 Lightnings, all the way up to the Class 8 semi-trucks and a bunch of box vans in between. How do you ensure that the work that your techs are doing is up to those like warranty or manufacturer standards? It's a really good question.
Speaker 4:Look, if you're going to contract with Zim, we need to make sure that we know the equipment incredibly well from the entire architecture of the vehicle. So what we do is, if a customer comes to us let's take Anheuser-Busch, I run BYDs we're going to go, we're going to find out everything about the BYD product so then that way, when it's on our site, we could troubleshoot it. It is 100% core to the business. If we don't understand the architecture of the vehicle, we won't take it in as a contract. So it's very, very important that we do know them all.
Speaker 4:Now you know and you've been at ACT there's a lot of nascent OEMs Really really challenging to have a team that can understand everything from a Tesla to an e-transit, to a XO's lightning systems, c electric and you name it all the way up to the Volvo and Daimler level and everything in between. The good news is, ev is not very complicated. A lot of the componentry is similar. So our team is very, very fluid in understanding the architecture of the vehicle, how to repair them, how to troubleshoot them, and we also do warranty work for most of these OEMs as well.
Speaker 1:Well, and that leads into my next question, right, Because I was going to say when you started to respond to that, if we want to make sure that we are 100% up to speed on the equipment and that we are confident, and but the question of how is it that you know Bollinger has a new CEO now? I had no idea that was coming. So, all of this stuff, how do you keep on top of that? How are you growing the business? And what is next after you know, after LAX, for example.
Speaker 4:So really good questions. You know, first of all, we started this business about three years ago and three years ago, as you can imagine, there was no Volvo VNR, there was no E-Cascadia. We had to deal with the nascents. Now I'm a glutton for punishment, joe. I wanted to understand the business. So what did I do? I dove into the most complicated city. I went into LA, went right around LAX and what I did is I immersed myself in this.
Speaker 4:So what happened is by dealing with a lot of the nascent OEMs. That's why I could confidently turn to you and say most of the componentry on this stuff is fairly similar, a little bit of different flavors here and there. But what's great about EV and the promise is that there's not a lot of complicated, there's not a lot of moving parts. You know you've got 20,000 moving parts in an ICE. You've got far less. You've got 5% or less of that in an EV. So what happens is when you concentrate on those main components, that helps us understand the architecture of just about every vehicle. So, because we now have the confidence, what we actually focus on is when an OEM comes in, what's the interoperability of the charging, because the service and maintenance piece is not overly complicated. The growth for us and what's next is now we're getting finally some good OEMs that are coughing up some good product. So, to your point, you're now starting to see some real good names that are recognizable stepping up with some good products. That makes us happy as well.
Speaker 4:You know we're technology agnostic in the way that we approach this, because I don't know what the best charger is. I don't know what the best truck is, but we're testing them more than anybody else out there. Now you're not finding us on NACFI and a lot of these other reporting agencies, for a very good reason. We want to turn around to our customer and understand that we have the IP and the understanding of what kind of vehicle should you use, what kind of charger. So we favor ABB. Why? We did 75,000 charge sessions, Joe, in about 18 months. So that's a lot.
Speaker 4:Everybody wants to beat up on ABB. That's a lot of performance. Our uptime is over 99%. That's the kind of work that we're doing and we want to make sure that that reverberates throughout the marketplace. So the future for us is good solid partnerships going into the OEMs, helping in the early days, have them understand what customers are asking us to do and then frankly keep them all honest my feeling and I'm a big time patriot, of course, american patriot what frustrates me is to see that the product we sell here is too expensive and it's lagging innovation across the country. So I very much look at us as cutting edge, pushing technology both on the charging end and, of course, on the OEM side, but where we complete the entire process is bringing in fleet management. Without three of those major components, in my opinion you have a failing offering.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I couldn't agree with you more. One of the things we talk about is that there's two aspects of sustainability, right, or two different types of sustainability Number one, which is sustainability of the planet, sustainability of resources, sustainability of in an ecological or environmental sense, and the other flip side of that is sustainability in terms of doing business. Can we continue to do business if not necessarily in the manner that we're used to, in the volume and quantity and to the quality that we're used to? And that comment of without the fleet management aspect, without that maintenance aspect, you really can't do that. I think that's absolutely true. How do you impress that upon a fleet customer who is used to just operating diesel trucks and bringing them in and out, and like sending them to the dealer once every five or six months and 50,000 hours they get a new one.
