September 10, 2024 • 53 mins
In today's thrilling HEP-isode of The Heavy Equipment Podcast, we ponder the burnout capabilities of Volvo's groundbreaking DD25 electric roller, reminisce about the good old days and the sweet smell of diesel on a spring morning, talk up PITT Ohio's big electric Mack deal, and take a detailed look at Caterpillar's acquisition of Bucyrus Erie. All this and more on the first (and possibly last) HEP-isode powered by Volvo CE!
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Today's thrilling episode is brought to you by
Volvo CE, and that's actuallytrue.
They're going to regret thisone.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
No, they don't regret , they know.
They've heard the show.
Yeah, no, in all seriousness,though, we really appreciate
them and all their hospitality.
I'm excited we're going to begoing to the Volvo days here
coming up.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Yeah, that's going to be a good show.
They actually sent me an emailabout what kind of machinery and
equipment we wanted to test outand I said you know I've got
this love for the electric stuff, so I want to check out the
DD25.
That's their new electricroller that they debuted last
year.
I suspect that if you were ableto get like a long thread of
(00:44):
that retread tire stuff on thatback side of it, it would look
pretty cool.
Look like you were rolling onlike one big mickey thompson
back there that'd be prettysweet.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
It's like a dot radio slick, but on a roller.
Let me tell you something weget this thing on full charge.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
It's maybe gonna go out and outrun your pickup truck
well, that's the thing, right,like it's all gear reduction and
torque amplification,everything else.
There's no reason why thatthing can't go 70, right well I
would.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
I would assume there's no reason why.
Yeah, with some time itcouldn't get up there.
I mean, anybody that's ever rana roller and has slipped the
drum on the asphalt mat andgotten yelled at for it and sent
home, maybe he wants a littlebit of extra tread there when
you're trying to work the matdown.
We're going to send this oneout to the guys out in Phoenix
that are working night shiftpaving, because you know they
(01:33):
got to hand it to them.
It's still 100 degrees outthere, it's dark.
They're out there trying to get, you know, sections of the
highway and sections of the citypaved at night because it's too
hot to do it during the day.
They need stuff like this.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
The last thing they need is the noise and vibration
of a diesel engine when theycould be rolling around on
Volvo's quiet, smooth,vibration-free DD25 electric
roller.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
That's my whole point .
And I mean, yeah, the sweetsmelling days of the Detroit and
Deutz listen, they had theirmoment.
They're still good, but we'vemoved beyond that, We've
progressed.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
That's true, but I also want to talk about this.
You mentioned the old, bygoneera of those sweet smelling
diesel exhausts.
Now, obviously, it was killingus, it was giving us cancer.
We didn't like it.
However, comma, I do rememberthat the diesel smell was like I
don't want to say like myfavorite smell, but it was a
(02:29):
huge part of my childhood inCosta Rica and in Ohio and in
Florida, well down there.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
They had nothing.
They didn't even have, I mean,a lot of stuff, didn't have
pipes on it, Joe.
But that's my point.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
You know the death fluid, the modern diesels that
do kind of have a smell that'ssimilar to that old diesel smell
.
It's very different.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
It's got a lot more bitterness to it Totally Because
of the after treatment and thecatalyst and stuff like that to
take place.
With all of that, it's waydifferent than it used to be
those days, those days of thatraw brownish gray smoke coming
out and then it goes over toblack and then clears out at the
end.
That was definitely an era longgone.
And not to mention, like yousaid, the extra vibrations and
(03:11):
we've brought this up on pastepisodes.
You know the extra vibrations,the constant ear ringing
decibels that you can't escapefrom when that detroit's just
screaming underneath the hood.
So here we are with the, theDD25, and all that stuff's
eliminated.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
Yeah, it's going to be a fun trip.
I'm going to be excited to.
I want to check out the VNL.
I want to see if I can stretchout the back of that thing.
It's like a 120 inch sleeper.
That's going to be nice.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
There's a reason they're all over the highway.
They've really built a trucksecond to none for fleets and
owner operator stuff and beingable to put somebody on the road
and let them go that truck'sreally is second to none for the
general, the general fleet.
And then there's a lot of guysthat you know like, like us, we,
we love mac.
You know that's for the someharder core trucking that you
(03:58):
get into some of the harder coretrucking.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
Well, you know, it's funny that we're talking about
mac because I I know we wantedto talk about fleet assessments.
We're going to talk about PittOhio, but Pitt Ohio, in terms of
being a trucking company, afleet company, they have one of
the largest fleets of Macktrucks I think almost
exclusively Mack trucks in thecountry.
They've got like 900 Class 8tractors, another bunch of Class
(04:22):
7 straight trucks and I thinkalmost all their trucks are Macs
.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
Believers are whipping that dog up and down
the highway every day of theweek, every day of the week.
But there's a reason for thatbecause of the superiority of
that product.
There are a lot of fleets thathave Peterbilt Kenworth but
fleets that are going to VolvoMac.
There's a reason for it.
It is just sustainability,which ultimately, at the end of
the day, means lower per milecost and with everything else
(04:49):
escalating, you have to fight itany which way you can, even if
it's a couple cents.
We're doing millions of miles ayear and you can shave a couple
cents off.
It all adds up.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
Yeah Well, that like goes back to the old United
Airlines story about how theyused to have three olives in the
first class salads and theyfigured out that by removing one
of the olives they could save$40,000 a year.
And that was one of the waysthat they quote unquote were
keeping costs down.
I mean, all they ever did withthat money was more stock
buybacks and yachts for theirexecutives, but that's a
(05:19):
completely differentconversation.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
We've already been on that rant.
We're going to skip through itand respect the episode 6, 11,
22 and 18 and uh here we goabout all that so here's the
thing if you go through theepisodes and you pick your
favorite rant, which, if anybodylistens to these in order,
realizes that they, it's acyclical thing and it repeats
(05:44):
itself because the conversationbrings up the same problems over
and over again, take thoseepisode numbers, go get lottery
tickets, pick three, pick four.
You know you can go get thesuper lotto, the mega millions
is out there.
And if you win, uh, just justbe kindly enough and sponsor a
episode there you go, pick oneup for yourself.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
I do really actually want to examine this Pitt Ohio
by, because Well before we getinto Pitt, Ohio.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
I got a question.
So, with Volvo CE in thisepisode being graciously caused
by their existence, do theyobtain the rights to the
reel-to-reel the reel-to-reel.
Just like trying to figure out.
Should he dub over an old tape?
Does he just remagnify thereel-to-reel deck and kind of
(06:30):
put some quality to it, or is he?
Is he getting out a fresh roll?
Speaker 1 (06:33):
that's what we're trying to figure out yeah, I
think ultimately they've justassumed liability for whatever.
Uh, you know, ultimatetrademark infringement lawsuit
comes from chasen sandborn well,here's the thing.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
So, going forward, every episode will be brought to
you by volvo.
You know, ultimate trademarkinfringement lawsuit comes from
Chase and Sanborn.
Well, here's the thing.
So, going forward, everyepisode will be brought to you
by Volvo CE and Chase andSanborn.
That's just how it is.
You got to have good coffee,you got to have the good coffee
to run a good equipment, andthose two partnered together,
the world is unstoppable.
My friend in the heavyequipment industry, let me tell
you that's right there,Unstoppable.
But we're going to get back toPitt Ohio, because they also
(07:07):
need good coffee.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
Well, we'll get back to Pitt Ohio here after a word
from our sponsor.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
The other woman.
She's nice and she really caresAbout his dinner, about him and
about his coffee.
That's why she starts hismorning with Jason Sanborn, the
heftier coffee, heftier flavor,heftier aroma.
But there's still the kind ofwoman who serves whatever's
handy.
Are you, this woman or theother woman?
(07:35):
Jason Sanborn, the heftiercoffee For the other woman, who
really cares?
Speaker 1 (07:42):
I'm going to run Jason Sanborn ad there you go.
The episode sponsored by Volvo.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
We need a Volvo ad, though they got to have one.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
I think we're supposed to be.
We're supposed to be recordingone.
We had a script.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
Oh, we'll do that too .
Well, not today.
Just send me the script andI'll we'll do that.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
We'll do that for the next episode.
That's do that.
We'll do that for the nextepisode.
That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
No but seriously, we'll just keep.
We'll keep plugging them.
Once you're on the list, you'reon the list.
If it is, you're on the list.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
When the first 10 minutes is just us rolling
credits like an old film, thenwe're just gonna do that I hate
that, though I you know, there'sa ton of podcasts that I really
like, and there's one inparticular that I've been
listening to for a couple ofyears.
It's called magnus archives.
It's really neat.
It's like an old radio horrorshow, right.
So, like each week it had likea little bit of a like a scary
story to tell, like a, you know,scary stories to tell in the
(08:34):
dark kind of thing, and when Ifirst started listening to it,
it would have like a littleintro and then like a commercial
and that'd be it.
Now you get on there andthey've got, without
exaggeration, the first two orthree minutes.
They've got five or six 30second ads back to back and it's
like, man, I don't listen toany of those, I just fast
forward right through them andthat's true, you can't.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
I think my opinion is you gotta have fun with it, you
gotta work it in.
You can't just sit there and belike today's episode, brought
to you by preparation h magnum38s, caterpillar, volvo, ce and
pens oil, like you can't do that, no, what a.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
Whatever happened to the guys who tested preparation
a through g?
They're no longer with anusesthey did all that, just sealed
right up we have the reverseaction oh, no a bunch of baboons
running around off the listbecause that sure didn't work.
Somebody shoot him up withsomething they had to put e out
(09:37):
of its misery had a whole bunchof flipper babies that's where
you know.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Yeah, because see you get something burning so bad
you gotta use.
Gotta use the juice from theSwedish meatballs from Ikea and
rub it on there.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
I think that's actually what they use in the we
can't say that we just did it'sover.
So back to Pitt, ohio.
You know they were in the newsrecently.
Last month they announced thatthey were buying 10 of the new
Mac MD electrics and puttingthem into their fleet.
And a lot of people pointed outyou know, oh, come on, guys,
you have a 475 vehicle fleet ofmedium duty trucks.
(10:13):
This is only 10 of them, but ifyou look at that and you
consider that they're cyclingthrough, say, 100 of those every
five years, this is 10% of thisyear's truck buy.
It's actually more than that.
So it's actually closer to 15%of their annual truck buy.
They're going pure electric.
And if you told me tomorrowthat Ryder Truck or Penske or
(10:34):
any of that was going to go 15%electric, I'd be really
surprised.
So I think that's a significantpurchase.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
Well, yeah, if you're running by the statistics, I
mean, that is a significantinvestment.
And any fleet that's constantlyreevaluating their position is
doing this.
You look at what are you goingto buy and how often and what
frequency.
And when you make a jump likethis, you need to know what
you're talking about.
And obviously there's a senseof security that they have with
(11:01):
the electric platform to makethat jump.
Nobody just sits there andleans back in their chair and
says, yeah, what the hell?
Send them the paper.
Like you know, you have a reasonfor it, so deep in the depths
of their fleet management psyche, they know, and they know that
they have a position wherethey're going I'm going to get
(11:23):
this stuff, we're going to placean order for it, and you can
only do that through efficientauditing practices and you can
only do that through datarecognition.
And I say data recognitionbecause you can't analyze data
that you don't recognize.
You have to recognize what isimportant to analyze.
So you pick your key points,don't let yourself get clouded
(11:45):
by the 5,000 points of light.
Okay, and you, you have to lookat that and go all right, well,
these 10 things I'm going totake a hard look at, or these 50
things, and I'm going to use analgorithm to kind of pair them
together for me, so we can letit flush itself out.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
Yeah, well, you know and we've talked about this a
couple of times where thecompanies that make it easy to
collect that data whether it'sthrough telematics or through,
like a, you know, an, automaticlog books or something like that
the companies that make it easyto collect the data are the
ones that I think, ultimately,are going to have a leg up going
forward, because the marginsare getting thinner and thinner.
(12:24):
And I think really that's whereMac and Volvo Mac if you want
to include them as well reallycomes across, because they've
got that Mac connect portal.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Well, yeah, they have the Mac portal and recently we
we analyzed the truck throughthat with one of the Mac
engineers.
Well, volvo Mac and the datathat they were showing us was
very enlightening.
So imagine if the company thatI work for, if we had a larger
fleet where we were a freightcompany.
You're going to select athousand units and pull that
(12:54):
data from them.
