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 41 | Fleet Leases, MOOG, and America's 250th
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In this exciting HEP-isode, the boys discuss the perils of mixed fleet leasing, Kenworth's jaw-dropping TourAmerica paint scheme celebrating America's 250th birthday, and MOOG Construction stops by to tell us more about their new ZQUIP technology, which allows a single machine to operate on diesel, gas, or battery electric power. PLUS: the original Roto Sweep!
New Truck Trip And First Impressions
SPEAKER_04How's that new Pete? Peter Bill's good.
SPEAKER_02Drove it uh back from Kansas yesterday.
SPEAKER_04That was wild because you you didn't even get back in till 2 a.m. or something like that, they were telling me.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, the both of us drove it over and then uh it we it was a great ride. Restored my faith in in newer trucks on maybe uh I shouldn't say it like that, but it did. I mean that that truck for its size, it it's the perfect balance of both worlds. You know, that I guess you call it mid-level people do, some people don't, depends on what operation you're running. But the 537 and that that size range, you know, it has normal Loving R225 tires on it, it's got all the normal running gear, air ride, and all those things. It just turns the miles without a problem. It's easy.
Custom Headache Racks And Storage
SPEAKER_04That's nice. Well, you know, you got some news on that trip as well, uh, talking out of Summit, right?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So uh we were walking through looking at a couple products yesterday, and while we were at Summit Truck Bodies, and they actually build headache racks for trucks. They'll build whatever you want, but the ones that we were looking at are not production, they're custom. And so if you truly want a true custom headache rack for whatever your operation is, they actually make it just like they make the toolboxes. So the slides inside, they use uh track and channel so that you can adjust the shelves, you can adjust the chain racks, they have wells in there. The particular one I was looking at for a customer, he wanted side doors on it, which were only a foot wide, which is a fairly deep box. It's so you can access it from the side instead of climbing up on the truck. And what's funny is that it actually they had somehow damaged it, and someone was in there reworking it, fixing some things on it, and we were gonna get it done and get it out the paint, which is very rare because a lot of places don't rework their stuff. So you you know, you call certain manufacturers a headache rack and say, hey, we had something happen and it hit the headache rack. They're like, Well, I mean, sell you a new one. Yeah, someone's like, send it over here, we'll take a look at it. And if it structurally can be repaired, we're gonna take care of it if you want that. So it's it's really neat. And we we floated the idea out there for them building us a headache rack and taking it to Mid-America truck show next year, which would be great. And we just Mass is just over recently. And then the need for storage and enclosing everything and putting your rain gear in there and your boots and oil and fluids and all these things, it's hard. You you're carrying a lot of stuff uh to successfully travel now because it's hard to get people to like we talked about uh, you know, on the last it's hard to get service response depending on where you go. So you got to carry some stuff, not everything, but some stuff.
SPEAKER_04Well, it's hard too, because a lot of the work that you guys are doing, you're out in the middle of nowhere, there's mud, there's all kinds of stuff. So you gotta have everything's gotta have a place to get put away. Because I mean, even you know, every job site, every company is dealing with theft and people taking stuff home, they're not supposed to, but take all of that out of it. You drop something in some of this mud and rain and sleet and garbage that you guys are in, it's gone. You might never see it again.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, we have some job sites that are that are horrific with that, depending on the time of year. And in the remote part is very real. We do a lot of work that is out and about, and it takes us a little bit to get there, or maybe you're not that far off the highway, but you're you're sure out somewhere where it's gonna take a minute for people to come get supplies to you or or come out and help do a road repair or service repair. So, yeah, you you gotta have organization, you gotta be able to keep your stuff, you know. If you're gonna keep tools and all these things on the truck, you need to have a way to organize it.
Kenworth’s Patriotic Paint And Style
SPEAKER_04I'm glad you feel good about the uh new modern era uh of trucking, at least when it comes to the speeder belt. But uh, I want to talk about the new Kenworth Tour America special edition paint. I saw this press release earlier in the week, and this is like red, white, and blue. These are absolutely gorgeous trucks, and it looks like you can get it in all the different truck bodies, too.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so they have the scheme on all these trucks. You know, they haven't done this since 76, 50 years ago with the with the um, I don't know what they called that back then. It was the bicentennial, yeah. The bicentennial paint job, which was red, white, and blue and have the stripes that went up, you know. But back then they had the cab over edition, which was pretty cool that they painted. Obviously, this year they don't have that. Makes me wonder if someone were to bring a K200 into the United States or ask for one, would they do it? And would they paint it?
SPEAKER_04I mean, you know, with enough money, they'll do anything. I've actually got a great picture of that 1976.
SPEAKER_02I think we should put uh on the on the art that and the other one right next to each other.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, that's facing each other.
SPEAKER_02Just you know what I mean.
SPEAKER_04Well, you know, I think also number one, I think that trucks back then, and maybe I'm wrong about this, but this is just the feeling that I have, right? Is it feels like trucks back then had a little bit more personality, had a little bit more style. They weren't a hundred percent built for efficiency, a lot of them were built for comfort, a lot of them were built really as a home away from home that the the drivers could take a lot of pride in. And it just seems like we've gone away from that. We talk about this all the time about how you know we're getting into this kind of cookie cutter, all the trucks sort of look the same.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, there's a there's there's a march though with with Kenworth this that they're trying to when you're not looking at a fleet vehicle where you need you know hundreds of them or thousands of them built to your spec, they still offer a good, you know. This is what we talked about. The we talked about the 580. The the 580 and the 990 and the T 880, you can get those however you want.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and that's what I was getting at is that Kenworth seems to be bucking that trend in a way that you're not seeing from the other manufacturers.
SPEAKER_02There has to be somebody that supports the small fleet that wants a cool truck. If you want to be able to drive cool stuff, or even if you get a fleet that's got 300 trucks and you want five token trucks that are your babies and they go out on the road and they they serve a purpose for whatever reason, it'd be nice to be able to call whoever you're getting that stuff from and say, hey, you know what? It's time for us to get a special truck. We got a guy that's been with us 25 years, and we he's got 10 to go or five to go or whatever the cycle is for your fleet. And so we want to put him in something neat.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. And I think you know, there's a lost art to that too, because there was a time where you could see a Penske truck or an RL truck from you know half a mile away, and you'd know exactly what you were looking at. There's a marketing element that's sort of gone away with this, you know, refrigerator white, everything is looks the same cookie cutter scenario.
