February 23, 2023 • 29 mins
Chace Barber is the co-founder of Edison Motors. Chace's problem is this: How do you build electric logging trucks in rural Canada, with money you raised from people who follow you on TikTok?
Chace started his career driving logging trucks. He loved the idea of Tesla's electric semi, but when it never arrived, he decided to build his own.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. In twenty seventeen, when Tesla announced plans to sell
an electric semi truck, Chase Barber was in I reserved
a Tesla Semi. On the day of the revealing, they
put out the little thing of like reservation numbers, and
I'm like reservation number five on this Tesla Semi. Chase
(00:37):
was the co owner of a small trucking company in
British Columbia. He and his partner bought and restored old
trucks and they drove them to haul logs and set
up power systems for remote towns in northern Canada. So
Chase was excited about the possibility of an electric truck.
Then a few years passed and a few more and
the Tesla Semi still wasn't available. So we thought, well,
(01:00):
we know how to build a truck. We can make
a truck. We've been building and restoring. Why don't we
just make our own electric truck. And I said, screw it.
We can actually do this when we can make it
as a company. And while we canceled our reservation, I
got the twenty five thousand dollars US back that we
had to put down for it, and I use that
twenty five thousand dollars to start Edison Motors. I'm Jacob
(01:30):
Goldstein and this is What's Your Problem, a show where
I talk to people who are trying to make technological progress.
My guest today is Chase Barber, co founder of Edison Motors.
Chase's problem is this, how do you build electric logging
trucks in rural Canada with money you raised from people
who follow you on TikTok. Before he started his company,
(01:52):
Chase drove a logging truck and he loved it. It
is such a good job. It's the only job logging
on the West coast or I think you can be
scared driving at like five mile an hour, ten mile
an hour and you're in a white knuckle on the wheel. Look,
I love it. I love being up in the mountains,
going up into the bush every day. The roads are challenging,
(02:13):
there's no traffic, it's just pure driving. Did you ever
almost die? Oh yeah, yeah, so many times? Like that's
just that's just a fact in life. How'd you get
from driving a logging truck to starting a company? Well,
that started back in university. I decided that I should
go back after I was tired of driving truck for
like three years and I'm like, okay, I need a backup.
(02:35):
It's like, in case I don't want to do this
my whole life, I'll go to university while I'm still
young and single and have you know, it would be
a good time. But after four years of university, you know,
I did really well. I had like a four point
er GPA in economics. And it's not bragg and it's
just tell you how bad the job market is. At
least when I was graduating is I did a Bank
(02:56):
of Canada economic forecasting contest where I came second place
in Canada and got offered a job as a junior
economist at the Bank. Bank of Canada's the Central Bank
of Canada, Like like that's head in the US. Yeah, yeah,
the US Federal Reserve as an economist there. And after
four years of university, the salary was forty five thousand
a year Canadian Like what I drove truck And I
(03:19):
made more money driving truck in one summer at university
working four months of the year than I did if
I was going to live in the center city of
Canada working at this prestige job. I'm like, that's insane.
So that's where I met my business partner Eric, and
I said, hey, we should just do a trucking company.
(03:42):
We got business degrees, I've got a real great background
in business. So we had the last of our money
that we had left after the year. We pulled it
up and we had about ten thousand dollars, so we
bought a truck and trailer for four thousand dollars in
nineteen sixty nine. Kenworth came with an old long logger
setup and we put that to work, and that's how
we started out in business bout six seven years ago. Now,
(04:04):
And were you driving that truck that you bought then?
Were you like owner operating? Oh yeah, yeah, we're owner operators.
We spent the whole last semester of university restoring this
old truck, fixing it all up at sat in a
field for like fifteen years. And then we got a
job and we went up to the ukon with this truck.
So up in northern Canada, up on the Arctic Circle
(04:25):
in a fifty year old logging truck, and that's how
we started our little business. So okay, so far, so good.
You got your truck, you're driving your truck, You're getting paid.
I mean lots of people spend their whole their whole
careers doing that. Oh yeah, that probably would have been
a good career. But we started doing like haul and
(04:47):
generators and haul and heavy equipment, and like we expanded
with the low bed into generators and machinery, and then
we thought, well, like, rather than just doing the trucking,
you can see that the money is doing the installs.
We can do some of these installs and construction. So
what are you what are you installing off grid diesel generators?
(05:07):
So there's a lot of mines, remote places. There's actually
over three hundred and fifty towns in Canada that aren't
hooked to the North American grid and rely one hundred
percent of diesel. So that's super expensive. You got to
bring in the fuel to these remote places. It's inefficient,
big carbon footprint, it's bad. Oh yeah, yeah, I mean
(05:28):
we did a lot of trucking of the fuel in there.
That's how we really, like, you know, haul a generator
in and we're like, oh, well we can haul a
fuel in. And are these are these mostly sort of
kind of industrial settings? I mean, is it like mining
and that sort of thing, or like what are the
places that need it. Some were industrial, some were mines.
There was a few mines in the Yukon and a
(05:50):
lot of them though we're residential, like just First Nations
reserves up in Canada or other normal cities, so like
Native American reservations we would call them in the US. Yeah, okay, yeah,
that's what you would call them. Yeah, Native American reservations.
So you're shifting your business now. You're going from being
just trucker's basically people moving stuff for a fee, to
(06:11):
being sort of you're in the you're in the power
business now for these remote settings, Is that right? Yeah? Yeah,
I guess we were. If you didn't know, it's a
good way to put it. Yeah, I guess we were.
I still thought of ourselves as probably right, you're probably right, okay. Yeah.
So we did our first big hybrid system installed. How
it must be about four years ago now, and it
(06:33):
was this community way up northern BC rate on the
Yukon border. And what we did is they had a
huge peak power load, so everybody would get home from
work at five o'clock, everyone comes home, everyone turns onto
the power. Where we see it in our national grid,
huge peak power demands at like five o'clock if everyone
gets home. Well, they had that. So what they had
(06:54):
is the old way of doing it is that you
would size a generator to meet that peak power load,
to have that power demand when you needed it. So
they had a ninety five kilowatt generator running. But what
we did is we went in, we start installed a
large battery bank, a bunch of solar, and then we
downsize that generator to thirty five because that battery bank
(07:16):
met that peak power to mat And you had a
lot of people there their whole lives, they've grown up there,
they've listened to these diesel generators always running in the background.
