What Happens When Truckers Build the Electric Trucks?

Caroline: [00:00:00] Welcome to this week in trucking, the podcast that tells you what you need to know about the trucking market for the week. My name is Caroline. And if you’re interested in anything we talk about on this channel, like where to book the best loads, fuel prices, and, Hot topics in the industry.

Make sure you like this video and subscribe to our channel. So you never miss out on an episode. So when I wrote to Edison motors on their website about a week ago, I really didn’t think I was going to get a response. They make it pretty clear that they get hundreds of messages all the time. And I thought it doesn’t hurt to try. I’ve been following their work for the past months since I got obsessed with electric truck regulation specifically in California and figuring out what that means for small trucking operations and owner operators. There’s an episode on that, so we’ll link that below. And it was actually a listener from that episode who commented and said, you should look at Edison Motors and what they’re doing with hybrid electric technology for trucks. So I sent a quick note, I’m a big fan. I see a lot of [00:01:00] parallels between what we do in factoring and financial services for trucking businesses and what you’re doing with electrification. Will you please come on our podcast? And you know what? The next day I had a reply. So forgive me if I’m a little starstruck.

Chace Barber, founder and CEO of Edison Motors. Thank you so much for being here. 

Chace: Hey, thanks for bringing me on. This is cool. Thanks for, yeah, thanks for the invite.

Caroline: So your story is pretty well known. I think for those of us that follow you on social media. But maybe not everyone who, maybe we don’t have fully overlapped audiences of who listens to us and people following you. So can you talk a little bit about how you got into trucking in the first place?

I understand that you started as a driver to get you through college. 

Chace: Yeah basically like a fourth generation trucker. My great grandad, grandad, dad drove truck. And I drove truck for a few years before university left high school. I’m like, Hey, I’m going to be a truck driver. That’s what I want to do. And after three years of driving truck, I’m like, ah maybe I should go to school. Try something out. And my buddy convinced me because it was like, yeah, man, there’s a lot of cute [00:02:00] girls in school. I’m like, you’ve got me sold. So I’m like, I’ll try a semester or two. And yeah, I ended up driving truck in the summer. And turns out I did four years degree in economics. And it turns out what you learn with a four year economics degree is that you can make a lot more money as a truck driver than you can with a degree in economics. So I turned around my business partner now Eric, my, one of my good buddies at the time, and he was in the same boat. He’s man, these job offers for after university suck. I’m like, yep, that wasn’t worth it at all. I can make more money in a summer driving truck than these job offers I’m getting after four years of school. 

Caroline: Wow.

Chace: I said, do you want to start a trucking company? We can haul some logs. So we, Took the money we had left, and we had about 10, 000 between us, and we bought a 1969 Kenworth long logger. And we spent the last semester of university fixing it up, doing a full restoration on it, and then we put it to work, and ran it, and then we bought another truck, and we bought another truck, and we bought another truck, and another truck, and we just started growing the company. And that’s it.

Then where Edison came in, it was [00:03:00] about seven years ago now. It was at the unveiling of the Tesla Semi. I saw the advantages, especially logging, you’re going uphill, empty, you’re coming downhill loaded for that regen breaking. So you can literally go up empty, use very little power and recharge the logs as you’re coming back downhill. So we reserved one and after about four or five years, I think, of waiting, we said, screw this, give me my money back. I will I’ll build my own electric Semi. How hard could it be? out very hard very hard. But we did it. We built a proof of concept and in about, Oh, I don’t know, eight, nine months, we had a working proof of concept base thing and looked at it and we decided that like batteries alone, weren’t enough to get a log and truck through the day. We did all the math and you need two and a half megawatt sub power. Even with the region breaking. So we had to put a little, we’re like we’ll put a generator, we’ll do a hybrid truck. Like, why isn’t anyone doing it? Freight trains do it. A lot of mobile equipment that uses all hybrids.

So let’s just make a hybrid semi. So we did that. The proof of concept was rough, [00:04:00] very rough, but it worked. And we showed that we could build a working electric truck. We raised then one and a half million and we built our first. production prototype that with the lessons we learned from the first truck and now we’ve had that out and running around and that’s basically the story of how a bunch of truck drivers built their own electric trucks.

Caroline: That’s so cool. So tell me when you put in your down payment for a Tesla semi truck. So actually our founder Gurvir did the same thing. He put, cause he was like, this is so cool. This is going to, change trucking, got to get in on this. And then same story, except he didn’t go quite as far as you, but he did say, Hey, give me my money back.

I’d rather put this into something else. Eventually, but back then, take yourself back seven years ago when you put that, that down payment on that truck, did you really, did, were you really confident that they were going to be able to deliver on that promise? 