Then you're going to use AI tohelp scrub it.
Today, you're going to let AIreanalyze it and put it out in a
way where it's digestible.
So you have to get to a pointwhere you're comfortable with
all of this and AI is only goingto help you in the long run.
I mean, that's all it's goingto do.
When you go through the fleetand you go through your points
(13:16):
that you want to pick out forthat given task, these OEMs that
have the ability to measurethat and help you measure that
that's where you get the leg upBecause, like you said, the
margins are lower, the miles areincreasing because the distance
the trucks can run isincreasing because of average
speed.
You know the days of looking atsomething going well.
We can only get about 150 milesround trip.
(13:37):
That was long gone.
Then it was 300 or whatever.
You're getting to a point nowwhere the trucks are more
efficient, so you need to beable to do that.
Also, a lot of these thingshave been beat to death Tire
wear, oil change, stretching,just general fleet body work.
A lot of those ratios have beenproven and proven and proven to
(13:57):
death.
Where you could literally talkamongst other fellow fleet
executives we spitball the samenumbers.
Yeah, we know the numbers, butwhen you're just talking and
passing and you don't have yourstuff right in front of you but
you know the round numbers soyou're talking about, we're all
within the same realm.
What electrification and whatCNG did before electrification
(14:20):
is it shook it up.
It's like okay, now what do Imeasure?
What am I measuring?
Because now I've got fuelingcosts.
I've got retrofit costs in theearly days of CNG, before we
were buying it, with CNG alreadyon it.
I've got management costs thatare new because we're actually
going to be putting the CNG intothe vehicle but we're buying it
and that's separate from fuel.
(14:40):
These are the things that keepshaking the industry up and the
more data that you can get yourhands on.
That's why you're going to geta leg up.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
Yeah, well, we should talk about that too, right?
Because the price of fuel goesup and down.
The price of natural gas goesup and down and, yes, the price
of electricity goes up and down,but the price of electricity,
it changes throughout the daybased on your market.
And if you're using this kindof analysis and you've got
off-peak charging, you've gotthe ability to charge this thing
(15:11):
up at seven or eight cents perkilowatt hour, instead of the 25
cents per kilowatt hour thatyou've got at a retail location
or a Tesla supercharger.
Now you're talking reallysignificant savings, even
without incentives to buy thesethings.
You're just talking aboutoperational costs and fuel costs
.
If you consider electricity asa fuel you're talking about,
(15:32):
your fuel costs aresignificantly lowered.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
You're spot on because, if anything, the
electric electricity makes itsimpler to calculate.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
Yeah, you know I was talking to a guy.
I wanted to interview himanother day.
The guy's named Sean Ackley.
He's from Enride.
I'm going to splice thatinterview in here because he has
a really good clip about thiswhere he talks about the back of
the napkin, math, how to makethis all pencil.
So I'm going to splice that inhere.
(16:02):
We've got Sean Ackley fromEnride and this was recorded on
another podcast that I do,called Electric Quick Charge,
but we'll splice that in hereand see if that does anything
for you.
I've been doing this for 10years.
You'd think I'd be good atintros by now.
Today's guest is Sean Ackley.
Sean, you're the head ofcommunications, but also
charging infrastructure.
(16:23):
You're the charging nerd, ifyou will, for Einride, and I
don't mean to call you a nerd,but that's kind of how you
introduced yourself to me.
Speaker 4 (16:32):
I did say that, and not to overcorrect, certainly
not head of communications, butdon't mind taking a call from
Joe when I get a chance, soabsolutely.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
Well, I mean, if you're the only comms guy I
talked to, that makes you themost important guy, right?
Speaker 4 (16:43):
Careful, careful.
I can't take any titles today.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
Fair enough.
Well, you know Einride is areally exciting company.
You know we've been followingthem on Electrek for a number of
years, even before that heavyequipment podcast, clean
Technica.
I've been writing about Einridefor years and I know you guys
primarily as an autonomousvehicle play.
Recently we've seen more in thelines of big fleet purchases
(17:11):
150 Freightliner, e-cascadias,among other electric vehicles.
You guys are interesting, right, because you're not an autonomy
play, you're not strictly ashipping company, you're not a
3PL.
Where, would you say, enride'splace is in the broader market?
Speaker 4 (17:28):
Oh yeah, great question.
And also, self-admittedly wetalked about this earlier I'm
newer to the Enride family here.
I joined back in January and so, not having a huge freight
logistics background, I'm apower guy.
I'm still catching up to speedwith all of the intricacies of
the service portfolio that weoffer, but at its core, we
deliver a service, so we wouldcall that sort of a capacity as
(17:50):
a service model, where we ownthe truck, we buy charging, we
deploy, we help shippers getproduct from A to B in a
sustainable way and anelectrified way.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
At its core, and that's really worth mentioning
too is that at the core of thebusiness is electrification.
This is not a shipping play.
You're not yellow freight oranything like that.
You are still providingshipping, still providing
capacity, but you're doing it ina way that serves the broader
ESG and decarbonization goalsthat, frankly, a lot of
(18:22):
companies are implementing.
Speaker 4 (18:24):
Oh yeah, and not discounting ESG in any way,
shape or form.
But there's still a bit of acapitalist nature to what we do,
right.
So we have to figure out how todo this on parity cost parity
to a traditional operation,traditional diesel service and
then still find a way to beprofitable with every load that
we deliver.
So it's an interesting area andthat we found a way to do it
(18:44):
it's certainly what got meexcited to come join the team.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
You know one of the things that we run into often
when we talk to fleets, when wetalk to commercial fleets like
in my other life that I do a lotof consulting with different
fleet managers and fleet buyersthey talk about the chicken and
the egg when they reference EVand charging.
Right, do I buy an EV or do Iput in charging first?
Do I do them both at the sametime?
(19:08):
That means my upfront costs arereally high.
How does Einride lower thatbarrier to entry to fleets that
want to electrify and that wantto do business in that more
sustainable way?
Speaker 4 (19:24):
Sure, I think, as Corey, you're right.
You know the ecosystem itrequires to electrify anything
within a fleet, a portion of afleet, the entire fleet.
It requires the vehicle, itrequires charging, it requires
power, it requires land.
All these things can be verycapitally intensive If you're a
large 3PL or if you're a smallmom and pop fleet.
The barrier to entry is costit's cash, and not only in that,
(19:45):
the timelines that youmentioned.
They're not perfectly parallel.
So the time it could take tobring the power to a site, if
you have the benefit of owningyour own real estate or you have
access to a long-term lease andyou can modify your property
and add power, the time it takesutility to bring ample power
could be measured in years.
And so you know, coming out ofCOVID, when EB supplies at
(20:09):
dealer inventory or through theOEMs have improved and so the
lead times of trucks have gottenshorter, the laggard still
remains time to power.
But so time and money,certainly the two ingredients
that make the most interestingsoups today.
What we have done is reducethat barrier to entry by owning
the assets.
So we own the trucks, we buythe charging and we can deploy
(20:31):
them in a service model.
But the other piece that reallyhas helped us be successful is
in that we know that there is anESG play helping shippers
deliver goods in a sustainableway.
We also want to be costeffective and very easy to see
that when something's moreexpensive, you just have to use
it more, right?
So if a truck, let alone, candeliver less goods because it's
(20:53):
7,000 pounds heavier, maybe, andif you have to deliver more
turns per day, you're going toneed more energy to recharge the
trucks midday possibly, orpossibly more trucks, right?
Just volume in general to matchdiesel parity.
So if someone were a shipper ora carrier or a fleet operator,
we're to look at thatmathematically and say, oh, this
(21:15):
doesn't make sense, and if I'mnot regulated and forced to do
it, I'm going to wait until allthis gets cheaper.
And what we've done is that wecan buy those assets, we can
help you deploy them and we can,using some of our software
capabilities, we can exactlycalculate which routes you could
electrify today, which ones aregoing to be the most efficient
to run electrified, get the mostturns out of it, based on
(21:37):
battery capacity of the truck,how much charging you can deploy
, and we will perfectlyright-size that deployment so
that utilization hits a clipwhere we can do it at diesel
parity.
And that's our core focus goingin like that.
We're going in in that fashionrather than working our way down
to it as much as possible.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
At the end of the day , your customer is interested in
getting their stuff from A to Band that's their prime thing.
And they may have ESG goals,they may have everything else,
but if they're not profitable,they can't sustain.
And we talk about that secondtype of sustainability.
Can we sustain the planet?
Can we sustain the business?
It needs to do both in order towork.
Speaker 4 (22:11):
Sure, yeah.
Now if you're a CEO that's gota long career road ahead of you
as a product manufacturer or afood and beverage company, you
might be concerned about yourconsumer base growing over time.
So, yes, might be important toyou, certainly.
And then, as consumers, we'veseen the consumer shift in the
(22:32):
global landscape.
Retailers are paying attentionthat consumers want to buy
something that's green or goodfor the environment or has less
of an impact than maybe it did30 years ago, when they were
still a fan of your product, sothere's a keen interest to do
things sustainably.
Oh and, by the way, if you cando it on parity with what you're
paying today, even better.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
Yeah, and there's a ton of government incentives and
utility incentives and evenstate incentives coming out to
help reduce that cost.
But I think there's still a lotof unknowns, there's still a
lot of question marks hangingabove fleet managers' heads and
fleet buyers' heads.
And what I like about yourmodel and correct me if I'm
wrong is that at the end of theday, you're taking on that
(23:12):
responsibility, you're taking onthat uncertainty, you're taking
on that fear and you're passingall of that certainty on to
them saying look, for whateverreason, the truck is down, the
technology is not working.
That day we're still going toget your package from A to B and
make it happen one way oranother.
Speaker 4 (23:28):
Sure, I feel like that's been kind of the crux of
my career, like I've moved todifferent parts of this industry
over the last 10 years roughlyand have been chasing sort of
the what is the problem we'resolving here today?
And the early problems werejust sort of this is mystical,
this is a black box.
I don't understand.
Speaker 1 (23:46):
Oh, it's magic.
Speaker 4 (23:46):
Yeah, yeah.
So that was the sales pitchback then.
It was we'll demystify this foryou.
I don't know construction, nowthat I understand I need
chargers and trucks.
Well, I don't understand.
Understand, okay, we'll handlethat.
We'll be a general contractor,we'll hire APCs.
But the further you move alongin the maturity of the market,
as people are being exposed toit, even if they haven't dabbled
in it or done you know thedirty word, haven't done a pilot
(24:08):
, they're growing in theirunderstanding of what it takes
to deploy and the thing thatthey will run into, as they
understand, is subsidy is great.
How do I get it?
What can I apply for?
How do I get me some of thosenevi funds?
Right, like, some of this stuffdoesn't translate perfectly for
every modality.
And then, beyond that, onceI've done all this math, wow,
that's really expensive.
(24:29):
I had a warehouse operations andlogistics team whose budget
didn't include electricity atthis scale before.
I've got to rework my entireinternal commercial budgeting
process for this.
Now, how do I do that?
We kind of try and take thatoff their plate.
We'll handle it and feed itback to them in the way that
they did consume the previoustechnology.
You're paying for fuel, you'repaying for trucks, you're paying
for service and maintenance,all a service model.
(24:51):
That's kind of the formula forus right now.
Speaker 1 (24:54):
Yeah, and I think that there is something that
clicks in people's heads AustinEnergy.
You know we were talking aboutAmy Ashley, my good friend,
bobby Godsey as well, down inAustin Energy.
They were one of the teams thatearly on, when we were talking
about electrification and youknow I got to credit where
credit is due Matt Teske, myformer co-host, said the words
(25:15):
electricity is a fuel, so justthink of it as electric fuel
instead of liquid fuel.
And Bobby and Amy got itimmediately.
And Austin Energy put out ahuge campaign talking about
electric fuel.
And if you go to their websitetoday, they talk about electric
fuel.
And I think once that light bulbwent off over their head of
like, oh, this is just fuel,it's just a different kind of
(25:37):
fuel.
I have to fuel up in adifferent way at a different
time, but it's just fuel.
I think a lot of people wereable to start doing that kind of
back of the napkin, back of theenvelope, math and saying, okay
, this is no longer mysterious,I just need to think of it in a
new way.
Speaker 4 (25:54):
Sure, and I think that too, like if you start to,
to start to reverse engineertheir thought process that you
know they're going to go downthat rabbit hole they're going
to chase to go well, what does agallon of diesel cost me in
fuel?