Speaker 4:What's great is, you know we're not. So we're not trying to sell electric trucks, right? What we're trying to do is we're trying to explain that we're going to help them in this transition phase. So what ends up happening is we're very educational with our fleets. When we first started the business, we literally didn't make one single sale intentionally for five years. We wanted to educate ourselves, so we wanted to have knowledge. Most of the fleets, if not 95% plus, have understood us to be consultants who really understand the charging, the vehicles and that transportation, that fleet management piece. I think that's how we're known in the industry, joe, and we've built our reputation that way. So then, that way they understand like I'm not going to drive a product down your throat because I'm trying to make a sale. I want to make sure it's right and what I want to do is deliver to those fleets that you could do this in an electric truck at the price, or below the price of a diesel and that it actually works and it's actually something that they should double or triple down on.
Speaker 4:The biggest problem in the industry is utilization. Without utilization, we have to go to incentives. Zim has a lot of utilization. So the one thing that I get frustrated about Joe we spoke about this in Vegas at ACT is the price of the truck needs to come down. We have figured out infrastructure. We figured out how to put it in the ground, operate it in a way that it's very low cost and really super efficient. It's the price of the truck that screws everything up. Electrification is ready, right. So we're very much out there educating fleets, letting them know we understand it's scary, but if you're educated and you have somebody holding your hand which is what Zene does will hold your hand through the process In the next three to five years technology gets much better.
Speaker 4:They're going to be able to handle it going forward. But today there's handoff and that handoff is something that we're a third party. So why would we pick a charger? Because it works. Why would we pick a truck? Because it works and our business model is pretty straightforward the charger doesn't work. We don't get paid If the truck doesn't start. It's tethered to that charger. So the fleet is motivated to use us because they realize, hey, you make money from that. So they're highly motivated to work with us in a partnership. And I think that's why the OEMs appreciate us, because we're helping them sell trucks. We're helping them sell chargers. I think it's important. It's early days and while it's early days, it's important to be educational.
Speaker 1:Well, I agree with you a hundred percent and I think also there's another aspect to this that needs to be mentioned, which is the concern about downtime, or rather uptime, and people asking about whether or not the uptime of EVs is comparable to diesel. And they look at that charging time, that charging cycle is downtime. I can't tell you how many fleets I talked to here in the Midwest that they've got their. And not to pick on Mac, because I'm a huge fan of Mac and to actually just help put somebody's spec out in order for a Mac Granite, so I can, so I can speak to that fairly. You know they're in scenarios now where some of these parts that are on back order on back order for six to eight weeks.
Speaker 1:So the type of uptime that people are used to getting out of diesel, historically, that is getting longer and longer because a lot of the electrification and, to your point, a lot of those moving parts that are now computer controlled have their own Bluetooth connection or CAN bus connection.
Speaker 1:They are getting infinitely more complex and getting harder and harder to maintain, while EVs are getting easier to maintain. Are you able to back that up with case studies when you're talking to a fleet manager, because I think you know Ryder. Earlier this year, ryder Trucks sent out a report talking about how EVs actually cost quite a bit more than diesel operations and if you knew what you were looking at, you understood that, hey, ryder bought this thing and treated it just like a diesel and it didn't work. You have to use you know you have to use a screwdriver like a diesel, and it didn't work. You have to use a screwdriver like a screwdriver and a hammer like a hammer, and these two tools are different things. But do you have the kind of case studies and the kind of reporting and hard data that these fleet managers want to see to answer their questions about how this all pencils out compared to diesel?
Speaker 4:Yeah, I'm very, very happy to tell you yes, very much. So what it comes down to. When I saw that rider report, the first thing I said to myself is you don't have a charger and you don't operate a charging hub. What happens is that data was incorrect. We could show you data that we operate class A trucks for the last two years plus. They're completely wrong. Right, the answer is very much for us.
