February 21, 2024 • 53 mins
In this exciting HEP-isode, Mike and Jo are joined by Chris and Rob from Moog Construction, whose innovative new ZQuip modular batteries could revolutionize the future of job sites. We also talk safety, work fitness, automation, and why South Park's anti-immigrant rally cry doesn't make a whole lot of sense. All this, and the power of Duracell batteries in our FIRST-EVER twentieth HEP-isode!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
Whether we're exploring the latest in trucking
technology, talking about thetrends that propel the industry
forward, or uncovering storiesabout the dedicated individuals
who keep the wheels of Americaturning, this is where the roar
of the engines and pulse ofprogress come together.
It's sublime, it's surreal.
That's the Heavy EquipmentPodcast with Mike and Joe.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
Welcome back to our first ever 20th episode of the
Heavy Equipment Podcast.
I'm your host, joe Boris, here,as ever with Mike Schweitzer,
and today's a good show becausenot only is it our 20th episode,
which is always neat, but we'vegot some guests today.
A couple of weeks ago we ran anarticle on Electricco talking
(00:58):
about Mogu Electronics' newZ-Quip system.
Z-quip was a modular batterysystem where each module had its
own thermal cooling, had itsown electronic controllers, had
its own battery pack, and theidea, in the most oversimplified
sense, is kind of the same wayit works with your Ryobi or
Milwaukee tools, where you canpull out the battery, put in a
(01:19):
fresh one when you need it andyou can kind of manage the
battery use based on what youneed to accomplish on the job
site.
So you don't necessarily needan 18-volt battery pack for your
flashlight.
You can put in a six-volt or anumber, whatever it is, and I
think that that is about assimplified as I can get it.
I'm here today with Rob Bauerand Chris LaFleur.
(01:39):
Chris is the managing directorof Z-Quip and Rob, you're one of
the engineers that's developingthe system.
Thanks for being on the show,thanks for having us, thank you.
Yeah, of course, now you know, Ithink for me it's very easy to
kind of see this and visualizethis as a powered hand tool
thing.
Right, that's what it said tome.
But you guys, you know Moogworks with a number of OEMs,
(02:02):
your suppliers to Bobcat Case, acouple of others.
You know, you guys are really,really smart.
What was your inspiration forsomething like this?
Speaker 5 (02:11):
Right, it was all focused on how can we make
electrification in constructionsomething that people actually
want to use, something thatreally makes sense.
Like you said, moog has spent alot of years working with the
existing OEMs and inconstruction on, I mean,
everything from electrified toautonomous tele-operation.
(02:31):
It's a lot of really smartstuff, but we wanted to take our
own approach and say you know,we see where certain things are
going and we think we can makeelectrification go faster and be
better for the constructionindustry.
So what would we do in order tomake that happen?
And, like you said, rob, rob isone of many super smart
(02:53):
engineers that we have.
The stuff that they can do isamazing, and so when you throw a
lot of really talented peopleat a problem and ask them to
take a fresh look at it, you getsome pretty cool stuff.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
Well, I think that's a really good way of putting it,
because these guys areliterally rocket scientists.
Some of these guys areliterally rocket scientists.
Speaker 5 (03:12):
So like that I was going to downplay how good he is
, but my God, he is the man.
Speaker 3 (03:16):
That's awesome, but we talk about electrification in
the construction space.
You know it is happening, butit's not happening very quickly.
And as we look at what thelegacy brands are doing, some of
the other OEMs are doing, theyhave a lot of things going for
them and that they know how tobuild stuff, they know what
their job sites need, they knowwhat their customers like, but
they also have a lot holdingthem back.
(03:38):
They have existing platforms,they have sunk costs, they have
diesel engine plants and a lotof R&D put in there.
How are you looking at thisdifferently, and how does being
a supplier enable you to be morenimble than an OEM?
Speaker 5 (03:54):
It's important to know that we see this as being
the kind of thing that everybodyis better off when people push
the envelope with this, and whatwe've learned with working with
the OEMs is the good and badthat comes with having an
existing stakeholder andexisting products and, like you
said, they're pushing this.
(04:14):
But we see ourselves as beingable to take risks and take
leaps of faith that they mightnot be willing to take or might
not want to take.
For example, it's when you comeout with a competitor through
your own diesel product line.
That's tough right, and itdoesn't mean that they don't
want to do that or it's not theright decision, but we don't
(04:35):
have a lot of the constraintsthat they do.
So we can take chances and wecan come out with innovations
and product features that wethink really are great for the
industry and other people willreally love in the future.
But we have the freedom and theability to do it, and so we see
it as just an opportunity forus to move the industry along
faster in the electrificationgame because of that.
Speaker 3 (04:57):
Yeah, and you mentioned giving your engineers,
guys like Rob, kind of carteblanche to look at things in a
different way.
And the thing that reallystruck me from our conversations
outside of this and also fromreading the materials and
reading up on Zquip and whatZquip was all about, is this
idea of looking at a job sitenot necessarily in terms of the
(05:18):
work that needs to be done, butthe energy that it's going to
take to do that work and thenthe most efficient way to put
that energy to use.
Rob, can you speak to that alittle bit?
Speaker 4 (05:28):
Here, ken, a few minutes ago you were mentioning
using the power tool analogy,the hand power tool analogy, and
that's a solid analogy, exceptfor and you brought up a couple
of different brands of powertools you might have the
batteries.
Don't go from one tool to thenext.
So once you commit to a brand,you know that you're stuck with
that one.
If you have multiple brands ofpower tools, you have to have
(05:50):
multiple brands of batteries andchargers and manage all that.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
Why would you have anything but Ryobi hand tools?
Speaker 4 (05:57):
Let me think.
Anyhow, when you're dealingwith small batteries, small
chargers, it's inconvenient butit's not that big a deal.
They're not that expensive,it's not driving your cost, it's
just an inconvenience.
When you get up to a vehiclelevel and you're talking about
the energy required for a jobsite, a battery that's sitting
on the side uncharged, everyonealways talks about how it's
(06:20):
terrible if your battery doesn'thave any energy left in it, how
terrible that is.
Our vision on that is that'sactually good.
That means you use that tool.
The bad part is if you can'tget more energy back out of that
machine.
Having a dead battery is a goodthing.
Not being able to get energyback in the machine is a bad
thing.
So in our system we havebatteries that can go from
(06:44):
machine to machine, acrossbrands, across types of machine,
across sizes of machine.
That means that you should haveonly the amount of energy that
you need to run that site.
Machines that are sittingaround unused are waste.
That's what you think of them.
That's not insurance.
That doesn't make you feel good.
It's waste, Right.
(07:06):
Furthermore, the machines thatwe're building have multiple
bays that take batteries, Somepower tools.
Now, if you see a Moitresoftware instance, it might take
260 volt batteries or somethinglike that.
Our machines can take as littleas one battery, or as much as
six for current machines we'vebeen looking at.
The machine will run just fineon one, two, three, four,
(07:26):
whatever you need to make it go.
It won't run as long, of course.
But having all of thisflexibility, Again, imagine that
you have your hand power toolsand one battery goes across all
the different brands.
There is no OEM that'sincentivized to want to be able
to swap with some other OEM'sequipment.
We are.
(07:48):
We understand that ourcustomers are.
Because the energy back to youroriginal question because the
energy on the site is thelimiting factor we've made it
that you have just enough andyou can move it from machine to
machine.
You can move it in three waysyou can swap batteries, you can
fast charge onto or you can dosharing energy from machine to
(08:09):
machine.
One machine can pull up next toanother and just transfer that
energy over.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
Let's talk about that for a second, because when we
talk about pulling a battery outof a hand tool, talking about
pulling it out of power drill,putting it into a microsoft,
whatever it may be, it's veryeasy to do that.
These batteries, I believethey're 140 kilowatt battery
packs.
They've also got cooling,they've also got controllers.
They got away and I'mexaggerating, but I don't think
I'm exaggerating by much.
(08:34):
They got away a thousand pounds.
How are you swapping these out?
It's one thing to say we'rejust going to grab the battery
and swap it out.
How does that actually happen?
Speaker 4 (08:45):
The first thing to plant in your mind is the swap.
Out is not the first thing thatyou want to do.
You're going to be able to swap.
We can swap.
I'm going to answer yourquestion in a second.
The first thing you want to dois just keep enough energy on
that machine.
That could be fast charging andthat could be buddy stores,
just transferring power over andyou're not dealing with those
heavy batteries at all.
Then if you have to swap, thenyou swap.
(09:09):
If you have to swap, there'smultiple ways to do it.
If you're on a site that has atower crane, that's by far the
easiest way.
You simply lift it off, youpull the battery pack back to
the base of the tower crane,which is generally electric and
has good power right thereavailable.
You throw that one on, charge.
You pick another one up that'salready charged.
You go out to the machine, dropit on.
It is literally our motto isone minute, one hand, one person
(09:32):
to swap.
The thing People are imaginingthis is a big, complex thing.
That is our goal.
Now I'm not saying we're quiteall the way to that goal, but
we're getting real close.
In addition, that one persondoesn't need any special
training.
They can be the operator.
Just a few minutes of training.
It's not much more complicatedthan the hand tool that you're
(09:55):
talking about.
All the interface to themachine has been made quite
simple.
Speaker 3 (09:59):
Let's talk about that , because you've got this
running on a CAT 308, eight tonexcavator right now as a proof
of concept.
You're building out othermachines, whether they're wheel
loaders or compact forklifts orwhatever else you're building.
You've got a couple of thesealready happening.
You can check the performanceon that.
But there are other systems onthe machines as well.
(10:19):
There's hydraulic systems,there's control systems, and
those are not going to beuniform from OEM to OEM.
How do all of these systemsplay nice together?
Are there any advantages tohaving this uniform battery that
works across all of thesesystems?
Speaker 4 (10:39):
The battery goes from system to system to system or
across brands, across machinetypes.
That is, literally there's twotypes of batteries there's a 70
kilowatt hour battery andthere's 140 kilowatt hour
battery.
There aren't 12, there's onlytwo For the other systems that
you're talking about.
In our conversion phase thatwe're in currently, we have to
(11:00):
deal with the fact thatCaterpillar has this kind of
pump and Hitachi has somethingelse.
We have the motors, we have theadapters, we have all the
pieces necessary to make allthat work the motor pump combos,
for instance.
There's a little bit ofengineering involved in that.
Each time we do a conversion.
The first machine that weengineer to do a conversion
(11:21):
takes us a little bit of time.
There's some engineeringassociated with that.
After that, we have all thedrawings, we have all the part
list, we have all the stuff.
We have effectively a kit.
The second machine is easy.
The engineering takes us a fewmonths, but the second machine
would only take us a couple ofweeks.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
That makes a ton of sense.
I imagine it's easier toactually service and work on
some of these because you'reremoving all of the diesel, all
the cooling lines, all of thefuel tank.
You can just pop the batteriesoff and now you've got a big
flat platform that you canaccess all the hydraulics from
the access is incredible.
Speaker 4 (11:54):
Most larger excavators or mid-sized to large
excavators.
The valve blocks right near thecenter of the machine and the
swing motors are right there.
Once the battery packs are off,you have complete, unbelievable
access to it.
There's such a luxury to workon the machines in that way.
We didn't start off the journeythere, but boy was that a nice
thing to find.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
Seems like Chris wants to say something.
Speaker 5 (12:17):
Oh, no, no, this is a better path to go down.
Speaker 3 (12:22):
Fair enough.
We're talking about some of theadvantages that you're getting
from this conversion.
Obviously, I work with electric.
I'm all about electrification.
In addition to the benefitsthat come with electrification
the ability to work on noiseregulated sites, the ability to
work in environmentallysensitive locations that are no
(12:42):
drip sites, the ability to dosome stuff indoors and minimize
the need for respirators andthings like that In addition to
those benefits, there's also acost benefit potentially to
converting existing fleet assetsrather than effectively
scrapping them all and buyingbrand new electric.