SPEAKER_02Well, I can tell you that the only thing that stands out on the road right now is there's a couple freight companies out there that their stuff stands out. When you see it coming, you know, Yellow Freight was a master of this.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_02I mean, those paint schemes were you could not mistake that coming down the road. The only ones left like that, Estes is a is a good freight company. They've got a yellow and black paint scheme, red lettering. Those are great trucks. You can see them from a while, you know. But let's talk about the the king of recognizable. Absolutely anytime you see one of their vehicles on the road, the king is UPS. Yes. You know, you know that's a UPS vehicle no matter what. And now it used to be FedEx was number two in the recognizing recognizable chart, we'll call it. Now it's Amazon. That blue swoosh logo. You see that, you see that on all the Rivian vans, you see that on the the freight vans going down the highway. You know exactly what that is when you're coming up on it.
SPEAKER_04I think the difference there is that Amazon is starting to understand that there is a resale market for these things, and they're starting to reduce their branding on the vehicles. I mean, the last two or three Amazon drop-offs that we've had here, and when I'm talking about you know, I'm I'm outside of Chicago, I'm not in some you know, minor podunk town, right? And they're dropping off in white Ram Pro Master vans.
SPEAKER_02There's a couple of things for that too. Ram Pro Master, anybody that's operating an independent fleet contracted to Amazon, if somehow by chance you fall upon our dialogue here or some sort of text that leads you to it and you're reading this, if you're not looking at a Ram ProMaster van for package delivery, for both the effect of efficiency, price point initially, maintenance, and just absolute operator comfort for what they're about to do in a given day, you need to be because there's an enormous amount of effort to build a flat floor van that you can put serious amounts of cargo in, low entry. And I'm only plugging them because they were at NTEA, they've they were at Con Expo, they had a booth for that. They have been at every major show in the United States. Every dealer, if you go to certain dealer groups, they have hundreds of these on the lot. And Ram is willing to make bulk deals. I know that because they approached me on it. They thought that it fit our business model and it doesn't. But I was taken back at the amount of wheeling and dealing they're willing to do with serious buyers. Go out and check them out because it goes back to what we're talking about. Take that thing, low entry point, wrap it in whatever your paint scheme is, wrap it, put your decals on it, and go. Yeah, but it still goes back to recognizing, you know, like you said, being able to recognize you coming down the road is a lost art. And I know with our own company, we have serious meetings about that where we're like, are we losing that? Should we look at something a different way? We we take a look at our paint schemes, we make sure that we have commercial vehicles in one color group, the run-of-the-mill regular vehicles are in another. It takes considerable effort. And I think when you get a bunch of whitewashing going on and everything is just vanilla, throw the decal on it and go. My opinion, and a lot of people have their ways for doing this and their reasoning, it's disrespectful to your brand. Build your brand, put it out on the street, have pride in what you're doing.
Why Fleet Branding Became Forgettable
SPEAKER_04A hundred percent. And I think that, you know, we're touching on a much larger issue and we're way off the rails in terms of script, but I I want to bring this up. Forget about trucks, forget about equipment, forget about fleets. Just look at the way homes were built and designed in the 1970s with conversation pits, with different color schemes. You used to be able to go down the road and you would see pink houses and yellow houses and blue houses. And something happened where instead of buying a house that was going to be your home and an expression of how you wanted to live, your home became an asset. And it became something that you didn't buy and build and decorate for yourself. You bought and built it and painted it and maintained it for curb appeal so that you could sell it when it was time to move on and you treated it like a commodity rather than something that you loved and cared about. Now hang on. When we started doing that with these fleets, when we started looking at short-term leases, get into it, get the good residual, turn it, get out of it, get the next new one. And one of the things I really respect about the way that you run your business is that you keep those vehicles a lot longer, I think, than the average fleet that's in there 24, 36 months.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, we do. I mean, our leasing uh partner, uh, we'll I'm gonna plug them because they're phenomenal Sasser families of companies, currently called Union Leasing. They're working working on rebranding that company a little bit. So there'd be some releases coming out shortly. But the Sasser family leasing group is always on us to turn the vehicles quicker. And we have a hard time doing that because we want to see a little bit of extra value out of something that is, in our eyes, underutilized. So we don't run a rental car fleet, we don't run a go back to the ProMaster, a package fleet. We run a very wide-ranged usage group. And because of that, our vehicles are put in a very wide range of use that tends to lead itself to these varying states of mileage, repairs because of that. We have enormous idle time in some areas and no idle time in others. We have guys that are averaging 55,000 miles a year on a three-quarter ton. We have guys that are averaging 10. So it's hard to go in there and start, well, everything will get replaced at 100. Uh, our actual goal is 200 or less. 200 or less is way over the national leasing average for non-highway guys. And what I mean by that is, is if you have a pickup truck and all its job is, is then it's gonna go from Baltimore, Maryland to Cleveland or Baltimore, Maryland to DC and further south and back and just do deliveries long term or just shuttle stuff, you can keep that thing for a lot more miles. We're sitting there going, well, a truck's five years old, we've only got a hundred in it. We want to keep it for another two, keep it to seven, and then re-evaluate. So I have all this stuff earmarked, and we go through constantly and evaluate every month where our oldest part of the fleet is and where our mid part of the fleet is so we can forecast it. Every vehicle is on its own schedule, every vehicle is on its own maintenance schedule, every vehicle is on its own turn as far as what we do with upfitting. It makes it very complex to manage that. Now, there are a lot of other fleets like this, and everybody, you know, I talk to people, they're like, How do we get into the same where we get a routine? You don't. You can't. Because when you build a routine, you're gonna shortchange one and shortchange the other. Now, what we're talking about with the houses, part of the curb appeal push and part of the we need to make it appeal to most everybody so we can turn around and sell it push is exactly what you were saying. That goes into fleet as well, and part of that is driven by debt. We need to be able to borrow, get, and sell and maintain the least amount of differential possible. And people are looking at their homes and they're like, Well, we need to buy this house for resale, we need to buy this for resale, we need to do this for resale inside the house. Same problem applies to a fleet. We need to do this because we can sell it later. We need to upfit this so that when we sell it, it's worth more. And then just like when you build your brand new bathroom in your house and you try to sell the house, you're only gonna get there's all these ratios, and all the realtor guys, you know, anybody that's listening to this that might be into that one will probably challenge this, but you're gonna get pennies on what you spend inside of your home on certain things, and other things are gonna make it worth a lot more than what you spend. Adding a bedroom, adding these things correctly with with the proper permits. The problem with the fleet is if you go to Napa Hide and you buy ten thousand dollars worth of stuff and you put it on top of the utility bed, you're not gonna get eight thousand dollars back out of that stuff. So, my theory is because of a kind of an oddball fleet that we run, put on it what we need, make it functional, and keep it. When it gets to the point you got to give it the axe, don't be emotionally attached to it, and then send that vehicle off to get rid of it by itself. Large equipment fleets are starting to do this when you get away from the skid steer mini excavator run-of-the-mill support equipment, large excavating stuff, large mining equipment. It gets to a cycle point, you do a re-eval on it, you look at what you've put into it, and then you go, it's not worth it, or it's worth it. And that it is there's you make that determination. Uh, fleet stuff is no different than your home, but you really have to be careful how you get buried into your own fleet because it's it's easy to do, it's real easy to do.