For the first time in some of their lives, their
little village in the mountains has been quiet, no sound.
That's nice. That's a nice detail. So okay, So there's
a town that had a giant diesel generator and you
(07:39):
got them set up with solar panels and batteries and
a much smaller generator that could charge the batteries when
the solar power wasn't enough. That's right, yep, Okay, So
keep going. I'm waiting for the big moment. We are.
We at the big moment. It's coming soon. There's no
big moments in business, no fair. That's a very business
is made of a lot of little moments that add
(08:02):
up to a big moments. There's always a little tiny
steps forward, steps back. It's a store good story is
a lot of little steps. That is very wise point,
very very fair. So what's the next little moment? The
next little moment is one day we were looking at
all these diesel light towers and we thought, well, why
do we make those solar? So on a napkin, I
sketched out this little solar light tower and Caterpillar loved that.
(08:26):
Finning loved that they turned that into one hundred percent solar.
So rather than running a diesel generator on site with
all the emissions and noise pollution and having to pay
for fuel, we now have made one hundred percent solar
one that we designed that works up in northern Canada.
And then that started as a manufacturing and in between
that I was just driving logging trucks doing solar like.
(08:48):
The solar installed was going really smoothly, so I actually
transferred back into hauling logs for a while. Finally we
had this kind of aha moment when we did a project,
and we were sitting there thinking that a semitruck is
a lot like these little diesel powered communities. It's got
a huge peak load, so it takes a lot of
(09:10):
power to get that weight moving, Like to build that
initial inertia takes a lot. Once you're at speed, it
takes very little to maintain that momentum. So that moment
when you're getting the truck going, it's like the moment
when everybody comes home from work and turns on all
their appliances. It's just this moment of peak demand that's
way higher than the kind of baseline. That's right, It's
(09:31):
exactly like that when you think of the truck like
an off grid power system. So we thought about it
and well, why don't we just optimize the trucks patteries
the same way. And this is what electric can do. Like,
we're at the point where all the electric technology for
trucks is there, the electric drive motors, the batteries, the
(09:52):
electric control gears. Well, why don't we make this efficient
and run this like a freight train. Freight trains have
been diesel electric and they move tons of weight because
the electric motors have tons of torque, tons of power
super efficient. You have regenerative breaking to capture energy slowing down.
When we built our prototype, we were finding like fifty
(10:13):
sixty percent fuel savings on these log and trucks. So
and can you plug it in or no? Yep, okay,
oh yeah, yeah, no, we plug it in in the evening.
So you pull up next to the house and pull
it up next to the shop and plug it in
and it just charges. So you always start your day
with one hundred percent battery and you get about two
hours of driving out of this thing, and then the
(10:34):
diesel generator turns on, runs for about half an hour,
shuts back off. You'd get another hour or two hours
of driving, and then it runs for another half hour.
So is it right that part of your thesis in
building this diesel charger is that a purely electric truck
just won't be able to carry enough enough batteries, enough
(10:54):
battery power to do the kind of work that these
trucks need to do. That was one of the issues
is that electric trucks for eighty percent eighty five percent
of the trucking industry will not work and probably won't
work until batteries and charging infrastructure massively improves but we're
looking at twenty thirty years until we can get to
(11:14):
that point. But going diesel electric is kind of that
best of both worlds. Oh, I can recharge the batteries. Like, yeah,
you're not going to eliminate diesel, but you're going to
massively reduce the amount of diesel you need. It's a
step in the right direction. So okay, So that's the
basic idea. It seems like it would be super hard
(11:36):
and capital intensive to turn that into a business, much
harder than buying one ten thousand dollars logging truck in
a field and driving it for fun and profit. It
was hard. Yeah, that's you're right, that's not an easy
thing to do. But thank god we kind of went
viral if a company can go viral, and it's been
(12:00):
one of those things that's really helped. You're you're big
on TikTok, which I would not have guessed. Tell me
about your life in TikTok and how that helped. Well,
it was when when I was still hauling logs. One
of the guys that used to work with us, an
older guy and you know, late fifties, early sixties, was
that kept making TikTok videos and I'm like, I'm okay,
(12:20):
I better download TikTok and see what the hell Shane's
posting about me. And I probably scrolled TikTok for like
six months before I even made a video. And then
I first made a truck video and it just went
really big, and then I started making more videos. Was
it What was the first one that went big? I
think I was shifting gears and dancing. I think it
(12:41):
was one of those ten fifteen seconds dancing tiktoks. But
I was doing like a trucker version of the dance whatever.
It was dorky. And then yeah, when I announced that
we were doing Edison, it all of a sudden took
off millions and millions of views. We had our own page,
we had a little crowdfunding, and I'm like, okay, well
(13:01):
we'll crowd fund this first build. And within five days
we had raised almost half a million dollars and closed
the crowdfunding out off of just this one TikTok. So
that's amazing. Half a million dollars is a lot of money.
But when I think of starting a truck company, it's
not even It's many orders of magnitude away, right, And
(13:24):
this is partly because the way you were starting a
truck company is different than what I would have thought of. Right,
you're not building a factory to mass produced trucks, right,
tell me, tell me about the way you're doing. No,
we're starting with a very common sense approach. Let's build
one prototype, and let's raising up money to build one
prototype to make sure that our idea is valid. Let's
take it in a truck, will retro fit it with
(13:44):
a diesel motor. We'll connect the control systems that we design,
and we'll just we'll try it out. We'll see how
it works. And we did that, and we built the
truck and did it work? Oh? Yeah, yeah, no, it
worked great, lots of good power, great acceleration. There was
a few little things that we needed to go back
to the drawing board. I did not like the drive
(14:06):
line system. We snapped the drive line a couple of
times trying to do some heavy stuff and then trying
to drag race the truck. Is that the way you
stress test a truck is all hall bunch of logs,
a ball and b drag race it. Apparently? Yes, yes,
I let I let another truck driver in town. Real
good truck driver. And we were letting all the truck
(14:27):
drivers come out and try it, and I'm like, all right,
Jim like give her, just give her the beans, and
he throttled into it and ping rain. We're like, okay,
I guess that ends the testing for today. That ping,
that was a key part of the truck breaking. So
they tried a different part. So I'm called an exel
(14:47):
that's designed to be used with electric vehicles. The exel worked,
no more pings. Just to zoom out for a quick
set here, I want to just highlight a thing Chase
said a minute ago, that idea that sure, electric trucks
sound great, but for lots of uses, full on electric
trucks just aren't there yet, right, And so I I
(15:09):
really like the sort of practical incrementalism of his approach,
this sort of let's build what we can build now
because it's better than the existing thing, even if it
isn't perfect. Still to come on the show today, how
Chase built his company on top of an old law
from the Cold War. Now back to the show, And
(15:36):
just to be clear, when you talk about building a truck,
I mean you're not like machining all the parts from
scratch or something. Right, No, that is our biggest saving grace.