Can you talk a little bit aboutsome of that, Chris?
Speaker 5 (13:05):
Sure, Understanding the value of this is tricky.
It really is a triggering pointfor a lot of people of what
it's expensive, but it could beworth it, and we don't know what
the future holds.
The way we see it, though, is,like you said, there's so many
benefits to this that, ratherthan focusing on what are the
costs, what is this going tomean?
(13:26):
What are the bad things thatcome along with electrification?
What does this enable in thefuture?
When you think about the valueof a conversion versus
purchasing new, there's going tobe an impact of electrification
on the residual value of adiesel.
We're already learning that inEurope.
(13:46):
Customers are saying I don'tknow how I feel about buying a
diesel machine, because there'sa chance it's worth nothing in
five years.
When you put that into a TCOmodel, it's tough.
We want people to understandthat it's the.
Electrification isn't foreverybody right now, but there
is absolutely the use case whereyou convert a fleet of machines
(14:10):
to electric, and it makeseconomic sense and it makes
operational sense, and it reallyis better for your operators
and for your customers.
I mean the first time you seethese things working quietly out
back somewhere and you see howhappy an operator is and you see
how nice it is for customers tobe able to be there, People
just operating near it it makesa huge difference.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
Yeah Well, we talk about this all the time on the
show, that just the ability tobe able to yell stop and have
the operator hear you, it's likea huge safety feature.
Right, because how many timeshas the operator, the guy's
digging a trench and he rips upa cable line or a gas line that
somebody else saw but thefrantic waving of the hands?
(14:53):
The operator just gives you thethumbs up, waves back and keeps
digging.
Speaker 5 (14:56):
I mean even we've seen it with the you get a 30
ton trenching, you got the guyin the pit with the total
fiction and they have to stopstick their head out.
Yell, stop stick their head outyell.
It's just the ease ofcommunication and the safety
aspect of it is amazing.
That's the thing is everybodywho we've had used these
(15:18):
machines prefers these machines.
It's a great experience.
It's where you get into yourcustomer versus your user, the
user of the machine.
This is a great machine.
It's powerful, it's quiet, it'sclean Everything you wish the
diesel was.
It's making it make sense froman operational and financial
perspective and that's what ourgoal is.
(15:38):
Our goal is to make this makesense.
When you talk about where wecan be in here that the OEMs
can't look, I don't think thatthe future of this will be.
Every OEM is swapping batteriesjust openly and having a great
time of everybody sharing it.
I don't think it needs to bethat, but I think it needs to be
that now to change.
Speaker 3 (16:01):
I'm going to disagree with you.
I'm going to disagree with you.
I think it needs to be that,because if I've got an 80-ton
machine or a 30-ton machine andit's got a 200 kilowatt hour
battery pack and somethinghappens to that machine and that
thing breaks down and I have toget it serviced and we all know
what a nightmare service hasbeen, parts availability has
(16:23):
been, chip shortage has been.
Now I've got a huge, expensiveasset sitting on a job site that
I can't move and I've got abajillion kilowatts of energy
sitting in that battery that Ican't access.
If I had the ability to say,okay, there's a problem with
this controller, there's aproblem with this thermal unit,
(16:44):
there's a problem with thisbattery, and I could just take
that pack off, put a known goodpack back on and send out that
little pack for service ormaintenance.
That is infinitely easier thanbringing an entire job site to a
halt because my one electricexcavator stopped working and
now I got to figure out a way toget it out of the trench and
ship it back to the dealer, andLord knows how I'm going to make
(17:07):
that happen.
So I disagree with you.
I think we do need to get tothis point.
Speaker 5 (17:12):
Yeah.
So that's the caveat right.
Should we be there?
Absolutely yeah.
Will everybody play nice in thesandbox?
I don't know, but you had anepisode previously about the
right to repair.
I think that the biggest partwith this is I just want to
interrupt here for one second,nobody should be listening to
these episodes.
Speaker 4 (17:33):
If you're listening to this podcast and getting real
information out of it.
Speaker 3 (17:37):
That's amazing.
Speaker 5 (17:40):
So yeah, we did talk about right to repair.
That's true, yeah, we did, yeah, but I think that the way we
approach it right is what do wethink a job site needs to look
like for electrification to makesense?
And if you think about just theoverall right to repair
discussion, that's happening now.
You get a diesel mechanic onsite and it's still difficult to
(18:04):
keep your uptime going.
Speaker 3 (18:06):
But yeah, it can't work on these machines.
Speaker 5 (18:08):
These are not machines that anybody will know
how to fix.
And then, even if you do,they're computers, they're
supercomputers, these are justunbelievable machines.
You're not going to fix them onsite.
And so when we talk about theserviceability of this, the goal
is uptime, always right.
(18:29):
In order for these things tomake financial sense, they have
to work all the time.
Everybody talks about batterylife.
Battery life is one part ofthat.
Serviceability is the otherside of it, and that's why this
idea of modularity and what ZQIPreally represents is not just
about modularity to swapbatteries.
It's modularity to make surethat your machine has the
(18:52):
greatest uptime of any electricmachine out there.
Battery dies you can swap it.
Great.
A battery breaks, things happenright Swap it.
Electric motor breaks ModularSwap it.
Charging Swap it.
There's so many things that cango wrong, and I think it's about
having the humility and theself awareness to know that this
(19:13):
is the first generation ofsomething that is going to be
the future.
To say that nothing will gowrong is naive, and so, rather
than avoiding that or trying tobe too big for that, we embrace
it, and Rob's background isdoing this for NASA and the US
government and making sure thatthings are up all the time,
(19:34):
because a plane can't be down orsoldiers die.
So we know how to do this, robknows how to do this and this is
what the background of thisgovernment and space and
military application.
If we can do it for them, wecan do it for your construction
site.
Speaker 3 (19:48):
Yeah, for sure, for sure.
Well, this is just great stuff,and I think that for me, the
only real question left is isthis real?
And I don't mean to put thatout there in a negative way, but
there's so much vaporware inthis space, there's so many
people where you don't even knowif what they're showing you
exists.
You know, cummins at the ACTshow, brought out their new 15
(20:11):
liter that you could swap thehead and run it on biodiesel.
You could run it on a hydrogenblend or pure hydrogen.
All you had to do is swap outthe top end and connect the fuel
sensor to determine what kindof fuel was in there and you
were good to go.
But here we are almost a yearlater and nobody's seen one
running yet.
So is this real?
(20:31):
Is this something that you lookat it and you go yeah, this is
real, we've got it in operation,it's going to cost this much.
Or are we still in the fingerscrossed Hail Mary stage?
Speaker 5 (20:42):
No, this is real, absolutely.
Speaker 4 (20:45):
Our 308 has been running now for a full year and
we take it out all the time.
We're beating the tar out of it.
We've had many operators comein from government agencies,
from private contractors and runit.
Sometimes they show up prettymuch diesel fans, but they
cannot help themselves.
They're kind of giggling by thetime they leave and it's just
too much fun to run it.
It's quiet, it's fantastic.
(21:06):
In addition to that, the otherparts of the system are real in
our shop right now.
It's totally functional andbeing turned into commercialized
buttoned up products ready togo out to the field.
We're months away from havingmultiple machines on a site
working together, sharing energy, swapping batteries, doing all
(21:29):
the things we've talked about.
We have all the prototype workgoing already.
In my entire time at Mogue,this is the lowest technical
risk project I've been on.
There is no technical risk left.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
I wish I could see behind the NDA curtain and see
what other cool stuff you'vebeen working on.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
Because that sounds pretty impressive.
Speaker 3 (21:50):
There's been some fun things along the way.
The high-tech thing that youguys can barely conceive of.
This is the dumbest thing I'vedone.
Speaker 4 (22:01):
I didn't mean that.
It's just that we know how todo this.
We have clear line of sight and, where we are to working in the
field, clear line of sight onthe whole thing.
Speaker 3 (22:14):
That's awesome.
One last question we're talkingabout construction sites.
Job sites are criticallyimportant.
This is one of the areas thatwe need to electrify.
I think there's alsoapplications for this in the
field of agriculture, especiallyon hobby farms, where you may
be able to set up somethingwhere you've got animals, you've
got horses, you've gotvineyards, where the smell of
(22:37):
diesel and the chemicals ofdiesel get on, the particulate
matter gets on the product.
That's something that you don'twant.
If you're a high-end organicfarmer, then the other question
I would have is is there anyon-road application that you
guys are looking at, becausewe've been talking about
off-road the entire time.
Speaker 5 (22:55):
You're going to get us down to rabbit hole here, man
.
We can talk about this for days.
Speaker 3 (23:00):
We got seven minutes left.
We got days is a lot but sevenminutes, and it's Miller time.
Speaker 5 (23:06):
We've got a big vision for this.
The smaller you have an ideaand a vision for what
electrification it is, the lessit makes sense.
So the bigger you get, italways just works better.
Then if you think of well inconstruction, the site is part
of it, but there's an entireon-road, there's a separate
off-the-site aspect of this.
(23:26):
You start to think of how allof that combines into this
operation of things getting doneto get a job completed.
You think on-road it's RZ-quipmodules can fit in the back of a
Ford Lightning.
You could have your pickuptruck with a battery in the back
(23:46):
, charging that plugged intoyour machines in back, taking it
to different sites.
You can have power movingacross sites.
There's not just energy on themachine, but there's gensets
that are going to be convertedto battery rather than diesel.
There's other mobile powerapplications.
Rob and I have talked a lotabout this, of solar farms.
Rather than connecting solarfarms to a grid, having this
(24:10):
last mile delivery of power backand forth, it's really about
the right way to get energy fromthe source to where it has to
be worked on.
We see the Z-quip applicationas having much broader reach
than just being a battery on amachine.
(24:31):
It's a way for the entire site,the entire operation, to get
the energy needed to do the workthat has to be done.
This is what makes this just anextremely rewarding and
challenging thing, because youkeep getting bigger, and the
bigger it gets, the more youstart to get that feeling of we
(24:52):
could be really onto somethinghere.
This could really change things.
Speaker 4 (24:55):
I'm impressed, I love it.
Once it's modular and eitherswappable or fast-chargeable, a
lot of things change.
Imagine the American Southwesta giant desert.
It is hard to take a largeheavy vehicle, electric vehicle
across that desert.
From a range point of viewthat's difficult to do.
Speaker 3 (25:12):
That's also one of the things I used to have a Fiat
who could barely get acrossthere.
Speaker 4 (25:16):
Yes, it's also one of the best places in the world to
put a solar farm.
Yes, there's huge tracks ofinexpensive, undeveloped land
that nobody's going to care.
If you build a solar farm, it'snot a nimby problem, nobody
cares.
Every 100 miles you have aplace where you have a giant
solar farm.
The energy is not even hookedto the grid.
You don't even have to have thegrid out there, it goes into
(25:37):
the Z-quips.
You pull them with your tractortrailer.
You don't own that Z-quip,you're renting it.
It's just a thing.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
It's a subscription.
Speaker 4 (25:43):
You stop going off you stop another one on, you
grab a cup of coffee and you'reon your way.
Yeah Right, we do all kinds ofrobotics here, so building the
automated swapper.
You're asking earlier todayabout swapping modules A year
and a half from now.
You're not going to even haveto touch it.
You're going to pull up next toa machine.
It's going to pull it out, putthe other one in and you're on
your way.
You don't touch it, you don'tworry about it.
You answer a couple of textswhy it's happening.
Speaker 3 (26:04):
That's cool.
This is great stuff, guysListen.
Thank you so much for being onthe show.
I know we're coming to the endof our time commitment.