Speaker 4:That's why, like I commented earlier, we don't go out to the NAC fees and other reporting agencies that want to see this, the RMIs, and they want to sort of-. Why would you? That's your competitive advantage. We love it because we come back and, joe, we realize, like, what works, what doesn't work. So we're not motivated to push one product or the other. We don't get commissioned on it. What we do is we go out and tell ABB, as an example we want you to be the best charging company. If you're not, we're not going to buy your product going forward. And, by the way, if somebody asks us what charger they should use, we're going to show that information. I know that sounds very basic, but that's important. You need to have that relationship and you need to know that you have the counterparties that realize how important it is for you.
Speaker 4:Whether it's a charger, whether it's a vehicle, the difference as a service is that we're coming in and realizing that it's long lead items for diesel. So what do we do? I mentioned to you that every truck that comes on the lot, we need to make sure we speak to the OEM and understand their process. What is great? We come in and say, hey, we've inspected this truck, we're just seeing right, but we think this door handle is going to break. You need to send us 20 of them in inventory. We think you need to give us wire harnessing and so on and so forth. They think we're nuts in the beginning. Then what happens is stuff starts to break and when it does exactly what you're talking about, comes up and then we hammer on the OEM and say you're giving us inventory.
Speaker 4:As an example, abb would be a great example. Everybody complains about ABB and that if a charger goes down it takes forever to get repaired Depends on how you run your business, not for us. We have parts and consignment. My team is trained to work on an ABB charger. So my point is you have to have a holistic solution. If you're gonna do EV bring in EV people? So, inder, you nailed it right. You've got diesel mechanics working on EV stuff trying to figure things out, so hours are spent that are unnecessary, a lot of the troubleshooting stuff, the TCOs out of our spot. Maintenance costs are more than half of what they are in diesel more than half and it's because every day we nurture that vehicle and you nailed it on the charging side I don't know how to charge, when to charge. Interoperability is so key. Those are all factors that really play into EV that the traditional diesel guys are not going to know, and I don't blame them right, this is all we eat, sleep and drink.
Speaker 1:You can't know everything.
Speaker 4:You can't have one guy know it all right, that's right, and I can tell you that why I admire Tesla. Tesla does nothing else but EV and that's why they're the best at doing it For Zim. We do nothing but focus on infrastructure for fleets. So if we've done nothing but obsess ourselves in that, the same way you obsess in your podcasts and your journalism, it's the same thing here. We look, it's all I eat, sleep and drink, and do so 24-7, 365,. Fleets know that and they realize here's a transition. Here's a group that's helping me bridge that. But, most importantly, we're taking risk operationally and financial risk on the assets when we're doing what we're doing 100%.
Speaker 1:There's two things that I wanted to bring up here, and because you said it, I don't want this to sound like a gotcha thing. I'm not Barbara Walters, I'm not here to make anybody cry. We want more electrification, so we want you guys to succeed. So, that said, we talked about the importance of interoperability, and then we bring up Tesla, which, yes, they are the best. They eat, live and breathe EVs. We would not be talking about EVs today if it was not for Tesla Credit, where credit is due. They are not typically known for playing well with others, so when you see, or if you've seen, a Tesla Semi in a fleet, how do you manage that vehicle in that ABB kind of infrastructure?
Speaker 4:Really really good. Question. Number one ABV knows that Tesla is very much in our line of sight, so they're going to have a NAX connector for their ABV charger, acquire a bunch of industrial sites. We know how complicated and hard it is. Right, I gave you insight around how we're building at power plants you need 750 kW just for one of their chargers, right, we're building at the 15 megawatt 33 megawatts in New Jersey and higher right. So that kind of charging is what they need. So I understand my opinion.
Speaker 4:Why they haven't put out a lot of semi-trucks is because the infrastructure is not there. So they need to figure out how to partner up and figure out how to get product in the market. We're hoping that they understand a company like Z. We have fleets that are in order to buy those Tesla trucks that are saying, hey, what do I do at my site to support that infrastructure? That's why I say to you they do need to go outside of the norm for them and say we have to look at external partners to figure this out. So the question mark is because nobody understands the industry and that's why Tesla is the best. Do they go to Truckers America? Do they go to Love's? And they start to realize that's not where the EV trucks are. Right, you have to go where the EV trucks are. Guys like us, we eat, sleep and drink it. So, where we are similar to a Tesla, we're obsessed about that market and only that market. We don't think about hydrogen, we don't think about ICE or CNG. This is all we think about. So for them, when they come around to Zim, they're going to realize you need that kind of a partnership.