Fleet Turn Cycles And Upfit Reality
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and there's plenty of people willing to give you as much rope as you ask for.
SPEAKER_02Oh, absolutely. Because here's the other fallacy that a lot of people that are running a fleet are or CFOs, or I'm still stuck on phallus. I know, I know. So here's the thing: you get stuck in this, they're gonna let me borrow, they're gonna let me go. I can the leasing company's gonna let me put you know$30,000 worth of upfit on this uh on this pickup truck, and we're gonna take the bet off, we're gonna do a$30,000 upfit on it, and I'm gonna put it out there, and my guys are gonna love it. They will love it, and you will use it, hopefully, if it's optioned correctly for what you want it to do. The leasing company will let you borrow that money because they're sitting there looking at, well, this customer's got$40,000,$50,000,$300,000,$500, 2,000 assets with us. Their equity is through the roof on all of that because we will only let them extend their payments out so far. So if they want to go borrow$30,000, it just blends in with the rest of it. We don't care. With your home, it's a different story because you can only borrow so much against a singular home. Well, when you have a blended fleet, it's easy to get buried into select assets. And then when that when it comes to the end of the time and you're looking at it going, Wow, uh, this thing's really clapped out, and I gotta figure out what we're gonna do. You get a whole leasing company and you're like, All right, we're gonna have to offload this. What's my buyout on it? And you drop the phone. You're like, wait a minute, it's junk. Then you're forced to keep it unwillingly, and that is a very scary place to be when you're pushing stuff. You can't push a rope, but you're forced to do it. And then you see these fleets with stuff laying out back, and you're like, wow, what happened to that? Well, we haven't paid it off yet. I've known a lot of people that have done that. A lot of people that have bought wheel loaders. They go down to Richie Brothers, and that's a great marketplace. They get a wheel loader, they run it for three or four years, they look at it and go, I don't have that much in it. I'll put a motor in it, and then it needs a it needs a rear diff assembly done on it. Sure, we we but we got we stole that at the Orlando sale. Next thing you know, they're buried in a 972 cat wheel loader that they should have unloaded a while ago, but they were doing it in the guise of when I sell it, people will care that I put a motor and a rear diff in it. They don't, they only care for a certain percentage of what you put in there. And in my experience, and and people have challenged me on this, and I I tell them then in your model, maybe it is different, but in my experience, if you put a hundred grand into something of a certain scale, you go to resell that after three or four years, you've put you know so many thousands of hours on it, you're only gonna get 25% of that hundred grand back.
SPEAKER_04Now, if that because you're not gonna sell it if it doesn't work, so like you have to put the money in to get it to work so that you can sell it for anything, correct?
Right-Sizing Machines For Real Work
SPEAKER_02And that's even worse when you're just trying to broom it and you're like, I gotta drop 50 grand on this just to get it to move. That's it. This all comes back around to what we always talk about the right tool, the right piece in your fleet for exactly what you're doing. There are a million ways you can go out there and you can find this information. You can resource people, you can get consultants to come in and look at where you're at. And this is the same thing we're talking about, and it's gonna take us into our next topic. Sizing your equipment is pivotal to your operation. Everybody wants the bigger, batter machine. And I'm gonna give you a great case study. Caterpillar came out with the 275 skid steer and they released the 285. 285 is a massive behemoth of a skid steer, it weighs it a lot more. The 275 virtually replaced the 299, which was its largest model. Then they said, Well, we need a bigger one for people that need that. People want them, we're gonna build the 285, and people buy them. But do you really need it? I mean, look at what your lifting capability is on the 285. That that you gotta need that to go and spend the money on it. And this happens a lot. We get where the economy's doing well in the in the industrial space or the ag space, and people are making some extra coin, and they go, we're gonna go get that big skid steer. Yeah, and then they have it, and that's their choice. They spend extra money on it, great. Lord knows that in our company we've we've splurged on some stuff, but we are very disciplined about that, and it's very specifically one-off for it. But man, you got to be buying the right stuff. And I have these internal meetings with people, I know other companies do that I talk to. They're like, we want this excavator, and they're like, We don't need it. And so it when I was a young fleet guy and I first started really getting into fleet on a contractor level, I had a guy look at me in the meeting and I said, Well, the you know, feedback is we need this model. And I'll tell you what it was. At the time, it was a 385 caterpillar X. Excavator. And they're like, they're telling me we need the 385. The 385 is what we need. And the guy looked me right in the eye and he goes, A caveman only needs a club so big. And I and it's it holds true. You only need so much machine or so much of your tool to do what you need. Now, if you're in the porn industry, you know, whatever.
