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 32 | Sponsors, Big Buckets, and Meatballs to Power the World
In today's thrilling HEP-isode of The Heavy Equipment Podcast, we ponder the burnout capabilities of Volvo's groundbreaking DD25 electric roller, reminisce about the good old days and the sweet smell of diesel on a spring morning, talk up PITT Ohio's big electric Mack deal, and take a detailed look at Caterpillar's acquisition of Bucyrus Erie. All this and more on the first (and possibly last) HEP-isode powered by Volvo CE!
Today's thrilling episode is brought to you by Volvo CE, and that's actually true. They're going to regret this one.
Speaker 2:No, they don't regret, they know. They've heard the show. Yeah, no, in all seriousness, though, we really appreciate them and all their hospitality. I'm excited we're going to be going to the Volvo days here coming up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's going to be a good show. They actually sent me an email about what kind of machinery and equipment we wanted to test out and I said you know I've got this love for the electric stuff, so I want to check out the DD25. That's their new electric roller that they debuted last year. I suspect that if you were able to get like a long thread of that retread tire stuff on that back side of it, it would look pretty cool. Look like you were rolling on like one big mickey thompson back there that'd be pretty sweet.
Speaker 2:It's like a dot radio slick, but on a roller. Let me tell you something we get this thing on full charge.
Speaker 1:It's maybe gonna go out and outrun your pickup truck well, that's the thing, right, like it's all gear reduction and torque amplification, everything else. There's no reason why that thing can't go 70, right well I would.
Speaker 2:I would assume there's no reason why. Yeah, with some time it couldn't get up there. I mean, anybody that's ever ran a roller and has slipped the drum on the asphalt mat and gotten yelled at for it and sent home, maybe he wants a little bit of extra tread there when you're trying to work the mat down. We're going to send this one out to the guys out in Phoenix that are working night shift paving, because you know they got to hand it to them. It's still 100 degrees out there, it's dark. They're out there trying to get, you know, sections of the highway and sections of the city paved at night because it's too hot to do it during the day. They need stuff like this.
Speaker 1:The last thing they need is the noise and vibration of a diesel engine when they could be rolling around on Volvo's quiet, smooth, vibration-free DD25 electric roller.
Speaker 2:That's my whole point. And I mean, yeah, the sweet smelling days of the Detroit and Deutz listen, they had their moment. They're still good, but we've moved beyond that, We've progressed.
Speaker 1:That's true, but I also want to talk about this. You mentioned the old, bygone era of those sweet smelling diesel exhausts. Now, obviously, it was killing us, it was giving us cancer. We didn't like it. However, comma, I do remember that the diesel smell was like I don't want to say like my favorite smell, but it was a huge part of my childhood in Costa Rica and in Ohio and in Florida, well down there.
Speaker 2:They had nothing. They didn't even have, I mean, a lot of stuff, didn't have pipes on it, Joe. But that's my point.
Speaker 1:You know the death fluid, the modern diesels that do kind of have a smell that's similar to that old diesel smell. It's very different.
Speaker 2:It's got a lot more bitterness to it Totally Because of the after treatment and the catalyst and stuff like that to take place. With all of that, it's way different than it used to be those days, those days of that raw brownish gray smoke coming out and then it goes over to black and then clears out at the end. That was definitely an era long gone. And not to mention, like you said, the extra vibrations and we've brought this up on past episodes. You know the extra vibrations, the constant ear ringing decibels that you can't escape from when that detroit's just screaming underneath the hood. So here we are with the, the DD25, and all that stuff's eliminated.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's going to be a fun trip. I'm going to be excited to. I want to check out the VNL. I want to see if I can stretch out the back of that thing. It's like a 120 inch sleeper. That's going to be nice.
Speaker 2:There's a reason they're all over the highway. They've really built a truck second to none for fleets and owner operator stuff and being able to put somebody on the road and let them go that truck's really is second to none for the general, the general fleet. And then there's a lot of guys that you know like, like us, we, we love mac. You know that's for the some harder core trucking that you get into some of the harder core trucking.
Speaker 1:Well, you know, it's funny that we're talking about mac because I I know we wanted to talk about fleet assessments. We're going to talk about Pitt Ohio, but Pitt Ohio, in terms of being a trucking company, a fleet company, they have one of the largest fleets of Mack trucks I think almost exclusively Mack trucks in the country. They've got like 900 Class 8 tractors, another bunch of Class 7 straight trucks and I think almost all their trucks are Macs.
Speaker 2:Believers are whipping that dog up and down the highway every day of the week, every day of the week. But there's a reason for that because of the superiority of that product. There are a lot of fleets that have Peterbilt Kenworth but fleets that are going to Volvo Mac. There's a reason for it. It is just sustainability, which ultimately, at the end of the day, means lower per mile cost and with everything else escalating, you have to fight it any which way you can, even if it's a couple cents. We're doing millions of miles a year and you can shave a couple cents off. It all adds up.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, that like goes back to the old United Airlines story about how they used to have three olives in the first class salads and they figured out that by removing one of the olives they could save $40,000 a year. And that was one of the ways that they quote unquote were keeping costs down. I mean, all they ever did with that money was more stock buybacks and yachts for their executives, but that's a completely different conversation.
Speaker 2:We've already been on that rant.
Speaker 2:We're going to skip through it and respect the episode 6, 11, 22 and 18 and uh here we go about all that so here's the thing if you go through the episodes and you pick your favorite rant, which, if anybody listens to these in order, realizes that they, it's a cyclical thing and it repeats itself because the conversation brings up the same problems over and over again, take those episode numbers, go get lottery tickets, pick three, pick four. You know you can go get the super lotto, the mega millions is out there. And if you win, uh, just just be kindly enough and sponsor a episode there you go, pick one up for yourself.