We looked at these things and what a truck company
is now. We realized really quickly that we couldn't afford
to compete if we had to make all our own
parts like Tesla, And we realized a lot of people
(15:57):
don't want to buy custom parts. So we went to
the parts that trucks have been using for the last
fifty sixty years, those common core parts, and we use
the simple off the shelf. We actually had a great
partnership with CBS Fleet Break. These trucks supply stores sat
down with their parts experts and we said, what parts
do you always have in stock? What are you finding
(16:19):
out that the people aren't complaining about that aren't breaking
Give us your most reliable parts that you always have
in stock. And then our team and mechanics worked with
our few engineers and they said, well, let's just part
putting these parts on. Let's pick those parts that we
can grab off the shelf. And you know how much
time and money that saves you in development cost. It's
going to save our customers money, it's going to save downtime,
(16:42):
and it got us into production. We're now starting on
our product first production truck already in just a year
and a half of starting the company. When you talk
about going to sort of trucking parts stores and using
parts that have been around for decades, I mean, I
wouldn't it makes sense at a certain level. I would
never have thought of it. Like it's almost like you're
building the trucks from the parts that are just sort
(17:02):
of around, like from spare parts or something. I mean,
how much of the truck can you build that way?
And you build a whole truck that way? You can
pretty well, except for some of like the high voltage
controls and the elect specific parts trucks have shared for
the last forty years. Of very common core parts. You
can take a break pot, a type thirty break pot
(17:24):
off a nineteen fifty five Kenworth, and that's the same
type thirty break pot that's still on a twenty twenty
three freight liner. Turn signal on my sixty two Kenworth
is the same turn signal that Western Star used up
until like two thousand and seven. Like a lot of
the parts were just all the same. Why is that,
Like that's not true for cars at all? Right? It
has a lot to do with the US defense Procurement
(17:47):
Act of nineteen fifty four O US Defense Procurement Act. Okay,
go on, I believe that's what it called. It's something
along those lines, but it's basically the US, NATO and
these places. They were worried about the Russians, sure, and
they saw what we did to Germany was we bomb
the hell out of their factories in World War two.
In World War two, okay, yeah, and they realized like, well,
(18:10):
if the Soviets attack us, the first thing they're gonna
do is hit our factories. Well, trucks are so vital
to the defense industry and just people surviving. If you
run out of trucks, you run out of food in cities.
And they thought like, well, okay, well they'll hit Detroit.
We need to be able to figure this out. So
they started making all the parts the same. So did
the government sort of put out a set of specifications
(18:32):
and said, whatever, the turn signal has to look like this.
I mean it was it something like that. That's exactly
what they did. It was right down to even the
shift knobs. The shift knobs are all the same in
color coded on trucks. If you have a fifteen speed,
it'll have a blue button for your thumb. Thirteen speed
will have a red, eighteen speed will have a gray
(18:54):
And it's the same across Europe. It's the same across Australia.
Like you op into an Australian truck and you look
at your shift knob, even on a brand new truck,
if it's gray, you know, you can split the bottom
and top end so that the drivers could ship Like
that is how can and standardized. We had trucks for
eighty years or sixty years. That is amazing And it's
(19:14):
really interesting to think about that, right, Like the thing
about sort of the economic implications of that and the
technological implications of it, right, Like, I mean, on the
one hand, it seems like it would be really bad
for innovation, right Like if somebody came up with a
better way to make a part, they kind of wouldn't
be able to do it, right. That seems like a
(19:35):
downside of it. On the other hand, you can always
get spare parts and the company isn't going to gouge
you if the turn signal breaks because you could buy
somebody else's turn signal. I mean, are those the basic
trade offs? Am I thinking about it? Right? Yeah? That's
probably about right, So they relax these laws in the eighties.
What innovation have we really seen in trucks? Well, I
(19:55):
don't know anything about trucks, So you tell me what
innovation have we seen in trucks? Well, we still have
a turn signal, but nowadays, you know, that turn signal
for my old sixties is about forty bucks on Amazon.
I can just order it. They still have it, Like
all the parts are there, forty dollars. Now you want
to turn signal for a brand new truck, it's five
hundred dollars. So are you the rare, you know, founder
(20:18):
entrepreneur making the case for a kind of government top
down regulation of like all detailed specifications. Oh god, am I?
Maybe I am? Kids Like, you know what, if that's
what it's, that's what it takes. Why not have a
little bit of regulation in here. We do need something.
It's not a pure free market we exist in anymore.
(20:40):
It's very much a more of a do I say,
chrony capitalism system. But there's only a few big truck
suppliers like you look at some of the big brands
are all owned by other large brands. Maybe we need
something in there to protect the owner operators of key
vital industries. That look what happened just with China during
(21:02):
COVID and it wasn't even malicious, but there was the
computer chip shortage. You couldn't even and buy new trucks,
they couldn't put them off the assembly line, that you
couldn't repair trucks, like the price of trucks went crazy.
And that was just from a few month interruption in
the global supply chain. Imagine what would happen if a
war broke out with China. What would happen to our
(21:24):
trucking industry overnight? If it was some economic war, it
doesn't even have to be a full on hot war.