Yes, so now let's just take aCalifornia average, right, five
bucks a gallon.
And okay, what is that innumbers of electrons, if I'm
trying to think about this likea liquid volume?
Try kilowatt hours.
(26:16):
And how many kilowatt hours areyou basically burning an energy
to achieve a mile?
What's your mileage ofefficiency running on diesel,
and sort of match that up.
And if you do all that math,you can depending on again,
where you're buying fuel and howefficient the EV vehicle that
you're operating is somewherebetween 25 and 45 cents a
kilowatt hours, the price youmight expect to be on price
(26:38):
parity with a gallon of diesel.
You start doing that math.
You go, okay, well, that's whatit costs.
This is how many kilowatt hoursI will consume to deliver this
many goods or this many routesor this many miles.
And then, okay, well, what ismy capital cost to build
infrastructure to get thatfueling If I'm going to do it
myself, build my own gas stationin the electric world.
You start doing all that mathand go okay, now divide all that
(26:59):
CapEx plus the electricity I'mgoing to buy for my utility at a
wholesale rate or retail rate,and I average all that out over
the term that I'm going to ownthe assets.
And then you start going oh mygosh, that's a dollar a kilowatt
hour.
I can't achieve parity.
So how do I do that?
Then you might look and there'sa lot of lessons I've learned
from the light duty vehiclespace.
You go oh, someone else isbuilding it.
(27:23):
Right, I don't build my own gasstations today.
Why do I need to do that in anEV future?
Who's building electric gasstations, electric charging
stations, hubs off premise?
They've got to figure out somefactor of scale that I can
benefit from as a consumer, andthere are.
There's a lot of greatcompanies that are out there
building charging hubs today.
They're just not asprolifically available out on
the highway corridors thattrucks drive today, so you can't
(27:44):
rely on them without some sortof backup plan exclusively.
But then you start to go andask well, what's the market rate
of a kilowatt hour off thosetaps?
And I guarantee you talk to anyof those developers today.
They're also sitting there withthe pencil.
They're doing that math.
Oh yeah, I get a kilowatt hourdown to 35 cents a kilowatt hour
retail.
That's tough, it's very tough,oh yeah.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
Well.
But you know, you start to seethese different plans, you see
these different solutions outthere, whether it's a
combination of solar, whetherit's battery backup, whether
charge it up, and they do that.
So there's a ton of solutionsout there.
You're absolutely right, and Ithink this is riveting stuff for
our fleet people.
(28:25):
I don't know that the consumershow is going to love it so much
, but I think this is justabsolutely riveting because,
like, I have spreadsheets forthis, I have pivot tables for
this, where it's like, oh,you're running two shifts or
you're running a night shift,what if you ran two day shifts?
You know, switch that around.
And then you're charging at thisrate instead of this rate.
All of a sudden you're atparity.
(28:46):
Now you stack the incentives ontop of that.
Now you're pocketing money,you're coming out ahead, and I
think that's super importantbecause you know we do have a
driver shortage, we do have anoperator shortage, not only in
this country but throughoutNorth America.
And one of the most excitingthings about Einride is not the
(29:07):
logistical stuff, it's not thefiguring it all that out, even
though that is the excitingstuff to fleet people, to people
who are in the industry likeyou and I are but the exciting
stuff.
To people who don't care aboutany of that and don't wanna do
math, the exciting part is therobot trucks, the self-driving,
the autonomy.
Speak a little bit to that, Imean because you know the
renderings of this thing.
They look like stormtroopers,they look awesome, it's like
(29:29):
Star Wars type trucks.
Speaker 4 (29:30):
They are cool, all right.
So for any listeners or viewerswho haven't searched Enride
before, maybe you have beenexposed to sort of the light
duty vehicle or the consumerspace and haven't looked at
trucking go and search Enrideand just Google image search.
This thing is cool.
It absolutely steals the show.
If we bring one to a trade showor if it's out in the proving
grounds, it gets the attention.
(29:52):
Yeah, so the autonomous truckor the autonomous mule being
able to deliver goods without adriver was probably the earliest
inception that anyone's everbeen exposed to, and myself
included in that.
You know, we do see a futurewhere year over year, the growth
like we're still going to shipmore goods every year it's going
(30:12):
to grow, let alone there beingany attrition in the market from
a driver perspective, it'sgoing to continue to grow and it
will outpace, and that's wherewe see a lot of job.
Growth is just in the abilityto grow faster than you could
even feed in new drivers if youwant to, let alone there being
attrition in the marketpotentially.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
And I think that that's worth bringing up,
because this is going to fueljob growth.
It's not going to stealanybody's jobs.
There's nobody there to do thework now.
Speaker 4 (30:38):
No, absolutely.
So.
Yeah, I mean I've spent a lotof time in my career talking
about workforce development,just broad spectrum.
I think EV technologies aregreat for it.
I used to work in a sort of afield construction environment,
doing like large powertransformer and utility upgrade
stats, working with great fieldservice professionals that have
been working out in the fieldfor 30 years in their career,
and the amount of times I've hadany of them turn to me going.
(31:00):
Ev is cool, but I'm not openinga laptop.
I haven't had to do it for 30years.
Don't tell me I have to addthat to my tool belt today and I
get it.
But you see a passion totransform your career, maybe
later in your career, and youwant to find a way to maybe not
have to travel work in theelements.
If you're a driver, that can behard on your body, let alone
just driving An EV truck, isimproving your state of health
(31:22):
and state of your quality oflife.
Imagine now also working in anetwork operations center
managing fleets of autonomousvehicles with all of that
institutional knowledge you haveabout if a road hazard were to
occur, if something has changedin your logistics and routing
requirements, if you need tostep in.
You have that institutionalknowledge to participate.
So there's job growth stillhappening, whether or not it
(31:44):
autonomous or electrified, foreven folks that are later in
their career.
Speaker 1 (31:48):
That's such a great point.
We just on our last episode wetalked a little bit about
Caterpillar and their remoteoperations for their heavy load
dump trucks at their miningoperations They've got an
operator sitting outside ofCharlotte, north Carolina, lives
with his family, gets to benear his kids at school, he's
effectively going to remote into these vehicles and he can
(32:10):
operate three or four differentvehicles 2 000 miles away
through his office simulator.
The same way that you know, Idrive gran turismo right, and he
does it effectively, he does itsafely and he gets to be with
his family every night.
That is a game changer where ifyou want to be an operator, you
want to to be a driver.
(32:30):
You can operate multiplemachines and you just pick it up
when it's time for you to pickit up, and when it's just going
through the terminal or goingover the road highway on a
pretty much straight shot, itcan handle that on its own.
We just need you when we needyou and you can operate three or
four trucks.
Speaker 4 (32:48):
Yeah, what's interesting to me as I learn
more about it is that you knowwe think of a piece of asphalt
or a piece of concrete to besomething that's constant right
Over my entire lifetime.
A road is a road.
The reality is these roads arenot constant.
There's deterioration, there'srepair, there's constant shifts.
So there's going to be aconstant need to be scanning,
updating, monitoring andtracking the state of the route
(33:12):
that you're going to deploy,even if that route is something
that's supposed to be repeatedfor the next 10 years the same
route, day in, day out.
Those routes have a lot ofvariability and environmental
impact.
So there's going to be jobs.
There's going to be importantfocus that's going to be
required on the human resourceside in the autonomous world for
a long time to come.
Speaker 1 (33:32):
That's such a smart way of putting it.
That's probably why you haveall those diplomas on the wall
behind you.
Speaker 4 (33:37):
Are you kidding me?
Those are coupons.
I'm going to trade one in later.
Speaker 1 (33:40):
That's like in the office where Michael's got the
SACO certificate of authenticityon the wall.
Speaker 4 (33:47):
I love it.
I love it.
No, no, just a couple of arrestrecords and nothing big back
there.
Speaker 1 (33:52):
This is the one where they had the governor.
Let you back into society.
Speaker 4 (33:56):
Yeah, exactly, exactly, I'm allowed in
(34:17):
no-transcript certainly reachout through our comms channel on
our website, enride or Einride,either way, no offense taken.
Enridetech T-E-C-H.
Go out and check it out.
Learn more about us.
Reach out on any social mediaplatform you'd like Send an
email, send a smoke signal, acarrier pigeon, we don't care.
(34:40):
Engage, ask questions.
It's a cool technology area tobe in and happy to share
whenever we can.
Speaker 1 (34:45):
Yeah, for sure.
And then the last thing I wouldsay to this is if you're a huge
shipping operation, if you aremoving, you know hundreds,
thousands of tons of equipment aday you definitely want to
check this out.
You want to see what these guysare doing.
And if you're not, if you're asmall operator, you're doing LTL
.
Look at this also, because itmight make sense for you, if
(35:08):
you're in an area here, to checkout what they're doing.
Check out the kind of fleetsthey're operating and, if
nothing else, right-size yourresources, Because you may have
six trucks in operation rightnow that are running with 50%
load on a diesel and you'retrying to figure out how to make
all this pencil.
You might not need to carrythose assets at all.
Speaker 4 (35:27):
Yeah, absolutely, Please do reach out.
I think that's a difficultposition, being that we are in
sort of a startup phase as wegrow in maturity in our company.
It's tough to reach everybodyand so many of our conversations
start with what is Enride?
Who is Enride?
You're the autonomous truckcompany?
Yes, but there's so much moreto share.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
Yeah, and we just ordered 150 E-Cascadys that
dudes are going to drive.
Speaker 4 (35:55):
Yeah, peterbilt, 150 peterbilt's, uh, and then you
know as many byds as we havehere in north america, let alone
globally it's.
It's so funny the amount oftimes I've had to explain.
You know we're one of thelargest class 8 truck fleet
operators in the us, full stop.
So well, but let's talk aboutthat for a minute and I swear
I'll let you go you got no thisyou got.
Speaker 1 (36:11):
No, this is going to be 16 more hours.
You've got.
You've got the new electricpizza in there.
You've got a great relationshipwith Packard.
I know that I said E-Cascadia,that was incorrect, but I think
you've probably got a few ofthose in the fleet as well
coming.
You have a pretty good sense ofwhat's out there and I think,
with BYD coming online online,byd is a new brand that a lot of
(36:33):
people aren't familiar with andthey're kind of testing them
out.
What product out there?
And I know that you know, andI'll cut this out if you don't
like it, I'll edit this becausewe do have editors, you know of
the different products that areout there, which are the ones
that you think are ready forprime time right now?
because a lot of people areexcited about now, because a lot
of people are excited about theTesla, a lot of people are
(36:54):
excited about Windrose, a lot ofpeople are excited about the
new Mac MD Electric, which Ithink is a great truck, but it's
tough to get those and if youare News coming back to the US
market, was it?
Speaker 4 (37:05):
the N series is electrified, oh.
Speaker 1 (37:07):
Isuzu yes, well, all right, I love that little Isuzu.
Yes, no, well, all right, Ilove that little Isuzu N truck.
I I was in college, so nowwe're going back to the nineties
and I rented one of those as aU-Haul to move Right.
So I had just gotten out of themilitary, I was going back to
school, put everything in there,cause like no now at this point
.
I've had a house for four yearsthe wife, the kid, I've got
(37:29):
stuff to move and I drove thislittle cab over a suzu n series
and I thought it was great.
I would drive that all day longover like a you know a 350 ram
or, uh, you know a 3500 ram or a350.
It's got all the capability,it's super comfortable, it's
easy to see, I could park it no,I love it.
I and, and I know that this isnot going to supposed to be an
(37:51):
isuzu commercial, but they don'tsell enough trucks to afford
the sponsorship, so I'm going tojust have to give them a
charity kick here.
That electric N-Series is goingto be really tough to beat.
I think that's going to be aphenomenal little box truck.
Speaker 4 (38:05):
Yeah, that's.
That's me personally, beingexcited to see that come to the
US market.
I think that'll be very cool.
No, coming back to your pointhere, now we are, I would say,
at its core technology agnostic.
What we deliver is that serviceand we'll evaluate all the
technologies available to us todeliver that service in the most
optimized way, Again achievingthat parity, if not better, and
(38:25):
delivering sustainable goodsfrom A to B Like a BYD.
Att has a 200-mile range todaythat we would say in Gen 2 or
Gen 3 platform, and mostcarriers might go.
That's not long enough, itneeds to be longer.
Well, for us, we can hyperfocus in on well, what routes
are 200 miles and less?