Chace: I was actually, I’d like we believed them. We thought it would take two, three years. We didn’t think it was going to take five years, but we’re like, okay, it’s a [00:05:00] multi billion dollar company. They’ve made all these promises like a billion dollar company wouldn’t just say all these things that they weren’t certain and they didn’t already have a truck built like they had a truck built that some videos of it driving and so we thought that it would take a couple of years but it’s okay, the lead time at Kenworth at the time was like a year and a half, two years or it’s probably gonna be like three, four years, but it’s something like we might as well get our name in and if it takes Three years, who cares

Caroline: So be it. 

Chace: Seven years and they’re still not delivering them to Canada. 

Caroline: Wow. We know that Tesla’s plans didn’t exactly work out, and you had been, at the same time, had gotten interested in these hybrid electrical systems. I understand that you worked on those systems before you actually applied them to trucking. What got you interested in that particular technology? 

Chace: Oh yeah. So when we were hauling logs, one of the big things is we did a bunch of low bedding and then we hauled a bunch of equipment and then we got into hauling generators for some of the bigger manufacturers and we were just bringing generators out to site and then a [00:06:00] picker truck would come out, unload the generator, place it where it needed to go. And then one of the OEM technicians would just hook it up and install it. And we’re like. Hold on there’s a subcontractor here, like a guy sitting in a pickup truck organizing all this, and we’re like, he’s making way more money than we are just hauling the generators. They’re like, why don’t we just bid on the whole generator package?

I can hire a crane truck, I’ve got buddies with cranes, and I know how to hook a motor up. I can hook up the motor, I can wire it into the fuel tank get that thing running, and then the We’ll just get an electrician out. Like we can take the whole package on. So we started like hauling generators, installing generators, and then Eric, my business partner, who is a much smarter man than I am we were looking at one community and they wanted to replace the power, basically optimize the group sorry.

They wanted to replace a generator that was worn out. And I think it was at the time, 90 kilowatt hours. They wanted to replace it with another 90 kilowatt and Looked at the average load demand, and the average load is, if I remember right, about 20 kilowatts of power average. That’s just your base load, but then it would peak up in the afternoons to about 70.

So we’re like we’re [00:07:00] putting in a 95 for that little bit in case there’s extra capacity, but now you’re running a 90 kilowatt generator when you really only need like an average of 20. So why don’t we downsize it to 35 and then we’ll put in battery bank And then the battery bank will make the peak load demand and then in the because it’s up north We’ll put in a bunch of solar and then all that solar will power it when the sun’s out recharge the batteries And then the generator will just fire up as needed.

So They ended up working. Actually ended up working really poorly for the first attempt But we worked on it for six months optimizing it getting it dialed in and yeah, no and then it’s been That was our intro into hybrid and we’re like it was on that project where we had already reserved a tesla semi that we were driving back in that old 1960s kenworth and we’re like man this truck is the same thing like i don’t use a lot of power while i’m going down the road but i use a lot of power when i’m climbing a hill or starting out from a stop sign what if we did the same thing and we made the batteries to do the peak power But then add a generator to make that small base load.

And then you could just [00:08:00] run a generator at one RPM and then the batteries would take like this hybrid approach. So we started looking into it and we’re like, man, this sure makes sense. How come nobody’s doing it? And then you would also have the range. Like you’re not limited by batteries. You’ve got this peak power.

You have all the advantages of electric, but without having to worry about the negative things of the range. So I was ranting on Tik TOK one day, cause I was filming what we were doing. And I’m like, yeah, why didn’t somebody do this? And then someone’s like, how about you just shut up and build your own? And I’m like, okay, fine. I will build my own. I’ll show you. And I asked, I’m like, Hey, I’m going to take my money back from the Tesla. Like I was basically saying, why doesn’t Tesla do this? Why doesn’t Tesla do it? They’re like, it’s so easy. Why don’t you do it? And I’m like, fine. So yeah, took the money back.

And I’m like, because I’m starting a company, I’m going to call it Edison motors, obviously, because Thomas Edison stealing Nikola Tesla’s idea. I thought it was pretty funny. So that’s how the name of the company came about. And basically off one or two comments where we basically said screw you, [00:09:00] we will do our own and we’ll do it better because I was adamant that just a bunch of truck drivers and mechanics. That no trucks operate them, work on them, restore them, can build a better semi truck than a bunch of Silicon Valley tech bros. We came in at it from a totally different angle. We knew everything about the trucks. We restored probably about 8, 9, 10 classic trucks, full restorations. And so we knew everything about trucks.

We just had to learn more on the electric side. Eric is brilliant, but we outsourced some extra little bit of work. And so we came at it with a truck background first and learnt the EV side. And that strategy has actually been relatively successful.