But if we had another Cold war with China where
they stopped supplying us, we would lose our ability to
move anything in North America. So when you decide to
try and build a prototype, you decide you're going to
go back, You're going to basically draw on this sort
(21:44):
of reservoir of interchangeable parts from this Cold war policy,
and you kind of build your truck out of those parts. Yeah,
that's exactly what we did. So okay, so you got
your prototype, like is it around now? Is it like out? Back. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
we parked here for the wintertime. We got a lot
of snow here. We only took it out one a
(22:06):
couple of days, like when it was minus thirty five
to see how it did in the winter. But other
than that, we parked it and we're now just building
the new production truck. So okay, So right, so you
did the prototype. It worked, I mean, then did you
would just tell me about the financing? Did you raise
You must have raised more money to go into production.
(22:26):
We did. We did another round of crowdfunding and same
thing again. Within five days we had raised one point
five million dollars, which is more than enough to build
the first production truck. We're calling out the production prototype,
and we've settled on four or five really good first
trial customers that are going to be financing the first
few truck builds. So and when do you think the
(22:49):
first you know, truck driver is gonna drive your truck
to go get a bunch of logs. I'm hoping by
the end of this summer. Okay, So what what do
you have to figure out between now and then? I mean,
I know you made a prototype, but what do you
have to solve to actually have your trucks out in
the world. Well, sell them to these first customers. We'll
(23:09):
get that real world feedback. We'll figure out. It's kind
of that old way of engineering. But let's put it
out in the field. Let's see what works, let's see
what breaks, let's bring it back in, let's change the
parts to break, let's improve it, and then let's go
into the general public. I mean in terms of the
maintenance space. I know you said you use, you know,
as many sort of core, old cheap parts on your
(23:32):
trucks as possible, but you know clearly it's not all old, core,
cheap parts. You're doing new things. Is that going to
be a challenge for the people who buy the truck,
Like getting that part of the truck maintained, It'll be
a little bit different on that part. So we designed
a lot of these, and we had some brilliant electrical engineers,
(23:56):
and we took electrical parts that were common for the
high voltage world, people working in like power plants, and
so you almost need like a mill electrician, like a
sawmill that has all these electric motors are a mine.
Has those people that can service those electric motors. That
makes sense. It does seem like in this sort of
period of transition, or just when your trucks are new
(24:18):
and there's only three of them in the world or
ten of them in the world, or a hundred of
them in the world, Like, it'll be hard for the
person driving that truck to figure out how to get
it fixed, right, Like, it's not obvious how to solve
that piece of it, even if there is some industrial
electrician who would know, Like figuring out who that person
is and getting them to fix the truck seems hard, No,
So we took advantage and we partnered up with some
(24:39):
universities and we bring a lot of summer students now
in for the summer, like heavy duty mechanics summer students
that are in their second third year apprenticeship. And what
we do is we've been training them up as part
of their coop education, paying them in wage they learn.
They work on these trucks in the summer. And now
these few companies that want to buy our trucks, they're
(24:59):
larger fleets, and they said the same thing, how are
we going to maintain these and like, rather than just
always coming back to our shop, we're gonna send you
this guy. These people's contact information, so you can hire
a diesel mechanic that already has a knowledge of how
these trucks work because they helped build the trucks. So
that was our way around it. When you look sort
(25:20):
of from here on out, whatever for the next year,
next six months, all the things you got to do,
what are you particularly worried about? Like what at this
point are you worried? They are you know, trying to
solve actually find a facility to build these trucks. Where
are you building them now? We're building them up in
a temporary shop, so I couldn't get city permitting to
(25:41):
build a shop where we're at, and my house is
kind of up a little bit of a logging road
about fifteen minutes out of side of town. So we're
building them illegally because I can't. I'm technically not zoned
to manufacture run any kind of industry. So right now
we're building them as any trucks as we can before
the government finds out that we're building trucks where we're
building them. So the stressful part is now finding a place.
(26:05):
And our town had a massive flood about a year ago.
We lost like twenty percent of our houses. It wiped
out the entire industrial district. There's no land available, and
I want to own the land. We have the money,
we have it, like, we got things in place to
be able to do this, but there's just nothing available.
So you're telling me that you want to have trucks
(26:26):
on the road in oh, six eight months, and you
don't have anywhere to build them right now. We have
a spot just nowhere to legally build. If anyone asks
our shop is for agricultural use, we could build a
big shop for agricultural use. And then they're like, well,
what are you using it for? But like storing my
(26:48):
classic truck collection and they come out and they look
at the classic trucks and they're like, oh, yeah, I
guess you do restore classic trucks. Yeah. No, it's just
a hobby. So we're on that zoning rate now. And
where where is it? Where do you live? Where do
you live? I feel like I definitely shouldn't say that now. Fair, okay, fair,
let's let's let's but it's small town in the middle
(27:08):
of the middle of BC in Canada, a small town
in British Columbia. We'll merrit British Columbia. That that's as
much as we can. We should say. We'll leave it there.
We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round,
including questions about trucking and TikTok. That's the end of
(27:35):
the ads. Now we're going back to the show. So
I do want to close with just sort of a
lightning round, a bunch of questions, mostly fun. Yeah, what's
one secret to succeeding on TikTok? Just be real and
be yourself? People like the genuine connection. Is it right
that you were in the army? I was, Yeah, Yeah,
(27:56):
I was in the reserves. What's something you learned in
the army reserves that I was not good in the army? Fair?
What's one thing you learned studying economics that's useful, actually
useful in running a business. The best thing is cause
and effect. You see a lot of things in economics
where it's you know, if this happens, this will move
(28:18):
the supply curve lefter or right. If the supply curve
and this industry moves left or right, it affects the
price this way, which is going to increase the input
costs of this other good. That's like ninety percent of
your first few years of economics. That's not the heavy
math based is learning that causation, what happens if certain
things in business change. It lets you strategize. You listen
(28:42):
to music when you drive a truck? Oh yeah, I'll
be honest, listen to music about ten percent. The other
ninety percent was audiobooks and podcasts. Okay. My main thing
is like I like to learn new things and truck driving.