Speaker 1:I do really actually want to examine this Pitt Ohio by, because Well before we get into Pitt, Ohio.
Speaker 2:I got a question. So, with Volvo CE in this episode being graciously caused by their existence, do they obtain the rights to the reel-to-reel the reel-to-reel. Just like trying to figure out. Should he dub over an old tape? Does he just remagnify the reel-to-reel deck and kind of put some quality to it, or is he? Is he getting out a fresh roll?
Speaker 1:that's what we're trying to figure out yeah, I think ultimately they've just assumed liability for whatever. Uh, you know, ultimate trademark infringement lawsuit comes from chasen sandborn well, here's the thing.
Speaker 2:So, going forward, every episode will be brought to you by volvo. You know, ultimate trademark infringement lawsuit comes from Chase and Sanborn. Well, here's the thing. So, going forward, every episode will be brought to you by Volvo CE and Chase and Sanborn. That's just how it is. You got to have good coffee, you got to have the good coffee to run a good equipment, and those two partnered together, the world is unstoppable. My friend in the heavy equipment industry, let me tell you that's right there, Unstoppable. But we're going to get back to Pitt Ohio, because they also need good coffee.
Speaker 1:Well, we'll get back to Pitt Ohio here after a word from our sponsor.
Speaker 3:The other woman. She's nice and she really cares About his dinner, about him and about his coffee. That's why she starts his morning with Jason Sanborn, the heftier coffee, heftier flavor, heftier aroma. But there's still the kind of woman who serves whatever's handy. Are you, this woman or the other woman? Jason Sanborn, the heftier coffee For the other woman, who really cares?
Speaker 1:I'm going to run Jason Sanborn ad there you go. The episode sponsored by Volvo.
Speaker 2:We need a Volvo ad, though they got to have one.
Speaker 1:I think we're supposed to be. We're supposed to be recording one. We had a script.
Speaker 2:Oh, we'll do that too. Well, not today. Just send me the script and I'll we'll do that.
Speaker 1:We'll do that for the next episode. That's do that. We'll do that for the next episode. That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 2:No but seriously, we'll just keep. We'll keep plugging them. Once you're on the list, you're on the list. If it is, you're on the list.
Speaker 1:When the first 10 minutes is just us rolling credits like an old film, then we're just gonna do that I hate that, though I you know, there's a ton of podcasts that I really like, and there's one in particular that I've been listening to for a couple of years. It's called magnus archives. It's really neat. It's like an old radio horror show, right. So, like each week it had like a little bit of a like a scary story to tell, like a, you know, scary stories to tell in the dark kind of thing, and when I first started listening to it, it would have like a little intro and then like a commercial and that'd be it. Now you get on there and they've got, without exaggeration, the first two or three minutes. They've got five or six 30 second ads back to back and it's like, man, I don't listen to any of those, I just fast forward right through them and that's true, you can't.
Speaker 2:I think my opinion is you gotta have fun with it, you gotta work it in. You can't just sit there and be like today's episode, brought to you by preparation h magnum 38s, caterpillar, volvo, ce and pens oil, like you can't do that, no, what a.
Speaker 1:Whatever happened to the guys who tested preparation a through g? They're no longer with anuses they did all that, just sealed right up we have the reverse action oh, no a bunch of baboons running around off the list because that sure didn't work. Somebody shoot him up with something they had to put e out of its misery had a whole bunch of flipper babies that's where you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because see you get something burning so bad you gotta use. Gotta use the juice from the Swedish meatballs from Ikea and rub it on there.
Speaker 1:I think that's actually what they use in the we can't say that we just did it's over.
Speaker 1:So back to Pitt, ohio. You know they were in the news recently. Last month they announced that they were buying 10 of the new Mac MD electrics and putting them into their fleet. And a lot of people pointed out you know, oh, come on, guys, you have a 475 vehicle fleet of medium duty trucks. This is only 10 of them, but if you look at that and you consider that they're cycling through, say, 100 of those every five years, this is 10% of this year's truck buy. It's actually more than that. So it's actually closer to 15% of their annual truck buy. They're going pure electric. And if you told me tomorrow that Ryder Truck or Penske or any of that was going to go 15% electric, I'd be really surprised. So I think that's a significant purchase.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, if you're running by the statistics, I mean, that is a significant investment. And any fleet that's constantly reevaluating their position is doing this. You look at what are you going to buy and how often and what frequency. And when you make a jump like this, you need to know what you're talking about. And obviously there's a sense of security that they have with the electric platform to make that jump. Nobody just sits there and leans back in their chair and says, yeah, what the hell? Send them the paper.