Here you have the floors.
Is there anything that, if Iwas a professional, I would have
asked you?
That would have really set themessage across.
Or is there something you justwant to sing?
A little mogul electronicsjingle for us?
The floor is yours, yeah.
Speaker 5 (26:24):
Still working on the jingle, but thank you for the
time.
I hope you can see how much welove this and we believe in this
and we are looking for peoplewho are interested in this, and
so for those who have a fleetthey have the site.
They need this to happen.
Reach out, talk to us and let'sget this going for you.
Speaker 3 (26:44):
Sounds great and I just want to address real quick.
Bill said something about thecenter of gravity.
Rob's a smart guy, I'm surehe's figured that out.
I don't think we need tovalidate the concerns there,
like if you're on a 45 degreeangle and you're trying to run
an 80 ton excavator, you've gotbigger problems.
Speaker 4 (27:01):
Yeah, we're paying a lot of attention to all this.
We're keeping our CG low.
We're there, we build airplanesfor living.
Cg is kind of a big deal inthat world.
Speaker 3 (27:08):
So we're good.
Yeah, Rob's got it undercontrol.
Guys, Do, do, do, do, do.
All right.
So that was Chris LaFleur,Robert Bauer from Zquip and Mike
.
What do you think of this thing, man?
I know we talked about it a fewweeks ago, but this is
something that I think is reallycool.
Nope, have we lost my loadthere?
(27:31):
We?
Speaker 2 (27:31):
are Good.
Sorry about that.
I went through a tunnel.
I came out the other side.
Speaker 3 (27:38):
Mike's driving through the tunnel today.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
Yeah, actually it's been an entire week of being on
the road.
We had a safety meeting atevery offer and we go through
that every year multiple timesthroughout the year.
Well, this is our big safetysummit throughout the entire
company.
Speaker 3 (27:55):
So here's the thing.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
Well, that's a lot of driving it is.
I was in Chicago on Monday,cleveland on Wednesday and then
I was at Pittsburgh today andI'm heading out to the airport
in Cleveland.
You fly out.
I'll be in Daytona tomorrow.
Speaker 3 (28:08):
Oh, that's right, You're going to the Daytona 500.
Speaker 2 (28:11):
That is correct.
There's a profound statementthat is on our safety meeting
and I can speak about that andit says we will perform to the
standard of which managementwill tolerate.
Ok, explain that a little bit.
Well, what that means is that,as managers, as supervision and
(28:35):
as personnel, if you have noresponsibility other than to
anybody but yourself, even ifyou have no pet, nobody to go
home to, you're just living onthe road you're going to work to
the standard of which youtolerate.
So, if you want to work safe,you're going to make choices
(28:56):
throughout the entire day andyou're going to work for the
standard of which you want to,and that goes to the people that
work for you and that goes tothe people you work for and to
the people you work next to you.
It's all about your own choice.
So if you want to do it, wewant you to do it right.
We want everybody to be safe,everybody to go home, not get
(29:17):
killed, not get hurt, not hurtthose around them, and that's
kind of a profound statement.
That was our message for theweek.
Speaker 3 (29:26):
I like that.
That kind of goes along withthat.
Have you ever heard of thePeter principle?
Yeah, good.
So for those of you listeningwho have not heard of the Peter
principle, peter's principle issort of like Murphy's law.
It says that everyone getspromoted to their level of
incompetence.
(29:46):
So if you think about that interms of a restaurant, you get
hired as a bus boy.
You're a really good bus boy,people like you.
They make you the host.
You're a really good host.
You're seating people.
You're keeping people moving.
So they make you a server.
You're a really good server.
You're making a whole bunch ofmoney.
You're making people happy.
They make you a shift manager.
You're a pretty good shiftmanager.
Everybody kind of digs whatyou're doing.
(30:07):
You're getting by, you're doingthe job, you're there a little
while.
Then they make you a storemanager, and you're not really a
good store manager.
You're kind of mediocre, maybenot even mediocre.
You're just not very good.
You're kind of incompetent,right, you're just barely
scraping by without the wholeplace catching on fire.
Well, most places will notdemote you.
(30:27):
They will not put you back inthe position that you were,
excelling.
What they'll do is they'll justkeep you there where you're
terrible and you're just goingto sit there and be terrible for
the rest of your career.
And now, as a company getsolder and more mature, you start
to have more of these Peterprinciple things take effect.
So you have somebody who is areally good regional manager
(30:48):
they get promoted in national.
They're not that good, theystay there.
You have someone who's notreally that good on the regional
side they stay there.
And you start to see thingslike that when you look at like
Ford and GM and these companiesthat are a hundred years old.
You start to meet and interactwith some of these guys and you
just go.
Some of them like wow, this guyis really sharp, and others
(31:08):
like man, how did this guy getthis job?
He has no business doing this.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
Yeah, he got the job because he's been there forever.
Speaker 3 (31:17):
That's exactly right, and he's just been promoted to
the point where he's justcompletely inept.
And I've always been lucky.
I always get to that point atthe ground level, so I don't
even have to worry about gettingpromoted.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
You know another big thing that we talked about with
safety in various forms.
It's fit for duty.
Fit for duty is a big thing,you know operators showing up on
the job.
They run equipment but they'renot fit to climb into it or not
fit to do it.
Speaker 3 (31:42):
Yeah, that's a real problem.
Speaker 2 (31:44):
It's a real problem you got I was talking to
somebody two weeks ago thatworks for another company it's
not ours and we were talkingabout, you know, people that are
fit for duty and he goes.
It is a problem with everybodythat I talked to, because
everybody I talked to is talkingabout that.
It's all showing up, not readyto work.
It could be something as simpleas you have tennis shoes on.
What can I do with you?
(32:04):
Do somebody that shows up whoclearly has a pre-existing
medical condition?
Okay?
Well then I need to talk tothis guy.
What could he do besides what Ithink he was brought in to do
Not going to be swinging an axall day, or he's not going to be
swinging a pick all day.
He can't do that, but maybehe's got some other hidden
talent that we're not sure of.
But it all takes time.
(32:26):
The workforce is full of usright now.
Speaker 3 (32:29):
Well, I think it goes two ways.
Right, the kind of lack ofworkforce that's out there, and
there's a group called HBI.
Right, this is the HomeBuilders Institute.
They're talking about the lackof skilled labor in the
construction industry, andthey're just talking about
residential construction.
And they're saying that, inorder to meet the demand that is
(32:50):
there now, that we need to add2,000, more than 2,000 new
workers every day into theindustry, 750,000 per year over
the next three years, just tomeet the current labor demand.
And we're not going to getthere.
We're just not going to getthere.
Speaker 2 (33:12):
You are not going to what happens and this goes back
to my first statement about willperform to the level of which
management tolerate If wetolerate less skilled workers or
less capable workers thattherefore are on fake Cuz.
We're trying to be the quotathat we can achieve anyway, but
everybody around you, theequipment that they're operating
(33:34):
or they're working next to, injeopardy.
Speaker 3 (33:37):
Yeah Well, but this is where you start to see that
push towards not only electricbut autonomous.
You know Like I'll give you acase in point arc best just put
out.
They've been doing electric youknow forklifts for a lot of
years now, and the reason thatit's important that their
electric is this next bit theynow have a fully autonomous
(33:59):
warehouse where one or two guysrunning the stuff on an iPad,
using cameras and sensors, canrun a fleet of 20 of these
things, these material handlers,inside a warehouse and move
stuff around and load up palletsand everything else.
And you don't need 20 guys andtwo foreman and people who are
alternates and then worry aboutpeople calling and sick.
(34:20):
What you need is guys who knowhow this stuff works, who can
sit behind a tablet and ensurethat everything is running
properly.
And the reason Electric is suchan important part of that is
you can't run all of thesesensors and all these Nvidia
graphics cards and all of thisAI Stuff.
Speaker 2 (34:36):
You can't run it off 12 volt current right this
reminds me of the Self-parkepisode, where they're talking
about stuff.
The next thing, you know,somebody stands up and he's like
they took our job.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
They took our jobs.
They took our jobs.
Speaker 2 (35:06):
And then they keep going and it keeps going all the
way to a rooster.
No, because it just gets.
So it's the idea behind thescene, was it's so ludicrous.
It is just not enough people asit is.
So the idea that autonomy andand all this is going to take
somebody's job, it's crazinessbecause there isn't.
There isn't anybody to take thejob as it is.
(35:27):
But but yeah, there is noreason why anybody should be
worried about people gettingtheir jobs taken by anything
that we're talking about,because there are not the people
to take them from.
Speaker 3 (35:43):
Exactly.
But how often do you hear that?
You hear it from all walks oflife, whether it's you know rich
guys on Madison Avenue or youknow these poor dirt farmers in
West Virginia.
Everybody is convinced thatimmigrants are coming for their
job, robots are coming for theirjob, ai is coming for their job
and it's like dude, nobodywants to do these jobs.
(36:04):
I was talking today, you know,and we'll revisit these guys in
another episode but I wastalking today to a guy from case
in New Holland, and Case, newHolland.
They're huge in agriculture, bigin construction, but huge in
agriculture with the farm, alland everything else.
And you know we keep talkingabout every year there's fewer
and fewer people who want to getinto farming and who want to
(36:26):
get into Agriculture and getinto that industry and the
people that are there now, a lotof these farm principles that
are in their 60s, that are intheir 70s.
They've worked their wholelives thinking that they were
gonna leave the farm to theirfamily or their kids or their
grandkids Maybe, and their kidsdon't want any part of the farm.
They don't want any part ofthat life.
(36:47):
So, number one, they've gotnobody to leave it to and number
two, they've got nobody to workon the land and we still keep
making more people.
You know there's people talkingabout Population growth is
slowing down.
It may be slowing down but thatdoesn't mean that the
population is not still growingLike it's gonna be decades
(37:08):
before we start reducing thenumber of population, especially
the United States, with all theimmigrants coming in and we
still need to feed all thesepeople and if we don't have
bodies to throw at the farms, wegot to start throwing robots at
them.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
Hey, you can't Keep going.
You want to know what.
The biggest thing that's takingpeople's jobs away is stupidity
.
There's a lot of that to goaround there is, and the lack of
common sense and the lack ofWillingness to learn which you
put them in them.
(37:42):
You're gonna call it ignorant,but it's stupidity.
That is what robbing people ofjobs right now.
Speaker 3 (37:50):
Yeah, you've got people who don't understand.
And it's something as simple asyou know fit for work, right,
you can't show up to a job on aconstruction site in tennis
shoes.
And then the other problemgoing around and this is, I
think, a minor problem in termsof the number of times that it's
affecting people, but I dothink it's a major problem
(38:12):
because we as a society have notyet come up with a way to To
integrate this into ourworkforce.
And I'm gonna get to what it isin a second the legalization of
marijuana and otherrecreational drugs throughout
the country.
You've got guys that you knowEnjoying the, the couple of
(38:32):
gummies themselves, or they hadan edible at a concert a month
ago.
Something goes wrong.
They go in for a drug test andthey have this perfectly legal
substance in their system.
And and now what do you do?
Now you have an incident, nowYou've got some evidence of
possible impairment.
Now You've got liability issue.
You've got to essentially letthese people go or keep them off
(38:54):
of your job sites Just becauseof the liability, even though
they may not be affected at allfrom something that's totally
legal.
Speaker 2 (39:02):
Yeah, and, and there are round table meetings going
on, you know, monthly withdifferent contractors and and
safety directors in the industry.
There is a number of tests nowthat have been developed.
They've been field tested thatcan tell okay, I had somebody
(39:23):
that drove a vehicle, drove apiece of equipment, operated a
piece of equipment, had anincident Tested positive.