It's one of those careers where I really really recommend
to any young person because you have all day to
(29:02):
sit there and learn as much as you want. What
other job affords you the opportunity to go deep into
whatever kind of passion that you have and learn as
much as you can about it. Chase Barber is the
co founder and CEO of Edison Motors. I first heard
him interviewed on the podcast Odd Lots Good Show. Today's
(29:25):
episode was produced by Edith Russolo, edited by Robert Smith
and Sarah Nix, and engineered by Amanda ka Wa. I'm
Jacob Goldstein. I am not on TikTok, but I am
on Twitter at Jacob Goldstein. You can also email us
at problem at pushkin dot FM. We'll be back next
week with another episode. Of the show
Pushkin. In twenty seventeen, when Tesla announced plans to sell
an electric semi truck, Chase Barber was in I reserved
a Tesla Semi. On the day of the revealing, they
put out the little thing of like reservation numbers, and
I'm like reservation number five on this Tesla Semi. Chase
(00:37):
was the co owner of a small trucking company in
British Columbia. He and his partner bought and restored old
trucks and they drove them to haul logs and set
up power systems for remote towns in northern Canada. So
Chase was excited about the possibility of an electric truck.
Then a few years passed and a few more and
the Tesla Semi still wasn't available. So we thought, well,
(01:00):
we know how to build a truck. We can make
a truck. We've been building and restoring. Why don't we
just make our own electric truck. And I said, screw it.
We can actually do this when we can make it
as a company. And while we canceled our reservation, I
got the twenty five thousand dollars US back that we
had to put down for it, and I use that
twenty five thousand dollars to start Edison Motors. I'm Jacob
(01:30):
Goldstein and this is What's Your Problem, a show where
I talk to people who are trying to make technological progress.
My guest today is Chase Barber, co founder of Edison Motors.
Chase's problem is this, how do you build electric logging
trucks in rural Canada with money you raised from people
who follow you on TikTok. Before he started his company,
(01:52):
Chase drove a logging truck and he loved it. It
is such a good job. It's the only job logging
on the West coast or I think you can be
scared driving at like five mile an hour, ten mile
an hour and you're in a white knuckle on the wheel. Look,
I love it. I love being up in the mountains,
going up into the bush every day. The roads are challenging,
(02:13):
there's no traffic, it's just pure driving. Did you ever
almost die? Oh yeah, yeah, so many times? Like that's
just that's just a fact in life. How'd you get
from driving a logging truck to starting a company? Well,
that started back in university. I decided that I should
go back after I was tired of driving truck for
like three years and I'm like, okay, I need a backup.
(02:35):
It's like, in case I don't want to do this
my whole life, I'll go to university while I'm still
young and single and have you know, it would be
a good time. But after four years of university, you know,
I did really well. I had like a four point
er GPA in economics. And it's not bragg and it's
just tell you how bad the job market is. At
least when I was graduating is I did a Bank
(02:56):
of Canada economic forecasting contest where I came second place
in Canada and got offered a job as a junior
economist at the Bank. Bank of Canada's the Central Bank
of Canada, Like like that's head in the US. Yeah, yeah,
the US Federal Reserve as an economist there. And after
four years of university, the salary was forty five thousand
a year Canadian Like what I drove truck And I
(03:19):
made more money driving truck in one summer at university
working four months of the year than I did if
I was going to live in the center city of
Canada working at this prestige job. I'm like, that's insane.
So that's where I met my business partner Eric, and
I said, hey, we should just do a trucking company.
(03:42):
We got business degrees, I've got a real great background
in business. So we had the last of our money
that we had left after the year. We pulled it
up and we had about ten thousand dollars, so we
bought a truck and trailer for four thousand dollars in
nineteen sixty nine. Kenworth came with an old long logger
setup and we put that to work, and that's how
we started out in business bout six seven years ago. Now,
(04:04):
And were you driving that truck that you bought then?
Were you like owner operating? Oh yeah, yeah, we're owner operators.
We spent the whole last semester of university restoring this
old truck, fixing it all up at sat in a
field for like fifteen years. And then we got a
job and we went up to the ukon with this truck.
So up in northern Canada, up on the Arctic Circle
(04:25):
in a fifty year old logging truck, and that's how
we started our little business. So okay, so far, so good.
You got your truck, you're driving your truck, You're getting paid.
I mean lots of people spend their whole their whole
careers doing that. Oh yeah, that probably would have been
a good career. But we started doing like haul and
(04:47):
generators and haul and heavy equipment, and like we expanded
with the low bed into generators and machinery, and then
we thought, well, like, rather than just doing the trucking,
you can see that the money is doing the installs.
We can do some of these installs and construction. So
what are you what are you installing off grid diesel generators?
(05:07):
So there's a lot of mines, remote places. There's actually
over three hundred and fifty towns in Canada that aren't
hooked to the North American grid and rely one hundred
percent of diesel. So that's super expensive. You got to
bring in the fuel to these remote places. It's inefficient,
big carbon footprint, it's bad. Oh yeah, yeah, I mean
(05:28):
we did a lot of trucking of the fuel in there.
That's how we really, like, you know, haul a generator
in and we're like, oh, well we can haul a
fuel in. And are these are these mostly sort of
kind of industrial settings? I mean, is it like mining
and that sort of thing, or like what are the
places that need it. Some were industrial, some were mines.
There was a few mines in the Yukon and a
(05:50):
lot of them though we're residential, like just First Nations
reserves up in Canada or other normal cities, so like
Native American reservations we would call them in the US. Yeah, okay, yeah,
that's what you would call them. Yeah, Native American reservations.
So you're shifting your business now. You're going from being
just trucker's basically people moving stuff for a fee, to
(06:11):
being sort of you're in the you're in the power
business now for these remote settings, Is that right? Yeah? Yeah,
I guess we were. If you didn't know, it's a
good way to put it. Yeah, I guess we were.
I still thought of ourselves as probably right, you're probably right, okay. Yeah.
So we did our first big hybrid system installed. How
it must be about four years ago now, and it
(06:33):
was this community way up northern BC rate on the
Yukon border. And what we did is they had a
huge peak power load, so everybody would get home from
work at five o'clock, everyone comes home, everyone turns onto
the power. Where we see it in our national grid,
huge peak power demands at like five o'clock if everyone
gets home. Well, they had that. So what they had
(06:54):
is the old way of doing it is that you
would size a generator to meet that peak power load,
to have that power demand when you needed it. So
they had a ninety five kilowatt generator running. But what
we did is we went in, we start installed a
large battery bank, a bunch of solar, and then we
downsize that generator to thirty five because that battery bank
(07:16):
met that peak power to mat And you had a
lot of people there their whole lives, they've grown up there,
they've listened to these diesel generators always running in the background.