Speaker 2:Like you know, you have a reason for it, so deep in the depths of their fleet management psyche, they know, and they know that they have a position where they're going I'm going to get this stuff, we're going to place an order for it, and you can only do that through efficient auditing practices and you can only do that through data recognition. And I say data recognition because you can't analyze data that you don't recognize. You have to recognize what is important to analyze. So you pick your key points, don't let yourself get clouded by the 5,000 points of light. Okay, and you, you have to look at that and go all right, well, these 10 things I'm going to take a hard look at, or these 50 things, and I'm going to use an algorithm to kind of pair them together for me, so we can let it flush itself out.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, you know and we've talked about this a couple of times where the companies that make it easy to collect that data whether it's through telematics or through, like a, you know, an, automatic log books or something like that the companies that make it easy to collect the data are the ones that I think, ultimately, are going to have a leg up going forward, because the margins are getting thinner and thinner. And I think really that's where Mac and Volvo Mac if you want to include them as well really comes across, because they've got that Mac connect portal.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, they have the Mac portal and recently we we analyzed the truck through that with one of the Mac engineers. Well, volvo Mac and the data that they were showing us was very enlightening. So imagine if the company that I work for, if we had a larger fleet where we were a freight company. You're going to select a thousand units and pull that data from them. Then you're going to use AI to help scrub it. Today, you're going to let AI reanalyze it and put it out in a way where it's digestible. So you have to get to a point where you're comfortable with all of this and AI is only going to help you in the long run. I mean, that's all it's going to do. When you go through the fleet and you go through your points that you want to pick out for that given task, these OEMs that have the ability to measure that and help you measure that that's where you get the leg up Because, like you said, the margins are lower, the miles are increasing because the distance the trucks can run is increasing because of average speed. You know the days of looking at something going well. We can only get about 150 miles round trip. That was long gone. Then it was 300 or whatever. You're getting to a point now where the trucks are more efficient, so you need to be able to do that. Also, a lot of these things have been beat to death Tire wear, oil change, stretching, just general fleet body work. A lot of those ratios have been proven and proven and proven to death. Where you could literally talk amongst other fellow fleet executives we spitball the same numbers. Yeah, we know the numbers, but when you're just talking and passing and you don't have your stuff right in front of you but you know the round numbers so you're talking about, we're all within the same realm.
Speaker 2:What electrification and what CNG did before electrification is it shook it up. It's like okay, now what do I measure? What am I measuring? Because now I've got fueling costs. I've got retrofit costs in the early days of CNG, before we were buying it, with CNG already on it. I've got management costs that are new because we're actually going to be putting the CNG into the vehicle but we're buying it and that's separate from fuel. These are the things that keep shaking the industry up and the more data that you can get your hands on. That's why you're going to get a leg up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, we should talk about that too, right? Because the price of fuel goes up and down. The price of natural gas goes up and down and, yes, the price of electricity goes up and down, but the price of electricity, it changes throughout the day based on your market. And if you're using this kind of analysis and you've got off-peak charging, you've got the ability to charge this thing up at seven or eight cents per kilowatt hour, instead of the 25 cents per kilowatt hour that you've got at a retail location or a Tesla supercharger. Now you're talking really significant savings, even without incentives to buy these things. You're just talking about operational costs and fuel costs. If you consider electricity as a fuel you're talking about, your fuel costs are significantly lowered.
Speaker 2:You're spot on because, if anything, the electric electricity makes it simpler to calculate.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know I was talking to a guy. I wanted to interview him another day. The guy's named Sean Ackley. He's from Enride. I'm going to splice that interview in here because he has a really good clip about this where he talks about the back of the napkin, math, how to make this all pencil. So I'm going to splice that in here. We've got Sean Ackley from Enride and this was recorded on another podcast that I do, called Electric Quick Charge, but we'll splice that in here and see if that does anything for you. I've been doing this for 10 years. You'd think I'd be good at intros by now. Today's guest is Sean Ackley. Sean, you're the head of communications, but also charging infrastructure. You're the charging nerd, if you will, for Einride, and I don't mean to call you a nerd, but that's kind of how you introduced yourself to me.
Speaker 4:I did say that, and not to overcorrect, certainly not head of communications, but don't mind taking a call from Joe when I get a chance, so absolutely.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, if you're the only comms guy I talked to, that makes you the most important guy, right?
Speaker 4:Careful, careful. I can't take any titles today.
Speaker 1:Fair enough. Well, you know Einride is a really exciting company. You know we've been following them on Electrek for a number of years, even before that heavy equipment podcast, clean Technica. I've been writing about Einride for years and I know you guys primarily as an autonomous vehicle play. Recently we've seen more in the lines of big fleet purchases 150 Freightliner, e-cascadias, among other electric vehicles. You guys are interesting, right, because you're not an autonomy play, you're not strictly a shipping company, you're not a 3PL. Where, would you say, enride's place is in the broader market?
Speaker 4:Oh yeah, great question. And also, self-admittedly we talked about this earlier I'm newer to the Enride family here. I joined back in January and so, not having a huge freight logistics background, I'm a power guy. I'm still catching up to speed with all of the intricacies of the service portfolio that we offer, but at its core, we deliver a service, so we would call that sort of a capacity as a service model, where we own the truck, we buy charging, we deploy, we help shippers get product from A to B in a sustainable way and an electrified way.
Speaker 1:At its core, and that's really worth mentioning too is that at the core of the business is electrification. This is not a shipping play. You're not yellow freight or anything like that. You are still providing shipping, still providing capacity, but you're doing it in a way that serves the broader ESG and decarbonization goals that, frankly, a lot of companies are implementing.
Speaker 4:Oh yeah, and not discounting ESG in any way, shape or form. But there's still a bit of a capitalist nature to what we do, right. So we have to figure out how to do this on parity cost parity to a traditional operation, traditional diesel service and then still find a way to be profitable with every load that we deliver. So it's an interesting area and that we found a way to do it it's certainly what got me excited to come join the team.
Speaker 1:You know one of the things that we run into often when we talk to fleets, when we talk to commercial fleets like in my other life that I do a lot of consulting with different fleet managers and fleet buyers they talk about the chicken and the egg when they reference EV and charging. Right, do I buy an EV or do I put in charging first? Do I do them both at the same time? That means my upfront costs are really high. How does Einride lower that barrier to entry to fleets that want to electrify and that want to do business in that more sustainable way?