Caroline: So can you explain a little bit what diesel electric means? Because as far as I understand it, it’s a different technology than what Tesla is trying to do, trying to build with their electric semi truck. 

Chace: Yeah, so Tesla is straight battery electric. So the best way to describe the diesel electric is it’s a fully electric truck. Everything [00:10:00] runs electric air compressor, electric thing. It the diesel just exists to recharge the battery. So it’s a fully it’s like driving around a tesla semi That’s packing its own fast charger behind it

Caroline: Can you, but you can still plug it in. So you put, you can plug it in, you can charge it up, you can leave. And then when the battery needs to be recharged, it’s being recharged using diesel. 

Chace: Yeah, so you can plug it in overnight if you’re plugged in or if you want to stop for lunch and you want to recharge It off of the grid you can But then when you’re running down the highway and you’re like there’s no charging infrastructure near me Or I can’t pull over for three hours to charge.

I’m just going to fire up this generator or it automatically fires up when it sees the batteries at a certain voltage. Like it’s hits 30 percent state of charge. The generator fires up, brings the batteries back up to 80 and then it shuts off again when it’s no longer needed.

Caroline: Yeah, makes sense. Now, some states and local governments here in the U. S. I’m not sure. I haven’t really followed what’s happening in Canada, but in California, particularly, they’ve created a lot of regulation around transitioning to a zero emission [00:11:00] truck infrastructure. So they’ve started with dredge trucks and larger fleets, government fleet.

Things like that, and they also have some of the strictest emissions regulations for vehicles in the U. S. What do you think about this movement and this type of regulation towards zero emission trucks and how do you think it, how do you think it will affect the industry and how do you think the technology for trucks that you’ve developed might fit in?

Chace: Honestly, I think a lot of those grants and regulations are to make a lot of companies a lot of money, but there’s a lot of like green washing of funds, but that’s a whole other conversation. It’s, I’m a firm believer that. If it makes sense economically and the market will solve itself. But get what they’re trying to do. There are some advantages I think of electric. I do see the advantage, especially in the city, is that if you’re working in a downtown city, you’re not producing the emissions where people are breathing it. You’re quieter downtown. Cities aren’t noisy. Vehicles are noisy. Like cities tend to be noisy because of [00:12:00] the vehicles in the cities. If you quiet them out with how quiet electric is and you stop producing that pollution where people are, but battery technology isn’t there yet and I feel like they’re trying to ram zero emissions down our throat when the grid infrastructure can’t handle going electric. You don’t have the range of batteries. You have to buy almost two, three trucks just to get what you would get through with a diesel truck. So you’re buying more trucks, you’re overloading the electrical grid. You have issues where a natural disaster, the grid goes down, your vehicles can’t move, food can’t get to the grocery store.

There’s some serious issues that, yes, it sounds beautiful. We’re going to clean up the air in the cities. We’re going to reduce the noise. We need to have a real serious look at whether our grid can support that, and whether the technology is at that state. It’s why I’m a firm believer of the hybrid diesel electric approach, or gas electric approach, is that you have the advantage.

Our truck can run for about two hours with the batteries but the engine totally shut off. So if you were something like a concrete mixer, and you had [00:13:00] to deliver into the city centre, You can shut your generator off, roll in on electric, unload on the job site or the residential area, leave on electric, and fire the generator back up once you’re outside the city on the way on the highway.

So you’re producing the emissions on the highway where people aren’t breathing, or you’re producing them in the more industrial areas and you’re shutting it off in the residential or downtown core area. It’s got some of that advantages, but it also, it’s not going to overload the grid, and it’s, you’re not going to have to buy two trucks just to do the job of one.

Caroline: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I’ve talked to a lot of O. T. R. drivers and small trucking businesses that run O. T. R. Just, across cross country, basically across different regions in the U. S. And I usually hear four main concerns about, Electric trucks. One of that is infrastructure, right?

The grid, but also the power the charging infrastructure, right? Sure. Maybe it’s getting better in California, but what if I’m going from California to Massachusetts doesn’t really matter if the infrastructure is great in California, I need to get across the country the range [00:14:00] and charging times, which is something you’ve talked about.

I don’t want to have to stop for three hours if I don’t. Wanna stop for three hours and it’s still got driving time. You have a whole other issue with the number of hours and hours of service regulation by the DOT and how that would be affected by charging times. And then there’s the issue of repairs and maintenance.

And this is actually something I think that you’ve talked about at length of, there’s no reason that we build electric vehicles. that are more difficult to service than other vehicles.