Or how many routes can we turnwithin a 200 mile range before
(38:47):
we need to recharge and howquickly can we recharge?
All that we're doing againstthe capabilities of each of
these platforms.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
Right.
Well, that just comes back tousing the right tool for the
right job.
If you've got an 800 mile route, this probably ain't it for you
, but if you're doing 175 miles,150 miles, you're doing that
three, four times a day.
You're foolish to not look atelectric.
Speaker 4 (39:07):
Absolutely, absolutely, and if it's
repeatable, very forecastableand you can predict exactly
which roads you're going to takefor the next five years.
Speaker 1 (39:15):
Then we get the robot to do it.
Speaker 4 (39:17):
Yeah, that's nice.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
I thought that was a really interesting interview
from Sean, because I think notonly is Sean an interesting guy,
he's been around the industryfor a long time but the company
that he works for now, enride.
They just bought 150 Peterbilt579 EVs oh wow.
Speaker 2 (39:43):
Yeah, I mean that's a significant investment.
Speaker 1 (39:46):
That's a ton of.
Not only is that a ton oftrucks, but that's a ton of
money, because if you figure,these things are two, two and a
half times more money than aconventional diesel.
They just basically spent 450Peterbilt's worth of money to
get 150 of these.
And they're doing it notnecessarily to save money
(40:07):
although I'm sure they do butthey're doing it for the
predictability of it.
They're doing it just to beable to have a handle on it, so
they don't wake up tomorrow.
And somebody steered acontainer ship sideways in the
Suez Canal and now gas is $7 agallon.
You know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (40:23):
Well, predictability is a whole other level.
You really have to get yourdata down and you have to trust
it to use it to predict trends.
Again, it goes back to what Iwas saying before You've got to
recognize the data that you'regoing to analyze it all comes
back to the analysis.
Well, yeah, but you've got torecognize also what are you
(40:45):
looking at to then use it topredict a trend.
So, if you're going to use itto predict a trend and use it to
predict a cost becauseultimately all we're trying to
do is drive cost what is itgoing to cost us and when?
We're going to use that topredict how we buy electricity?
(41:05):
We're going to use that justlike we used to buy and what we
still do.
We buy fuel futures.
We buy fuel on the open marketto maintain our position and
control our costs and create anaverage.
We're going to do the samething with electricity Large
fleets we're doing the samething with CNG.
You can only predict that stuffwhen you have true data.
Yeah, because it will gohorribly wrong and any fleet
(41:26):
person will tell you in theindustry.
Does it matter if your fleet isa bunch of electric mailboxes
that you manage for apartmentbuildings, which is a thing If
your data and how those work andhow the striker mechanisms and
all that stuff go down and whenyou need to work on them and
what you have to watch out for,it doesn't matter.
You're still trying to do thesame thing.
(41:47):
What is this going to cost meand when we're all in the same
field.
Speaker 1 (41:52):
We are, especially when it comes to energy.
You know, and that was one ofthe things that I really liked,
you know, back when we had RayGallant from Volvo CE in the
early episodes and he was on, hewas talking about don't look at
a job site as how many you knowtons of earth you need to move,
or how many rocks you got tomove from here to there.
Look at it in terms of energy.
(42:13):
How many kilowatts are youexpending to get that work done?
And if you look at it that way,you can convert everything else
to those kilowatts.
You can convert gasoline BTUsfrom CNG, all of that into that
unit of power and figure thatout.
And I think he's right.
So I think we've talked thatone fairly well to death.
(42:34):
I want to talk about this bigcat, svo 40, monstrous crane
thing that you've got a pictureof here I'll put that as a cover
art.
Yeah, that is bananas man.
Speaker 2 (42:43):
Where is?
Speaker 1 (42:44):
that.
Speaker 2 (42:45):
Well, you know.
So Caterpillar bought PsyrusErie and the actual model number
, that is a 7495.
Cyrus Erie and the actual modelnumber, that is a 7495.
It's a 7495 front shovelconfiguration.
Svo 40 is the unit number ofthe company that has that and
they're walking it across thehighway so that they can
(43:05):
transport it from one side ofthe mine to the other.
Or excavation that they'redoing and the picture is not
really clear if they're walkingit from one mine to another and
that happens to just be ahighway that goes past, or if
they're doing some kind ofinfrastructure work where
they're walking it from one sideof the infrastructure project
to the other.
But either way, this is amonster.
So the Caterpillar, when theytook over Bucyrus area, they
(43:26):
literally walked in and,according to the reps that I've
talked to about it, they said wewant to learn what you're doing
and we want to continue tosupport mining and large
excavation projects.
And Caterpillar has done aphenomenal job with this because
the staff that they have onboard now at the plant they have
moved some of the componentryaround, depending on where it's
(43:49):
coming from, but thesuperstructure and the
manufacturing of the booms andeverything like that, all of
that is still done byCaterpillar.
They have just continuouslyrefined that product and worked
it into the new age, into allthe new regulations, into
everything that you need.
And if you look at the cab onthat thing, it's not a cab, it's
(44:11):
an office.
You could have a serious staffin there working while you're in
there trying to figure out.
You know how you're going tokeep moving dirt all day and
that machine has technology init that is second to none when
it comes to that.
They know exactly what's goingon with that.
They can pull data live all thetime.
Fleet management can pull datalive all the time.
From that they know exactlywhat they're moving with it.
(44:33):
You know it goes right back towhat we were talking about.
Caterpillar has done aphenomenal job along with Volvo.
Volvo and Cap really dove intothe data collection of not just
what does the machine need froma health standpoint, but what is
it doing, what are we movingwith it?
You know the distance rolled.
Are we measuring it inproduction units or you know
(44:53):
whether it's yards or tonnage or, like you said, and then what
energy have we used to do this?
It's another, another exampleof I mean we can talk all day
about specs, about the cat 740or 7495 model and their whole
lineup of front shovel stuff.
But beyond that, if anybodytakes the time to look at any of
this stuff, look at thecatwalks, look at the detail on
(45:17):
it, the handrails, everything onthat machine is set up so that
you can work on it, you canaccess it, you can keep going
with it.
You know we've talked aboutthis too, but Volvo was one of
the first to bring the hydraulicundercarriage to market, where
it widened itself after youtransported it, so it'd move it
(45:38):
in and out based on what youneeded.
It keeps you from having tohave people get underneath there
and then re-bolt everything.
You still got to put the boltsback in, but the idea is that
it's a lot safer and theyrecognized an issue with that.
Speaker 1 (45:51):
So, man, I just found obviously this is an audio
podcast.
You guys aren't going to beable to see this, but go online
and look up that cat 7495operator cab.
You've got some wild picturesof this guy with all the screens
, but then behind him, behindhim, there's another operator
seat, there's like a controlroom where it's almost like two
(46:11):
or three different PCs on there,and there's like a control room
with almost like two or threedifferent pcs on there and
there's like a little bathroom,a little coffee setting, a
little kitchen in there.
And it makes sense yeah, you'renot leaving.
You're in there eight, tenhours.
You're doing your whole shift.
You're not going nowhere thatmakes perfect sense.
Speaker 2 (46:25):
They're managing that whole thing, right from the cab
of that crazy, you know, andthey're electric or they're
diesel, the diesel electric, Imean, depending on the
configuration.
And again, we don't go into thedetail and the spec and break
down of that crazy you know, andthey're electric or they're
diesel, the diesel electric, Imean, depending on the
configuration.
And again, we don't go into thedetail and the spec and break
down every model and do all thatstuff.
That's not what this show'sabout.
Go online, check this thing out.
You gotta see it.
They once again kings of movingmassive material.
(46:48):
Them and hitachi have thatmarket.
Just there's nothing else youcan say.
I mean, that's just it yeah,that's it then.
Speaker 1 (46:56):
Well, I think hitachi and I think probably kamatsu is
probably the only other onethat's a real player, and
kamatsu has a huge stake in themarket, but they they
continuously have had that stake.
Speaker 2 (47:07):
I mean caterpillar is doing some moving and some
shaking because of theiracquisitions and and what
they've tried to do to get abetter foothold in that market
space.
Speaker 1 (47:15):
Yeah Well, the cats have been very smart because
they're.
They are a company that hasgrown by acquiring other leaders
in a space that they were notin and kind of adding all of the
stuff that made cats good tothat.
Adding all of the stuff thatmade cats good to that.
(47:36):
They're not watering it down,correct, they're building it up
and then they're building inenough similarity in terms of
the controls and the operatingsoftware that a cat operator
from one machine can go intoanother one and maybe not know
how to use it on day one, butknow their way around and be
able to find stuff.
I really like this because youknow I don't want to mention the
companies.
Obviously we don't mention thecompanies use it on day one, but
know their way around and beable to find stuff.
I really like this because youknow I don't want to mention the
companies.
Obviously we don't mention thecompanies we work for because
(47:57):
that would be terrible for ourcareers.
But you know you've done a tonof excavating work.
I never saw anything this bigover at your old facility.
This is great.
Speaker 2 (48:07):
No, we did not have stuff this large.
I mean, this is for a massivemountain moving project.
When you are going to go insomewhere and you literally have
to dig a hole in the earth thatis visible from somewhere too
far up, you want to be flyingover and go.
I wonder what they're workingon down there the iss radios in.
Speaker 1 (48:29):
What are you boys doing down?
Speaker 2 (48:30):
there, right, exactly you, when you have, when you
have the faa channels on yourshovel and they get on there and
they're like a cabin crew, cat7495, this is, uh, bravo, tango,
fly over over.
Hey, do you want to?
You have to figure out like youknow.
You know, they see what you'redoing down there.
That's what this is meant to do.
I there's that old saying youknow, they see what you're doing
(48:52):
down there.
Speaker 1 (48:52):
That's what this is meant to do.
There's that old saying youknow, if the mountain will not
come to muhammad, muhammad goesto the mountain no, no, we move
it to muhammad.
We bring the mountain tomuhammad.
Speaker 2 (49:01):
Now, that's right, that's right customer service.
And also so caterpillar fundedthe busiris erie was busiris
international.
Bucyrus InternationalIncorporated.
Acquisition was $8.8 billion.
They did that in July 8th of2011 after we were about 18
(49:22):
months out of the housing crisis, which was crippling, yeah, but
they had the foresight to turnaround and say, look, we got to
do something here and they wentin and they funded it and they
brought them on board and I'msure it has not been without,
just like any acquisition painpoints.
They've done nothing but makethat company stronger and better
.
And the Volvo CE guys we wantto see a mountain moving shovel
(49:49):
come out of Volvo CE Sweden.
Speaker 1 (49:51):
You're doing everything you can to make sure
they get their money's worth outof this one.
Speaker 2 (49:54):
Oh, no, no, but I'm serious.
We want to see this.
When you go to Ikea and theyhave the meatballs and then all
that sludge, grease and all thatcomes down and becomes biofuel
we know that that's the nextstep Just tell us this is where
you're going.
Ikea is a private way to pullfuel worldwide.
Pull fuel together to build abiofuel generating facility
(50:18):
based solely off the sales ofSwedish meatballs.
We know this is what you'redoing.
Just acknowledge it.
Speaker 1 (50:24):
Let it know.
Speaker 2 (50:26):
This is where we plug the X-Files.
Speaker 1 (50:41):
Right, x-files, right .
Well, you know how everythingat ikea has that the weird, the
weird names.
This would be lubsk.
It's like l with the little uwith the dots s b s k well, yeah
, it's.
Speaker 2 (50:47):
It's located in aisle double a slot 12b yeah, tvorsk,
the tvorsk aisle.
Speaker 1 (50:53):
That's actually really neat stuff, you know.
So apparently the guy who whostarted ikea founded it, was
dyslexic and he would name stuffwith these crazy names, but the
the letters and numbers werearranged in a way that they
didn't invert when he looked athim, so they looked the same to
him as they do to us, and thathelped him keep track of that.
(51:15):
So that's your ADA moment ofthe day.
It's so funny.
We have to do when we have atthe company I work for, we have
to do a corporate safety minute.
Whenever we have a groupmeeting, we have to do a safety
minute.
And the safety minute was aboutladders and the guy was
literally talking about properladder use and three points of
(51:37):
contact and all that.
Oh yeah, and I'm holding arolling office chair.
This other dude is standing oneleg on the office chair, one
foot on my shoulder, while I'mholding the chair to get up to
adjust the uh, the projector sothat we can get a clear, focused
view of our ladder safetyroutine.