Speaker 4:Sure, I think, as Corey, you're right. You know the ecosystem it requires to electrify anything within a fleet, a portion of a fleet, the entire fleet. It requires the vehicle, it requires charging, it requires power, it requires land. All these things can be very capitally intensive If you're a large 3PL or if you're a small mom and pop fleet. The barrier to entry is cost it's cash, and not only in that, the timelines that you mentioned. They're not perfectly parallel. So the time it could take to bring the power to a site, if you have the benefit of owning your own real estate or you have access to a long-term lease and you can modify your property and add power, the time it takes utility to bring ample power could be measured in years. And so you know, coming out of COVID, when EB supplies at dealer inventory or through the OEMs have improved and so the lead times of trucks have gotten shorter, the laggard still remains time to power. But so time and money, certainly the two ingredients that make the most interesting soups today. What we have done is reduce that barrier to entry by owning the assets. So we own the trucks, we buy the charging and we can deploy them in a service model.
Speaker 4:But the other piece that really has helped us be successful is in that we know that there is an ESG play helping shippers deliver goods in a sustainable way.
Speaker 4:We also want to be cost effective and very easy to see that when something's more expensive, you just have to use it more, right?
Speaker 4:So if a truck, let alone, can deliver less goods because it's 7,000 pounds heavier, maybe, and if you have to deliver more turns per day, you're going to need more energy to recharge the trucks midday possibly, or possibly more trucks, right?
Speaker 4:Just volume in general to match diesel parity. So if someone were a shipper or a carrier or a fleet operator, we're to look at that mathematically and say, oh, this doesn't make sense, and if I'm not regulated and forced to do it, I'm going to wait until all this gets cheaper. And what we've done is that we can buy those assets, we can help you deploy them and we can, using some of our software capabilities, we can exactly calculate which routes you could electrify today, which ones are going to be the most efficient to run electrified, get the most turns out of it, based on battery capacity of the truck, how much charging you can deploy, and we will perfectly right-size that deployment so that utilization hits a clip where we can do it at diesel parity. And that's our core focus going in like that. We're going in in that fashion rather than working our way down to it as much as possible.
Speaker 1:At the end of the day, your customer is interested in getting their stuff from A to B and that's their prime thing. And they may have ESG goals, they may have everything else, but if they're not profitable, they can't sustain. And we talk about that second type of sustainability. Can we sustain the planet? Can we sustain the business? It needs to do both in order to work.
Speaker 4:Sure, yeah. Now if you're a CEO that's got a long career road ahead of you as a product manufacturer or a food and beverage company, you might be concerned about your consumer base growing over time. So, yes, might be important to you, certainly. And then, as consumers, we've seen the consumer shift in the global landscape. Retailers are paying attention that consumers want to buy something that's green or good for the environment or has less of an impact than maybe it did 30 years ago, when they were still a fan of your product, so there's a keen interest to do things sustainably. Oh and, by the way, if you can do it on parity with what you're paying today, even better.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and there's a ton of government incentives and utility incentives and even state incentives coming out to help reduce that cost. But I think there's still a lot of unknowns, there's still a lot of question marks hanging above fleet managers' heads and fleet buyers' heads. And what I like about your model and correct me if I'm wrong is that at the end of the day, you're taking on that responsibility, you're taking on that uncertainty, you're taking on that fear and you're passing all of that certainty on to them saying look, for whatever reason, the truck is down, the technology is not working. That day we're still going to get your package from A to B and make it happen one way or another.
Speaker 4:Sure, I feel like that's been kind of the crux of my career, like I've moved to different parts of this industry over the last 10 years roughly and have been chasing sort of the what is the problem we're solving here today? And the early problems were just sort of this is mystical, this is a black box. I don't understand.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's magic.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah. So that was the sales pitch back then. It was we'll demystify this for you. I don't know construction, now that I understand I need chargers and trucks. Well, I don't understand. Understand, okay, we'll handle that. We'll be a general contractor, we'll hire APCs.
Speaker 4:But the further you move along in the maturity of the market, as people are being exposed to it, even if they haven't dabbled in it or done you know the dirty word, haven't done a pilot, they're growing in their understanding of what it takes to deploy and the thing that they will run into, as they understand, is subsidy is great. How do I get it? What can I apply for? How do I get me some of those nevi funds? Right, like, some of this stuff doesn't translate perfectly for every modality. And then, beyond that, once I've done all this math, wow, that's really expensive.
Speaker 4:I had a warehouse operations and logistics team whose budget didn't include electricity at this scale before. I've got to rework my entire internal commercial budgeting process for this. Now, how do I do that? We kind of try and take that off their plate. We'll handle it and feed it back to them in the way that they did consume the previous technology. You're paying for fuel, you're paying for trucks, you're paying for service and maintenance, all a service model. That's kind of the formula for us right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think that there is something that clicks in people's heads Austin Energy. You know we were talking about Amy Ashley, my good friend, bobby Godsey as well, down in Austin Energy. They were one of the teams that early on, when we were talking about electrification and you know I got to credit where credit is due Matt Teske, my former co-host, said the words electricity is a fuel, so just think of it as electric fuel instead of liquid fuel. And Bobby and Amy got it immediately. And Austin Energy put out a huge campaign talking about electric fuel. And if you go to their website today, they talk about electric fuel.
Speaker 1:And I think once that light bulb went off over their head of like, oh, this is just fuel, it's just a different kind of fuel. I have to fuel up in a different way at a different time, but it's just fuel. I think a lot of people were able to start doing that kind of back of the napkin, back of the envelope, math and saying, okay, this is no longer mysterious, I just need to think of it in a new way.