Chace: No, and electric should be way easier to service. In all honesty, electric is really easy to work on. If us, a bunch of hillbilly loggers can figure out how to build it, it’s pretty obvious that it’s easy to work on because we are not a sophisticated group of guys. Like you’ve got three wires and you connect this A wire goes into the A spot, B wire goes into the B spot.

And it’s like color coded from the manufacturers. Like it’s, Make the wiring harness in the motor like it’s really easy There’s not a lot [00:15:00] of moving parts in an electric motor You just have a couple bearings a magnet and some copper and there’s almost no moving parts like you ever opened up or seen inside like an 18 speed transmission with all those shafts counter shafts and gears and bearings all like An 18 speed transmission is complicated an electric motor is dogshit simple It’s one of those ones where But then they say the argument is that it’s got high voltage.

So it’s dangerous because you could have high voltage on the truck. So we can’t let somebody work on that truck because it’s dangerous because of the live, the batteries. I’m sorry, but it’s high voltage. The amount of industrial electricians and millwrights and like people like that, that are familiar working at like a sawmill or an industrial plant manufacturing facility, all has 600 volts, high voltage at a lot of these facilities. But it’s lockout tagout procedures. All you need to do is teach lockout tagout. Basically where you disconnect your battery, you put a lock on it, a tag on it that won’t let somebody re energize the battery, and then you open it up and then you put on your [00:16:00] fancy gloves. You’ve got 10, 000 volt gloves.

You put on your gloves, you disconnect it, and then you verify it. You take your little volt meter, you stick it on there. Yes, I’m seeing zero volts, zero amps. Okay, it’s safe to work on, you can take the gloves off, then you’re safe. You just need to teach lockout tagout procedures. They’re very standard in basically any industrial industry. Trucks don’t really have that beyond, I’m going to take the key out of the ignition and put it in my pocket. That seems to be the lockout tagout for trucks. It’s just, you need to do a little bit more disconnect it, or pull the pack fuse out and put the pack fuses somewhere. But if you teach that, Anybody can pretty well service electric trucks, as long as they have the safety procedures that they’re followed.

Caroline: Do you think though, that practically speaking, those kinds of set in stone procedures are easier to control for bigger companies that can, That have resources to develop and train on those processes. Because from what I know about truck mechanics, a lot of them [00:17:00] are owner operated as well, or they’re small shops, local mom and pop businesses is it more difficult for those kinds of companies to switch over to electric and maybe that’s why people are concerned about the price of maintenance and the cost of repairs is already so high. Oh, wow. I think I lost you. 

Chace: We’re just running off solar and luckily we do hybrid. 

Caroline: Yeah. And I’ll give people a little bit of a recap. We lost Chace’s connection and I thought, Oh shoot, is this my connection? Is this his connection? Then I got a text. Hey, my power went out. And don’t you know, we were just talking about the reliability of our electrical grid and how important it is to have hybrid systems that can work in any conditions.

Chace: Yep. This is probably a great example. Imagine that the power goes out because I still don’t have power in the office in the house. So you’re trying to charge your semi truck and then the grid goes down because it gets overloaded due to more vehicles or weather or storms. What do you do? How do people get food to the grocery store?

Because we do all these [00:18:00] hybrid systems, we got a little diesel hybrid set up right outside. We. Eric here got that going. As I mentioned to Eric before, he is the genius. He’s we’ll just plug it into the solar and then we’ll bring the shop back online. So

Caroline: That’s why you got to have a brains in the operation, right?

Chace: that’s right. That’s right. I think this is a perfect example though, is like where the hybrid could actually be used to stabilize the grid. The batteries of the semi truck could take excess power from the grid.

There’s times at night where a lot of wind turbines fire up and load in power on the grid in the middle of the night when it’s not needed.

The trucks can suck that power, but they could also offshore power the grid. Like the trucks in the hybrid system could power up, bring a grid back up, stabilize it. There’s a lot of things for grid resiliency that hybrid semi trucks could bring in. This is a kind of a perfect example.

Caroline: And if you just combine the type of technology that we’re used to using, plus this super advanced batteries that are coming out, you get the benefits of both. Why not use both?

Chace: I lost power there, 

Caroline: What a great example of of an application in real time. So we were talking about repairs and how it doesn’t really make sense that one of the big complaints about electric vehicles is that they’re difficult to service.

And you pointed out that there’s really no reason. Except for maybe some really important but relatively simple safety precautions that people servicing electric trucks need to take that electric trucks should be any harder to service than regular internal combustion engines. 

Chace: Should be way easier. They should be easier to service. Have you ever seen inside of an internal combustion engine? I can’t do an engine rebuild, but I can build an electric truck, so that should tell you a few things.