I don't know who you are.
The osha manual, the oshahandbook, is written in blood.
(52:01):
To remember that.
I think we close with that no,maybe we're done, we're done.
Today's thrilling episode is brought to you by
Volvo CE, and that's actuallytrue.
They're going to regret thisone.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
No, they don't regret , they know.
They've heard the show.
Yeah, no, in all seriousness,though, we really appreciate
them and all their hospitality.
I'm excited we're going to begoing to the Volvo days here
coming up.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Yeah, that's going to be a good show.
They actually sent me an emailabout what kind of machinery and
equipment we wanted to test outand I said you know I've got
this love for the electric stuff, so I want to check out the
DD25.
That's their new electricroller that they debuted last
year.
I suspect that if you were ableto get like a long thread of
(00:44):
that retread tire stuff on thatback side of it, it would look
pretty cool.
Look like you were rolling onlike one big mickey thompson
back there that'd be prettysweet.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
It's like a dot radio slick, but on a roller.
Let me tell you something weget this thing on full charge.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
It's maybe gonna go out and outrun your pickup truck
well, that's the thing, right,like it's all gear reduction and
torque amplification,everything else.
There's no reason why thatthing can't go 70, right well I
would.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
I would assume there's no reason why.
Yeah, with some time itcouldn't get up there.
I mean, anybody that's ever rana roller and has slipped the
drum on the asphalt mat andgotten yelled at for it and sent
home, maybe he wants a littlebit of extra tread there when
you're trying to work the matdown.
We're going to send this oneout to the guys out in Phoenix
that are working night shiftpaving, because you know they
(01:33):
got to hand it to them.
It's still 100 degrees outthere, it's dark.
They're out there trying to get, you know, sections of the
highway and sections of the citypaved at night because it's too
hot to do it during the day.
They need stuff like this.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
The last thing they need is the noise and vibration
of a diesel engine when theycould be rolling around on
Volvo's quiet, smooth,vibration-free DD25 electric
roller.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
That's my whole point .
And I mean, yeah, the sweetsmelling days of the Detroit and
Deutz listen, they had theirmoment.
They're still good, but we'vemoved beyond that, We've
progressed.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
That's true, but I also want to talk about this.
You mentioned the old, bygoneera of those sweet smelling
diesel exhausts.
Now, obviously, it was killingus, it was giving us cancer.
We didn't like it.
However, comma, I do rememberthat the diesel smell was like I
don't want to say like myfavorite smell, but it was a
(02:29):
huge part of my childhood inCosta Rica and in Ohio and in
Florida, well down there.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
They had nothing.
They didn't even have, I mean,a lot of stuff, didn't have
pipes on it, Joe.
But that's my point.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
You know the death fluid, the modern diesels that
do kind of have a smell that'ssimilar to that old diesel smell
.
It's very different.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
It's got a lot more bitterness to it Totally Because
of the after treatment and thecatalyst and stuff like that to
take place.
With all of that, it's waydifferent than it used to be
those days, those days of thatraw brownish gray smoke coming
out and then it goes over toblack and then clears out at the
end.
That was definitely an era longgone.
And not to mention, like yousaid, the extra vibrations and
(03:11):
we've brought this up on pastepisodes.
You know the extra vibrations,the constant ear ringing
decibels that you can't escapefrom when that detroit's just
screaming underneath the hood.
So here we are with the, theDD25, and all that stuff's
eliminated.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
Yeah, it's going to be a fun trip.
I'm going to be excited to.
I want to check out the VNL.
I want to see if I can stretchout the back of that thing.
It's like a 120 inch sleeper.
That's going to be nice.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
There's a reason they're all over the highway.
They've really built a trucksecond to none for fleets and
owner operator stuff and beingable to put somebody on the road
and let them go that truck'sreally is second to none for the
general, the general fleet.
And then there's a lot of guysthat you know like, like us, we,
we love mac.
You know that's for the someharder core trucking that you
(03:58):
get into some of the harder coretrucking.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
Well, you know, it's funny that we're talking about
mac because I I know we wantedto talk about fleet assessments.
We're going to talk about PittOhio, but Pitt Ohio, in terms of
being a trucking company, afleet company, they have one of
the largest fleets of Macktrucks I think almost
exclusively Mack trucks in thecountry.
They've got like 900 Class 8tractors, another bunch of Class
(04:22):
7 straight trucks and I thinkalmost all their trucks are Macs
.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
Believers are whipping that dog up and down
the highway every day of theweek, every day of the week.
But there's a reason for thatbecause of the superiority of
that product.
There are a lot of fleets thathave Peterbilt Kenworth but
fleets that are going to VolvoMac.
There's a reason for it.
It is just sustainability,which ultimately, at the end of
the day, means lower per milecost and with everything else
(04:49):
escalating, you have to fight itany which way you can, even if
it's a couple cents.
We're doing millions of miles ayear and you can shave a couple
cents off.
It all adds up.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
Yeah Well, that like goes back to the old United
Airlines story about how theyused to have three olives in the
first class salads and theyfigured out that by removing one
of the olives they could save$40,000 a year.
And that was one of the waysthat they quote unquote were
keeping costs down.
I mean, all they ever did withthat money was more stock
buybacks and yachts for theirexecutives, but that's a
(05:19):
completely differentconversation.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
We've already been on that rant.
We're going to skip through itand respect the episode 6, 11,
22 and 18 and uh here we goabout all that so here's the
thing if you go through theepisodes and you pick your
favorite rant, which, if anybodylistens to these in order,
realizes that they, it's acyclical thing and it repeats
(05:44):
itself because the conversationbrings up the same problems over
and over again, take thoseepisode numbers, go get lottery
tickets, pick three, pick four.
You know you can go get thesuper lotto, the mega millions
is out there.
And if you win, uh, just justbe kindly enough and sponsor a
episode there you go, pick oneup for yourself.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
I do really actually want to examine this Pitt Ohio
by, because Well before we getinto Pitt, Ohio.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
I got a question.
So, with Volvo CE in thisepisode being graciously caused
by their existence, do theyobtain the rights to the
reel-to-reel the reel-to-reel.
Just like trying to figure out.
Should he dub over an old tape?
Does he just remagnify thereel-to-reel deck and kind of
(06:30):
put some quality to it, or is he?
Is he getting out a fresh roll?
Speaker 1 (06:33):
that's what we're trying to figure out yeah, I
think ultimately they've justassumed liability for whatever.
Uh, you know, ultimatetrademark infringement lawsuit
comes from chasen sandborn well,here's the thing.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
So, going forward, every episode will be brought to
you by volvo.
You know, ultimate trademarkinfringement lawsuit comes from
Chase and Sanborn.
Well, here's the thing.
So, going forward, everyepisode will be brought to you
by Volvo CE and Chase andSanborn.
That's just how it is.
You got to have good coffee,you got to have the good coffee
to run a good equipment, andthose two partnered together,
the world is unstoppable.
My friend in the heavyequipment industry, let me tell
you that's right there,Unstoppable.
But we're going to get back toPitt Ohio, because they also
(07:07):
need good coffee.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
Well, we'll get back to Pitt Ohio here after a word
from our sponsor.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
The other woman.
She's nice and she really caresAbout his dinner, about him and
about his coffee.
That's why she starts hismorning with Jason Sanborn, the
heftier coffee, heftier flavor,heftier aroma.
But there's still the kind ofwoman who serves whatever's
handy.
Are you, this woman or theother woman?
(07:35):
Jason Sanborn, the heftiercoffee For the other woman, who
really cares?
Speaker 1 (07:42):
I'm going to run Jason Sanborn ad there you go.
The episode sponsored by Volvo.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
We need a Volvo ad, though they got to have one.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
I think we're supposed to be.
We're supposed to be recordingone.
We had a script.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
Oh, we'll do that too .
Well, not today.
Just send me the script andI'll we'll do that.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
We'll do that for the next episode.
That's do that.
We'll do that for the nextepisode.
That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
No but seriously, we'll just keep.
We'll keep plugging them.
Once you're on the list, you'reon the list.
If it is, you're on the list.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
When the first 10 minutes is just us rolling
credits like an old film, thenwe're just gonna do that I hate
that, though I you know, there'sa ton of podcasts that I really
like, and there's one inparticular that I've been
listening to for a couple ofyears.
It's called magnus archives.
It's really neat.
It's like an old radio horrorshow, right.
So, like each week it had likea little bit of a like a scary
story to tell, like a, you know,scary stories to tell in the
(08:34):
dark kind of thing, and when Ifirst started listening to it,
it would have like a littleintro and then like a commercial
and that'd be it.
Now you get on there andthey've got, without
exaggeration, the first two orthree minutes.
They've got five or six 30second ads back to back and it's
like, man, I don't listen toany of those, I just fast
forward right through them andthat's true, you can't.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
I think my opinion is you gotta have fun with it, you
gotta work it in.
You can't just sit there and belike today's episode, brought
to you by preparation h magnum38s, caterpillar, volvo, ce and
pens oil, like you can't do that, no, what a.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
Whatever happened to the guys who tested preparation
a through g?
They're no longer with anusesthey did all that, just sealed
right up we have the reverseaction oh, no a bunch of baboons
running around off the listbecause that sure didn't work.
Somebody shoot him up withsomething they had to put e out
(09:37):
of its misery had a whole bunchof flipper babies that's where
you know.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Yeah, because see you get something burning so bad
you gotta use.
Gotta use the juice from theSwedish meatballs from Ikea and
rub it on there.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
I think that's actually what they use in the we
can't say that we just did it'sover.
So back to Pitt, ohio.
You know they were in the newsrecently.
Last month they announced thatthey were buying 10 of the new
Mac MD electrics and puttingthem into their fleet.
And a lot of people pointed outyou know, oh, come on, guys,
you have a 475 vehicle fleet ofmedium duty trucks.
(10:13):
This is only 10 of them, but ifyou look at that and you
consider that they're cyclingthrough, say, 100 of those every
five years, this is 10% of thisyear's truck buy.
It's actually more than that.
So it's actually closer to 15%of their annual truck buy.
They're going pure electric.
And if you told me tomorrowthat Ryder Truck or Penske or
(10:34):
any of that was going to go 15%electric, I'd be really
surprised.
So I think that's a significantpurchase.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
Well, yeah, if you're running by the statistics, I
mean, that is a significantinvestment.
And any fleet that's constantlyreevaluating their position is
doing this.
You look at what are you goingto buy and how often and what
frequency.
And when you make a jump likethis, you need to know what
you're talking about.
And obviously there's a senseof security that they have with
(11:01):
the electric platform to makethat jump.
Nobody just sits there andleans back in their chair and
says, yeah, what the hell?
Send them the paper.
Like you know, you have a reasonfor it, so deep in the depths
of their fleet management psyche, they know, and they know that
they have a position wherethey're going I'm going to get
(11:23):
this stuff, we're going to placean order for it, and you can
only do that through efficientauditing practices and you can
only do that through datarecognition.
And I say data recognitionbecause you can't analyze data
that you don't recognize.
You have to recognize what isimportant to analyze.
So you pick your key points,don't let yourself get clouded
(11:45):
by the 5,000 points of light.
Okay, and you, you have to lookat that and go all right, well,
these 10 things I'm going totake a hard look at, or these 50
things, and I'm going to use analgorithm to kind of pair them
together for me, so we can letit flush itself out.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
Yeah, well, you know and we've talked about this a
couple of times where thecompanies that make it easy to
collect that data whether it'sthrough telematics or through,
like a, you know, an, automaticlog books or something like that
the companies that make it easyto collect the data are the
ones that I think, ultimately,are going to have a leg up going
forward, because the marginsare getting thinner and thinner.
(12:24):
And I think really that's whereMac and Volvo Mac if you want
to include them as well reallycomes across, because they've
got that Mac connect portal.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Well, yeah, they have the Mac portal and recently we
we analyzed the truck throughthat with one of the Mac
engineers.
Well, volvo Mac and the datathat they were showing us was
very enlightening.
So imagine if the company thatI work for, if we had a larger
fleet where we were a freightcompany.
You're going to select athousand units and pull that
(12:54):
data from them.
Then you're going to use AI tohelp scrub it.
Today, you're going to let AIreanalyze it and put it out in a
way where it's digestible.
So you have to get to a pointwhere you're comfortable with
all of this and AI is only goingto help you in the long run.