Speaker 4:So I believe that Tesla is going to be the same way it did it for the car industry, joe. It's going to blow open the semi-truck industry where everybody realizes how can you do that for $200,000?, how can you get that range? And the same way, zim only focuses on infrastructure, tesla builds the truck. That's why, right, if I make a diesel and I make a great amount of money over here, why are you going to go into this other sector?
Speaker 4:I think that there's a financial problem there and it's not bad. I mean, volvo's great at what they do, daimler's great at what they do. They should continue to do that. Oil's got its place in the world, Diesel's got its place, so it's not being replaced. I think that's a ridiculous comment to say in the industry. I think there's a big addressable market. What does 200, 300 miles or less as the tech gets better? That's the addressable market that makes sense to electrify. That's where Zim has burden of proof that this is how much it costs to operate a truck like that, and I know it's far below the cost of a diesel.
Speaker 1:You mentioned this was my other Barbara Walters gotcha from your previous comment was that as the price of the trucks comes down and I think we've seen Tesla's road vehicles on-road vehicles over the years passenger car vehicles the price comes out very high and then it tends to come down as the years. Passenger car vehicles the price comes out very high and then it tends to come down as the years go on, which is different from most other industries, right, where everything just gets more and more expensive. You are in a unique scenario because, in addition to seeing that kind of breadth of product throughout the whole industry, you have some connections overseas and we can edit this out if you don't want to talk about it. But I know that you have some connections overseas and we can edit this out if you don't want to talk about it. But I know that you have some insight into chinese evs overseas evs that most people in the states do not have. Are you able to talk about that at all or just give it a yes?
Speaker 4:absolutely. I mean, look, joe, the one thing you want to think about with zine, right, we're making the market here everybody keeps talking about. There's a lot of like nice PowerPoints and I know the administration likes to talk about it as if it's done, but it's super hard, right? So when I come to you and I say, hey, my hurdle, like trying to find the right truck, right, I need range, I need the right price, you better believe I'm going to scour the planet. My customers are expecting me to do that.
Speaker 4:So China, let me just say it again huge American patriot, love America, would love for everything to be sourced out of America. They're killing us on EV, killing us, right. You could go out there. You'd sit in a beautiful $20,000 electric vehicle with 300 miles of range and you'd be blown away, right. That same exact vehicle here is double the price. Just is the case, right. So we knew we need to fight the terrorists to bring them in. Because products better. Look, american, love America, their products better. So right now they have Chinese product that's coming in, fits the bill. It's almost the price of the other diesel and it's got the range requirements. They run very overweight in China. Europe, same thing. They're having really good vehicle options out there, far better than the US. What happens is there's a bit of a monopoly here, so I think it's important to look across the country. You do that for vehicles, you do that for the chargers, you do that for battery storage.
Speaker 4:The entire ecosystem is so undefined right now, joe, I'm looking frustrated, saying I thought we were further along. Right, if we're not this far along, like I'm watching Tesla in the passenger vehicle market, what I'm saying to you, I truly believe. What I'm watching Tesla do in the passenger vehicle market, what I'm saying to you, I truly believe. When I'm watching Tesla doing the passenger vehicle market, I'm watching it in slow motion in the commercial EV market, no different. I was internal as an investor. I watched companies succeed and fail.
Speaker 4:So for me, I took all the ingredients and I said, okay, what do I think is needed for fleet? I stripped away the politics, I even stripped away the incentives and said, hey, I have no incentive. Does this survive on its own two feet? And I'm happy to say that the answer was yes. Utilization is the key. The one area that I would say is the biggest barrier right now is the price of that truck. So, yeah, I'll scour the plan. I'll take a shot to the moon to go see what they're doing up there, to see if that could come back down here to earth. Whatever it takes to make sure the customer understands the type of options they have, I'm just providing the service. I'm going to make sure that works smoothly and whatever OEM you want to use, fine, I'm going to make sure that every day that truck starts and that it operates and it does the duty it's supposed to do.