Caroline: And then the other part of this is what I was thinking about is, how do you take Right now, a lot of the benefits or the grants that you can get to get electric [00:20:00] vehicles or zero emissions vehicles are based on buying new trucks, right? They want you to buy new trucks. What about the billions of dollars in trucking assets that are already existing?

What do we do with all of those internal combustion engine trucks that we already have?

Chace: Yeah, see, I’m a big proponent that, like, why not just rebuild them? Semi trucks and truck owners are used to rebuilding motors and new transmissions and rear ends. Rather than building an entire new truck, why don’t we just take a used truck, drop the axles, put the electric axles in, drop the transmission, put a generator on, and then put the batteries in the frame rail drop in a box with the power inverters and the PDU, power distribution unit, and send out that truck and like just basically rebuild it.

And we thought about that when we were starting out the company and we’re like, man, this makes so much sense. It’s going to be cheaper. It’s easier. One of the screwed up things about that though is that it’s cheaper for me to build a new truck than it is to retrofit an old [00:21:00] truck because then you get your incentives.

The Canadian government gives you a 150, 000 incentive for a new truck. And then some of the provinces have different incentives on top of that. So it’s by the time you add your incentives, it’s actually basically the same cost, if not cheaper, to provide a whole new truck. So it’s you’ve already got frame rails that are 10 years old.

The body’s getting old. The seat’s old. The airlines are getting a little old. Why don’t we just rebuild the but that makes no sense. From an environmental point of view, if what your goal is to reduce emissions wouldn’t rebuilding and retrofitting what you have and if your goal is to just get more electric vehicles on the road, why not incentivize a retrofit as opposed to so ironically, we did some work with the Bc government and talked with the green party, which is the biggest pro environmental party around I was talking with the leader of the green party and I brought these issues and she is fantastic But she’s yeah that makes so much sense We should have incentives to like a retrofit [00:22:00] incentive Like as long as you have an electric vehicle and you’re like plug in hybrid counts as the incentives So if the goal is to get a hybrid vehicle or electric vehicle, why don’t the incentives apply to retrofit?

So they put forward a motion that says hey If you got an old semi truck, we want to get that same incentive if you went and bought a new one. So I never thought we would ever see the day where the green party teamed up with a bunch of loggers to be like, hey, we need to keep those old W 900s and long nose Peterbilt’s on the road.

We’re going to put the Green Party you guys realize that the Green Party put forward a bill that says, hey, we want to give you a grant for keeping your long nose Peterbilt on the road for an extended period of time. Like that’s a weird, that’s a weird world we’re in now.

Caroline: Yeah. But I think it just goes to show that most people are pretty reasonable. And it just means if they haven’t thought of it yet, it’s just that they didn’t have that perspective. Maybe they didn’t have that perspective coming in. Maybe the, all the perspectives that are coming in are [00:23:00] maybe, the ones that have some interest, in, in, in making something out of it, making something off of the policy that you’re going to do. And so those are the voices they’re hearing. Do you think that, policy makers could do a better job if, of reaching environmental goals by just taking into consideration more the perspectives of truck drivers,

Chace: So you’re asking that it could politicians do a better job if they stopped listening to lobbyists and started thinking with some common sense and listening to people in the industry? Yeah.

Caroline: just listening to that, maybe not just, and not just anybody, but like actually talking to people who know about trucks huh, you’re trying to make regulations around, maybe talk to the people who drive in those trucks every day.

Chace: Yeah, like maybe General Motors or Chrysler isn’t the person to best recommend you on funding policies for vehicles, like maybe the big manufacturers have ulterior motives when they’re suggesting things. [00:24:00] Silence.

Caroline: you would have those people in the room as well, but there’s no reason that we don’t talk to most drivers.

And actually I was really shocked and appalled that I didn’t see anything at the mid America truck show about electric trucks. And I know that they’re not exactly the most popular thing for truck drivers to talk about, but they have people talking about autonomous trucks. at the Mid America Truck Show, which I would argue are even less popular than electric vehicles.

Chace: Autonomous is the dumbest idea I’ve heard of because it’s Oh, you know what? The drivers will take over last mile. Like autonomous trucks are a way of tech bros in Silicon Valley policing investor money because I, and I’ve done videos on this and be like, They’re like, the autonomous trucks are going to [00:25:00] replace the long haul driver and the truck’s going to go down the road, but who’s going to maintain it, who’s going to fuel it, who’s going to charge it, and they’re like we can solve those things, we can have gas station.

But we already have basically autonomous vehicles moving freight. They’re called freight trains, and they’ve existed forever. A freight train can move like 400 semi trucks worth of cargo per load. If you’re just trying to Build more rail infrastructure. If you’re just going to be like, the truckers are going to handle the last mile delivery.