Speaker 4:Sure, and I think that too, like if you start to, to start to reverse engineer their thought process that you know they're going to go down that rabbit hole they're going to chase to go well, what does a gallon of diesel cost me in fuel? Yes, so now let's just take a California average, right, five bucks a gallon. And okay, what is that in numbers of electrons, if I'm trying to think about this like a liquid volume? Try kilowatt hours. And how many kilowatt hours are you basically burning an energy to achieve a mile? What's your mileage of efficiency running on diesel, and sort of match that up. And if you do all that math, you can depending on again, where you're buying fuel and how efficient the EV vehicle that you're operating is somewhere between 25 and 45 cents a kilowatt hours, the price you might expect to be on price parity with a gallon of diesel.
Speaker 4:You start doing that math. You go, okay, well, that's what it costs. This is how many kilowatt hours I will consume to deliver this many goods or this many routes or this many miles. And then, okay, well, what is my capital cost to build infrastructure to get that fueling If I'm going to do it myself, build my own gas station in the electric world. You start doing all that math and go okay, now divide all that CapEx plus the electricity I'm going to buy for my utility at a wholesale rate or retail rate, and I average all that out over the term that I'm going to own the assets. And then you start going oh my gosh, that's a dollar a kilowatt hour. I can't achieve parity. So how do I do that?
Speaker 4:Then you might look and there's a lot of lessons I've learned from the light duty vehicle space. You go oh, someone else is building it. Right, I don't build my own gas stations today. Why do I need to do that in an EV future? Who's building electric gas stations, electric charging stations, hubs off premise? They've got to figure out some factor of scale that I can benefit from as a consumer, and there are. There's a lot of great companies that are out there building charging hubs today. They're just not as prolifically available out on the highway corridors that trucks drive today, so you can't rely on them without some sort of backup plan exclusively. But then you start to go and ask well, what's the market rate of a kilowatt hour off those taps? And I guarantee you talk to any of those developers today. They're also sitting there with the pencil. They're doing that math.
Speaker 4:Oh yeah, I get a kilowatt hour down to 35 cents a kilowatt hour retail. That's tough, it's very tough, oh yeah.
Speaker 1:Well. But you know, you start to see these different plans, you see these different solutions out there, whether it's a combination of solar, whether it's battery backup, whether charge it up, and they do that. So there's a ton of solutions out there. You're absolutely right, and I think this is riveting stuff for our fleet people. I don't know that the consumer show is going to love it so much, but I think this is just absolutely riveting because, like, I have spreadsheets for this, I have pivot tables for this, where it's like, oh, you're running two shifts or you're running a night shift, what if you ran two day shifts? You know, switch that around.
Speaker 1:And then you're charging at this rate instead of this rate. All of a sudden you're at parity. Now you stack the incentives on top of that. Now you're pocketing money, you're coming out ahead, and I think that's super important because you know we do have a driver shortage, we do have an operator shortage, not only in this country but throughout North America. And one of the most exciting things about Einride is not the logistical stuff, it's not the figuring it all that out, even though that is the exciting stuff to fleet people, to people who are in the industry like you and I are but the exciting stuff. To people who don't care about any of that and don't wanna do math, the exciting part is the robot trucks, the self-driving, the autonomy. Speak a little bit to that, I mean because you know the renderings of this thing. They look like stormtroopers, they look awesome, it's like Star Wars type trucks.
Speaker 4:They are cool, all right. So for any listeners or viewers who haven't searched Enride before, maybe you have been exposed to sort of the light duty vehicle or the consumer space and haven't looked at trucking go and search Enride and just Google image search. This thing is cool. It absolutely steals the show. If we bring one to a trade show or if it's out in the proving grounds, it gets the attention. Yeah, so the autonomous truck or the autonomous mule being able to deliver goods without a driver was probably the earliest inception that anyone's ever been exposed to, and myself included in that. You know, we do see a future where year over year, the growth like we're still going to ship more goods every year it's going to grow, let alone there being any attrition in the market from a driver perspective, it's going to continue to grow and it will outpace, and that's where we see a lot of job. Growth is just in the ability to grow faster than you could even feed in new drivers if you want to, let alone there being attrition in the market potentially.
Speaker 1:And I think that that's worth bringing up, because this is going to fuel job growth. It's not going to steal anybody's jobs. There's nobody there to do the work now.
Speaker 4:No, absolutely. So. Yeah, I mean I've spent a lot of time in my career talking about workforce development, just broad spectrum. I think EV technologies are great for it. I used to work in a sort of a field construction environment, doing like large power transformer and utility upgrade stats, working with great field service professionals that have been working out in the field for 30 years in their career, and the amount of times I've had any of them turn to me going. Ev is cool, but I'm not opening a laptop. I haven't had to do it for 30 years. Don't tell me I have to add that to my tool belt today and I get it.
Speaker 4:But you see a passion to transform your career, maybe later in your career, and you want to find a way to maybe not have to travel work in the elements. If you're a driver, that can be hard on your body, let alone just driving An EV truck, is improving your state of health and state of your quality of life. Imagine now also working in a network operations center managing fleets of autonomous vehicles with all of that institutional knowledge you have about if a road hazard were to occur, if something has changed in your logistics and routing requirements, if you need to step in. You have that institutional knowledge to participate. So there's job growth still happening, whether or not it autonomous or electrified, for even folks that are later in their career.