Speaker 1:So we've mentioned BYD, we've mentioned Volvo, which is a Daimler Geely project, things like that. Geely is a Chinese brand. There are other brands out there that we don't have access to. You know, you don't sell trucks, I don't sell trucks. There's nothing in this for you to like, endorse one or the other. Do you have any favorites of what you've seen out there that either not yet in the US or not earmarked for the US?
Speaker 4:You know, I've been pretty impressed with a couple I'm just going to call them science projects Anything that has produced less than 500 units in a couple. I'm just going to call them science projects Anything that has produced less than 500 units in a market. Let's just be honest, it's a science project. I think that's fair. Yeah, you know, there's a couple of them out there that have been super impressive, right, you were at ACT and Windrose came out as one of the Chinese manufacturers and I actually spoke to you about those guys. I went to that manufacturing facility, scrubbed the top, the bottom like I would. Any OEM went to their battery packer really impressed, really impressed. Right, chinese quality is usually, you know, iffy. This here was, you know, a high quality Chinese product, right, which means that it's pretty good standard for US product. What I saw, I was pretty blown away. So that what I'm seeing is I'm seeing good engineering, I'm seeing a lot of good technology. I would say that that would be one that I'm saying is one to watch the Tesla semi truck. You can't compete with it. It is the best semi truck by far. You can't even touch it. Every bit of the technology, the range, the battery efficiency, how quickly it could be charged, the longevity of the batteries, all that stuff it's untouchable, right? So I would put Tesla way up top the others.
Speaker 4:I wish I could say some positive things. Let me say something positive. We've got a bunch of all those that are in our fleet. They work great, they're okay. They need to come down in price. Daimler got to come down in your price. Got to come down in your price. That's all I'm going to say. Come down in your price. Love it. Customers keep coming. Love Freightliner. You're sending the customer the other way, like You're sending the customer the other way Like they don't want to buy EV, right? So that means that, okay, you don't want the EV market. So if you don't want the EV market, who wants it right? To me, it's Tesla all day. If I had Tesla, my entire business would be utopia. I'd be flying right. Now. My biggest problem is getting trucks right. So I wish I can endorse others.
Speaker 1:The other one I would put out a nice waste management unit that I've been seeing. That's been crossing my path a few times in the last couple of months.
Speaker 4:That's a good, solid product. We have a couple of customers that are big right that have been operating that product and coming back with very positive feedback. I want to endorse those that are doing the right thing and doing good work. I would hope and expect Faldo Daimler. They should be stepping up. They should be stepping up. That's the innovation we need. We just had $1.7 billion now allocated for manufacturing. I expect American innovation and I expect people to really step up here in technology.
Speaker 4:Lower the price, right. Let's take that number from two and a half times the cost of a diesel. I would hope that our tax dollars, joe, are going to go in to lower that cost so we could be competitive. And literally what I'm about to say I'll defend all day with anybody in the industry. We're in last place. We're in last place doing this, killing us in China, killing us in Europe and then other areas like Latin America. They're just killing us. They're laughing at us. What we're doing in the capability that we have, we're not even trying. So I'm very frustrated as what I would believe our company is pioneering in this industry. I'm very disappointed, like we need to see a lot more happening here. Innovate, do what we expect you to do and if not, let's bring in a new entrant. That's why I love Tesla.
Speaker 4:We all know what everybody said about Tesla when they came in. They hated Tesla. They thought it was absolutely wrong, thought it was ludicrous. It's one of the biggest companies in the world. The boat went by. They missed the boat right. Same thing is happening, in my opinion. Like I said to you earlier, it's like watching the passenger market in slow motion. What Tesla did, it's happening right now in front of me. So I feel like it's easy for me to navigate, joe, I hate to say it that way, but I feel like it's easy for me to navigate and that's why I make sure I drive the way that we do at Zim, at the port, at the airport. Let's concentrate where it is, where it works, and then prove that out over time and as the tech gets better, long range will get better, cost will get better, et cetera.