They send it off to a differenttesting procedure and they can
tell, based on their BMI andthings like that, roughly how
much and how long ago it wasthat they ingested, whether
(39:46):
smoke that, ate it, drank itwhatever it is and that that's
becoming a larger player in thetesting of substances and drug
alcohol, because you're right,it's more complex.
Today used to be.
A guy had drugs in the system.
It's not legal.
He's gone exactly Now you havea whole level of testing that
(40:11):
has to go on.
Beyond that, there are a lot ofpeople fighting for the
legalization of marijuana.
There's a lot of reasons why itprobably is really good.
There are a lot of reasons whythat whole industry Is for it.
The states are for it.
People want to talk about taxesand tax revenue.
They have a huge generator ofthat.
(40:33):
Take some of the burden off ofeverything.
The bottom line is people aregoing to buy it, they're going
to get it, they're going tosmoke it, eat it, do whatever
they want to do.
It all falls under that sameumbrella fit for work.
And are we going to tolerate it?
Yeah, we're going to tolerateit.
How do we tolerate it?
Speaker 3 (40:52):
Exactly, and I think that comes down again to this
robotization and electrificationof the workforce.
And we don't even have to.
You know I always like to makethings about electric for a lot
of reasons.
I came into all this right, itwas from the battery side and
from the tech side of it, buteven on the diesel stuff I mean
cat.
You know this wasn't somethingthat we were planning to talk
(41:14):
about, but Caterpillar hasupgraded all of its you know cat
grade and cat assist and AR,euro software, and they're
putting all of that into theirdozers, the D4, d5 and D6.
They're making all that, whaton a car would be called ADAS or
the driver assistance systems.
They're making all of thatstandard across their line.
(41:34):
And they're doing that becausethere is the lack of skilled
workers.
But the people that are willingto show up a lot of them don't
have the 20, 25 years ofexperience that guys from the
previous generation had.
So if they're going to be, youknow grading a road or something
you want to make sure that's,you know smooth, not a bunch of
waves on it like you're lookingout onto the ocean.
(41:56):
So all of this software ismaking up for that lack of
experience.
And I think, as you start to seethe cost of college and tuition
and that life path, continue toget away from the middle class
and you know the workingfamilies of America and that
college dream that has beenaccessible for a couple of years
(42:16):
and I think that's going to bea big step for a couple of
decades but is now becoming lessaccessible.
You look out 5, 10, 15 years.
If you've got young kids nowand you're thinking where am I
going to get $300,000 per kid tosend them to college, the
answer is a lot of people aren't.
They're just not going to beable to.
You're going to have morepeople coming back into the
(42:37):
trades.
You're going to have young catsthat are familiar with
technology, that are not afraidto use technology.
They're going to be coming intoconstruction, agriculture and
they are going to expect thatthe machine is going to do a lot
of the stuff for them.
Speaker 2 (42:51):
We have to have that.
We have to have the equipmentaiding these people, whoever you
are, because, like you said andwe've talked about this before
the guys that can feel itthrough the seat yeah, when it
doesn't matter whether themachine's electric, it's
hydraulic, it's purelymechanical the seasoned guys
that drew up on stuff, they canfeel it before it happens.
(43:14):
They know when things are goingto rock.
You don't have that anymorewith the younger group, with the
newer people coming in.
They've been sheltered fromthat for their entire existence.
Speaker 3 (43:26):
Hang on, I don't think that's fair, because
there's guys that come up youknow, we talked about this
before Like if you were drivingthe old 74 Cadillac and that
thing was like a boat and youcouldn't feel the ground and you
couldn't feel the wheel.
And if you came up driving earlyBMWs in the 80s and early 90s
that had no digital anything,everything was analog and felt
(43:48):
connected to the road, that wasa real revolution compared to
that kind of floaty Americansort of battleship type of
handling that these cars had.
When you look at the heavyequipment, you look at the
trucks and drivers andeverything else, it's almost the
reverse of that where thosereally stiff machines that
(44:09):
didn't have the isolation, thatdidn't have, you know, the
comfortable air ride seats, thatdidn't have the cushy seat
padding, that didn't have thenoise canceling in them, the
guys that have experienced theycame into this through that.
If you there is no amount ofseat time, I think that you
could get in a modern machinethat would teach you how to feel
(44:31):
that from the seat of yourpants or from the feel of the
wheel, because you're soisolated by power steering,
power seats, power brakes, powerand everything.
Speaker 2 (44:40):
That's what I mean.
Speaker 3 (44:41):
Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah, it's not a fault of the
guy, it's a fault of theequipment, the equipment doesn't
let you feel.
Speaker 2 (44:49):
That's what I was getting to you.
They've been isolated from thisgrowing up, like we are talking
about this in a small focusgroup that we were working on it
, even from the early concept ofthe car.
Young kids today do not knowwhat it's like to ride in
something like it was 30 yearsago or 50 years ago.
(45:12):
Okay, so you're a young kid,you're isolated from a young age
.
If you and then you progressthrough life, you then you get
into a semi truck, which isisolating you again.
You get into a new piece ofequipment, just like you said,
it's isolating you from thesounds of the noise and the dirt
that 50 years ago guys wereexperiencing.
(45:34):
20 years ago guys wereexperiencing.
We're removing a ton of peoplefrom those ambient environments
and because of that we'redesensitizing a ton of people to
think Because the equipment hasto help.
You need that to help Becausethe days you know and like you
(45:54):
were bringing it up about C&H,the kids that work on the farms,
and then the sixth, seventhgeneration farmers they're
dwindling faster than we couldever create them and we need the
equipment to help.
Speaker 3 (46:09):
Yeah, and there's no reason why.
Speaker 2 (46:13):
That's what I was going to say.
There's no reason why it can't,and there's no reason why we
can't use the technologyavailable to us to help replace
people that are not capable ofdoing it any other way and put
the people to work.
There's a saying that the worldneeds ditch diggers too.
That's very true, but we'rerunning out of those.
(46:35):
We're running out of a need,though, for them to, because a
lot of manual labor anymore isbeing phased out by unsafe work
practices.
This is a whole other level.
You have unsafe work practicesthat led the way for manual
labor.
Not going to stick a guy 30feet down in a hole with six
(46:57):
other guys and they're going tofill buckets to be hauled out
with a crane.
No, we're going to bring amachine in and we're going to
dig that out with the machine.
There's a lot of these thingsthat are starting to finally
fade.
I also think we need to put thecaddy shed clip in that part.
Speaker 1 (47:17):
I plan to go to law school after I graduated, but it
looks like my folks won't haveenough money to put me through
college.
Speaker 2 (47:23):
Well, the world needs ditch diggers too.
Speaker 5 (47:27):
Nice try.
Speaker 2 (47:30):
Yep.
Speaker 3 (47:34):
We should play that earlier because, like we're
talking about, like peoplearen't going to go to college
like they have been in the last2040 years.
You know, I think it's reallysad, because we talked about
this a lot, right?
Like, I think it's really sadthat we have all these robots
and all this AI out there.
And what an awesome way to say,like, look, the world needs
(47:55):
ditch diggers too, but itdoesn't have to be you or me.
It can be this robot and we cango do this awesome thing.
Except, instead of that, now wego, uh-oh, need to get your
jobs.
You're going to go find someother way to put food on the
table?
Speaker 2 (48:11):
Yes, Well, you know and a lot of things do come full
circle, though Sure, ashumanity, we do bring things
around full circle.
So there was an article thatjust came out not too long ago
about how they want to equipocean going vessels with sails
to aid in helping them, propelthem, become more efficient.
(48:34):
We had it.
We thought it was the worstthing ever.
We get rid of it.
We went to steam, we went todiesel power, Then we went to
electric.
If you're the government, youhave nuke, because that'll go
for you know however manyhalf-life.
So you know, we do bring thingsback around.
Somebody's going to tell usthat steam engines are cleaner
(48:54):
and that it was better offhaving it that way, but instead
of burning coal, we're going tohave a reactor in it.
Speaker 3 (49:00):
Right, exactly right.
You know, I see the point thatyou're making.
Like I do think that there is athere's a cyclical way of
looking at those.
Speaker 2 (49:10):
Glad somebody does.
Speaker 3 (49:12):
Glad somebody knows what you're talking about.
Biff's over there in thepassenger seat he's taking his
head.
It's like, oh God, what are wetalking about here.
Speaker 2 (49:20):
Hey God, I'm not on the road doing seminars anymore.
Speaker 3 (49:25):
He doesn't even.
He's not even keeping thescript anymore.
We're all over the place.
We got episode one, episode two.
We're all over.
It's terrible, but Go back tothe Edit it and just pull it
back together.
Speaker 2 (49:36):
That's all you got to do.
That's all I got to do.
Throw the rest of it back intothere and just cut and paste the
whole shit back.
It's going to be fine.
We're going to love it.
Speaker 3 (49:46):
Hey, you know.
So why didn't you get yourcomments on the on the mode
thing?
Cause we were you were ridingthrough the channel, so talk to
me about that.
I still think that's a greatidea with the Swapping the
batteries on the equipment.
Speaker 2 (49:58):
So when I was watching, that and then, and
then we were listening to thewhole thing and Get that at that
out, cause that was.
I was rambling there for asecond, somebody caught my
attention, so all this is 40minutes of rambling.
Speaker 3 (50:11):
You don't have to worry about it.
I know how to edit it.
You're going to tell me what itis.
Yeah, oh, eddie, yeah.
Speaker 2 (50:17):
Here's the thing that I took away from that whole
interview, and and what theyhave is a very cool product, the
very good concept, and I cantell you as a fleet manager has
somebody that helps dispatchequipment and breakdowns do
matter when they happen.
It eliminates a whole level ofthe machine that could let you
(50:37):
down.
Speaker 3 (50:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (50:39):
And if I was in caterpillar or C and H or
Kamatsu, I would have gone intoa meeting with a model excavator
and a Milwaukee battery andsaid this is what I need.
We're talking aboutelectrification.
Slide the battery into the backof the thing and let's go to
(51:00):
work.
And the other good thing aboutit, too, is Okay.
So let's say I have a failure.
I do look at the machine and Icannot be fixed right then and
there Right, and I can't takethat off of the core source.
It's not wasted.
Put it on to something that isviable and let's go back to work
.
It has nothing.
I mean the battery, if you know.
(51:23):
It's just one part of it thatyou have the machine part of it
as well.
If I lose an engine and anexcavator on a job, I can't take
that excavator and pull anengine out of another one and
stick it in the one.
Speaker 4 (51:34):
That I think is better for the job than the one
that blew up.
Speaker 2 (51:39):
I can't make that swap.
It's the same thing with youknow we, years and years ago
they used to do that withequipment.
When equipment was simpler, youhad a twin engine scraper and
you lost the rear engine.
You could pull the engine outof another scraper, put it in
(51:59):
the back of the other one and goback to work.
Those days are long gone.
This is as close to thatsimplicity as you're going to
get, because once you plug thebattery in and, like you said,
if, even if the battery is theproblem, you take it off and put
one back on.
If the machine's the problem,you move all your batteries and
you put them into the otherasset that you've brought and go
(52:21):
back to work.
Speaker 3 (52:23):
Yeah, it's a great concept and you know we opened
the show with those guys.
We'll close with that and thiswas a little bit light on
cultural references.
Let's throw in some randomvintage commercial for something
, maybe a little chase in thesandborn we will see you next
week.
Speaker 2 (52:38):
Duracell batteries we need vintage Duracell batteries
.
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (52:45):
Here are the current readings under partly sunny
skies perometer 30.1.
Speaker 1 (52:48):
When you're out fishing, you count on your radio
, so use the batteries you cancount on too, duracell.
Speaker 5 (52:54):
Tests show that after regular carbon batteries wear
out, duracell keeps going strong, because Duracell batteries
last longer.
And that means a lot Wheneveryou use your radio.