SPEAKER_04That's a different set of needs. I think that's a good thing.
SPEAKER_02That's a different set of needs. Again, the right tool for the right job.
Interview Starts: The ZQuip Concept
SPEAKER_04So I don't I want it, like we're in a perfect spot for this lead-in to the next segment of this. There's a guy named Rob Bauer. He is one of the engineers, one of the RD heads over at Moog construction, Moog Industries. They do a lot of electric actuators and act and automation for defense industry, for aviation. And in this interview that I did with him, he actually makes the same point where he says, you know, most guys will spec out a machine for their number one most extreme use case ever. But in the last five years, they needed it to do this one thing one time. And man, we better make sure that we've got a machine to do it. And what that means is that 99% of the time they're running inefficient and they're losing money. They're leaving money on the table. I'm going to slide this right in. We're going to go right into that interview, which was pre-recorded because this dude is in Europe and I had to record this at 4 30 in the morning. You're welcome, Michael. And uh we'll we'll come back from that. My guest today, of course, Rob Bauer, he's the engineering manager for MOG and Peter Clausen, he is a program manager for the company as well. These are the guys behind ZQuip and that uh kind of innovative idea of using power packets on the back of these electric vehicles and you know, heavy-duty off-highway vehicles in the same way that you would kind of a Milwaukee or Ryobi drill. Guys, thanks so much for being on the show. Happy to be here. Now, Rob, with everything going on in the world right now, people are really struggling. Fleet managers are really struggling, not only on the heavy equipment off-highway side, but just everything, trying to understand what is the best move to make. I think two or three years ago, everybody was going battery electric. Six months ago, everybody had kind of ditched that, and we were now going and talking about removing the deaf controls and removing a lot of emissions controls from diesel to kind of improve that reliability. And now in the last week or two, we've narrowly averted nuclear war, it seems, with all the drama and everything happening. Fuel prices and oil prices are through the roof. It seems almost impossible for a company or a fleet to make the right call. But with a system like what you guys are developing, I know this is not something that's for sale. People can't go buy it. We're not here to drum up sales or anything. But the technology that you've developed, this idea of using the right amount of energy to do the work, I think it's the right time. Can you give us a brief overview for people who maybe have never heard of MOG or ZQIP, of you know what it is that I'm so excited about, why you guys are here, and then we can go from that into some of the other technology that you guys are developing for the uh OEMs that you guys supply for.
SPEAKER_03Sure, that sounds great. Uh so the the the first statement I would make, um, and it's gonna be really bold, is at a technology level, uh, moving dirt uh using electric drivetrain equipment is the least expensive way to do it. Now I want to be careful, I want to put a little caveat around that. Doesn't mean you can go all out and buy electrical equipment right now that that's true of. I'm simply saying at a technology level, that is a true statement. It is the most efficient way to do the work. Requires less maintenance, lots and lots of things. Not nearly as much of that equipment is available out in the world, so there's some challenges to get over, and that's really what we're talking about today. What does that transition look like uh to get to a place where we go from the um the diesel technology to the electric technology? But it is less expensive uh in today's world. In other words, the technology has arrived. I couldn't have made that statement even five years ago with the price of batteries, the development of motors, all those different things. I couldn't have made that statement, but it has arrived now. So now we gotta look at the uh at the transition. Um as you alluded to, there's a lot of flux um in the world in general, and certainly within this market, and none of us have a complete crystal ball. It's hard to say when the tipping point's gonna hit in different regions or for different um you know specific domains. You know, mining is different from construction, it's different from demo. But we all know it's coming. Diesel only gets more expensive over time, electric only gets less expensive over time. Um, and so it it will hit. It's just a question of when in my region and in my particular domain. So um the Z Zquib concept um is uh uh very much like your your electric drill. Okay, so you take your uh your electric drill, um, and if you went back into the 90s, the batteries are integrated right into the into the drill. Um and uh the the part that was a bummer about that is when the battery was dead, you had to put the drill down and let it charge for two or three hours, and then you were kind of out of luck. You had to have a second whole drill to make that work. In today's world, nobody does that. If you have your Dewall drill, your Milwaukee drill, you pop the battery out, you pop another one on, you keep moving, it's great. Um and so that is uh is part of the concept. So, in other words, swappable energy modules the expansion of that is um uh many tools now accept two batteries. So if you think about your miter saw, for instance, there's two ports to plug batteries in there, and the the saw is is pulling out of those two ports. So in the DeWalt um you know miter saw world, um you put uh two batteries on there and you pull down, and when those two batteries are dead, you pull them out and you and you replace them. And we can do the same thing in Dequiz. But the expansion of the concept is we can also apply different types of energy into those ports. So one of them can be a battery, and another one can still be a small diesel engine. Now you say, Well, I thought we were getting rid of diesel. Yeah, I I get it. Uh I want to get rid of diesel too, um, uh, at the right time and in the right way, uh, that supports the business and allows things to happen. Imagine you have a machine that's all diesel. Uh that engine has to be sized to support your worst possible second of the life of the machine. Okay. Uh so that's that machine has to have an engine that is uh uh capable of producing the peak energy demand of any one moment of the day. That's what battery does for you. It does really two things. One of them is it allows you to store a whole ton of energy into that battery, and you can size the diesel now for your average energy usage instead of your peak energy usage. That's far more efficient. Um number two um is electric drivetrains are just far more efficient or far uh far more efficient, um, but also far less maintenance required. On the uh efficiency side, we have the entire possibility to regen uh and shove any um energy, uh you know, kinetic or uh potential energy uh back into the batteries, which uh when you're lowering the boom on a diesel uh machine, you don't make diesel fuel, it doesn't back up into the tank. That would be low. That's exactly what happens on an electric machine. So it's a very efficient um arrangement. So what we have is a highly field configurable in a few minutes uh arrangement that I can be all electric, I can be combination hybrid, I can even uh run a couple hybrid modules on a machine and have a continuous use machine that would be operationally no different than your uh conventional diesel machine. I'm gonna pause there. That was a really long answer.