Speaker 1:Paul, we're actually ahead of time. Usually I do these and they're an hour long and I got to trim it down to 20 tight minutes, but this was really good. I will just simply say thank you for being on the show. If there's anything that you would like to plug or promote any websites that you'd like people to go check out, you know, obviously everybody in this tree has beautiful PowerPoints. I'm sure you've got one or two good looking PowerPoints as well. How do people find them? How do people keep track and follow along with what you're doing?
Speaker 4:I appreciate that, joe. I mean the one thing I would say, just overarching to your audience EV trucks are here. It's time now, right, the costs are getting there. There's companies like Ziemann others who are similar to us that can provide this service. It works for routes that are 250 to 300 miles or less. Let's not even talk about anything that's above that. If we could stay in that category, ev trucking and fleet is incredibly exciting. It's such a great growth area that's coming. Of course, if you're a fleet transportation company, logistics company, you want to look at electrification, and right now we're one of the leaders in the world doing that, so please reach out. Our website is fairly informative cryptic for a reason because we do a lot of stuff that's important IP. But again, ev trucks are here. They're here to stay and costs are only going to get lower and performance is only going to get better.
Speaker 1:And that's ZimSolutionscom. That's not, like you know, Zim pet sitting or anything Correct.
Speaker 4:So ZimSolutionscom Correct.
Speaker 1:And that was the great american pierogi race you say what you will, man, but you see one of them, big old trucks running down the road with 45,000 pounds of pure midwestern potatoey goodness and you're gonna know that you've eaten something. Only only a lithuanian would look at a potato and go. You know what that thing needs more starch dough wrapped around its starchy goodness that's right, oh, man.
Speaker 1:So you know my? My wife is lithuanian, her family's from lithuania, and I I have come to believe honestly in my heart of hearts, the lithuanian cuisine is the greatest cuisine in the world. They have this thing called a Zeppolino or Zeppolini. It is effectively not to be confused with Zim. Not to be confused with Zim, but it does sound like Zeppolini, zimoletti. It's potato like, basically a mashed potato with cheese and bacon in it, breaded and then deep fried. It looks like a football. It's like 62 000 calories, like you could feel your arteries hardening while you eat it.
Speaker 2:It's I don't know. So let the wainians eat like this and stay thin, because a lot of them are thin. I think they only get one a year. Oh that, that makes sense like a soviet bloc country.
Speaker 1:They get like. They get like one of them in february, they get another one in September.
Speaker 2:They airdrop the supplies for the Zima lady.
Speaker 1:They just hit the ground like scud missiles. One of them goes through the roof of your Lada.
Speaker 2:I swear to God, I thought I thought pierogies could fly.
Speaker 3:As God is my witness. I thought turkeys could fly.
Speaker 1:Well, in all seriousness, though, I think Paul's got a compelling product. You know it may not work for all people and all things, but if you've got a delivery fleet and you know you've got a fleet of like six or eight box trucks and you know you don't want to put in hundreds of thousands of dollars to manage all that infrastructure on your own, you don't want to have to train your guys that have been diesel guys for 25 years. Here's a simple part of that.
Speaker 2:Organizations can no longer afford at the rate of what everything costs to put in the infrastructure required to self-service every single different thing that you used to be able to do that for. You used to be able to go buy a mixed fleet and it either had a Cummins engine in it, it had a cat engine in it, and then you could train your people on that stuff and you could have all the things at your disposal, because it was pretty much the same brand to brand. And occasionally somebody would come into the service office screaming because Freightliner or Kenworth or whatever tried to use some weird door handle that keeps falling off. But seriously, that's what would happen. It was some one-off thing where they were like this is crap, why are they doing this? And then you talk to the dealer and they send you 20 of them, right, well and I'm laughing because that's the exact example that Paul gave during the interview.