Speaker 1:That's such a great point. We just on our last episode we talked a little bit about Caterpillar and their remote operations for their heavy load dump trucks at their mining operations They've got an operator sitting outside of Charlotte, north Carolina, lives with his family, gets to be near his kids at school, he's effectively going to remote in to these vehicles and he can operate three or four different vehicles 2 000 miles away through his office simulator. The same way that you know, I drive gran turismo right, and he does it effectively, he does it safely and he gets to be with his family every night. That is a game changer where if you want to be an operator, you want to to be a driver. You can operate multiple machines and you just pick it up when it's time for you to pick it up, and when it's just going through the terminal or going over the road highway on a pretty much straight shot, it can handle that on its own. We just need you when we need you and you can operate three or four trucks.
Speaker 4:Yeah, what's interesting to me as I learn more about it is that you know we think of a piece of asphalt or a piece of concrete to be something that's constant right Over my entire lifetime. A road is a road. The reality is these roads are not constant. There's deterioration, there's repair, there's constant shifts. So there's going to be a constant need to be scanning, updating, monitoring and tracking the state of the route that you're going to deploy, even if that route is something that's supposed to be repeated for the next 10 years the same route, day in, day out. Those routes have a lot of variability and environmental impact. So there's going to be jobs. There's going to be important focus that's going to be required on the human resource side in the autonomous world for a long time to come.
Speaker 1:That's such a smart way of putting it. That's probably why you have all those diplomas on the wall behind you.
Speaker 4:Are you kidding me? Those are coupons. I'm going to trade one in later.
Speaker 1:That's like in the office where Michael's got the SACO certificate of authenticity on the wall.
Speaker 4:I love it. I love it. No, no, just a couple of arrest records and nothing big back there.
Speaker 1:This is the one where they had the governor. Let you back into society.
Speaker 4:Yeah, exactly, exactly, I'm allowed in no-transcript certainly reach out through our comms channel on our website, enride or Einride, either way, no offense taken. Enridetech T-E-C-H. Go out and check it out. Learn more about us. Reach out on any social media platform you'd like Send an email, send a smoke signal, a carrier pigeon, we don't care. Engage, ask questions. It's a cool technology area to be in and happy to share whenever we can.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure. And then the last thing I would say to this is if you're a huge shipping operation, if you are moving, you know hundreds, thousands of tons of equipment a day you definitely want to check this out. You want to see what these guys are doing. And if you're not, if you're a small operator, you're doing LTL. Look at this also, because it might make sense for you, if you're in an area here, to check out what they're doing. Check out the kind of fleets they're operating and, if nothing else, right-size your resources, Because you may have six trucks in operation right now that are running with 50% load on a diesel and you're trying to figure out how to make all this pencil. You might not need to carry those assets at all.
Speaker 4:Yeah, absolutely, Please do reach out. I think that's a difficult position, being that we are in sort of a startup phase as we grow in maturity in our company. It's tough to reach everybody and so many of our conversations start with what is Enride? Who is Enride? You're the autonomous truck company? Yes, but there's so much more to share.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and we just ordered 150 E-Cascadys that dudes are going to drive.
Speaker 4:Yeah, peterbilt, 150 peterbilt's, uh, and then you know as many byds as we have here in north america, let alone globally it's. It's so funny the amount of times I've had to explain. You know we're one of the largest class 8 truck fleet operators in the us, full stop. So well, but let's talk about that for a minute and I swear I'll let you go you got no this you got.
Speaker 1:No, this is going to be 16 more hours. You've got. You've got the new electric pizza in there. You've got a great relationship with Packard. I know that I said E-Cascadia, that was incorrect, but I think you've probably got a few of those in the fleet as well coming. You have a pretty good sense of what's out there and I think, with BYD coming online online, byd is a new brand that a lot of people aren't familiar with and they're kind of testing them out. What product out there? And I know that you know, and I'll cut this out if you don't like it, I'll edit this because we do have editors, you know of the different products that are out there, which are the ones that you think are ready for prime time right now?
Speaker 1:because a lot of people are excited about now, because a lot of people are excited about the Tesla, a lot of people are excited about Windrose, a lot of people are excited about the new Mac MD Electric, which I think is a great truck, but it's tough to get those and if you are News coming back to the US market, was it?
Speaker 4:the N series is electrified, oh.
Speaker 1:Isuzu yes, well, all right, I love that little Isuzu. Yes, no, well, all right, I love that little Isuzu N truck. I I was in college, so now we're going back to the nineties and I rented one of those as a U-Haul to move Right. So I had just gotten out of the military, I was going back to school, put everything in there, cause like no now at this point. I've had a house for four years the wife, the kid, I've got stuff to move and I drove this little cab over a suzu n series and I thought it was great. I would drive that all day long over like a you know a 350 ram or, uh, you know a 3500 ram or a 350. It's got all the capability, it's super comfortable, it's easy to see, I could park it no, I love it.
Speaker 1:I and, and I know that this is not going to supposed to be an isuzu commercial, but they don't sell enough trucks to afford the sponsorship, so I'm going to just have to give them a charity kick here. That electric N-Series is going to be really tough to beat. I think that's going to be a phenomenal little box truck.
Speaker 4:Yeah, that's. That's me personally, being excited to see that come to the US market. I think that'll be very cool. No, coming back to your point here, now we are, I would say, at its core technology agnostic. What we deliver is that service and we'll evaluate all the technologies available to us to deliver that service in the most optimized way, Again achieving that parity, if not better, and delivering sustainable goods from A to B Like a BYD. Att has a 200-mile range today that we would say in Gen 2 or Gen 3 platform, and most carriers might go. That's not long enough, it needs to be longer. Well, for us, we can hyper focus in on well, what routes are 200 miles and less? Or how many routes can we turn within a 200 mile range before we need to recharge and how quickly can we recharge? All that we're doing against the capabilities of each of these platforms.