I mean, that's all it's goingto do.
When you go through the fleetand you go through your points
(13:16):
that you want to pick out forthat given task, these OEMs that
have the ability to measurethat and help you measure that
that's where you get the leg upBecause, like you said, the
margins are lower, the miles areincreasing because the distance
the trucks can run isincreasing because of average
speed.
You know the days of looking atsomething going well.
We can only get about 150 milesround trip.
(13:37):
That was long gone.
Then it was 300 or whatever.
You're getting to a point nowwhere the trucks are more
efficient, so you need to beable to do that.
Also, a lot of these thingshave been beat to death Tire
wear, oil change, stretching,just general fleet body work.
A lot of those ratios have beenproven and proven and proven to
(13:57):
death.
Where you could literally talkamongst other fellow fleet
executives we spitball the samenumbers.
Yeah, we know the numbers, butwhen you're just talking and
passing and you don't have yourstuff right in front of you but
you know the round numbers soyou're talking about, we're all
within the same realm.
What electrification and whatCNG did before electrification
(14:20):
is it shook it up.
It's like okay, now what do Imeasure?
What am I measuring?
Because now I've got fuelingcosts.
I've got retrofit costs in theearly days of CNG, before we
were buying it, with CNG alreadyon it.
I've got management costs thatare new because we're actually
going to be putting the CNG intothe vehicle but we're buying it
and that's separate from fuel.
(14:40):
These are the things that keepshaking the industry up and the
more data that you can get yourhands on.
That's why you're going to geta leg up.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
Yeah, well, we should talk about that too, right?
Because the price of fuel goesup and down.
The price of natural gas goesup and down and, yes, the price
of electricity goes up and down,but the price of electricity,
it changes throughout the daybased on your market.
And if you're using this kindof analysis and you've got
off-peak charging, you've gotthe ability to charge this thing
(15:11):
up at seven or eight cents perkilowatt hour, instead of the 25
cents per kilowatt hour thatyou've got at a retail location
or a Tesla supercharger.
Now you're talking reallysignificant savings, even
without incentives to buy thesethings.
You're just talking aboutoperational costs and fuel costs
.
If you consider electricity asa fuel you're talking about,
(15:32):
your fuel costs aresignificantly lowered.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
You're spot on because, if anything, the
electric electricity makes itsimpler to calculate.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
Yeah, you know I was talking to a guy.
I wanted to interview himanother day.
The guy's named Sean Ackley.
He's from Enride.
I'm going to splice thatinterview in here because he has
a really good clip about thiswhere he talks about the back of
the napkin, math, how to makethis all pencil.
So I'm going to splice that inhere.
(16:02):
We've got Sean Ackley fromEnride and this was recorded on
another podcast that I do,called Electric Quick Charge,
but we'll splice that in hereand see if that does anything
for you.
I've been doing this for 10years.
You'd think I'd be good atintros by now.
Today's guest is Sean Ackley.
Sean, you're the head ofcommunications, but also
charging infrastructure.
(16:23):
You're the charging nerd, ifyou will, for Einride, and I
don't mean to call you a nerd,but that's kind of how you
introduced yourself to me.
Speaker 4 (16:32):
I did say that, and not to overcorrect, certainly
not head of communications, butdon't mind taking a call from
Joe when I get a chance, soabsolutely.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
Well, I mean, if you're the only comms guy I
talked to, that makes you themost important guy, right?
Speaker 4 (16:43):
Careful, careful.
I can't take any titles today.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
Fair enough.
Well, you know Einride is areally exciting company.
You know we've been followingthem on Electrek for a number of
years, even before that heavyequipment podcast, clean
Technica.
I've been writing about Einridefor years and I know you guys
primarily as an autonomousvehicle play.
Recently we've seen more in thelines of big fleet purchases
(17:11):
150 Freightliner, e-cascadias,among other electric vehicles.
You guys are interesting, right, because you're not an autonomy
play, you're not strictly ashipping company, you're not a
3PL.
Where, would you say, enride'splace is in the broader market?
Speaker 4 (17:28):
Oh yeah, great question.
And also, self-admittedly wetalked about this earlier I'm
newer to the Enride family here.
I joined back in January and so, not having a huge freight
logistics background, I'm apower guy.
I'm still catching up to speedwith all of the intricacies of
the service portfolio that weoffer, but at its core, we
deliver a service, so we wouldcall that sort of a capacity as
(17:50):
a service model, where we ownthe truck, we buy charging, we
deploy, we help shippers getproduct from A to B in a
sustainable way and anelectrified way.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
At its core, and that's really worth mentioning
too is that at the core of thebusiness is electrification.
This is not a shipping play.
You're not yellow freight oranything like that.
You are still providingshipping, still providing
capacity, but you're doing it ina way that serves the broader
ESG and decarbonization goalsthat, frankly, a lot of
(18:22):
companies are implementing.
Speaker 4 (18:24):
Oh yeah, and not discounting ESG in any way,
shape or form.
But there's still a bit of acapitalist nature to what we do,
right.
So we have to figure out how todo this on parity cost parity
to a traditional operation,traditional diesel service and
then still find a way to beprofitable with every load that
we deliver.
So it's an interesting area andthat we found a way to do it
(18:44):
it's certainly what got meexcited to come join the team.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
You know one of the things that we run into often
when we talk to fleets, when wetalk to commercial fleets like
in my other life that I do a lotof consulting with different
fleet managers and fleet buyersthey talk about the chicken and
the egg when they reference EVand charging.
Right, do I buy an EV or do Iput in charging first?
Do I do them both at the sametime?
(19:08):
That means my upfront costs arereally high.
How does Einride lower thatbarrier to entry to fleets that
want to electrify and that wantto do business in that more
sustainable way?
Speaker 4 (19:24):
Sure, I think, as Corey, you're right.
You know the ecosystem itrequires to electrify anything
within a fleet, a portion of afleet, the entire fleet.
It requires the vehicle, itrequires charging, it requires
power, it requires land.
All these things can be verycapitally intensive If you're a
large 3PL or if you're a smallmom and pop fleet.
The barrier to entry is costit's cash, and not only in that,
(19:45):
the timelines that youmentioned.
They're not perfectly parallel.
So the time it could take tobring the power to a site, if
you have the benefit of owningyour own real estate or you have
access to a long-term lease andyou can modify your property
and add power, the time it takesutility to bring ample power
could be measured in years.
And so you know, coming out ofCOVID, when EB supplies at
(20:09):
dealer inventory or through theOEMs have improved and so the
lead times of trucks have gottenshorter, the laggard still
remains time to power.
But so time and money,certainly the two ingredients
that make the most interestingsoups today.
What we have done is reducethat barrier to entry by owning
the assets.
So we own the trucks, we buythe charging and we can deploy
(20:31):
them in a service model.
But the other piece that reallyhas helped us be successful is
in that we know that there is anESG play helping shippers
deliver goods in a sustainableway.
We also want to be costeffective and very easy to see
that when something's moreexpensive, you just have to use
it more, right?
So if a truck, let alone, candeliver less goods because it's
(20:53):
7,000 pounds heavier, maybe, andif you have to deliver more
turns per day, you're going toneed more energy to recharge the
trucks midday possibly, orpossibly more trucks, right?
Just volume in general to matchdiesel parity.
So if someone were a shipper ora carrier or a fleet operator,
we're to look at thatmathematically and say, oh, this
(21:15):
doesn't make sense, and if I'mnot regulated and forced to do
it, I'm going to wait until allthis gets cheaper.
And what we've done is that wecan buy those assets, we can
help you deploy them and we can,using some of our software
capabilities, we can exactlycalculate which routes you could
electrify today, which ones aregoing to be the most efficient
to run electrified, get the mostturns out of it, based on
(21:37):
battery capacity of the truck,how much charging you can deploy
, and we will perfectlyright-size that deployment so
that utilization hits a clipwhere we can do it at diesel
parity.
And that's our core focus goingin like that.
We're going in in that fashionrather than working our way down
to it as much as possible.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
At the end of the day , your customer is interested in
getting their stuff from A to Band that's their prime thing.
And they may have ESG goals,they may have everything else,
but if they're not profitable,they can't sustain.
And we talk about that secondtype of sustainability.
Can we sustain the planet?
Can we sustain the business?
It needs to do both in order towork.
Speaker 4 (22:11):
Sure, yeah.
Now if you're a CEO that's gota long career road ahead of you
as a product manufacturer or afood and beverage company, you
might be concerned about yourconsumer base growing over time.
So, yes, might be important toyou, certainly.
And then, as consumers, we'veseen the consumer shift in the
(22:32):
global landscape.
Retailers are paying attentionthat consumers want to buy
something that's green or goodfor the environment or has less
of an impact than maybe it did30 years ago, when they were
still a fan of your product, sothere's a keen interest to do
things sustainably.
Oh and, by the way, if you cando it on parity with what you're
paying today, even better.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
Yeah, and there's a ton of government incentives and
utility incentives and evenstate incentives coming out to
help reduce that cost.
But I think there's still a lotof unknowns, there's still a
lot of question marks hangingabove fleet managers' heads and
fleet buyers' heads.
And what I like about yourmodel and correct me if I'm
wrong is that at the end of theday, you're taking on that
(23:12):
responsibility, you're taking onthat uncertainty, you're taking
on that fear and you're passingall of that certainty on to
them saying look, for whateverreason, the truck is down, the
technology is not working.
That day we're still going toget your package from A to B and
make it happen one way oranother.
Speaker 4 (23:28):
Sure, I feel like that's been kind of the crux of
my career, like I've moved todifferent parts of this industry
over the last 10 years roughlyand have been chasing sort of
the what is the problem we'resolving here today?
And the early problems werejust sort of this is mystical,
this is a black box.
I don't understand.
Speaker 1 (23:46):
Oh, it's magic.
Speaker 4 (23:46):
Yeah, yeah.
So that was the sales pitchback then.
It was we'll demystify this foryou.
I don't know construction, nowthat I understand I need
chargers and trucks.
Well, I don't understand.
Understand, okay, we'll handlethat.
We'll be a general contractor,we'll hire APCs.
But the further you move alongin the maturity of the market,
as people are being exposed toit, even if they haven't dabbled
in it or done you know thedirty word, haven't done a pilot
(24:08):
, they're growing in theirunderstanding of what it takes
to deploy and the thing thatthey will run into, as they
understand, is subsidy is great.
How do I get it?
What can I apply for?
How do I get me some of thosenevi funds?
Right, like, some of this stuffdoesn't translate perfectly for
every modality.
And then, beyond that, onceI've done all this math, wow,
that's really expensive.
(24:29):
I had a warehouse operations andlogistics team whose budget
didn't include electricity atthis scale before.
I've got to rework my entireinternal commercial budgeting
process for this.
Now, how do I do that?
We kind of try and take thatoff their plate.
We'll handle it and feed itback to them in the way that
they did consume the previoustechnology.
You're paying for fuel, you'repaying for trucks, you're paying
for service and maintenance,all a service model.
(24:51):
That's kind of the formula forus right now.
Speaker 1 (24:54):
Yeah, and I think that there is something that
clicks in people's heads AustinEnergy.
You know we were talking aboutAmy Ashley, my good friend,
bobby Godsey as well, down inAustin Energy.
They were one of the teams thatearly on, when we were talking
about electrification and youknow I got to credit where
credit is due Matt Teske, myformer co-host, said the words
(25:15):
electricity is a fuel, so justthink of it as electric fuel
instead of liquid fuel.
And Bobby and Amy got itimmediately.
And Austin Energy put out ahuge campaign talking about
electric fuel.
And if you go to their websitetoday, they talk about electric
fuel.
And I think once that light bulbwent off over their head of
like, oh, this is just fuel,it's just a different kind of
(25:37):
fuel.
I have to fuel up in adifferent way at a different
time, but it's just fuel.
I think a lot of people wereable to start doing that kind of
back of the napkin, back of theenvelope, math and saying, okay
, this is no longer mysterious,I just need to think of it in a
new way.
Speaker 4 (25:54):
Sure, and I think that too, like if you start to,
to start to reverse engineertheir thought process that you
know they're going to go downthat rabbit hole they're going
to chase to go well, what does agallon of diesel cost me in
fuel?
Yes, so now let's just take aCalifornia average, right, five
bucks a gallon.
And okay, what is that innumbers of electrons, if I'm
trying to think about this likea liquid volume?
Try kilowatt hours.