Speaker 2:But that's my point. You used to be able to do that on your own level. You can't do that anymore and I will. And I have been through this argument with many people where I said, yes, you need to shop, yes, you need a place to work on stuff, but you need to be able to have people inside that say I'm pulling the ripcord, get it towed out of here, or have some come here and fix this thing, because I got to work on this over here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it just comes back to the things that one of the things that we've been talking about since day one on this show, which is the idea that we need more specialization day after day, but we have fewer and fewer specialists every day, which kind of blows my mind, because you've got a growing population of young people who are Gen Z or millennials or whatever, who are coming into the workforce and they've got really no appetite for not to really sound like an old guy, but they've got no appetite for real work, for construction work, they've got no appetite for being an operator driving a truck, working a machine, and it just blows my mind that everybody kind of thinks that they're going to get this six figure job. Well, you know, if I get out of school and I don't like what I'm doing, I'll just go work at Panda Express or Bucky's and make one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year. It's like it don't work like that, dude, ain't going to happen.
Speaker 2:No, it doesn't work like that, and if you want to get ahead and you, you have to do it the same way. We've had to do it since the time we fell off of a boat. You have to be good at something, you have to be able to succeed and you have to make yourself worth something and not in some crazy way, you know, getting on only fans or whatever.
Speaker 1:But my point is is that you hang on, hang on, hang on. There's plenty of people making legitimate contributions to the economy through only fans that's true.
Speaker 2:Well, and I will say this, on my race car there is there is a small sponsorship only fan sticker on there, so it's okay but the point is is that my what I'm saying is is that from the beginning of time of this country, people realize listen, I got to be good at something, or these people are going to eat me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's changed over the years, but let me tell you, it still means the same thing. You will cease to exist in a level that you want to. Yeah, we need ambitious people in this country more than ever. We talk about this all the time. We talk about the lack of drivers, talk about the lack of mechanics. Everybody knows this. So, to beat a dead horse which has already decayed into the ground, we need as many people as possible that are focused into what they want to be focused in. But it has to be specialized, because you can no longer be a jack of all trades.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, there used to be a guy that would sell turnips and cabbage to the british because he grew it on the island and would, in the dark, move it in a boat, and the british paid him handsomely for that. The guy also was a spy and ratted the british out, which is part of the reason we have the country we have today. But the point was is he was so good at growing lettuce, cabbage and uh, rutabagas or whatever the hell else he could throw in his boat at night with a lantern that the british were dumbfounded by it and started paying him tremendously. Okay, so from the beginning of everything, everything circles back to the same stuff over and over again. And then you have his company who's like listen, don't, don't get into this whole trying to relearn everything, we're going to handle it for you. You pay us a fee, or you know.
Speaker 2:And then and the other thing too is is the cost of that's not localized them over, however many hundreds of trucks you have? He has his entire customer base to spread out all of his costs against, which makes it even more affordable, and he's coming to your door if need be and taking the truck from you. If he has to, takes it over to his place. I don't know how to get any cleaner than that. You can't. Can't get any cleaner than that, the only way you can do it and do it.
Speaker 1:The only way you could do it is to go back in time 45 years and have that kind of idea of, like you know, hey, I know how to make a carburetor work, I know how to make this work. And where you don't have the software, we don't have the proprietary firmware update and the special can, connectors and everything else and all those things that make this product better and make the work more efficient, make it harder to work on, make it harder to bring people in. You know it's funny because we're talking about all this over and over again and I think it's worth bringing up that for the first time ever. One right, left, center, green, libertarian, whatever the F you think you are, if you're going to win a national election right now, you need labor on your side and I think that's the key component right there you have to the working people of this country.
Speaker 2:People of this country. They need someone that they believe they can talk to, that listens to them, regardless of what side of the aisle you're on or what ticket you're punching or however you're using a pigeon to send your vote in. The working people of this country need somebody that's going to talk. They needed administration. It's not just a person. Okay, right, this is the big thing that gets everybody in trouble when they're talking politics. It's not solely one person, it is the entire administration and their focus, and whether, again, democrat, republican, independent, you know the guy from Mars that comes down and gives us some free energy, it comes down to connecting with people. Yeah, and any administration? This goes back to I mean, this goes back to the beginning of the industrial revolution, when any administration that was like look, you have a business, you have a purpose here, you create an economic flow and we back that. Democrat or Republican, those people have always come out on top.
Speaker 1:Yes, that's true, but there's two parts to that. There's always two parts to it with you. No stop, because supporting the business is not the same as picking a side right. It's not as simple as picking a side. It's not as simple as picking the side of capital versus labor. It's not as simple as picking a side versus corporate, versus public welfare. It's somebody who sits there and let's not say somebody. It's an administration, it's a system that. What did FDR used to say? Two chickens in every pot. Right, that's what we need here.