Speaker 1:Right. Well, that just comes back to using the right tool for the right job. If you've got an 800 mile route, this probably ain't it for you, but if you're doing 175 miles, 150 miles, you're doing that three, four times a day. You're foolish to not look at electric.
Speaker 4:Absolutely, absolutely, and if it's repeatable, very forecastable and you can predict exactly which roads you're going to take for the next five years.
Speaker 1:Then we get the robot to do it.
Speaker 4:Yeah, that's nice.
Speaker 1:I thought that was a really interesting interview from Sean, because I think not only is Sean an interesting guy, he's been around the industry for a long time but the company that he works for now, enride. They just bought 150 Peterbilt 579 EVs oh wow.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean that's a significant investment.
Speaker 1:That's a ton of. Not only is that a ton of trucks, but that's a ton of money, because if you figure, these things are two, two and a half times more money than a conventional diesel. They just basically spent 450 Peterbilt's worth of money to get 150 of these. And they're doing it not necessarily to save money although I'm sure they do but they're doing it for the predictability of it. They're doing it just to be able to have a handle on it, so they don't wake up tomorrow. And somebody steered a container ship sideways in the Suez Canal and now gas is $7 a gallon. You know what I mean.
Speaker 2:Well, predictability is a whole other level. You really have to get your data down and you have to trust it to use it to predict trends. Again, it goes back to what I was saying before You've got to recognize the data that you're going to analyze it all comes back to the analysis.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, but you've got to recognize also what are you looking at to then use it to predict a trend. So, if you're going to use it to predict a trend and use it to predict a cost because ultimately all we're trying to do is drive cost what is it going to cost us and when? We're going to use that to predict how we buy electricity? We're going to use that just like we used to buy and what we still do. We buy fuel futures. We buy fuel on the open market to maintain our position and control our costs and create an average. We're going to do the same thing with electricity Large fleets we're doing the same thing with CNG.
Speaker 2:You can only predict that stuff when you have true data. Yeah, because it will go horribly wrong and any fleet person will tell you in the industry. Does it matter if your fleet is a bunch of electric mailboxes that you manage for apartment buildings, which is a thing If your data and how those work and how the striker mechanisms and all that stuff go down and when you need to work on them and what you have to watch out for, it doesn't matter. You're still trying to do the same thing. What is this going to cost me and when we're all in the same field.
Speaker 1:We are, especially when it comes to energy. You know, and that was one of the things that I really liked, you know, back when we had Ray Gallant from Volvo CE in the early episodes and he was on, he was talking about don't look at a job site as how many you know tons of earth you need to move, or how many rocks you got to move from here to there. Look at it in terms of energy. How many kilowatts are you expending to get that work done? And if you look at it that way, you can convert everything else to those kilowatts. You can convert gasoline BTUs from CNG, all of that into that unit of power and figure that out. And I think he's right. So I think we've talked that one fairly well to death. I want to talk about this big cat, svo 40, monstrous crane thing that you've got a picture of here I'll put that as a cover art.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that is bananas man.
Speaker 2:Where is?
Speaker 1:that.
Speaker 2:Well, you know. So Caterpillar bought Psyrus Erie and the actual model number, that is a 7495. Cyrus Erie and the actual model number, that is a 7495. It's a 7495 front shovel configuration. Svo 40 is the unit number of the company that has that and they're walking it across the highway so that they can transport it from one side of the mine to the other. Or excavation that they're doing and the picture is not really clear if they're walking it from one mine to another and that happens to just be a highway that goes past, or if they're doing some kind of infrastructure work where they're walking it from one side of the infrastructure project to the other. But either way, this is a monster.
Speaker 2:So the Caterpillar, when they took over Bucyrus area, they literally walked in and, according to the reps that I've talked to about it, they said we want to learn what you're doing and we want to continue to support mining and large excavation projects. And Caterpillar has done a phenomenal job with this because the staff that they have on board now at the plant they have moved some of the componentry around, depending on where it's coming from, but the superstructure and the manufacturing of the booms and everything like that, all of that is still done by Caterpillar. They have just continuously refined that product and worked it into the new age, into all the new regulations, into everything that you need. And if you look at the cab on that thing, it's not a cab, it's an office. You could have a serious staff in there working while you're in there trying to figure out. You know how you're going to keep moving dirt all day and that machine has technology in it that is second to none when it comes to that. They know exactly what's going on with that. They can pull data live all the time. Fleet management can pull data live all the time. From that they know exactly what they're moving with it. You know it goes right back to what we were talking about. Caterpillar has done a phenomenal job along with Volvo.
Speaker 2:Volvo and Cap really dove into the data collection of not just what does the machine need from a health standpoint, but what is it doing, what are we moving with it? You know the distance rolled. Are we measuring it in production units or you know whether it's yards or tonnage or, like you said, and then what energy have we used to do this? It's another, another example of I mean we can talk all day about specs, about the cat 740 or 7495 model and their whole lineup of front shovel stuff.
Speaker 2:But beyond that, if anybody takes the time to look at any of this stuff, look at the catwalks, look at the detail on it, the handrails, everything on that machine is set up so that you can work on it, you can access it, you can keep going with it. You know we've talked about this too, but Volvo was one of the first to bring the hydraulic undercarriage to market, where it widened itself after you transported it, so it'd move it in and out based on what you needed. It keeps you from having to have people get underneath there and then re-bolt everything. You still got to put the bolts back in, but the idea is that it's a lot safer and they recognized an issue with that.