Duracell, the copper topbattery no regular battery looks
like it.
Speaker 1 (53:12):
Or lasts like it.
Tune in next week for moreheavy equipment podcast on
Spotify, apple Podcasts, googleor wherever you find podcasts.
Whether we're exploring the latest in trucking
technology, talking about thetrends that propel the industry
forward, or uncovering storiesabout the dedicated individuals
who keep the wheels of Americaturning, this is where the roar
of the engines and pulse ofprogress come together.
It's sublime, it's surreal.
That's the Heavy EquipmentPodcast with Mike and Joe.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
Welcome back to our first ever 20th episode of the
Heavy Equipment Podcast.
I'm your host, joe Boris, here,as ever with Mike Schweitzer,
and today's a good show becausenot only is it our 20th episode,
which is always neat, but we'vegot some guests today.
A couple of weeks ago we ran anarticle on Electricco talking
(00:58):
about Mogu Electronics' newZ-Quip system.
Z-quip was a modular batterysystem where each module had its
own thermal cooling, had itsown electronic controllers, had
its own battery pack, and theidea, in the most oversimplified
sense, is kind of the same wayit works with your Ryobi or
Milwaukee tools, where you canpull out the battery, put in a
(01:19):
fresh one when you need it andyou can kind of manage the
battery use based on what youneed to accomplish on the job
site.
So you don't necessarily needan 18-volt battery pack for your
flashlight.
You can put in a six-volt or anumber, whatever it is, and I
think that that is about assimplified as I can get it.
I'm here today with Rob Bauerand Chris LaFleur.
(01:39):
Chris is the managing directorof Z-Quip and Rob, you're one of
the engineers that's developingthe system.
Thanks for being on the show,thanks for having us, thank you.
Yeah, of course, now you know, Ithink for me it's very easy to
kind of see this and visualizethis as a powered hand tool
thing.
Right, that's what it said tome.
But you guys, you know Moogworks with a number of OEMs,
(02:02):
your suppliers to Bobcat Case, acouple of others.
You know, you guys are really,really smart.
What was your inspiration forsomething like this?
Speaker 5 (02:11):
Right, it was all focused on how can we make
electrification in constructionsomething that people actually
want to use, something thatreally makes sense.
Like you said, moog has spent alot of years working with the
existing OEMs and inconstruction on, I mean,
everything from electrified toautonomous tele-operation.
(02:31):
It's a lot of really smartstuff, but we wanted to take our
own approach and say you know,we see where certain things are
going and we think we can makeelectrification go faster and be
better for the constructionindustry.
So what would we do in order tomake that happen?
And, like you said, rob, rob isone of many super smart
(02:53):
engineers that we have.
The stuff that they can do isamazing, and so when you throw a
lot of really talented peopleat a problem and ask them to
take a fresh look at it, you getsome pretty cool stuff.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
Well, I think that's a really good way of putting it,
because these guys areliterally rocket scientists.
Some of these guys areliterally rocket scientists.
Speaker 5 (03:12):
So like that I was going to downplay how good he is
, but my God, he is the man.
Speaker 3 (03:16):
That's awesome, but we talk about electrification in
the construction space.
You know it is happening, butit's not happening very quickly.
And as we look at what thelegacy brands are doing, some of
the other OEMs are doing, theyhave a lot of things going for
them and that they know how tobuild stuff, they know what
their job sites need, they knowwhat their customers like, but
they also have a lot holdingthem back.
(03:38):
They have existing platforms,they have sunk costs, they have
diesel engine plants and a lotof R&D put in there.
How are you looking at thisdifferently, and how does being
a supplier enable you to be morenimble than an OEM?
Speaker 5 (03:54):
It's important to know that we see this as being
the kind of thing that everybodyis better off when people push
the envelope with this, and whatwe've learned with working with
the OEMs is the good and badthat comes with having an
existing stakeholder andexisting products and, like you
said, they're pushing this.
(04:14):
But we see ourselves as beingable to take risks and take
leaps of faith that they mightnot be willing to take or might
not want to take.
For example, it's when you comeout with a competitor through
your own diesel product line.
That's tough right, and itdoesn't mean that they don't
want to do that or it's not theright decision, but we don't
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have a lot of the constraintsthat they do.
So we can take chances and wecan come out with innovations
and product features that wethink really are great for the
industry and other people willreally love in the future.
But we have the freedom and theability to do it, and so we see
it as just an opportunity forus to move the industry along
faster in the electrificationgame because of that.
Speaker 3 (04:57):
Yeah, and you mentioned giving your engineers,
guys like Rob, kind of carteblanche to look at things in a
different way.
And the thing that reallystruck me from our conversations
outside of this and also fromreading the materials and
reading up on Zquip and whatZquip was all about, is this
idea of looking at a job sitenot necessarily in terms of the
(05:18):
work that needs to be done, butthe energy that it's going to
take to do that work and thenthe most efficient way to put
that energy to use.
Rob, can you speak to that alittle bit?
Speaker 4 (05:28):
Here, ken, a few minutes ago you were mentioning
using the power tool analogy,the hand power tool analogy, and
that's a solid analogy, exceptfor and you brought up a couple
of different brands of powertools you might have the
batteries.
Don't go from one tool to thenext.
So once you commit to a brand,you know that you're stuck with
that one.
If you have multiple brands ofpower tools, you have to have
(05:50):
multiple brands of batteries andchargers and manage all that.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
Why would you have anything but Ryobi hand tools?
Speaker 4 (05:57):
Let me think.
Anyhow, when you're dealingwith small batteries, small
chargers, it's inconvenient butit's not that big a deal.
They're not that expensive,it's not driving your cost, it's
just an inconvenience.
When you get up to a vehiclelevel and you're talking about
the energy required for a jobsite, a battery that's sitting
on the side uncharged, everyonealways talks about how it's
(06:20):
terrible if your battery doesn'thave any energy left in it, how
terrible that is.
Our vision on that is that'sactually good.
That means you use that tool.
The bad part is if you can'tget more energy back out of that
machine.
Having a dead battery is a goodthing.
Not being able to get energyback in the machine is a bad
thing.
So in our system we havebatteries that can go from
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machine to machine, acrossbrands, across types of machine,
across sizes of machine.
That means that you should haveonly the amount of energy that
you need to run that site.
Machines that are sittingaround unused are waste.
That's what you think of them.
That's not insurance.
That doesn't make you feel good.
It's waste, Right.
(07:06):
Furthermore, the machines thatwe're building have multiple
bays that take batteries, Somepower tools.
Now, if you see a Moitresoftware instance, it might take
260 volt batteries or somethinglike that.
Our machines can take as littleas one battery, or as much as
six for current machines we'vebeen looking at.
The machine will run just fineon one, two, three, four,
(07:26):
whatever you need to make it go.
It won't run as long, of course.
But having all of thisflexibility, Again, imagine that
you have your hand power toolsand one battery goes across all
the different brands.
There is no OEM that'sincentivized to want to be able
to swap with some other OEM'sequipment.
We are.
(07:48):
We understand that ourcustomers are.
Because the energy back to youroriginal question because the
energy on the site is thelimiting factor we've made it
that you have just enough andyou can move it from machine to
machine.
You can move it in three waysyou can swap batteries, you can
fast charge onto or you can dosharing energy from machine to
(08:09):
machine.
One machine can pull up next toanother and just transfer that
energy over.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
Let's talk about that for a second, because when we
talk about pulling a battery outof a hand tool, talking about
pulling it out of power drill,putting it into a microsoft,
whatever it may be, it's veryeasy to do that.
These batteries, I believethey're 140 kilowatt battery
packs.
They've also got cooling,they've also got controllers.
They got away and I'mexaggerating, but I don't think
I'm exaggerating by much.
(08:34):
They got away a thousand pounds.
How are you swapping these out?
It's one thing to say we'rejust going to grab the battery
and swap it out.
How does that actually happen?
Speaker 4 (08:45):
The first thing to plant in your mind is the swap.
Out is not the first thing thatyou want to do.
You're going to be able to swap.
We can swap.
I'm going to answer yourquestion in a second.
The first thing you want to dois just keep enough energy on
that machine.
That could be fast charging andthat could be buddy stores,
just transferring power over andyou're not dealing with those
heavy batteries at all.
Then if you have to swap, thenyou swap.
(09:09):
If you have to swap, there'smultiple ways to do it.
If you're on a site that has atower crane, that's by far the
easiest way.
You simply lift it off, youpull the battery pack back to
the base of the tower crane,which is generally electric and
has good power right thereavailable.
You throw that one on, charge.
You pick another one up that'salready charged.
You go out to the machine, dropit on.
It is literally our motto isone minute, one hand, one person
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to swap.
The thing People are imaginingthis is a big, complex thing.
That is our goal.
Now I'm not saying we're quiteall the way to that goal, but
we're getting real close.
In addition, that one persondoesn't need any special
training.
They can be the operator.
Just a few minutes of training.
It's not much more complicatedthan the hand tool that you're
(09:55):
talking about.
All the interface to themachine has been made quite
simple.
Speaker 3 (09:59):
Let's talk about that , because you've got this
running on a CAT 308, eight tonexcavator right now as a proof
of concept.
You're building out othermachines, whether they're wheel
loaders or compact forklifts orwhatever else you're building.
You've got a couple of thesealready happening.
You can check the performanceon that.
But there are other systems onthe machines as well.
(10:19):
There's hydraulic systems,there's control systems, and
those are not going to beuniform from OEM to OEM.
How do all of these systemsplay nice together?
Are there any advantages tohaving this uniform battery that
works across all of thesesystems?
Speaker 4 (10:39):
The battery goes from system to system to system or
across brands, across machinetypes.
That is, literally there's twotypes of batteries there's a 70
kilowatt hour battery andthere's 140 kilowatt hour
battery.
There aren't 12, there's onlytwo For the other systems that
you're talking about.
In our conversion phase thatwe're in currently, we have to
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deal with the fact thatCaterpillar has this kind of
pump and Hitachi has somethingelse.
We have the motors, we have theadapters, we have all the
pieces necessary to make allthat work the motor pump combos,
for instance.
There's a little bit ofengineering involved in that.
Each time we do a conversion.
The first machine that weengineer to do a conversion
(11:21):
takes us a little bit of time.
There's some engineeringassociated with that.
After that, we have all thedrawings, we have all the part
list, we have all the stuff.
We have effectively a kit.
The second machine is easy.
The engineering takes us a fewmonths, but the second machine
would only take us a couple ofweeks.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
That makes a ton of sense.
I imagine it's easier toactually service and work on
some of these because you'reremoving all of the diesel, all
the cooling lines, all of thefuel tank.
You can just pop the batteriesoff and now you've got a big
flat platform that you canaccess all the hydraulics from
the access is incredible.
Speaker 4 (11:54):
Most larger excavators or mid-sized to large
excavators.
The valve blocks right near thecenter of the machine and the
swing motors are right there.
Once the battery packs are off,you have complete, unbelievable
access to it.
There's such a luxury to workon the machines in that way.
We didn't start off the journeythere, but boy was that a nice
thing to find.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
Seems like Chris wants to say something.
Speaker 5 (12:17):
Oh, no, no, this is a better path to go down.
Speaker 3 (12:22):
Fair enough.
We're talking about some of theadvantages that you're getting
from this conversion.
Obviously, I work with electric.
I'm all about electrification.
In addition to the benefitsthat come with electrification
the ability to work on noiseregulated sites, the ability to
work in environmentallysensitive locations that are no
(12:42):
drip sites, the ability to dosome stuff indoors and minimize
the need for respirators andthings like that In addition to
those benefits, there's also acost benefit potentially to
converting existing fleet assetsrather than effectively
scrapping them all and buyingbrand new electric.
Can you talk a little bit aboutsome of that, Chris?