(26:16):
And how many kilowatt hours areyou basically burning an energy
to achieve a mile?
What's your mileage ofefficiency running on diesel,
and sort of match that up.
And if you do all that math,you can depending on again,
where you're buying fuel and howefficient the EV vehicle that
you're operating is somewherebetween 25 and 45 cents a
kilowatt hours, the price youmight expect to be on price
(26:38):
parity with a gallon of diesel.
You start doing that math.
You go, okay, well, that's whatit costs.
This is how many kilowatt hoursI will consume to deliver this
many goods or this many routesor this many miles.
And then, okay, well, what ismy capital cost to build
infrastructure to get thatfueling If I'm going to do it
myself, build my own gas stationin the electric world.
You start doing all that mathand go okay, now divide all that
(26:59):
CapEx plus the electricity I'mgoing to buy for my utility at a
wholesale rate or retail rate,and I average all that out over
the term that I'm going to ownthe assets.
And then you start going oh mygosh, that's a dollar a kilowatt
hour.
I can't achieve parity.
So how do I do that?
Then you might look and there'sa lot of lessons I've learned
from the light duty vehiclespace.
You go oh, someone else isbuilding it.
(27:23):
Right, I don't build my own gasstations today.
Why do I need to do that in anEV future?
Who's building electric gasstations, electric charging
stations, hubs off premise?
They've got to figure out somefactor of scale that I can
benefit from as a consumer, andthere are.
There's a lot of greatcompanies that are out there
building charging hubs today.
They're just not asprolifically available out on
the highway corridors thattrucks drive today, so you can't
(27:44):
rely on them without some sortof backup plan exclusively.
But then you start to go andask well, what's the market rate
of a kilowatt hour off thosetaps?
And I guarantee you talk to anyof those developers today.
They're also sitting there withthe pencil.
They're doing that math.
Oh yeah, I get a kilowatt hourdown to 35 cents a kilowatt hour
retail.
That's tough, it's very tough,oh yeah.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
Well.
But you know, you start to seethese different plans, you see
these different solutions outthere, whether it's a
combination of solar, whetherit's battery backup, whether
charge it up, and they do that.
So there's a ton of solutionsout there.
You're absolutely right, and Ithink this is riveting stuff for
our fleet people.
(28:25):
I don't know that the consumershow is going to love it so much
, but I think this is justabsolutely riveting because,
like, I have spreadsheets forthis, I have pivot tables for
this, where it's like, oh,you're running two shifts or
you're running a night shift,what if you ran two day shifts?
You know, switch that around.
And then you're charging at thisrate instead of this rate.
All of a sudden you're atparity.
(28:46):
Now you stack the incentives ontop of that.
Now you're pocketing money,you're coming out ahead, and I
think that's super importantbecause you know we do have a
driver shortage, we do have anoperator shortage, not only in
this country but throughoutNorth America.
And one of the most excitingthings about Einride is not the
(29:07):
logistical stuff, it's not thefiguring it all that out, even
though that is the excitingstuff to fleet people, to people
who are in the industry likeyou and I are but the exciting
stuff.
To people who don't care aboutany of that and don't wanna do
math, the exciting part is therobot trucks, the self-driving,
the autonomy.
Speak a little bit to that, Imean because you know the
renderings of this thing.
They look like stormtroopers,they look awesome, it's like
(29:29):
Star Wars type trucks.
Speaker 4 (29:30):
They are cool, all right.
So for any listeners or viewerswho haven't searched Enride
before, maybe you have beenexposed to sort of the light
duty vehicle or the consumerspace and haven't looked at
trucking go and search Enrideand just Google image search.
This thing is cool.
It absolutely steals the show.
If we bring one to a trade showor if it's out in the proving
grounds, it gets the attention.
(29:52):
Yeah, so the autonomous truckor the autonomous mule being
able to deliver goods without adriver was probably the earliest
inception that anyone's everbeen exposed to, and myself
included in that.
You know, we do see a futurewhere year over year, the growth
like we're still going to shipmore goods every year it's going
(30:12):
to grow, let alone there beingany attrition in the market from
a driver perspective, it'sgoing to continue to grow and it
will outpace, and that's wherewe see a lot of job.
Growth is just in the abilityto grow faster than you could
even feed in new drivers if youwant to, let alone there being
attrition in the marketpotentially.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
And I think that that's worth bringing up,
because this is going to fueljob growth.
It's not going to stealanybody's jobs.
There's nobody there to do thework now.
Speaker 4 (30:38):
No, absolutely.
So.
Yeah, I mean I've spent a lotof time in my career talking
about workforce development,just broad spectrum.
I think EV technologies aregreat for it.
I used to work in a sort of afield construction environment,
doing like large powertransformer and utility upgrade
stats, working with great fieldservice professionals that have
been working out in the fieldfor 30 years in their career,
and the amount of times I've hadany of them turn to me going.
(31:00):
Ev is cool, but I'm not openinga laptop.
I haven't had to do it for 30years.
Don't tell me I have to addthat to my tool belt today and I
get it.
But you see a passion totransform your career, maybe
later in your career, and youwant to find a way to maybe not
have to travel work in theelements.
If you're a driver, that can behard on your body, let alone
just driving An EV truck, isimproving your state of health
(31:22):
and state of your quality oflife.
Imagine now also working in anetwork operations center
managing fleets of autonomousvehicles with all of that
institutional knowledge you haveabout if a road hazard were to
occur, if something has changedin your logistics and routing
requirements, if you need tostep in.
You have that institutionalknowledge to participate.
So there's job growth stillhappening, whether or not it
(31:44):
autonomous or electrified, foreven folks that are later in
their career.
Speaker 1 (31:48):
That's such a great point.
We just on our last episode wetalked a little bit about
Caterpillar and their remoteoperations for their heavy load
dump trucks at their miningoperations They've got an
operator sitting outside ofCharlotte, north Carolina, lives
with his family, gets to benear his kids at school, he's
effectively going to remote into these vehicles and he can
(32:10):
operate three or four differentvehicles 2 000 miles away
through his office simulator.
The same way that you know, Idrive gran turismo right, and he
does it effectively, he does itsafely and he gets to be with
his family every night.
That is a game changer where ifyou want to be an operator, you
want to to be a driver.
(32:30):
You can operate multiplemachines and you just pick it up
when it's time for you to pickit up, and when it's just going
through the terminal or goingover the road highway on a
pretty much straight shot, itcan handle that on its own.
We just need you when we needyou and you can operate three or
four trucks.
Speaker 4 (32:48):
Yeah, what's interesting to me as I learn
more about it is that you knowwe think of a piece of asphalt
or a piece of concrete to besomething that's constant right
Over my entire lifetime.
A road is a road.
The reality is these roads arenot constant.
There's deterioration, there'srepair, there's constant shifts.
So there's going to be aconstant need to be scanning,
updating, monitoring andtracking the state of the route
(33:12):
that you're going to deploy,even if that route is something
that's supposed to be repeatedfor the next 10 years the same
route, day in, day out.
Those routes have a lot ofvariability and environmental
impact.
So there's going to be jobs.
There's going to be importantfocus that's going to be
required on the human resourceside in the autonomous world for
a long time to come.
Speaker 1 (33:32):
That's such a smart way of putting it.
That's probably why you haveall those diplomas on the wall
behind you.
Speaker 4 (33:37):
Are you kidding me?
Those are coupons.
I'm going to trade one in later.
Speaker 1 (33:40):
That's like in the office where Michael's got the
SACO certificate of authenticityon the wall.
Speaker 4 (33:47):
I love it.
I love it.
No, no, just a couple of arrestrecords and nothing big back
there.
Speaker 1 (33:52):
This is the one where they had the governor.
Let you back into society.
Speaker 4 (33:56):
Yeah, exactly, exactly, I'm allowed in
(34:17):
no-transcript certainly reachout through our comms channel on
our website, enride or Einride,either way, no offense taken.
Enridetech T-E-C-H.
Go out and check it out.
Learn more about us.
Reach out on any social mediaplatform you'd like Send an
email, send a smoke signal, acarrier pigeon, we don't care.
(34:40):
Engage, ask questions.
It's a cool technology area tobe in and happy to share
whenever we can.
Speaker 1 (34:45):
Yeah, for sure.
And then the last thing I wouldsay to this is if you're a huge
shipping operation, if you aremoving, you know hundreds,
thousands of tons of equipment aday you definitely want to
check this out.
You want to see what these guysare doing.
And if you're not, if you're asmall operator, you're doing LTL
.
Look at this also, because itmight make sense for you, if
(35:08):
you're in an area here, to checkout what they're doing.
Check out the kind of fleetsthey're operating and, if
nothing else, right-size yourresources, Because you may have
six trucks in operation rightnow that are running with 50%
load on a diesel and you'retrying to figure out how to make
all this pencil.
You might not need to carrythose assets at all.
Speaker 4 (35:27):
Yeah, absolutely, Please do reach out.
I think that's a difficultposition, being that we are in
sort of a startup phase as wegrow in maturity in our company.
It's tough to reach everybodyand so many of our conversations
start with what is Enride?
Who is Enride?
You're the autonomous truckcompany?
Yes, but there's so much moreto share.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
Yeah, and we just ordered 150 E-Cascadys that
dudes are going to drive.
Speaker 4 (35:55):
Yeah, peterbilt, 150 peterbilt's, uh, and then you
know as many byds as we havehere in north america, let alone
globally it's.
It's so funny the amount oftimes I've had to explain.
You know we're one of thelargest class 8 truck fleet
operators in the us, full stop.
So well, but let's talk aboutthat for a minute and I swear
I'll let you go you got no thisyou got.
Speaker 1 (36:11):
No, this is going to be 16 more hours.
You've got.
You've got the new electricpizza in there.
You've got a great relationshipwith Packard.
I know that I said E-Cascadia,that was incorrect, but I think
you've probably got a few ofthose in the fleet as well
coming.
You have a pretty good sense ofwhat's out there and I think,
with BYD coming online online,byd is a new brand that a lot of
(36:33):
people aren't familiar with andthey're kind of testing them
out.
What product out there?
And I know that you know, andI'll cut this out if you don't
like it, I'll edit this becausewe do have editors, you know of
the different products that areout there, which are the ones
that you think are ready forprime time right now?
because a lot of people areexcited about now, because a lot
of people are excited about theTesla, a lot of people are
(36:54):
excited about Windrose, a lot ofpeople are excited about the
new Mac MD Electric, which Ithink is a great truck, but it's
tough to get those and if youare News coming back to the US
market, was it?
Speaker 4 (37:05):
the N series is electrified, oh.
Speaker 1 (37:07):
Isuzu yes, well, all right, I love that little Isuzu.
Yes, no, well, all right, Ilove that little Isuzu N truck.
I I was in college, so nowwe're going back to the nineties
and I rented one of those as aU-Haul to move Right.
So I had just gotten out of themilitary, I was going back to
school, put everything in there,cause like no now at this point
.
I've had a house for four yearsthe wife, the kid, I've got
(37:29):
stuff to move and I drove thislittle cab over a suzu n series
and I thought it was great.
I would drive that all day longover like a you know a 350 ram
or, uh, you know a 3500 ram or a350.
It's got all the capability,it's super comfortable, it's
easy to see, I could park it no,I love it.
I and, and I know that this isnot going to supposed to be an
(37:51):
isuzu commercial, but they don'tsell enough trucks to afford
the sponsorship, so I'm going tojust have to give them a
charity kick here.
That electric N-Series is goingto be really tough to beat.
I think that's going to be aphenomenal little box truck.
Speaker 4 (38:05):
Yeah, that's.
That's me personally, beingexcited to see that come to the
US market.
I think that'll be very cool.
No, coming back to your pointhere, now we are, I would say,
at its core technology agnostic.
What we deliver is that serviceand we'll evaluate all the
technologies available to us todeliver that service in the most
optimized way, Again achievingthat parity, if not better, and
(38:25):
delivering sustainable goodsfrom A to B Like a BYD.
Att has a 200-mile range todaythat we would say in Gen 2 or
Gen 3 platform, and mostcarriers might go.
That's not long enough, itneeds to be longer.
Well, for us, we can hyperfocus in on well, what routes
are 200 miles and less?
Or how many routes can we turnwithin a 200 mile range before
(38:47):
we need to recharge and howquickly can we recharge?
All that we're doing againstthe capabilities of each of
these platforms.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
Right.