SPEAKER_04No, I think it was a great answer, and I think the key phrase there is operationally identical because one of the things that I hear all the time in in my other life where I you know do this kind of consulting work for fleets and off-highway and on highway is this idea that they need to retrain their operators and retrain their technicians. I don't think that's necessarily true. 80% of the vehicle is identical. The HVAC system is pretty similar, the power windows rolling up and down are pretty similar, suspension brakes, all of that stuff. You're still bleeding brake lines, all of that stuff is pretty similar. And the idea that your operator doesn't need to be completely retrained on a whole new machine, on a whole new system of working, I think is critical. I want to hit here, and I know that you know most of what we've seen so far has been excavators, has been wheel loaders, but I want to nail this concept of this modular energy source or this energy module, right? Because to me, electric farming makes so much sense. I have a little hobby farm. My family has a hobby farm in Wisconsin. I love the idea of an electric tractor, but when it comes to harvest, and there's maybe one or two weeks out of the year, that machine has to run 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So for the other 350 days a year, a battery makes a ton of sense. But for those two weeks of the year, it must go continuous. So the ability to simply pop off the battery module and put in a diesel, or if I'm a dairy farm, a lot of those guys are doing methane capture. If I can do maybe instead of a diesel, I've got an X15 motor in there or flex fuel motor in there that can run RNG, renewable natural gas. I can still get that work done with the same machine. I don't have to have a battery and a diesel. I don't have to compromise on diesel the entire year round. So that's the kind of thing, and that's where I think this concept is really huge. You start thinking about the work that needs to be done and start considering the work in terms of energy. You're not looking at tons of dirt and hours, you're looking at how many kilowatts of energy does it take to get you know 15 cubic meters of Earth from point A to point B, and then what's the best way to get those kilowatts?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, absolutely. Um, so so we have several types of battery modules available. Um, and we currently have a uh a diesel hybrid module available. Now remember, it snaps into the same port on the machine. If you think of your, you know, you're again back to the DeWalt drill or Dewalt miter saw, um, it's got ports where you snap those batteries on. Our machine has, uh, depending on the machine, two or three ports. Um, and the exact same port except a battery or diesel, or um, our our architecture is designed around being able to run natural gas or propane or hydrogen fuel cell or hydrogen ice engine, any of those things can snap onto the same ports. All of our software, all of our equipment is sized, and it's the exact the battery uh the module is exactly the same size with the same mechanical interface. You plug it in, uh, the machine recognizes which one it is and continues on.
Construction Isn’t Automotive: Utilization Matters
SPEAKER_04And that's that's a really crazy thing to understand because if you're not in the trades, if you're not a blue-collar person, you kind of have some stuff in your garage, a lot of people buy one tool with one battery. But the people who work with this stuff day in and day out, they may have six or eight batteries and 40 tools, and they use the tools that they need and the battery that they need, and you typically buy the tool without the battery because you don't need to have this constant supply of batteries. Now, you know, in our conversations leading up to this, uh to this call, we talked a little bit about residuals, but the one thing that really jumped out to me was your your statement that the automotive market is an unhelpful framework for the conversion of the construction market. And I think that we're getting close to that reason why, in the sense that, you know, when you drive by a construction site or a road site, you might see two or three excavators out there, you might see, you know, a few different machines. And most of the time you don't see them running. But if you have to have a 200 or a 300 kilowatt hour battery in each machine, the way that people in the US still think about having a 100 kilowatt battery in every EV, that is a huge waste of resources. And even more than that, it's it's begging for a problem because if that thing has an issue and it's in the mud, now you have to find a way to haul a 30-ton excavator out of there just to get it sent to the dealer, assuming there's a dealer nearby that can work on it, and the whole thing is down. If one of these modules goes bad for whatever reason, the diesel engine you know eats a valve or the battery goes sideways, you can just pop it off, pop on another one, and get back to work.
SPEAKER_03Absolutely. Your utilization uh of your assets is much, much higher in the modular world. Um, and and you can augment whatever you don't have, that's just quite right, by either renting things, pulling them into your fleet uh temporarily, or even renting them out and saying, I'm not going to be using these batteries, these hybrid modules for a period of time. So there's a lot of operational flexibility uh when you break it down into separating energy from the machine. Separating those two things creates enormous operational flexibility and also resilience. Uh, you know, you you don't want your equipment to be down. And so having the um the ability to move things around and get the most important job done today is is part of that um uh benefit.
SPEAKER_00I think it's also where it's where it's different uh from uh where the construction world is different from the from automotive. Yeah, if in in automotive we we want uh bigger batteries and more charging points and heavier charging points, but for construction you need uh different solutions because those construction sites typically don't have a large and heavy grid connection. So you uh you really need flexibility to solve uh everyday problems of keeping the machines charged and and separating the energy from the drivetrain uh really enables that flexibility.
SPEAKER_04As a fleet manager, you know, when we talk about flexibility, we talk about the different things we can do. A solution like this works in two ways. Number one, it gives me flexibility on the job site, gives me the flexibility to work in different ways and manage my energy, but it also gives me flexibility in terms of spending and financing, right? Because Rob's or to Rob's point earlier, it is hard to predict what electric vehicles and especially electric construction vehicles outside of mining and these industries where they've existed for many years, what they're gonna be worth in five or six years. So you have, you know, subsidized leases from companies like Volvo or John Deere and or uh Kubota, and they're trying to make something work and they're trying to put something together that makes sense for consumers. But if you're a fleet and you're looking to invest in this stuff because maybe you're doing a job in a low emission zone, or not necessarily emissions, maybe you don't care about emissions, you're trying to get a job that's in a low noise zone, and the electric vehicles help you with that, you know, to earn that work and gain that business. Do you see a future where the energy module is leased or financed in a separate way or a separate contract from the machines in a way that allows fleet managers to kind of navigate the future in terms of maybe it's not necessarily a cap cost, but it's an operational cost.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, absolutely. We we do see that as a as a business model that would work. Uh separating the machines from the energy supply really uh enables uh fleet owners to do separate uh depreciation of of those assets. And um, if at some point in the next uh years uh a different technology, different battery technology or different other different uh energy storage concept becomes more popular or more affordable or more efficient, then they can uh still own their machine, but swap the energy source or the energy carrier.