That’s what a freight train is. A freight train goes across the country with massive payloads, and then they get to a yard and the trucker grabs the cargo or the container off it and takes it the last mile. Like it’s just a bunch of tech bros jerking themselves off for investor money trying to figure out Hey, how are we going to get billions to fund these autonomous trucks?

It’s trains It’s been solved and it’s super efficient and it’s way more efficient than the trucks. You don’t have tire wear the extra wind resistance like you can pack loads Like just build more train tracks if you took all of the billions and billions of dollars that went into autonomous money And you just built [00:26:00] dedicated train tracks across the country You would probably have more success and have a much better carbon footprint than trying to redo the entire tracking industry.

Caroline: No, good point.

How many people driving trucks want they’re one of the things that, that one of the people that came on the show Adam from DIY Semi he came on the show and pointed out that. Not only could Truck driving, does that, do all kinds of things, you’ve got all kinds of safety concerns, you’ve got all kinds of technological issues, you have other alternatives that could do a better job, but you’re also automating out the number one job for high school educated men in the United States and what kind of impact might that have On everything, not just the environment, but our society.

What are we even doing this for? So there’s so many more considerations to think about when you’re thinking about autonomous trucking and autonomous vehicles. My point is that autonomous trucking is [00:27:00] not a popular topic among truck drivers and mid America truck show is. The number one place, I think it’s the biggest convening of truck drivers in North America.

So if you want to get truck drivers perspectives on something, then that’s where you should be. And there was no one that I saw in three days that was even mentioning electric or hybrid vehicles. So that’s why I was really excited when I found your channel, because I’m like, finally, Somebody who knows about trucking and knows about trucks is talking about electric technology in a way that makes sense.

And it’s actually pretty popular with truck drivers. You guys have gotten an enormous following from people in the trucking industry. Can you talk a little bit about that? What is your fan base look like? And has it surprised you?

Chace: Honestly, yeah, our fan base is probably definitely majority truck drivers that follow us and people in the trucking industry and then some engineers and [00:28:00] some technology people that like to follow and, but the feedback has been very positive. It’s very rare. We’ve come across somebody negative and it’s a lot of the time.

Truckers are painted as these anti environmental. They don’t care about the environment and they don’t want to do this. And they’re like, they’re for the most part. It’s not that truckers just want to pollute the environment. It’s that the fact that they’re not dumb. But the silicone valley California says truck drivers are just dumb.

They know better than the average driver. And the driver looks at it and saves the battery, sees what he does for work, and he can put two and two together and be like that electric truck won’t do the job I’m gonna do. I can’t sacrifice my income. I can’t buy two trucks. I can’t pull over for three, four hours.

They’re not dumb. They’re telling it’s not going to work. So yeah, you can see the advantage, the electric torque, the region. So it’s when we were just like we’ll just put a diesel engine and we’ll make it run way more efficiently. And you’ll get some fuel savings because it’s going to be more efficient.

You’ll get the power. The feedback is yes, this makes sense. Freight trains have been around since the 1930s as diesel electric and [00:29:00] freight trains don’t have transmissions for a reason because once you electric, it’s very hard, like drilling rigs. We get a lot of support from the oil and gas workers, the guys out on the drilling rigs, because they’ve seen that technology for diesel electric.

There probably has not been a mechanical rig in operation in Alberta. In about 20 years because they’ve all gone diesel electric They have diesel generators and then all of your drive units. All of your controls are all electric. It’s way more efficient It’s way quicker. You save fuel. Nobody would ever dream of bringing out a mechanical unit So you see these oil and gas workers that are used to rigs and they’re like That’s the same technology as the drill and rig brought into the semi truck.

Yes. We’ve had huge success So obviously that’s going to be a success in the semi truck side. So You Even oil and gas workers aren’t opposed to electric. They all run electric drive units. They’re just, if you told the oil and gas, Hey, we’re going to bring out a battery, and you’re going to have to bring out a charging station or something to your drilling rig, they’d tell you to [00:30:00] beat it the same way the truckers are telling California to beat it.

It’s, they’re not dumb. They just yeah.

Caroline: They know how to run a trucking business. It’s that simple. Like they know how to run a trucking business. They know how it works right now. I’m not saying that they’re the only people that should be shaping that, that policy and regulation. But they certainly should be the loudest voices there.

Chace: Yep, it’s you make the best point. They know about it. They know about the trucks. I think it’s for that exact reason why Edison Motors has had such success in building these trucks. You look at Nikola Motor, they’re worth 40 billion when it came out. Their truck didn’t even work. They released the brakes, aired the truck up, released the brakes, rolled it down a hill and made a fake video of their truck working with 40 billion.