For the first time in some of their lives, their
little village in the mountains has been quiet, no sound.
That's nice. That's a nice detail. So okay, So there's
a town that had a giant diesel generator and you
(07:39):
got them set up with solar panels and batteries and
a much smaller generator that could charge the batteries when
the solar power wasn't enough. That's right, yep, Okay, So
keep going. I'm waiting for the big moment. We are.
We at the big moment. It's coming soon. There's no
big moments in business, no fair. That's a very business
is made of a lot of little moments that add
(08:02):
up to a big moments. There's always a little tiny
steps forward, steps back. It's a store good story is
a lot of little steps. That is very wise point,
very very fair. So what's the next little moment? The
next little moment is one day we were looking at
all these diesel light towers and we thought, well, why
do we make those solar? So on a napkin, I
sketched out this little solar light tower and Caterpillar loved that.
(08:26):
Finning loved that they turned that into one hundred percent solar.
So rather than running a diesel generator on site with
all the emissions and noise pollution and having to pay
for fuel, we now have made one hundred percent solar
one that we designed that works up in northern Canada.
And then that started as a manufacturing and in between
that I was just driving logging trucks doing solar like.
(08:48):
The solar installed was going really smoothly, so I actually
transferred back into hauling logs for a while. Finally we
had this kind of aha moment when we did a project,
and we were sitting there thinking that a semitruck is
a lot like these little diesel powered communities. It's got
a huge peak load, so it takes a lot of
(09:10):
power to get that weight moving, Like to build that
initial inertia takes a lot. Once you're at speed, it
takes very little to maintain that momentum. So that moment
when you're getting the truck going, it's like the moment
when everybody comes home from work and turns on all
their appliances. It's just this moment of peak demand that's
way higher than the kind of baseline. That's right, It's
(09:31):
exactly like that when you think of the truck like
an off grid power system. So we thought about it
and well, why don't we just optimize the trucks patteries
the same way. And this is what electric can do. Like,
we're at the point where all the electric technology for
trucks is there, the electric drive motors, the batteries, the
(09:52):
electric control gears. Well, why don't we make this efficient
and run this like a freight train. Freight trains have
been diesel electric and they move tons of weight because
the electric motors have tons of torque, tons of power
super efficient. You have regenerative breaking to capture energy slowing down.
When we built our prototype, we were finding like fifty
(10:13):
sixty percent fuel savings on these log and trucks. So
and can you plug it in or no? Yep, okay,
oh yeah, yeah, no, we plug it in in the evening.
So you pull up next to the house and pull
it up next to the shop and plug it in
and it just charges. So you always start your day
with one hundred percent battery and you get about two
hours of driving out of this thing, and then the
(10:34):
diesel generator turns on, runs for about half an hour,
shuts back off. You'd get another hour or two hours
of driving, and then it runs for another half hour.
So is it right that part of your thesis in
building this diesel charger is that a purely electric truck
just won't be able to carry enough enough batteries, enough
(10:54):
battery power to do the kind of work that these
trucks need to do. That was one of the issues
is that electric trucks for eighty percent eighty five percent
of the trucking industry will not work and probably won't
work until batteries and charging infrastructure massively improves but we're
looking at twenty thirty years until we can get to
(11:14):
that point. But going diesel electric is kind of that
best of both worlds. Oh, I can recharge the batteries. Like, yeah,
you're not going to eliminate diesel, but you're going to
massively reduce the amount of diesel you need. It's a
step in the right direction. So okay, So that's the
basic idea. It seems like it would be super hard
(11:36):
and capital intensive to turn that into a business, much
harder than buying one ten thousand dollars logging truck in
a field and driving it for fun and profit. It
was hard. Yeah, that's you're right, that's not an easy
thing to do. But thank god we kind of went
viral if a company can go viral, and it's been
(12:00):
one of those things that's really helped. You're you're big
on TikTok, which I would not have guessed. Tell me
about your life in TikTok and how that helped. Well,
it was when when I was still hauling logs. One
of the guys that used to work with us, an
older guy and you know, late fifties, early sixties, was
that kept making TikTok videos and I'm like, I'm okay,
(12:20):
I better download TikTok and see what the hell Shane's
posting about me. And I probably scrolled TikTok for like
six months before I even made a video. And then
I first made a truck video and it just went
really big, and then I started making more videos. Was
it What was the first one that went big? I
think I was shifting gears and dancing. I think it
(12:41):
was one of those ten fifteen seconds dancing tiktoks. But
I was doing like a trucker version of the dance whatever.
It was dorky. And then yeah, when I announced that
we were doing Edison, it all of a sudden took
off millions and millions of views. We had our own page,
we had a little crowdfunding, and I'm like, okay, well
(13:01):
we'll crowd fund this first build. And within five days
we had raised almost half a million dollars and closed
the crowdfunding out off of just this one TikTok. So
that's amazing. Half a million dollars is a lot of money.
But when I think of starting a truck company, it's
not even It's many orders of magnitude away, right, And
(13:24):
this is partly because the way you were starting a
truck company is different than what I would have thought of. Right,
you're not building a factory to mass produced trucks, right,
tell me, tell me about the way you're doing. No,
we're starting with a very common sense approach. Let's build
one prototype, and let's raising up money to build one
prototype to make sure that our idea is valid. Let's
take it in a truck, will retro fit it with
(13:44):
a diesel motor. We'll connect the control systems that we design,
and we'll just we'll try it out. We'll see how
it works. And we did that, and we built the
truck and did it work? Oh? Yeah, yeah, no, it
worked great, lots of good power, great acceleration. There was
a few little things that we needed to go back
to the drawing board. I did not like the drive
(14:06):
line system. We snapped the drive line a couple of
times trying to do some heavy stuff and then trying
to drag race the truck. Is that the way you
stress test a truck is all hall bunch of logs,
a ball and b drag race it. Apparently? Yes, yes,
I let I let another truck driver in town. Real
good truck driver. And we were letting all the truck
(14:27):
drivers come out and try it, and I'm like, all right,
Jim like give her, just give her the beans, and
he throttled into it and ping rain. We're like, okay,
I guess that ends the testing for today. That ping,
that was a key part of the truck breaking. So
they tried a different part. So I'm called an exel
(14:47):
that's designed to be used with electric vehicles. The exel worked,
no more pings. Just to zoom out for a quick
set here, I want to just highlight a thing Chase
said a minute ago, that idea that sure, electric trucks
sound great, but for lots of uses, full on electric
trucks just aren't there yet, right, And so I I
(15:09):
really like the sort of practical incrementalism of his approach,
this sort of let's build what we can build now
because it's better than the existing thing, even if it
isn't perfect. Still to come on the show today, how
Chase built his company on top of an old law
from the Cold War. Now back to the show, And
(15:36):
just to be clear, when you talk about building a truck,
I mean you're not like machining all the parts from
scratch or something. Right, No, that is our biggest saving grace.