Electric Actuation, Automation, Cold Weather
SPEAKER_04Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Obviously, this is all really great, innovative stuff, and the ZQIP concept, right? Whether it comes to market as ZQIP or under some other name, that concept I think is going to give fleet buyers and fleet managers the flexibility not only with energy but with financing and in a really neat way to build kind of a future-proof fleet that we haven't really seen in other ways. But I know that Mog is involved not only in heavy equipment. You guys are also doing a lot of actuation and automation work. So, you know, tell us a little bit about that here as we close out the episode.
SPEAKER_03Okay. Uh so from uh um Moog as a company, we're in our 75th year this year. Um, and we're an actuation company. Yeah, thank you. It's a big year for us. Uh so um uh we're an actuation company from from the get-go. That's in our DNA. Um, and so where that plays on this, uh, right now uh machines are almost exclusively hydraulic. Now uh when we're talking hydraulics that has a totally different animal than the energy and all that that we've been talking about today. Um we do mostly electric actuation, although we do a lot of hydraulic actuation as well. Um the energy efficiency of electric actuation is enormous uh compared compared to any other variety, which means you can get more work done with the same size battery uh when you have an electric uh machine. Um you can regen more effectively. You can also make the machine uh much more readily um basically robotic. Uh so that leans into the automation aspect of what we're doing and more accuracy if you're talking about precision grading and these kind of things. So that's another uh venue that uh or or domain, I should say, that that MOAC plays in is in um electric actuation for construction equipment. And we are on several platforms of um, you know, uh with with major OEMs right now of providing electric actuators um and replacing those hydraulic actuators. The maintenance is uh super low and the performance is amazing. More powerful. People say, oh, it can't be as powerful.
SPEAKER_04It's more powerful, it's more powerful, yeah. I think there's a real misunderstanding there of how much downtime is lost, especially in colder climates, waiting for the hydraulic fluids and waiting for that kind of system to warm up. I mean, it literally has to warm up sometimes 20, 30 minutes, especially here in Chicago, or you know, I have family in Winnipeg and they they've got a bobcat out there that like you got to idle that thing for a half hour, and that is pure wasted energy, wasted time, wasted effort. So this is a huge downtime saver. How do the electric actuators perform in that extreme cold?
SPEAKER_03Uh the actuators themselves uh prefer it. Uh so uh the electric actuator, yeah, yeah, no, uh uh actually hot is our our bigger challenge. Um and we've got that now. You know, uh Moag's uh heritage um is in very, very high performance applications, uh, whether that's uh uh we're very heavily in the space program. Uh we have a lot of equipment in our Artemis right now that's uh getting ready to land tomorrow. Um we're we're very heavily into those kind of vehicles. We're we're certainly capable of doing all those temperature management things. Um back to the battery side. Um we we do some we have some proprietary equipment on our our our battery modules uh to be able to manage temperatures better than than other our competitors.
SPEAKER_04That's cool. So I'll I'll put this final thought out there, and this is something that that I don't really understand. So you made the comment that your batteries have been tested in all these different locations and you are in the space frame, you are in all these places. It has never occurred to me that the batteries could be used in something other than equipment, but it's an energy store, right? So, like if you have a mobile office, if you have a portable deployment, you're responding to a natural disaster, the grid is down. Theoretically, you guys could roll up with eight or nine of these things on the back of a semi-trailer, put them in and plug an office building into it, right? Or am I hallucinating?
SPEAKER_00That yeah, that's absolutely possible. And um, so we have focused with this uh with this technology on the uh construction uh equipment market, but uh this could might just as well be used in in uh in in the military or at airports, or uh there's lots of different places where you can uh benefit from using electric machinery, but you don't use that machinery all the time, all year round. And then the swappability and uh and the flexibility that this concept gives you can can help you uh get more use out of your uh out of your assets.
SPEAKER_04We're coming to the end of our time commitment. You guys have been more than patient with all of our technical issues starting up today. For people who are hearing this, who are excited about it, who want to say, man, what are these guys into? How do they follow along with what Mogue is doing? Mogue construction, I think, is one of the uh searches that you can do in social media, but I know Mogue is in a lot of different industries. What's the best way to find out more about what you guys are doing?
SPEAKER_00On the uh LinkedIn, I I think that's where we have uh where do we do the most uh active posting. Don't see us on Instagram or TikTok, I don't think.
Sponsors And Truck Stop Side Quest
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and while Chris used to dance on the tables for us, so that was uh that was good. So we'll try to get try to get Rob on there for one of these guys. Thank you again so much. That is uh Rob Bauer, he's the engineering manager over at Vogue, and Pater Clausen's the program manager. These are very knowledgeable guys. Uh you heard Pater go stock him on LinkedIn and he'll answer all your questions. Thanks so much for being on the show, and uh yeah, that'll work. There's such a good lead in, too, by the way.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I was doing we were doing good. And we're like remote from our sponsors.
SPEAKER_04Who are our sponsors today, Michael?
SPEAKER_02Well, we got a couple. Our uh current sponsor of the day is uh Lysol Disinfect and Sprite. And Gojo. And remember Gojo when you're in the uh when you are in the Love's Travel Plaza and you look over to the left or the right on the far end of the sink counter, it is there with the pumice in it to clean up after the nasty thing you just absolutely had to do and get yourself off the road for. Gojo's there to help, and it'll clean you back up. Is that good or what? I just pulled that out of there.
SPEAKER_04I love that. I like the orange pumice that you can like really like just scrape down all your skin, lose a layer, pop out of the shower, hot pink.