Speaker 1:So, man, I just found obviously this is an audio podcast. You guys aren't going to be able to see this, but go online and look up that cat 7495 operator cab. You've got some wild pictures of this guy with all the screens, but then behind him, behind him, there's another operator seat, there's like a control room where it's almost like two or three different PCs on there, and there's like a control room with almost like two or three different pcs on there and there's like a little bathroom, a little coffee setting, a little kitchen in there. And it makes sense yeah, you're not leaving. You're in there eight, ten hours. You're doing your whole shift. You're not going nowhere that makes perfect sense.
Speaker 2:They're managing that whole thing, right from the cab of that crazy, you know, and they're electric or they're diesel, the diesel electric, I mean, depending on the configuration. And again, we don't go into the detail and the spec and break down of that crazy you know, and they're electric or they're diesel, the diesel electric, I mean, depending on the configuration. And again, we don't go into the detail and the spec and break down every model and do all that stuff. That's not what this show's about. Go online, check this thing out. You gotta see it. They once again kings of moving massive material. Them and hitachi have that market. Just there's nothing else you can say. I mean, that's just it yeah, that's it then.
Speaker 1:Well, I think hitachi and I think probably kamatsu is probably the only other one that's a real player, and kamatsu has a huge stake in the market, but they they continuously have had that stake.
Speaker 2:I mean caterpillar is doing some moving and some shaking because of their acquisitions and and what they've tried to do to get a better foothold in that market space.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, the cats have been very smart because they're. They are a company that has grown by acquiring other leaders in a space that they were not in and kind of adding all of the stuff that made cats good to that. Adding all of the stuff that made cats good to that. They're not watering it down, correct, they're building it up and then they're building in enough similarity in terms of the controls and the operating software that a cat operator from one machine can go into another one and maybe not know how to use it on day one, but know their way around and be able to find stuff. I really like this because you know I don't want to mention the companies. Obviously we don't mention the companies use it on day one, but know their way around and be able to find stuff.
Speaker 1:I really like this because you know I don't want to mention the companies. Obviously we don't mention the companies we work for because that would be terrible for our careers. But you know you've done a ton of excavating work. I never saw anything this big over at your old facility. This is great.
Speaker 2:No, we did not have stuff this large. I mean, this is for a massive mountain moving project. When you are going to go in somewhere and you literally have to dig a hole in the earth that is visible from somewhere too far up, you want to be flying over and go. I wonder what they're working on down there the iss radios in.
Speaker 1:What are you boys doing down?
Speaker 2:there, right, exactly you, when you have, when you have the faa channels on your shovel and they get on there and they're like a cabin crew, cat 7495, this is, uh, bravo, tango, fly over over. Hey, do you want to? You have to figure out like you know. You know, they see what you're doing down there. That's what this is meant to do. I there's that old saying you know, they see what you're doing down there.
Speaker 1:That's what this is meant to do. There's that old saying you know, if the mountain will not come to muhammad, muhammad goes to the mountain no, no, we move it to muhammad. We bring the mountain to muhammad.
Speaker 2:Now, that's right, that's right customer service. And also so caterpillar funded the busiris erie was busiris international. Bucyrus International Incorporated. Acquisition was $8.8 billion. They did that in July 8th of 2011 after we were about 18 months out of the housing crisis, which was crippling, yeah, but they had the foresight to turn around and say, look, we got to do something here and they went in and they funded it and they brought them on board and I'm sure it has not been without, just like any acquisition pain points. They've done nothing but make that company stronger and better. And the Volvo CE guys we want to see a mountain moving shovel come out of Volvo CE Sweden.
Speaker 1:You're doing everything you can to make sure they get their money's worth out of this one.
Speaker 2:Oh, no, no, but I'm serious. We want to see this. When you go to Ikea and they have the meatballs and then all that sludge, grease and all that comes down and becomes biofuel we know that that's the next step Just tell us this is where you're going. Ikea is a private way to pull fuel worldwide. Pull fuel together to build a biofuel generating facility based solely off the sales of Swedish meatballs. We know this is what you're doing. Just acknowledge it.
Speaker 1:Let it know.
Speaker 2:This is where we plug the X-Files.
Speaker 1:Right, x-files, right. Well, you know how everything at ikea has that the weird, the weird names. This would be lubsk. It's like l with the little u with the dots s b s k well, yeah, it's.
Speaker 2:It's located in aisle double a slot 12b yeah, tvorsk, the tvorsk aisle.
Speaker 1:That's actually really neat stuff, you know. So apparently the guy who who started ikea founded it, was dyslexic and he would name stuff with these crazy names, but the the letters and numbers were arranged in a way that they didn't invert when he looked at him, so they looked the same to him as they do to us, and that helped him keep track of that. So that's your ADA moment of the day. It's so funny.
Speaker 1:We have to do when we have at the company I work for, we have to do a corporate safety minute. Whenever we have a group meeting, we have to do a safety minute. And the safety minute was about ladders and the guy was literally talking about proper ladder use and three points of contact and all that. Oh yeah, and I'm holding a rolling office chair. This other dude is standing one leg on the office chair, one foot on my shoulder, while I'm holding the chair to get up to adjust the uh, the projector so that we can get a clear, focused view of our ladder safety routine. I don't know who you are. The osha manual, the osha handbook, is written in blood. To remember that. I think we close with that no, maybe we're done, we're done.