And it’s taken them forever, and people have complaints, and like parking brakes fail, like there’s just, there’s issues with them building the trucks. We have been so successful because we are truck guys. We have a, had a trucking company, we shut the truck company down to focus on Edison. And that’s it.

We had all the trucks. We rebuilt the trucks. We know [00:31:00] trucks. We were successful in building electric semi trucks because we knew trucks. That was our passion. These guys that run the trucking company know what’s best for the trucking company. Not a person sitting in an office in California.

Caroline: right. Can you talk a little bit about battery safety? I’ve heard one of the other concerns that I hear, especially OTR drivers who have to sleep are in sleeper cabs, right? They say, I don’t want to sleep above one of those batteries. And that can just, blow up. We see it on the news. Whenever something goes wrong with an electric vehicle or battery we see what happens out on the road.

It can be really tragic, actually. So can you talk about battery safety? What is the issue here? Is this really an issue?

Chace: Anytime you have any source of energy that’s condensed, you’re going to have a risk of fires. Now, there’s a big difference though, where it comes to battery chemistry. Much as you have a difference between ethanol, gasoline, and diesel for combustion, different fuels ignite differently you can throw a cigarette in [00:32:00] gasoline and it explodes.

You throw a lit cigarette into a puddle of diesel, it won’t. The same way it happens with battery chemistry. If you have lithium ion, it tends to be subject to, it can be subject to thermal runaway. But, one of the advantages is because it’s super energy dense, You can pack a lot of power into a very light battery.

So a lot of manufacturers go lithium ion because they just want to minimize the weight while maximizing the range. That’s our key focus, and they’ll make the trade off on a battery that has worse chemistry. We went with lithium iron. And then right now we just switched over to LMFAO batteries, magnesium oxide batteries.

They aren’t nearly as subject to thermal runaway. They don’t overheat, they don’t run away, they’re more puncture resistant, they just don’t ignite the same way that the lithium does. And we can get away with that, even though the batteries are heavier, We don’t need as many batteries because we’re a hybrid.

I don’t need to pack around a megawatt of batteries. I can pack around 200 kilowatt hours worth of batteries So i’ve got smaller batteries. So my weight [00:33:00] going to the heavier safer battery isn’t going to be negatively affected as much

Caroline: I see. How realistic do you think? I know the types of trucks that you’re building are mainly for logging or heavy hauls. Going up and down hills. There’s some advantage to hybrid in that sense, because you’re breaking a lot. So you’re recharging. The batteries, you can take advantage of that kind of technology.

How realistic do you think it is that long haul trucking can go electric or electric hybrid anytime soon, given all of the challenges that we’ve faced? That we’ve talked about.

Chace: It can go electric hybrid, like diesel electric. Because you’re not worried about range or charging. Now there is a downside. You’re not going to see nearly as many as much efficiencies as you would logging or city driving because it’s all about that peak Power as we discussed earlier shaving that peak power getting the regen A long haul truck gets up to 60 mile an hour and it stays there for two three hours running across the prairies Like it’s not going to take the peak load.

It’s not going to get the regen It’s not going to get a lot of those features Where [00:34:00] you could make an argument is yes, the engine’s running at one, but you can gear a truck and a transmission. Realistically it doesn’t make as much sense. It’s almost a wash when it comes to fuel mileage for long haul.

Where it does make sense, though, is driver creature comforts. How many drivers or companies have no idle policies, or they may have APUs, and you’ve got to listen to that noisy APU. If you have the batteries, The semi truck batteries will run all your creature comforts in the floor. We’re building a couple other trucks, and for example, we’re putting in electric heated floors in the truck.

So in the wintertime, you can just turn on the electric heat in the floors to warm your feet up. You got air conditioning, heating you want to put in a hot water tank with on demand hot water? You can do that if you have the battery range. You don’t have to ever idle your truck. That’s the advantage and I think that’s where companies would see the more savings is like the winter time when you’re idling it all night or it’s 100 degrees out in Texas in the summertime and you gotta idle for your AC.

You don’t have to worry about that you’ve got the batteries. So that’s probably the advantage is like creature comforts. [00:35:00] Run your Starlink. Starlink uses a a kilowatt of power. It will slowly kill your things but if you want a Starlink dish you got the batteries for it. Like you can make the driver’s life better by having the batteries.

Caroline: That’s interesting. I hadn’t thought of that application for it. I do think that probably OTR long haul is probably gonna be the last thing that we figure out in for, in terms of electrification for trucking.