Speaker 5 (13:05):
Sure, Understanding the value of this is tricky.
It really is a triggering pointfor a lot of people of what
it's expensive, but it could beworth it, and we don't know what
the future holds.
The way we see it, though, is,like you said, there's so many
benefits to this that, ratherthan focusing on what are the
costs, what is this going tomean?
(13:26):
What are the bad things thatcome along with electrification?
What does this enable in thefuture?
When you think about the valueof a conversion versus
purchasing new, there's going tobe an impact of electrification
on the residual value of adiesel.
We're already learning that inEurope.
(13:46):
Customers are saying I don'tknow how I feel about buying a
diesel machine, because there'sa chance it's worth nothing in
five years.
When you put that into a TCOmodel, it's tough.
We want people to understandthat it's the.
Electrification isn't foreverybody right now, but there
is absolutely the use case whereyou convert a fleet of machines
(14:10):
to electric, and it makeseconomic sense and it makes
operational sense, and it reallyis better for your operators
and for your customers.
I mean the first time you seethese things working quietly out
back somewhere and you see howhappy an operator is and you see
how nice it is for customers tobe able to be there, People
just operating near it it makesa huge difference.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
Yeah Well, we talk about this all the time on the
show, that just the ability tobe able to yell stop and have
the operator hear you, it's likea huge safety feature.
Right, because how many timeshas the operator, the guy's
digging a trench and he rips upa cable line or a gas line that
somebody else saw but thefrantic waving of the hands?
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The operator just gives you thethumbs up, waves back and keeps
digging.
Speaker 5 (14:56):
I mean even we've seen it with the you get a 30
ton trenching, you got the guyin the pit with the total
fiction and they have to stopstick their head out.
Yell, stop stick their head outyell.
It's just the ease ofcommunication and the safety
aspect of it is amazing.
That's the thing is everybodywho we've had used these
(15:18):
machines prefers these machines.
It's a great experience.
It's where you get into yourcustomer versus your user, the
user of the machine.
This is a great machine.
It's powerful, it's quiet, it'sclean Everything you wish the
diesel was.
It's making it make sense froman operational and financial
perspective and that's what ourgoal is.
(15:38):
Our goal is to make this makesense.
When you talk about where wecan be in here that the OEMs
can't look, I don't think thatthe future of this will be.
Every OEM is swapping batteriesjust openly and having a great
time of everybody sharing it.
I don't think it needs to bethat, but I think it needs to be
that now to change.
Speaker 3 (16:01):
I'm going to disagree with you.
I'm going to disagree with you.
I think it needs to be that,because if I've got an 80-ton
machine or a 30-ton machine andit's got a 200 kilowatt hour
battery pack and somethinghappens to that machine and that
thing breaks down and I have toget it serviced and we all know
what a nightmare service hasbeen, parts availability has
(16:23):
been, chip shortage has been.
Now I've got a huge, expensiveasset sitting on a job site that
I can't move and I've got abajillion kilowatts of energy
sitting in that battery that Ican't access.
If I had the ability to say,okay, there's a problem with
this controller, there's aproblem with this thermal unit,
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there's a problem with thisbattery, and I could just take
that pack off, put a known goodpack back on and send out that
little pack for service ormaintenance.
That is infinitely easier thanbringing an entire job site to a
halt because my one electricexcavator stopped working and
now I got to figure out a way toget it out of the trench and
ship it back to the dealer, andLord knows how I'm going to make
(17:07):
that happen.
So I disagree with you.
I think we do need to get tothis point.
Speaker 5 (17:12):
Yeah.
So that's the caveat right.
Should we be there?
Absolutely yeah.
Will everybody play nice in thesandbox?
I don't know, but you had anepisode previously about the
right to repair.
I think that the biggest partwith this is I just want to
interrupt here for one second,nobody should be listening to
these episodes.
Speaker 4 (17:33):
If you're listening to this podcast and getting real
information out of it.
Speaker 3 (17:37):
That's amazing.
Speaker 5 (17:40):
So yeah, we did talk about right to repair.
That's true, yeah, we did, yeah, but I think that the way we
approach it right is what do wethink a job site needs to look
like for electrification to makesense?
And if you think about just theoverall right to repair
discussion, that's happening now.
You get a diesel mechanic onsite and it's still difficult to
(18:04):
keep your uptime going.
Speaker 3 (18:06):
But yeah, it can't work on these machines.
Speaker 5 (18:08):
These are not machines that anybody will know
how to fix.
And then, even if you do,they're computers, they're
supercomputers, these are justunbelievable machines.
You're not going to fix them onsite.
And so when we talk about theserviceability of this, the goal
is uptime, always right.
(18:29):
In order for these things tomake financial sense, they have
to work all the time.
Everybody talks about batterylife.
Battery life is one part ofthat.
Serviceability is the otherside of it, and that's why this
idea of modularity and what ZQIPreally represents is not just
about modularity to swapbatteries.
It's modularity to make surethat your machine has the
(18:52):
greatest uptime of any electricmachine out there.
Battery dies you can swap it.
Great.
A battery breaks, things happenright Swap it.
Electric motor breaks ModularSwap it.
Charging Swap it.
There's so many things that cango wrong, and I think it's about
having the humility and theself awareness to know that this
(19:13):
is the first generation ofsomething that is going to be
the future.
To say that nothing will gowrong is naive, and so, rather
than avoiding that or trying tobe too big for that, we embrace
it, and Rob's background isdoing this for NASA and the US
government and making sure thatthings are up all the time,
(19:34):
because a plane can't be down orsoldiers die.
So we know how to do this, robknows how to do this and this is
what the background of thisgovernment and space and
military application.
If we can do it for them, wecan do it for your construction
site.
Speaker 3 (19:48):
Yeah, for sure, for sure.
Well, this is just great stuff,and I think that for me, the
only real question left is isthis real?
And I don't mean to put thatout there in a negative way, but
there's so much vaporware inthis space, there's so many
people where you don't even knowif what they're showing you
exists.
You know, cummins at the ACTshow, brought out their new 15
(20:11):
liter that you could swap thehead and run it on biodiesel.
You could run it on a hydrogenblend or pure hydrogen.
All you had to do is swap outthe top end and connect the fuel
sensor to determine what kindof fuel was in there and you
were good to go.
But here we are almost a yearlater and nobody's seen one
running yet.
So is this real?
(20:31):
Is this something that you lookat it and you go yeah, this is
real, we've got it in operation,it's going to cost this much.
Or are we still in the fingerscrossed Hail Mary stage?
Speaker 5 (20:42):
No, this is real, absolutely.
Speaker 4 (20:45):
Our 308 has been running now for a full year and
we take it out all the time.
We're beating the tar out of it.
We've had many operators comein from government agencies,
from private contractors and runit.
Sometimes they show up prettymuch diesel fans, but they
cannot help themselves.
They're kind of giggling by thetime they leave and it's just
too much fun to run it.
It's quiet, it's fantastic.
(21:06):
In addition to that, the otherparts of the system are real in
our shop right now.
It's totally functional andbeing turned into commercialized
buttoned up products ready togo out to the field.
We're months away from havingmultiple machines on a site
working together, sharing energy, swapping batteries, doing all
(21:29):
the things we've talked about.
We have all the prototype workgoing already.
In my entire time at Mogue,this is the lowest technical
risk project I've been on.
There is no technical risk left.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
I wish I could see behind the NDA curtain and see
what other cool stuff you'vebeen working on.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
Because that sounds pretty impressive.
Speaker 3 (21:50):
There's been some fun things along the way.
The high-tech thing that youguys can barely conceive of.
This is the dumbest thing I'vedone.
Speaker 4 (22:01):
I didn't mean that.
It's just that we know how todo this.
We have clear line of sight and, where we are to working in the
field, clear line of sight onthe whole thing.
Speaker 3 (22:14):
That's awesome.
One last question we're talkingabout construction sites.
Job sites are criticallyimportant.
This is one of the areas thatwe need to electrify.
I think there's alsoapplications for this in the
field of agriculture, especiallyon hobby farms, where you may
be able to set up somethingwhere you've got animals, you've
got horses, you've gotvineyards, where the smell of
(22:37):
diesel and the chemicals ofdiesel get on, the particulate
matter gets on the product.
That's something that you don'twant.
If you're a high-end organicfarmer, then the other question
I would have is is there anyon-road application that you
guys are looking at, becausewe've been talking about
off-road the entire time.
Speaker 5 (22:55):
You're going to get us down to rabbit hole here, man
.
We can talk about this for days.
Speaker 3 (23:00):
We got seven minutes left.
We got days is a lot but sevenminutes, and it's Miller time.
Speaker 5 (23:06):
We've got a big vision for this.
The smaller you have an ideaand a vision for what
electrification it is, the lessit makes sense.
So the bigger you get, italways just works better.
Then if you think of well inconstruction, the site is part
of it, but there's an entireon-road, there's a separate
off-the-site aspect of this.
(23:26):
You start to think of how allof that combines into this
operation of things getting doneto get a job completed.
You think on-road it's RZ-quipmodules can fit in the back of a
Ford Lightning.
You could have your pickuptruck with a battery in the back
(23:46):
, charging that plugged intoyour machines in back, taking it
to different sites.
You can have power movingacross sites.
There's not just energy on themachine, but there's gensets
that are going to be convertedto battery rather than diesel.
There's other mobile powerapplications.
Rob and I have talked a lotabout this, of solar farms.
Rather than connecting solarfarms to a grid, having this
(24:10):
last mile delivery of power backand forth, it's really about
the right way to get energy fromthe source to where it has to
be worked on.
We see the Z-quip applicationas having much broader reach
than just being a battery on amachine.
(24:31):
It's a way for the entire site,the entire operation, to get
the energy needed to do the workthat has to be done.
This is what makes this just anextremely rewarding and
challenging thing, because youkeep getting bigger, and the
bigger it gets, the more youstart to get that feeling of we
(24:52):
could be really onto somethinghere.
This could really change things.
Speaker 4 (24:55):
I'm impressed, I love it.
Once it's modular and eitherswappable or fast-chargeable, a
lot of things change.
Imagine the American Southwesta giant desert.
It is hard to take a largeheavy vehicle, electric vehicle
across that desert.
From a range point of viewthat's difficult to do.
Speaker 3 (25:12):
That's also one of the things I used to have a Fiat
who could barely get acrossthere.
Speaker 4 (25:16):
Yes, it's also one of the best places in the world to
put a solar farm.
Yes, there's huge tracks ofinexpensive, undeveloped land
that nobody's going to care.
If you build a solar farm, it'snot a nimby problem, nobody
cares.
Every 100 miles you have aplace where you have a giant
solar farm.
The energy is not even hookedto the grid.
You don't even have to have thegrid out there, it goes into
(25:37):
the Z-quips.
You pull them with your tractortrailer.
You don't own that Z-quip,you're renting it.
It's just a thing.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
It's a subscription.
Speaker 4 (25:43):
You stop going off you stop another one on, you
grab a cup of coffee and you'reon your way.
Yeah Right, we do all kinds ofrobotics here, so building the
automated swapper.
You're asking earlier todayabout swapping modules A year
and a half from now.
You're not going to even haveto touch it.
You're going to pull up next toa machine.
It's going to pull it out, putthe other one in and you're on
your way.
You don't touch it, you don'tworry about it.
You answer a couple of textswhy it's happening.
Speaker 3 (26:04):
That's cool.
This is great stuff, guysListen.
Thank you so much for being onthe show.
I know we're coming to the endof our time commitment.
Here you have the floors.
Is there anything that, if Iwas a professional, I would have
asked you?
That would have really set themessage across.
Or is there something you justwant to sing?
A little mogul electronicsjingle for us?
The floor is yours, yeah.