SPEAKER_02You look amazing. Listen, when you I'm gonna tell you this when you're when you're at a when when you're at a truck stop on the road I already love where this is going. And and you go into you know, you're in there and they're calling out the driver number because he's got his little ticket from getting, you know, three thousand dollars worth of diesel fuel out at the pump, but that's another that's another toy. Yeah, so you know, they're gonna start switching us to leaders soon. And you see them disappear in the back, and you're in there waiting on food, or you're trying to find something that's the least worst option to eat. And uh you got you know, a nice lady with her kids in there, and they're the kids are running around rubbing their noses and touching all the healthy stuff, all their apples and the bananas and all the fruit you could possibly probably try to eat, but you can't because you need to wipe it down with hydrogen peroxide. I saw the most disturbing sight. This actually wasn't yesterday on the road trip, it was a couple trips before when I was I was driving and I had a pretty pretty good road trip for a couple of days. And I this guy must have got his clothes wet in the shower because he came out looking like a red NASCAR hot dog, and clearly he was in there, and the shower was so intensely hot, and somehow he got all of his crap wet because he had a soggy bag with him and he was walking with a towel back to his truck, and it was horrifying looking. Let me tell you that. Jesus. Yeah, so you know what he needed to go, Joe, in there because I'm sure there was a lot of exfoliation that could have happened. There's a crevice somewhere that needed cleaned.
SPEAKER_04There's a crevice off so horrific. You know, I love these shows where like we get off on like a good topic where we're actually being professional for a little while.
SPEAKER_02Well, I'm allowed to do it today. Joe's not here, but at the at the studio exactly. But in the control room, I got on that tangent only allowed because Tim put a sign up that said, I'll be right back.
SPEAKER_04And it's over. Well, I love also like you know, we take our little breaks, and you know, for for those of you who are not as high functioning as we are, trust me when I tell you the people who start the breaks are not the same as the people who come back after the break.
SPEAKER_02That's true.
SPEAKER_04Who are we drinking today, Michael? That'll be a good way to sign off. So wait, listen.
SPEAKER_02Well, we're talking about auto car, we're not going anywhere.
America’s 250th And Gratitude
SPEAKER_04Auto car we're not going anywhere. We're we've been threatening an auto car episode for two or three episodes. They can wait one more. Oh, we need to touch on this. As a country, as a nation, we are celebrating our 250th birthday this year. Where's the party, Michael? We are failing this generation of American partygoers. We should already be talking about you know, a belt-fed Roman candle insanity for 4th of July.
SPEAKER_02That's what I was gonna say. I mean, the 4th of July is coming up on the 250th anniversary of this country. I know there are there are all kinds of things being looked at, and you know, and I heard from uh a few different cities of people that I know work for, whether you're a cop, a fireman, or whatever. They're there cities are trying to figure out what to do. Yeah. And in the current state of everything and everything we got going on and the march across the globe, it's a it's a weird, it's a weird time to have your 250th birthday. Sure. And you got all these things going on, and and we should be proud of 250 years. No matter what the political climate is, and no matter how people are looking at each other based on which way you like looking at whatever political thing you're on, we should be proud that we have made it 250 years, and w everything that we have available to us, and the things that we talk about on this episode, all of them in general, all the podcasts. This is only available because of what we have and what what has happened over the last 250 years. Not that we're perfect, we've made a lot of wrong turns, but so is a lot of other nations, and they have never a lot of other countries, they have not come back from those wrong turns. Yeah, we have a system of government driven out of the need for something different, and we cannot forget that.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and I think it's also worth saying that there's always hard times, there's always tough times in everybody's life, even when the economy is booming and things are good, somebody you know has cancer, somebody you know is suffering, somebody you know is going through loss or going through some kind of a deal. And you know, it's like when when you turn 21, you go get a drink. You may be laying in the hospital, the deathbed, you may not see 22, but by God, enjoy 21, enjoy the moment. And I think that regardless of where you stand on the politics, regardless of who you are, like I think that's a great message. Be a little bit grateful, a little bit thankful for this democracy and what it could have given you and might still give you. And uh, dude, even if you are of the doom and gloom mindset, uh one little party ain't gonna kill you, and you might make a good memory out of it.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely, absolutely.
Autocar’s Comeback And Vocational Focus
SPEAKER_04So I think we need to do that. And as we discuss this, Autocar's new independent factory is celebrating its first revolution around the sun as an independent company again. And last month had its highest ever production, and it's going into April. Looks like April's gonna beat that record. So it's great to see those guys doing well. They've got two new chassis that they rolled out this year already, and uh yeah, man, you can't say enough cool stuff about what these guys are doing.
SPEAKER_02AutoCAR has been a spin-off company for a very long time, pushed into a corner by large corporations that were when we we touched on that before, that were adapting them to what they had available, putting the auto car label on it, slapping a sticker on it, putting a different hood on a Volvo cab, a white GMC cab, whatever it may have been, for far too long. These guys are doing something that has not been done in the trucking world for a very long time. They went out and they took it over, created a manufacturing process, and have built a vocational truck with an amount of energy behind it that hasn't been seen in this marketplace for a very long time. These guys developed something and they said, Look, we know it's gonna take us a minute to get our dealer base. We have a dealer base, but we know we're gonna have to get these trucks out on the road, but it's vocational, so the guy can't afford downtime. We're gonna put all this stuff in the dash. There's 3D image uh diagrams and and modeling in the dash, in this in the info center that will let you go through the truck and understand what you need to look for. That's cool. People need to be taking heed of this and they need to be walking over and looking at this at AutoCAR because auto car is about I'm I'm gonna say this because I I love Mac. I love Mac trucks because of their heritage, and I truly believe that AutoCAR is the is where Mac could have gone, and they they recognized a moment in the market and went, it's our time. Yeah. And they took an available brand, they could have they could have called it anything, they could have called it Matt's shitbox, but they took they decided to go out and get the auto car name and preserve it. That alone is cool. The second thing that's cool about that is that they they sat back and went, well, we could go and get a cab. The international group that will sell us a cab. We can go to we can go to PACAR and get a cab. No, we're gonna build one, we're gonna do our own cab, we're gonna source our own stuff. Again, that takes an enormous amount of work, effort, and dreaming that we need more of in this marketplace. We need people like autocar. If you have a a business case that supports autocar, you really need to take a look at it. They are about to take over the daycab marketplace with a storm. And if you're just going down and looking at your your your very next day cab Volvo or your very next day cab international, you're doing yourself a disservice if you don't go over there and look at auto car. They build a cab over model, they're they're they're they're taking on the assuzu front. No one has challenged a Suzu in a medium duty marketplace for short wheelbase before. There are people out there who've done it. Mitsubishi had their run, you know, all these things. But they were like, hey, we're gonna build something, and you know what, we need to build this marketplace too. So let's just do it.