We looked at these things and what a truck company
is now. We realized really quickly that we couldn't afford
to compete if we had to make all our own
parts like Tesla, And we realized a lot of people
(15:57):
don't want to buy custom parts. So we went to
the parts that trucks have been using for the last
fifty sixty years, those common core parts, and we use
the simple off the shelf. We actually had a great
partnership with CBS Fleet Break. These trucks supply stores sat
down with their parts experts and we said, what parts
do you always have in stock? What are you finding
(16:19):
out that the people aren't complaining about that aren't breaking
Give us your most reliable parts that you always have
in stock. And then our team and mechanics worked with
our few engineers and they said, well, let's just part
putting these parts on. Let's pick those parts that we
can grab off the shelf. And you know how much
time and money that saves you in development cost. It's
going to save our customers money, it's going to save downtime,
(16:42):
and it got us into production. We're now starting on
our product first production truck already in just a year
and a half of starting the company. When you talk
about going to sort of trucking parts stores and using
parts that have been around for decades, I mean, I
wouldn't it makes sense at a certain level. I would
never have thought of it. Like it's almost like you're
building the trucks from the parts that are just sort
(17:02):
of around, like from spare parts or something. I mean,
how much of the truck can you build that way?
And you build a whole truck that way? You can
pretty well, except for some of like the high voltage
controls and the elect specific parts trucks have shared for
the last forty years. Of very common core parts. You
can take a break pot, a type thirty break pot
(17:24):
off a nineteen fifty five Kenworth, and that's the same
type thirty break pot that's still on a twenty twenty
three freight liner. Turn signal on my sixty two Kenworth
is the same turn signal that Western Star used up
until like two thousand and seven. Like a lot of
the parts were just all the same. Why is that,
Like that's not true for cars at all? Right? It
has a lot to do with the US defense Procurement
(17:47):
Act of nineteen fifty four O US Defense Procurement Act. Okay,
go on, I believe that's what it called. It's something
along those lines, but it's basically the US, NATO and
these places. They were worried about the Russians, sure, and
they saw what we did to Germany was we bomb
the hell out of their factories in World War two.
In World War two, okay, yeah, and they realized like, well,
(18:10):
if the Soviets attack us, the first thing they're gonna
do is hit our factories. Well, trucks are so vital
to the defense industry and just people surviving. If you
run out of trucks, you run out of food in cities.
And they thought like, well, okay, well they'll hit Detroit.
We need to be able to figure this out. So
they started making all the parts the same. So did
the government sort of put out a set of specifications
(18:32):
and said, whatever, the turn signal has to look like this.
I mean it was it something like that. That's exactly
what they did. It was right down to even the
shift knobs. The shift knobs are all the same in
color coded on trucks. If you have a fifteen speed,
it'll have a blue button for your thumb. Thirteen speed
will have a red, eighteen speed will have a gray
(18:54):
And it's the same across Europe. It's the same across Australia.
Like you op into an Australian truck and you look
at your shift knob, even on a brand new truck,
if it's gray, you know, you can split the bottom
and top end so that the drivers could ship Like
that is how can and standardized. We had trucks for
eighty years or sixty years. That is amazing And it's
(19:14):
really interesting to think about that, right, Like the thing
about sort of the economic implications of that and the
technological implications of it, right, Like, I mean, on the
one hand, it seems like it would be really bad
for innovation, right Like if somebody came up with a
better way to make a part, they kind of wouldn't
be able to do it, right. That seems like a
(19:35):
downside of it. On the other hand, you can always
get spare parts and the company isn't going to gouge
you if the turn signal breaks because you could buy
somebody else's turn signal. I mean, are those the basic
trade offs? Am I thinking about it? Right? Yeah? That's
probably about right, So they relax these laws in the eighties.
What innovation have we really seen in trucks? Well, I
(19:55):
don't know anything about trucks, So you tell me what
innovation have we seen in trucks? Well, we still have
a turn signal, but nowadays, you know, that turn signal
for my old sixties is about forty bucks on Amazon.
I can just order it. They still have it, Like
all the parts are there, forty dollars. Now you want
to turn signal for a brand new truck, it's five
hundred dollars. So are you the rare, you know, founder
(20:18):
entrepreneur making the case for a kind of government top
down regulation of like all detailed specifications. Oh god, am I?
Maybe I am? Kids Like, you know what, if that's
what it's, that's what it takes. Why not have a
little bit of regulation in here. We do need something.
It's not a pure free market we exist in anymore.
(20:40):
It's very much a more of a do I say,
chrony capitalism system. But there's only a few big truck
suppliers like you look at some of the big brands
are all owned by other large brands. Maybe we need
something in there to protect the owner operators of key
vital industries. That look what happened just with China during
(21:02):
COVID and it wasn't even malicious, but there was the
computer chip shortage. You couldn't even and buy new trucks,
they couldn't put them off the assembly line, that you
couldn't repair trucks, like the price of trucks went crazy.
And that was just from a few month interruption in
the global supply chain. Imagine what would happen if a
war broke out with China. What would happen to our
(21:24):
trucking industry overnight? If it was some economic war, it
doesn't even have to be a full on hot war.
But if we had another Cold war with China where
they stopped supplying us, we would lose our ability to
move anything in North America. So when you decide to
try and build a prototype, you decide you're going to
go back, You're going to basically draw on this sort
(21:44):
of reservoir of interchangeable parts from this Cold war policy,
and you kind of build your truck out of those parts. Yeah,
that's exactly what we did. So okay, so you got
your prototype, like is it around now? Is it like out? Back. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
we parked here for the wintertime. We got a lot
of snow here. We only took it out one a
(22:06):
couple of days, like when it was minus thirty five
to see how it did in the winter. But other
than that, we parked it and we're now just building
the new production truck. So okay, So right, so you
did the prototype. It worked, I mean, then did you
would just tell me about the financing? Did you raise
You must have raised more money to go into production.