Speaker 5 (26:24):
Still working on the jingle, but thank you for the
time.
I hope you can see how much welove this and we believe in this
and we are looking for peoplewho are interested in this, and
so for those who have a fleetthey have the site.
They need this to happen.
Reach out, talk to us and let'sget this going for you.
Speaker 3 (26:44):
Sounds great and I just want to address real quick.
Bill said something about thecenter of gravity.
Rob's a smart guy, I'm surehe's figured that out.
I don't think we need tovalidate the concerns there,
like if you're on a 45 degreeangle and you're trying to run
an 80 ton excavator, you've gotbigger problems.
Speaker 4 (27:01):
Yeah, we're paying a lot of attention to all this.
We're keeping our CG low.
We're there, we build airplanesfor living.
Cg is kind of a big deal inthat world.
Speaker 3 (27:08):
So we're good.
Yeah, Rob's got it undercontrol.
Guys, Do, do, do, do, do.
All right.
So that was Chris LaFleur,Robert Bauer from Zquip and Mike
.
What do you think of this thing, man?
I know we talked about it a fewweeks ago, but this is
something that I think is reallycool.
Nope, have we lost my loadthere?
(27:31):
We?
Speaker 2 (27:31):
are Good.
Sorry about that.
I went through a tunnel.
I came out the other side.
Speaker 3 (27:38):
Mike's driving through the tunnel today.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
Yeah, actually it's been an entire week of being on
the road.
We had a safety meeting atevery offer and we go through
that every year multiple timesthroughout the year.
Well, this is our big safetysummit throughout the entire
company.
Speaker 3 (27:55):
So here's the thing.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
Well, that's a lot of driving it is.
I was in Chicago on Monday,cleveland on Wednesday and then
I was at Pittsburgh today andI'm heading out to the airport
in Cleveland.
You fly out.
I'll be in Daytona tomorrow.
Speaker 3 (28:08):
Oh, that's right, You're going to the Daytona 500.
Speaker 2 (28:11):
That is correct.
There's a profound statementthat is on our safety meeting
and I can speak about that andit says we will perform to the
standard of which managementwill tolerate.
Ok, explain that a little bit.
Well, what that means is that,as managers, as supervision and
(28:35):
as personnel, if you have noresponsibility other than to
anybody but yourself, even ifyou have no pet, nobody to go
home to, you're just living onthe road you're going to work to
the standard of which youtolerate.
So, if you want to work safe,you're going to make choices
(28:56):
throughout the entire day andyou're going to work for the
standard of which you want to,and that goes to the people that
work for you and that goes tothe people you work for and to
the people you work next to you.
It's all about your own choice.
So if you want to do it, wewant you to do it right.
We want everybody to be safe,everybody to go home, not get
(29:17):
killed, not get hurt, not hurtthose around them, and that's
kind of a profound statement.
That was our message for theweek.
Speaker 3 (29:26):
I like that.
That kind of goes along withthat.
Have you ever heard of thePeter principle?
Yeah, good.
So for those of you listeningwho have not heard of the Peter
principle, peter's principle issort of like Murphy's law.
It says that everyone getspromoted to their level of
incompetence.
(29:46):
So if you think about that interms of a restaurant, you get
hired as a bus boy.
You're a really good bus boy,people like you.
They make you the host.
You're a really good host.
You're seating people.
You're keeping people moving.
So they make you a server.
You're a really good server.
You're making a whole bunch ofmoney.
You're making people happy.
They make you a shift manager.
You're a pretty good shiftmanager.
Everybody kind of digs whatyou're doing.
(30:07):
You're getting by, you're doingthe job, you're there a little
while.
Then they make you a storemanager, and you're not really a
good store manager.
You're kind of mediocre, maybenot even mediocre.
You're just not very good.
You're kind of incompetent,right, you're just barely
scraping by without the wholeplace catching on fire.
Well, most places will notdemote you.
(30:27):
They will not put you back inthe position that you were,
excelling.
What they'll do is they'll justkeep you there where you're
terrible and you're just goingto sit there and be terrible for
the rest of your career.
And now, as a company getsolder and more mature, you start
to have more of these Peterprinciple things take effect.
So you have somebody who is areally good regional manager
(30:48):
they get promoted in national.
They're not that good, theystay there.
You have someone who's notreally that good on the regional
side they stay there.
And you start to see thingslike that when you look at like
Ford and GM and these companiesthat are a hundred years old.
You start to meet and interactwith some of these guys and you
just go.
Some of them like wow, this guyis really sharp, and others
(31:08):
like man, how did this guy getthis job?
He has no business doing this.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
Yeah, he got the job because he's been there forever.
Speaker 3 (31:17):
That's exactly right, and he's just been promoted to
the point where he's justcompletely inept.
And I've always been lucky.
I always get to that point atthe ground level, so I don't
even have to worry about gettingpromoted.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
You know another big thing that we talked about with
safety in various forms.
It's fit for duty.
Fit for duty is a big thing,you know operators showing up on
the job.
They run equipment but they'renot fit to climb into it or not
fit to do it.
Speaker 3 (31:42):
Yeah, that's a real problem.
Speaker 2 (31:44):
It's a real problem you got I was talking to
somebody two weeks ago thatworks for another company it's
not ours and we were talkingabout, you know, people that are
fit for duty and he goes.
It is a problem with everybodythat I talked to, because
everybody I talked to is talkingabout that.
It's all showing up, not readyto work.
It could be something as simpleas you have tennis shoes on.
What can I do with you?
(32:04):
Do somebody that shows up whoclearly has a pre-existing
medical condition?
Okay?
Well then I need to talk tothis guy.
What could he do besides what Ithink he was brought in to do
Not going to be swinging an axall day, or he's not going to be
swinging a pick all day.
He can't do that, but maybehe's got some other hidden
talent that we're not sure of.
But it all takes time.
(32:26):
The workforce is full of usright now.
Speaker 3 (32:29):
Well, I think it goes two ways.
Right, the kind of lack ofworkforce that's out there, and
there's a group called HBI.
Right, this is the HomeBuilders Institute.
They're talking about the lackof skilled labor in the
construction industry, andthey're just talking about
residential construction.
And they're saying that, inorder to meet the demand that is
(32:50):
there now, that we need to add2,000, more than 2,000 new
workers every day into theindustry, 750,000 per year over
the next three years, just tomeet the current labor demand.
And we're not going to getthere.
We're just not going to getthere.
Speaker 2 (33:12):
You are not going to what happens and this goes back
to my first statement about willperform to the level of which
management tolerate If wetolerate less skilled workers or
less capable workers thattherefore are on fake Cuz.
We're trying to be the quotathat we can achieve anyway, but
everybody around you, theequipment that they're operating
(33:34):
or they're working next to, injeopardy.
Speaker 3 (33:37):
Yeah Well, but this is where you start to see that
push towards not only electricbut autonomous.
You know Like I'll give you acase in point arc best just put
out.
They've been doing electric youknow forklifts for a lot of
years now, and the reason thatit's important that their
electric is this next bit theynow have a fully autonomous
(33:59):
warehouse where one or two guysrunning the stuff on an iPad,
using cameras and sensors, canrun a fleet of 20 of these
things, these material handlers,inside a warehouse and move
stuff around and load up palletsand everything else.
And you don't need 20 guys andtwo foreman and people who are
alternates and then worry aboutpeople calling and sick.
(34:20):
What you need is guys who knowhow this stuff works, who can
sit behind a tablet and ensurethat everything is running
properly.
And the reason Electric is suchan important part of that is
you can't run all of thesesensors and all these Nvidia
graphics cards and all of thisAI Stuff.
Speaker 2 (34:36):
You can't run it off 12 volt current right this
reminds me of the Self-parkepisode, where they're talking
about stuff.
The next thing, you know,somebody stands up and he's like
they took our job.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
They took our jobs.
They took our jobs.
Speaker 2 (35:06):
And then they keep going and it keeps going all the
way to a rooster.
No, because it just gets.
So it's the idea behind thescene, was it's so ludicrous.
It is just not enough people asit is.
So the idea that autonomy andand all this is going to take
somebody's job, it's crazinessbecause there isn't.
There isn't anybody to take thejob as it is.
(35:27):
But but yeah, there is noreason why anybody should be
worried about people gettingtheir jobs taken by anything
that we're talking about,because there are not the people
to take them from.
Speaker 3 (35:43):
Exactly.
But how often do you hear that?
You hear it from all walks oflife, whether it's you know rich
guys on Madison Avenue or youknow these poor dirt farmers in
West Virginia.
Everybody is convinced thatimmigrants are coming for their
job, robots are coming for theirjob, ai is coming for their job
and it's like dude, nobodywants to do these jobs.
(36:04):
I was talking today, you know,and we'll revisit these guys in
another episode but I wastalking today to a guy from case
in New Holland, and Case, newHolland.
They're huge in agriculture, bigin construction, but huge in
agriculture with the farm, alland everything else.
And you know we keep talkingabout every year there's fewer
and fewer people who want to getinto farming and who want to
(36:26):
get into Agriculture and getinto that industry and the
people that are there now, a lotof these farm principles that
are in their 60s, that are intheir 70s.
They've worked their wholelives thinking that they were
gonna leave the farm to theirfamily or their kids or their
grandkids Maybe, and their kidsdon't want any part of the farm.
They don't want any part ofthat life.
(36:47):
So, number one, they've gotnobody to leave it to and number
two, they've got nobody to workon the land and we still keep
making more people.
You know there's people talkingabout Population growth is
slowing down.
It may be slowing down but thatdoesn't mean that the
population is not still growingLike it's gonna be decades
(37:08):
before we start reducing thenumber of population, especially
the United States, with all theimmigrants coming in and we
still need to feed all thesepeople and if we don't have
bodies to throw at the farms, wegot to start throwing robots at
them.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
Hey, you can't Keep going.
You want to know what.
The biggest thing that's takingpeople's jobs away is stupidity
.
There's a lot of that to goaround there is, and the lack of
common sense and the lack ofWillingness to learn which you
put them in them.
(37:42):
You're gonna call it ignorant,but it's stupidity.
That is what robbing people ofjobs right now.
Speaker 3 (37:50):
Yeah, you've got people who don't understand.
And it's something as simple asyou know fit for work, right,
you can't show up to a job on aconstruction site in tennis
shoes.
And then the other problemgoing around and this is, I
think, a minor problem in termsof the number of times that it's
affecting people, but I dothink it's a major problem
(38:12):
because we as a society have notyet come up with a way to To
integrate this into ourworkforce.
And I'm gonna get to what it isin a second the legalization of
marijuana and otherrecreational drugs throughout
the country.
You've got guys that you knowEnjoying the, the couple of
(38:32):
gummies themselves, or they hadan edible at a concert a month
ago.
Something goes wrong.
They go in for a drug test andthey have this perfectly legal
substance in their system.
And and now what do you do?
Now you have an incident, nowYou've got some evidence of
possible impairment.
Now You've got liability issue.
You've got to essentially letthese people go or keep them off
(38:54):
of your job sites Just becauseof the liability, even though
they may not be affected at allfrom something that's totally
legal.
Speaker 2 (39:02):
Yeah, and, and there are round table meetings going
on, you know, monthly withdifferent contractors and and
safety directors in the industry.
There is a number of tests nowthat have been developed.
They've been field tested thatcan tell okay, I had somebody
(39:23):
that drove a vehicle, drove apiece of equipment, operated a
piece of equipment, had anincident Tested positive.
They send it off to a differenttesting procedure and they can
tell, based on their BMI andthings like that, roughly how
much and how long ago it wasthat they ingested, whether
(39:46):
smoke that, ate it, drank itwhatever it is and that that's
becoming a larger player in thetesting of substances and drug
alcohol, because you're right,it's more complex.
Today used to be.