SPEAKER_04Well, and don't forget, too, you know, one of the things that that I get into sometimes here up in Illinois is you know, we have the wet ports and they have the the roll-on, roll-off terminal trucks. Autocar has a six by four terminal tractor that is is basically a jeep. I mean, this thing, whether it's ice, sleet, snow, it does not care. It'll hook up, you know, two containers, 90,000 pounds, drag it off the boat onto the pier, and hook it up to the cranes and get it ready and out for another semi-truck. So that is really impressive. I don't actually know, at least stateside in the US, I don't know anybody else making a roll-on, roll-off rowroad truck like that.
SPEAKER_02I don't think so. I don't think there is. I think they're imported. I think the rest of them, I mean, look, well, the autocar is not imported. No, I'm saying I think I think anybody else in that market space, yeah.
SPEAKER_04The channel Volvo's got one, Tyco's got one, but I don't think they're making them here.
SPEAKER_02Opportunities are endless for that truck. You've got a lot of smaller trucking radius fleets that need that. And uh again, I can't say enough about the energy behind that. One year out of the gate, it is it is great. One year around the sun is great, and part of the reason that they're gonna succeed is this. We were at Con Expo, our lead driver was over there, and one of our young mechanics jumped in their auto car there at the show, was talking to this guy. They said, Hey, let me scan your badge. They said, Well, we're not sure about our what we're gonna be doing for our next truck. We may or may not need a sleeper. They don't currently offer a sleeper. So the guy was very upfront about that and said, Well, that's kind of not where we are. We are vocational daycab. You know, we want to take on the cement market, we want to take on the dump market, we want to take on the heavy tractor market. It's like, okay. The very next week, a guy reached out to both of those guys and said, Hey, we just wanted to learn a bit a little bit more about your company, who's handling your purchasing over there. They told him to get a hold of me, but they explained what we do for a living. And it wasn't pushy, it wasn't salesy, it wasn't gimmicky. The guy was they were super respectful with our time, and it made us sit back and go, it's something worth looking at. Yeah, there's not enough of that non-gimmick, non-sales, right to the point, right to your use case selling going on anymore. It's still selling, but it you there's a different way of selling, and and these guys are starting to they're tapped, they've tapped into that and they're deploying it in the marketplace.
SPEAKER_04I was having this conversation with another guy that I work with here, and it I um I'm not currently in a sales role, but you know, I have a lot of sales experience, and and I've been very successful at it at that role, and I made the comment to him about going into this trade show that we have coming up, and he was trying to identify well, I want to talk to these people about this, and I said, No, man, you got to go out there, you got to talk to people, you got to listen to what they do, understand where they're coming from, and the more than anything else, you have to be the kind of person they want to do business with. You'll find a way to work together, but if you don't want to work together, if you guys aren't getting along, if you don't show a genuine interest in what they do and in the problems that they're trying to solve, it doesn't matter if you've got exactly the tool for them, they're not gonna want to do business with you. That's right, they have to want to do business with you first, and then they'll look at what you're selling. And I think a lot of that comes down to just having a genuine interest not only in people, but in companies, in the work that people do. And I these auto car guys seem to get it from everything I've heard. And I think honestly, that's what a lot of people find from this show and programs like it, is that you know what we do on a day-to-day basis and what other people do on a day-to-day basis, what the working man does every day is interesting, it has value in and of itself that goes far beyond numbers at the end of a spreadsheet. And people are sick of being treated like numbers at the end of a spreadsheet.
SPEAKER_02Oh, yeah. Well, it doesn't hurt either when uh the guy that calls you has an thick Australian accent and you just automatically know he's cool. Throw another shrimp on the Bobby. Listen, this guy this guy called up and he's talking away, and he is just excited about what he is involved in. That kind of energy is absolutely what's the word I'm looking for.
RotoSweep Sign-Off And Closing
SPEAKER_04I don't know, but we're gonna close this out with the as seen on TV Roto Sweep, the all-original RotoSweep from Ronco.
SPEAKER_01Since 1906, the Fuller Brush Company has been bringing our quality products direct to your door. Hi, I'm John Florel, the Fuller Brush Man, knocking on your screen to bring you the best product you've ever seen. Introducing RotoSweep, the hard floor sweeper from the Fuller Brush Company. It's a rotating broom with its own dust pan that puts the power to clean up any mask right in the palm of your hand. Now you can safely clean tile, marble, linoleum, or any hardwood floors with no scuffing or scratching. Look, you wouldn't break out your big vacuum just to clean up this little mess, and why is it written sweep by hand? You never get all the dirt into the fan. With no cords, bags, or batteries to recharge. As rotosweep rolls across the floor, it gobbles up more and more. Whether it's left or drummed, you've gotta give this a drive. The secrets are the triple rotating brushes that loosen the lift and channels the dirt and debris right into the onboard dust man. It comes with an easy empty door and a full glass handle, which allows you to clean under your furniture. And with RotoSweep's unique bench cleaning technology, it reaches in and under to clean baseboards, walls, and tow kids. Plus, RotoSweep is lightweight, it's less than two pounds, and it makes no sounds. Broken glass on the floor, not anymore. Look how RotoSweep gets every last yard. Now that is awesome! Cat food, dog food, kiddy litter, pet hair. With RotoSweep, it's like it was never there.