Chace: Last thing we should figure out, I don’t know why folks are focusing on long haul, because long haul, you’re by definition not in a city the majority of the time. You’re running down the highway where people don’t live, people don’t work shouldn’t we focus on the concrete mixers, the dump trucks, the garbage trucks, the hydro?

Like the utility trucks, all of the things that work and live where people live can make those really quiet when they’re doing the job, you got to do a concrete pour in a residential area. You roll in on electric, you unload, you leave it. That’s cleaning up the air where people live, breathe, reducing sound pollution, like who cares about the long haul trucks they’re [00:36:00] running down the highway at 60 miles an hour, where nobody hears them and nobody’s breathing that the air,

Caroline: right, and to be fair to the regulations that are being passed through the ones that we’ve looked at in, in California. Most of them are really focused on some pretty specific groups of trucking companies. Dreyage is a big focus of it government run fleets, which are in essence, local fleets, right?

You’re talking about Trash disposal or waste management. You’re talking about school buses things that go, in a city or locally, and then larger fleets. They’ve got they want to move larger fleets in the trucking industry, generally in California over to zero emissions vehicles.

They do have really strict emission standards, and those are the most progressive emission standards in the country. In California, so people have to be concerned about that because there’s a certain age of truck can’t meet those emissions regulations, even [00:37:00] today. And as they get stricter and stricter, you’re gonna have to have newer and newer trucks.

So I do wonder if there’s a, there’s a. argument or, an idea that maybe you could have you could retrofit trucks that just have better emission standards. So you, if you have an old truck, is it crazy to think that you might be able to retrofit that truck? Maybe even if it’s not going hybrid or electric, could you retrofit it with better emission standards?

Chace: Yeah, you could rip out a motor and put in a tier four final motor in it like if you had an older truck and does make sense when you get into retrofitting some of the trucks is like what when people don’t think about it like yeah on a highway truck on a straight edge truck where I can get a Freightliner Cascadia for 200 grand.

I can just buy a new truck. Why am I gonna spend a hundred grand rep repair, repairing it, and 200 on a new one? But what about the things like a 40 ton, 50 ton rotator, like a wrecker or a crane truck? Those crane trucks can get out. Re rec, rotators can get over a million dollars. So you got some of those [00:38:00] specialized vocational trucks that have heavy use of power that you spend a million dollars.

If you’re spending a million dollars. And now you’re looking at 100, 000 to retrofit it with a new diesel motor that’s tier 4 final or a couple hundred thousand to retrofit it with hybrid. You’ve got a million dollar asset. Why buy a whole new million dollar asset when you can just replace the drivetrain and like they’re not as disposable in the heavy vocational industry.

It’s really why we decided to go for a niche. Like we’re not building light duty drayage trucks. We’re not building long haul. We’re building those heavy specs like the Kenworth C500s, the off highway loggers, the crane trucks. That’s the kind of trucks we’re building on because I think that’s the one where the technology is best suited for.

Caroline: What do you think small fleet managers or owner operators should know about electric and hybrid trucks? What’s something that you hear, maybe a misconception about electric vehicles that, that you wish people knew more about?

Chace: The biggest one is that you can’t work on them or [00:39:00] service them. That is my biggest pet peeve. No, we’ve very much shown that they’re easy to work on and service. The big manufacturers don’t want you to they want you to bring it back to the dealership so they can charge you but that isn’t something to really be scared of One of the coolest things is like where people are like you can’t do anything with it The programming we’ve learned is actually really fun Like I want to see like we’ve heard from the diesel shops and the guys that build the high performance trucks I like to be able to play with my motor bigger injectors more power We will make that code open when they people buy the truck and what we have learned is the ability to program throttle Mapping power torque curves like the controllability of electric is infinitely more There’s people that can program some really cool things So it’s like it’s not that you can’t program or work on them.

They just won’t let you We’ll let them. I will give somebody, if they buy a truck, I will give them the code that they can program their own. Because I want to see what like the Pittsburgh Powers or the PDIs can actually do once they get their hands on electric. Like we can take it so far, but there’s going to be some experts out there [00:40:00] that can really take it to the next level.

Caroline: That’s awesome. So who should we talk to next about this issue anybody interesting that you’ve met at conferences, or maybe we should talk to the green party.

Chace: Talk to the green party and see why they want to keep old W 900s on the road. Yeah, no, I. Probably find a few people but it is We’ve been to a few conferences where the electric vehicles Are there and like they don’t bring a lot of engineers Like it’s cool to talk with the engineers that design work on them. And like those are the cool people to talk to.

Caroline: All right, we’ll try to get another engineer on thank you so much Chace for joining us for this week in trucking. It was awesome to meet you and we’re really excited to see where Edison motors goes.

Chace: You bet thanks for inviting me on there’s tons of fun.