A guy had drugs in the system.
It's not legal.
He's gone exactly Now you havea whole level of testing that
(40:11):
has to go on.
Beyond that, there are a lot ofpeople fighting for the
legalization of marijuana.
There's a lot of reasons why itprobably is really good.
There are a lot of reasons whythat whole industry Is for it.
The states are for it.
People want to talk about taxesand tax revenue.
They have a huge generator ofthat.
(40:33):
Take some of the burden off ofeverything.
The bottom line is people aregoing to buy it, they're going
to get it, they're going tosmoke it, eat it, do whatever
they want to do.
It all falls under that sameumbrella fit for work.
And are we going to tolerate it?
Yeah, we're going to tolerateit.
How do we tolerate it?
Speaker 3 (40:52):
Exactly, and I think that comes down again to this
robotization and electrificationof the workforce.
And we don't even have to.
You know I always like to makethings about electric for a lot
of reasons.
I came into all this right, itwas from the battery side and
from the tech side of it, buteven on the diesel stuff I mean
cat.
You know this wasn't somethingthat we were planning to talk
(41:14):
about, but Caterpillar hasupgraded all of its you know cat
grade and cat assist and AR,euro software, and they're
putting all of that into theirdozers, the D4, d5 and D6.
They're making all that, whaton a car would be called ADAS or
the driver assistance systems.
They're making all of thatstandard across their line.
(41:34):
And they're doing that becausethere is the lack of skilled
workers.
But the people that are willingto show up a lot of them don't
have the 20, 25 years ofexperience that guys from the
previous generation had.
So if they're going to be, youknow grading a road or something
you want to make sure that's,you know smooth, not a bunch of
waves on it like you're lookingout onto the ocean.
(41:56):
So all of this software ismaking up for that lack of
experience.
And I think, as you start to seethe cost of college and tuition
and that life path, continue toget away from the middle class
and you know the workingfamilies of America and that
college dream that has beenaccessible for a couple of years
(42:16):
and I think that's going to bea big step for a couple of
decades but is now becoming lessaccessible.
You look out 5, 10, 15 years.
If you've got young kids nowand you're thinking where am I
going to get $300,000 per kid tosend them to college, the
answer is a lot of people aren't.
They're just not going to beable to.
You're going to have morepeople coming back into the
(42:37):
trades.
You're going to have young catsthat are familiar with
technology, that are not afraidto use technology.
They're going to be coming intoconstruction, agriculture and
they are going to expect thatthe machine is going to do a lot
of the stuff for them.
Speaker 2 (42:51):
We have to have that.
We have to have the equipmentaiding these people, whoever you
are, because, like you said andwe've talked about this before
the guys that can feel itthrough the seat yeah, when it
doesn't matter whether themachine's electric, it's
hydraulic, it's purelymechanical the seasoned guys
that drew up on stuff, they canfeel it before it happens.
(43:14):
They know when things are goingto rock.
You don't have that anymorewith the younger group, with the
newer people coming in.
They've been sheltered fromthat for their entire existence.
Speaker 3 (43:26):
Hang on, I don't think that's fair, because
there's guys that come up youknow, we talked about this
before Like if you were drivingthe old 74 Cadillac and that
thing was like a boat and youcouldn't feel the ground and you
couldn't feel the wheel.
And if you came up driving earlyBMWs in the 80s and early 90s
that had no digital anything,everything was analog and felt
(43:48):
connected to the road, that wasa real revolution compared to
that kind of floaty Americansort of battleship type of
handling that these cars had.
When you look at the heavyequipment, you look at the
trucks and drivers andeverything else, it's almost the
reverse of that where thosereally stiff machines that
(44:09):
didn't have the isolation, thatdidn't have, you know, the
comfortable air ride seats, thatdidn't have the cushy seat
padding, that didn't have thenoise canceling in them, the
guys that have experienced theycame into this through that.
If you there is no amount ofseat time, I think that you
could get in a modern machinethat would teach you how to feel
(44:31):
that from the seat of yourpants or from the feel of the
wheel, because you're soisolated by power steering,
power seats, power brakes, powerand everything.
Speaker 2 (44:40):
That's what I mean.
Speaker 3 (44:41):
Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah, it's not a fault of the
guy, it's a fault of theequipment, the equipment doesn't
let you feel.
Speaker 2 (44:49):
That's what I was getting to you.
They've been isolated from thisgrowing up, like we are talking
about this in a small focusgroup that we were working on it
, even from the early concept ofthe car.
Young kids today do not knowwhat it's like to ride in
something like it was 30 yearsago or 50 years ago.
(45:12):
Okay, so you're a young kid,you're isolated from a young age
.
If you and then you progressthrough life, you then you get
into a semi truck, which isisolating you again.
You get into a new piece ofequipment, just like you said,
it's isolating you from thesounds of the noise and the dirt
that 50 years ago guys wereexperiencing.
(45:34):
20 years ago guys wereexperiencing.
We're removing a ton of peoplefrom those ambient environments
and because of that we'redesensitizing a ton of people to
think Because the equipment hasto help.
You need that to help Becausethe days you know and like you
(45:54):
were bringing it up about C&H,the kids that work on the farms,
and then the sixth, seventhgeneration farmers they're
dwindling faster than we couldever create them and we need the
equipment to help.
Speaker 3 (46:09):
Yeah, and there's no reason why.
Speaker 2 (46:13):
That's what I was going to say.
There's no reason why it can't,and there's no reason why we
can't use the technologyavailable to us to help replace
people that are not capable ofdoing it any other way and put
the people to work.
There's a saying that the worldneeds ditch diggers too.
That's very true, but we'rerunning out of those.
(46:35):
We're running out of a need,though, for them to, because a
lot of manual labor anymore isbeing phased out by unsafe work
practices.
This is a whole other level.
You have unsafe work practicesthat led the way for manual
labor.
Not going to stick a guy 30feet down in a hole with six
(46:57):
other guys and they're going tofill buckets to be hauled out
with a crane.
No, we're going to bring amachine in and we're going to
dig that out with the machine.
There's a lot of these thingsthat are starting to finally
fade.
I also think we need to put thecaddy shed clip in that part.
Speaker 1 (47:17):
I plan to go to law school after I graduated, but it
looks like my folks won't haveenough money to put me through
college.
Speaker 2 (47:23):
Well, the world needs ditch diggers too.
Speaker 5 (47:27):
Nice try.
Speaker 2 (47:30):
Yep.
Speaker 3 (47:34):
We should play that earlier because, like we're
talking about, like peoplearen't going to go to college
like they have been in the last2040 years.
You know, I think it's reallysad, because we talked about
this a lot, right?
Like, I think it's really sadthat we have all these robots
and all this AI out there.
And what an awesome way to say,like, look, the world needs
(47:55):
ditch diggers too, but itdoesn't have to be you or me.
It can be this robot and we cango do this awesome thing.
Except, instead of that, now wego, uh-oh, need to get your
jobs.
You're going to go find someother way to put food on the
table?
Speaker 2 (48:11):
Yes, Well, you know and a lot of things do come full
circle, though Sure, ashumanity, we do bring things
around full circle.
So there was an article thatjust came out not too long ago
about how they want to equipocean going vessels with sails
to aid in helping them, propelthem, become more efficient.
(48:34):
We had it.
We thought it was the worstthing ever.
We get rid of it.
We went to steam, we went todiesel power, Then we went to
electric.
If you're the government, youhave nuke, because that'll go
for you know however manyhalf-life.
So you know, we do bring thingsback around.
Somebody's going to tell usthat steam engines are cleaner
(48:54):
and that it was better offhaving it that way, but instead
of burning coal, we're going tohave a reactor in it.
Speaker 3 (49:00):
Right, exactly right.
You know, I see the point thatyou're making.
Like I do think that there is athere's a cyclical way of
looking at those.
Speaker 2 (49:10):
Glad somebody does.
Speaker 3 (49:12):
Glad somebody knows what you're talking about.
Biff's over there in thepassenger seat he's taking his
head.
It's like, oh God, what are wetalking about here.
Speaker 2 (49:20):
Hey God, I'm not on the road doing seminars anymore.
Speaker 3 (49:25):
He doesn't even.
He's not even keeping thescript anymore.
We're all over the place.
We got episode one, episode two.
We're all over.
It's terrible, but Go back tothe Edit it and just pull it
back together.
Speaker 2 (49:36):
That's all you got to do.
That's all I got to do.
Throw the rest of it back intothere and just cut and paste the
whole shit back.
It's going to be fine.
We're going to love it.
Speaker 3 (49:46):
Hey, you know.
So why didn't you get yourcomments on the on the mode
thing?
Cause we were you were ridingthrough the channel, so talk to
me about that.
I still think that's a greatidea with the Swapping the
batteries on the equipment.
Speaker 2 (49:58):
So when I was watching, that and then, and
then we were listening to thewhole thing and Get that at that
out, cause that was.
I was rambling there for asecond, somebody caught my
attention, so all this is 40minutes of rambling.
Speaker 3 (50:11):
You don't have to worry about it.
I know how to edit it.
You're going to tell me what itis.
Yeah, oh, eddie, yeah.
Speaker 2 (50:17):
Here's the thing that I took away from that whole
interview, and and what theyhave is a very cool product, the
very good concept, and I cantell you as a fleet manager has
somebody that helps dispatchequipment and breakdowns do
matter when they happen.
It eliminates a whole level ofthe machine that could let you
(50:37):
down.
Speaker 3 (50:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (50:39):
And if I was in caterpillar or C and H or
Kamatsu, I would have gone intoa meeting with a model excavator
and a Milwaukee battery andsaid this is what I need.
We're talking aboutelectrification.
Slide the battery into the backof the thing and let's go to
(51:00):
work.
And the other good thing aboutit, too, is Okay.
So let's say I have a failure.
I do look at the machine and Icannot be fixed right then and
there Right, and I can't takethat off of the core source.
It's not wasted.
Put it on to something that isviable and let's go back to work
.
It has nothing.
I mean the battery, if you know.
(51:23):
It's just one part of it thatyou have the machine part of it
as well.
If I lose an engine and anexcavator on a job, I can't take
that excavator and pull anengine out of another one and
stick it in the one.
Speaker 4 (51:34):
That I think is better for the job than the one
that blew up.
Speaker 2 (51:39):
I can't make that swap.
It's the same thing with youknow we, years and years ago
they used to do that withequipment.
When equipment was simpler, youhad a twin engine scraper and
you lost the rear engine.
You could pull the engine outof another scraper, put it in
(51:59):
the back of the other one and goback to work.
Those days are long gone.
This is as close to thatsimplicity as you're going to
get, because once you plug thebattery in and, like you said,
if, even if the battery is theproblem, you take it off and put
one back on.
If the machine's the problem,you move all your batteries and
you put them into the otherasset that you've brought and go
(52:21):
back to work.
Speaker 3 (52:23):
Yeah, it's a great concept and you know we opened
the show with those guys.
We'll close with that and thiswas a little bit light on
cultural references.
Let's throw in some randomvintage commercial for something
, maybe a little chase in thesandborn we will see you next
week.
Speaker 2 (52:38):
Duracell batteries we need vintage Duracell batteries
.
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (52:45):
Here are the current readings under partly sunny
skies perometer 30.1.
Speaker 1 (52:48):
When you're out fishing, you count on your radio
, so use the batteries you cancount on too, duracell.
Speaker 5 (52:54):
Tests show that after regular carbon batteries wear
out, duracell keeps going strong, because Duracell batteries
last longer.
And that means a lot Wheneveryou use your radio.
Duracell, the copper topbattery no regular battery looks
like it.
Speaker 1 (53:12):
Or lasts like it.
Tune in next week for moreheavy equipment podcast on
Spotify, apple Podcasts, googleor wherever you find podcasts.
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