(22:26):
We did. We did another round of crowdfunding and same
thing again. Within five days we had raised one point
five million dollars, which is more than enough to build
the first production truck. We're calling out the production prototype,
and we've settled on four or five really good first
trial customers that are going to be financing the first
few truck builds. So and when do you think the
(22:49):
first you know, truck driver is gonna drive your truck
to go get a bunch of logs. I'm hoping by
the end of this summer. Okay, So what what do
you have to figure out between now and then? I mean,
I know you made a prototype, but what do you
have to solve to actually have your trucks out in
the world. Well, sell them to these first customers. We'll
(23:09):
get that real world feedback. We'll figure out. It's kind
of that old way of engineering. But let's put it
out in the field. Let's see what works, let's see
what breaks, let's bring it back in, let's change the
parts to break, let's improve it, and then let's go
into the general public. I mean in terms of the
maintenance space. I know you said you use, you know,
as many sort of core, old cheap parts on your
(23:32):
trucks as possible, but you know clearly it's not all old, core,
cheap parts. You're doing new things. Is that going to
be a challenge for the people who buy the truck,
Like getting that part of the truck maintained, It'll be
a little bit different on that part. So we designed
a lot of these, and we had some brilliant electrical engineers,
(23:56):
and we took electrical parts that were common for the
high voltage world, people working in like power plants, and
so you almost need like a mill electrician, like a
sawmill that has all these electric motors are a mine.
Has those people that can service those electric motors. That
makes sense. It does seem like in this sort of
period of transition, or just when your trucks are new
(24:18):
and there's only three of them in the world or
ten of them in the world, or a hundred of
them in the world, Like, it'll be hard for the
person driving that truck to figure out how to get
it fixed, right, Like, it's not obvious how to solve
that piece of it, even if there is some industrial
electrician who would know, Like figuring out who that person
is and getting them to fix the truck seems hard, No,
So we took advantage and we partnered up with some
(24:39):
universities and we bring a lot of summer students now
in for the summer, like heavy duty mechanics summer students
that are in their second third year apprenticeship. And what
we do is we've been training them up as part
of their coop education, paying them in wage they learn.
They work on these trucks in the summer. And now
these few companies that want to buy our trucks, they're
(24:59):
larger fleets, and they said the same thing, how are
we going to maintain these and like, rather than just
always coming back to our shop, we're gonna send you
this guy. These people's contact information, so you can hire
a diesel mechanic that already has a knowledge of how
these trucks work because they helped build the trucks. So
that was our way around it. When you look sort
(25:20):
of from here on out, whatever for the next year,
next six months, all the things you got to do,
what are you particularly worried about? Like what at this
point are you worried? They are you know, trying to
solve actually find a facility to build these trucks. Where
are you building them now? We're building them up in
a temporary shop, so I couldn't get city permitting to
(25:41):
build a shop where we're at, and my house is
kind of up a little bit of a logging road
about fifteen minutes out of side of town. So we're
building them illegally because I can't. I'm technically not zoned
to manufacture run any kind of industry. So right now
we're building them as any trucks as we can before
the government finds out that we're building trucks where we're
building them. So the stressful part is now finding a place.
(26:05):
And our town had a massive flood about a year ago.
We lost like twenty percent of our houses. It wiped
out the entire industrial district. There's no land available, and
I want to own the land. We have the money,
we have it, like, we got things in place to
be able to do this, but there's just nothing available.
So you're telling me that you want to have trucks
(26:26):
on the road in oh, six eight months, and you
don't have anywhere to build them right now. We have
a spot just nowhere to legally build. If anyone asks
our shop is for agricultural use, we could build a
big shop for agricultural use. And then they're like, well,
what are you using it for? But like storing my
(26:48):
classic truck collection and they come out and they look
at the classic trucks and they're like, oh, yeah, I
guess you do restore classic trucks. Yeah. No, it's just
a hobby. So we're on that zoning rate now. And
where where is it? Where do you live? Where do
you live? I feel like I definitely shouldn't say that now. Fair, okay, fair,
let's let's let's but it's small town in the middle
(27:08):
of the middle of BC in Canada, a small town
in British Columbia. We'll merrit British Columbia. That that's as
much as we can. We should say. We'll leave it there.
We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round,
including questions about trucking and TikTok. That's the end of
(27:35):
the ads. Now we're going back to the show. So
I do want to close with just sort of a
lightning round, a bunch of questions, mostly fun. Yeah, what's
one secret to succeeding on TikTok? Just be real and
be yourself? People like the genuine connection. Is it right
that you were in the army? I was, Yeah, Yeah,
(27:56):
I was in the reserves. What's something you learned in
the army reserves that I was not good in the army? Fair?
What's one thing you learned studying economics that's useful, actually
useful in running a business. The best thing is cause
and effect. You see a lot of things in economics
where it's you know, if this happens, this will move
(28:18):
the supply curve lefter or right. If the supply curve
and this industry moves left or right, it affects the
price this way, which is going to increase the input
costs of this other good. That's like ninety percent of
your first few years of economics. That's not the heavy
math based is learning that causation, what happens if certain
things in business change. It lets you strategize. You listen
(28:42):
to music when you drive a truck? Oh yeah, I'll
be honest, listen to music about ten percent. The other
ninety percent was audiobooks and podcasts. Okay. My main thing
is like I like to learn new things and truck driving.
It's one of those careers where I really really recommend
to any young person because you have all day to
(29:02):
sit there and learn as much as you want. What
other job affords you the opportunity to go deep into
whatever kind of passion that you have and learn as
much as you can about it. Chase Barber is the
co founder and CEO of Edison Motors. I first heard
him interviewed on the podcast Odd Lots Good Show. Today's
(29:25):
episode was produced by Edith Russolo, edited by Robert Smith
and Sarah Nix, and engineered by Amanda ka Wa. I'm
Jacob Goldstein. I am not on TikTok, but I am
on Twitter at Jacob Goldstein. You can also email us
at problem at pushkin dot FM. We'll be back next
week with another episode. Of the show
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