Well, that just comes back tousing the right tool for the
right job.
If you've got an 800 mile route, this probably ain't it for you
, but if you're doing 175 miles,150 miles, you're doing that
three, four times a day.
You're foolish to not look atelectric.
Speaker 4 (39:07):
Absolutely, absolutely, and if it's
repeatable, very forecastableand you can predict exactly
which roads you're going to takefor the next five years.
Speaker 1 (39:15):
Then we get the robot to do it.
Speaker 4 (39:17):
Yeah, that's nice.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
I thought that was a really interesting interview
from Sean, because I think notonly is Sean an interesting guy,
he's been around the industryfor a long time but the company
that he works for now, enride.
They just bought 150 Peterbilt579 EVs oh wow.
Speaker 2 (39:43):
Yeah, I mean that's a significant investment.
Speaker 1 (39:46):
That's a ton of.
Not only is that a ton oftrucks, but that's a ton of
money, because if you figure,these things are two, two and a
half times more money than aconventional diesel.
They just basically spent 450Peterbilt's worth of money to
get 150 of these.
And they're doing it notnecessarily to save money
(40:07):
although I'm sure they do butthey're doing it for the
predictability of it.
They're doing it just to beable to have a handle on it, so
they don't wake up tomorrow.
And somebody steered acontainer ship sideways in the
Suez Canal and now gas is $7 agallon.
You know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (40:23):
Well, predictability is a whole other level.
You really have to get yourdata down and you have to trust
it to use it to predict trends.
Again, it goes back to what Iwas saying before You've got to
recognize the data that you'regoing to analyze it all comes
back to the analysis.
Well, yeah, but you've got torecognize also what are you
(40:45):
looking at to then use it topredict a trend.
So, if you're going to use itto predict a trend and use it to
predict a cost becauseultimately all we're trying to
do is drive cost what is itgoing to cost us and when?
We're going to use that topredict how we buy electricity?
(41:05):
We're going to use that justlike we used to buy and what we
still do.
We buy fuel futures.
We buy fuel on the open marketto maintain our position and
control our costs and create anaverage.
We're going to do the samething with electricity Large
fleets we're doing the samething with CNG.
You can only predict that stuffwhen you have true data.
Yeah, because it will gohorribly wrong and any fleet
(41:26):
person will tell you in theindustry.
Does it matter if your fleet isa bunch of electric mailboxes
that you manage for apartmentbuildings, which is a thing If
your data and how those work andhow the striker mechanisms and
all that stuff go down and whenyou need to work on them and
what you have to watch out for,it doesn't matter.
You're still trying to do thesame thing.
(41:47):
What is this going to cost meand when we're all in the same
field.
Speaker 1 (41:52):
We are, especially when it comes to energy.
You know, and that was one ofthe things that I really liked,
you know, back when we had RayGallant from Volvo CE in the
early episodes and he was on, hewas talking about don't look at
a job site as how many you knowtons of earth you need to move,
or how many rocks you got tomove from here to there.
Look at it in terms of energy.
(42:13):
How many kilowatts are youexpending to get that work done?
And if you look at it that way,you can convert everything else
to those kilowatts.
You can convert gasoline BTUsfrom CNG, all of that into that
unit of power and figure thatout.
And I think he's right.
So I think we've talked thatone fairly well to death.
(42:34):
I want to talk about this bigcat, svo 40, monstrous crane
thing that you've got a pictureof here I'll put that as a cover
art.
Yeah, that is bananas man.
Speaker 2 (42:43):
Where is?
Speaker 1 (42:44):
that.
Speaker 2 (42:45):
Well, you know.
So Caterpillar bought PsyrusErie and the actual model number
, that is a 7495.
Cyrus Erie and the actual modelnumber, that is a 7495.
It's a 7495 front shovelconfiguration.
Svo 40 is the unit number ofthe company that has that and
they're walking it across thehighway so that they can
(43:05):
transport it from one side ofthe mine to the other.
Or excavation that they'redoing and the picture is not
really clear if they're walkingit from one mine to another and
that happens to just be ahighway that goes past, or if
they're doing some kind ofinfrastructure work where
they're walking it from one sideof the infrastructure project
to the other.
But either way, this is amonster.
So the Caterpillar, when theytook over Bucyrus area, they
(43:26):
literally walked in and,according to the reps that I've
talked to about it, they said wewant to learn what you're doing
and we want to continue tosupport mining and large
excavation projects.
And Caterpillar has done aphenomenal job with this because
the staff that they have onboard now at the plant they have
moved some of the componentryaround, depending on where it's
(43:49):
coming from, but thesuperstructure and the
manufacturing of the booms andeverything like that, all of
that is still done byCaterpillar.
They have just continuouslyrefined that product and worked
it into the new age, into allthe new regulations, into
everything that you need.
And if you look at the cab onthat thing, it's not a cab, it's
(44:11):
an office.
You could have a serious staffin there working while you're in
there trying to figure out.
You know how you're going tokeep moving dirt all day and
that machine has technology init that is second to none when
it comes to that.
They know exactly what's goingon with that.
They can pull data live all thetime.
Fleet management can pull datalive all the time.
From that they know exactlywhat they're moving with it.
(44:33):
You know it goes right back towhat we were talking about.
Caterpillar has done aphenomenal job along with Volvo.
Volvo and Cap really dove intothe data collection of not just
what does the machine need froma health standpoint, but what is
it doing, what are we movingwith it?
You know the distance rolled.
Are we measuring it inproduction units or you know
(44:53):
whether it's yards or tonnage or, like you said, and then what
energy have we used to do this?
It's another, another exampleof I mean we can talk all day
about specs, about the cat 740or 7495 model and their whole
lineup of front shovel stuff.
But beyond that, if anybodytakes the time to look at any of
this stuff, look at thecatwalks, look at the detail on
(45:17):
it, the handrails, everything onthat machine is set up so that
you can work on it, you canaccess it, you can keep going
with it.
You know we've talked aboutthis too, but Volvo was one of
the first to bring the hydraulicundercarriage to market, where
it widened itself after youtransported it, so it'd move it
(45:38):
in and out based on what youneeded.
It keeps you from having tohave people get underneath there
and then re-bolt everything.
You still got to put the boltsback in, but the idea is that
it's a lot safer and theyrecognized an issue with that.
Speaker 1 (45:51):
So, man, I just found obviously this is an audio
podcast.
You guys aren't going to beable to see this, but go online
and look up that cat 7495operator cab.
You've got some wild picturesof this guy with all the screens
, but then behind him, behindhim, there's another operator
seat, there's like a controlroom where it's almost like two
(46:11):
or three different PCs on there,and there's like a control room
with almost like two or threedifferent pcs on there and
there's like a little bathroom,a little coffee setting, a
little kitchen in there.
And it makes sense yeah, you'renot leaving.
You're in there eight, tenhours.
You're doing your whole shift.
You're not going nowhere thatmakes perfect sense.
Speaker 2 (46:25):
They're managing that whole thing, right from the cab
of that crazy, you know, andthey're electric or they're
diesel, the diesel electric, Imean, depending on the
configuration.
And again, we don't go into thedetail and the spec and break
down of that crazy you know, andthey're electric or they're
diesel, the diesel electric, Imean, depending on the
configuration.
And again, we don't go into thedetail and the spec and break
down every model and do all thatstuff.
That's not what this show'sabout.
Go online, check this thing out.
You gotta see it.
They once again kings of movingmassive material.
(46:48):
Them and hitachi have thatmarket.
Just there's nothing else youcan say.
I mean, that's just it yeah,that's it then.
Speaker 1 (46:56):
Well, I think hitachi and I think probably kamatsu is
probably the only other onethat's a real player, and
kamatsu has a huge stake in themarket, but they they
continuously have had that stake.
Speaker 2 (47:07):
I mean caterpillar is doing some moving and some
shaking because of theiracquisitions and and what
they've tried to do to get abetter foothold in that market
space.
Speaker 1 (47:15):
Yeah Well, the cats have been very smart because
they're.
They are a company that hasgrown by acquiring other leaders
in a space that they were notin and kind of adding all of the
stuff that made cats good tothat.
Adding all of the stuff thatmade cats good to that.
(47:36):
They're not watering it down,correct, they're building it up
and then they're building inenough similarity in terms of
the controls and the operatingsoftware that a cat operator
from one machine can go intoanother one and maybe not know
how to use it on day one, butknow their way around and be
able to find stuff.
I really like this because youknow I don't want to mention the
companies.
Obviously we don't mention thecompanies use it on day one, but
know their way around and beable to find stuff.
I really like this because youknow I don't want to mention the
companies.
Obviously we don't mention thecompanies we work for because
(47:57):
that would be terrible for ourcareers.
But you know you've done a tonof excavating work.
I never saw anything this bigover at your old facility.
This is great.
Speaker 2 (48:07):
No, we did not have stuff this large.
I mean, this is for a massivemountain moving project.
When you are going to go insomewhere and you literally have
to dig a hole in the earth thatis visible from somewhere too
far up, you want to be flyingover and go.
I wonder what they're workingon down there the iss radios in.
Speaker 1 (48:29):
What are you boys doing down?
Speaker 2 (48:30):
there, right, exactly you, when you have, when you
have the faa channels on yourshovel and they get on there and
they're like a cabin crew, cat7495, this is, uh, bravo, tango,
fly over over.
Hey, do you want to?
You have to figure out like youknow.
You know, they see what you'redoing down there.
That's what this is meant to do.
I there's that old saying youknow, they see what you're doing
(48:52):
down there.
Speaker 1 (48:52):
That's what this is meant to do.
There's that old saying youknow, if the mountain will not
come to muhammad, muhammad goesto the mountain no, no, we move
it to muhammad.
We bring the mountain tomuhammad.
Speaker 2 (49:01):
Now, that's right, that's right customer service.
And also so caterpillar fundedthe busiris erie was busiris
international.
Bucyrus InternationalIncorporated.
Acquisition was $8.8 billion.
They did that in July 8th of2011 after we were about 18
(49:22):
months out of the housing crisis, which was crippling, yeah, but
they had the foresight to turnaround and say, look, we got to
do something here and they wentin and they funded it and they
brought them on board and I'msure it has not been without,
just like any acquisition painpoints.
They've done nothing but makethat company stronger and better
.
And the Volvo CE guys we wantto see a mountain moving shovel
(49:49):
come out of Volvo CE Sweden.
Speaker 1 (49:51):
You're doing everything you can to make sure
they get their money's worth outof this one.
Speaker 2 (49:54):
Oh, no, no, but I'm serious.
We want to see this.
When you go to Ikea and theyhave the meatballs and then all
that sludge, grease and all thatcomes down and becomes biofuel
we know that that's the nextstep Just tell us this is where
you're going.
Ikea is a private way to pullfuel worldwide.
Pull fuel together to build abiofuel generating facility
(50:18):
based solely off the sales ofSwedish meatballs.
We know this is what you'redoing.
Just acknowledge it.
Speaker 1 (50:24):
Let it know.
Speaker 2 (50:26):
This is where we plug the X-Files.
Speaker 1 (50:41):
Right, x-files, right .
Well, you know how everythingat ikea has that the weird, the
weird names.
This would be lubsk.
It's like l with the little uwith the dots s b s k well, yeah
, it's.
Speaker 2 (50:47):
It's located in aisle double a slot 12b yeah, tvorsk,
the tvorsk aisle.
Speaker 1 (50:53):
That's actually really neat stuff, you know.
So apparently the guy who whostarted ikea founded it, was
dyslexic and he would name stuffwith these crazy names, but the
the letters and numbers werearranged in a way that they
didn't invert when he looked athim, so they looked the same to
him as they do to us, and thathelped him keep track of that.
(51:15):
So that's your ADA moment ofthe day.
It's so funny.
We have to do when we have atthe company I work for, we have
to do a corporate safety minute.
Whenever we have a groupmeeting, we have to do a safety
minute.
And the safety minute was aboutladders and the guy was
literally talking about properladder use and three points of
(51:37):
contact and all that.
Oh yeah, and I'm holding arolling office chair.
This other dude is standing oneleg on the office chair, one
foot on my shoulder, while I'mholding the chair to get up to
adjust the uh, the projector sothat we can get a clear, focused
view of our ladder safetyroutine.
I don't know who you are.
The osha manual, the oshahandbook, is written in blood.
(52:01):
To remember that.
I think we close with that no,maybe we're done, we're done.
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