Speaker 1:We need to have some scenario that makes Two chickens in every pot and then it was a car in every driveway, car in every driveway. We had this idea of raising the middle class, moving the poor into the middle class and creating upward mobility, and somewhere along the line we forgot that. And it's the same mentality of when you have a pizza party at work. You got a group of people who go up and say, well, I'm only going to take one slice because I don't think they bought enough. And you got another group of people who says I'm going to take three slices because I don't think they bought enough and I want to make sure they don't run there. I, you know, I've never really observed the gluttony at the pizza party table.
Speaker 2:But that's I'm going. Benefits look at their salaries all the way down the line.
Speaker 1:Look at how. That's how a lot of people looked at toilet paper during the pandemic back in March of 2020. I'm going to buy it all. There's nothing left. I'm going to buy it all because there's nothing. Exactly right, you got guys in Costco rolling out with 20 bags of toilet paper going well, I have to do this because they're going to run out we were so stupid back then. We're still that stupid.
Speaker 2:We're just doing it over others we just do it on a different, we do it in different ways.
Speaker 1:Now that's the problem my favorite meme to come out of all of that was january 1st 2020. This is going to be my year. March 20th, march 1st 2020 wipes ass with stale tortilla you know, but we have to have this.
Speaker 2:This country has to have an administration that understands what we need. We're at a weird like I said earlier. We're at a weird crossroads with technology. We're at a weird crossroads with the available resources that we actually have not dreamt up, not some other country's resources. It's going to give us something that we think we can get actual available resources knowledge and technology. And knowledge is different from technology. People get all weird about that, but human knowledge and their ability to understand and do things. That leads us over and over and over again into the next realm. And you have to have more companies like zine, where they do?
Speaker 1:they haven't sponsored us, so don't give it too much credit right, but but we have to have more companies like them and yes not not to add.
Speaker 2:I don't mean competitiveness, and they're in their space. I'm saying like their ideal. Yes, come out and take care of your problems on the exact, specific part of your fleet that you have there's a bunch of holes that need to be filled. I don't know how we're going to do it, but the industry as a whole has to take care of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah we could do it. We could be the heavy equipment logistics providers, we could be the help cats. Oh, we could, we could you know?
Speaker 2:actually there used to be a PBS program and then they would call in to John Deere and these guys would talk about that. We talked about this on another episode. We could do that. We could have the help desk yeah, the help desk and some guy calls. He's like I got this flashing light and I'm on the side of 75 down here in Atlanta. I don't know where the hell. I'm at this is horrible, and then you just talk him through it.
Speaker 1:Well, that'd be a full-time job for Neil. He'd sit there and be like hang on. I've got the Chilton manual, for that Leans over on page 417. Binders that he just flips over he asked the guy hey, where are you? I'm not really sure. I'm on the side of the road here your gps. Yeah, get your gps. Give me the lat long on that. We'll have this thing drone drop to you in the next 20 minutes oh, some of these guys, though.
Speaker 2:They take the drone with them, they just keep it in the bunk, capture it.
Speaker 1:We're flying around, yeah amazon is gonna start delivering stuff with the, with the drone. That's good, that's just skeet shooting with prizes. Man, it's over. It didn't last long.
Speaker 2:It was a great idea that stuff would just get dropped off because we didn't have enough people to do it, but actually the people were like no, you're not going to fly around. I don't understand how people allow them to open their garage door with the Amazon key and go into their homes.
Speaker 1:There are places where that's cool but come on, I don't even like it when the neighbor kids eat my cinnamon toast crunch.
Speaker 2:And I'm not saying that Amazon isn't trustworthy. What I'm saying is that you have the human element. The guy leaves the door open. Something happens, the cat runs out. You, you have the human element. The guy leaves the door open. Something happens, the cat runs out. You don't realize it Gets ran over by the school bus and Johnny Sue is out there just freaking out crying. It's a bad idea. Don't open people's things. Leave it. We're one step away from the stuff not being boxed and then some giant toy gets dropped off on the front lawn. I don't know.
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