Good morning Grid Connections listeners and for those of you who may be listening
for the first time, the Grid Connections podcast is the show where we unravel the
complexities of electric transportation, renewable energy, and our electrical power
grid that ties all of them together.
I'm your host Chase and today we're thrilled to have Rustam Kocher, a
visionary retired trucking executive known for his pivotal role at Daimler, where he
spearheaded the electric Cascadia trucking program.
Our conversation was amazing.
I felt like I knew quite a bit actually about electric trucking, but I really did
learn so much with our discussion.
In fact, our conversation went for so long and we covered so much that I had to break
up our conversation into two parts.
So dive deep with us as we explore the first part of our conversation with Rustam
discussing the electrifying challenges and achievements in electric trucking from the
adoption of the game changing megawatt charging standard or MCS for short.
to the future of autonomy in the industry.
In this episode, Rustam shares his invaluable insights on the roadblocks and
milestones in electrifying the trucking sector, enhancing EV charging
infrastructure, and the exciting prospects of electric trucking domestically and
abroad.
It's a conversation packed with expertise and foresight you won't want to miss.
But before we start, a quick reminder.
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And for those intrigued by Rustam's journey and eager to learn more about his
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There's a treasure trove of information waiting for you.
And with that, enjoy.
good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you're at, listeners.
My name is Rustam Kocher.
I actually do the heavy U on Rustam, but either way is correct.
I fell into electrification actually before I ever joined Daimler Trucks.
I was at Nike at the time in supply chain and sourcing, and I had an old Nissan
Altima that I wanted to get rid of because I got tired of paying the gasoline bill.
and this is around 2010 and there wasn't any electric cars out there.
And so I went looking for them and I could buy a zebra zap, which is a three wheeled
Chinese lead acid battery piece of crap, but I think with 40 miles an hour and had
40 miles of range and had zero safety features.
And I was like, that doesn't sound like a car that I want to put my family and I
don't even mean.
But then I started to do some research and the Nissan Leaf was coming out and then I
got into who killed the electric car and looked at the Chevy Volt and I started to
do some research.
I was born and raised in Portland, Oregon.
I wanted to stay in the Portland area.
There was one auto maker in the Portland area and that was Freightliner.
And they make really big class eight trucks and class six, seven trucks.
And...
I decided to go in with the objective of becoming a bit of an inside agitator, kind
of the guy that throws the Molotov cocktail over the wall and sees what
happens.
And so I was able to finagle myself into a sourcing role there because of my
experience at Nike.
And I was purchasing essentially the elements of an electric vehicle, spinning
electric motors, so starters and alternators, batteries, lead acid, 12 volt
batteries, and all the electrical components that kind of go into those
things.
And...
By doing so, I got a great lesson in who the suppliers were, what the technology
was, how everyone was preparing for electrification.
And what I found out was that I knew more about vehicle electrification than most of
the suppliers did.
Certainly more than Daimler was prepared to do.
And so quickly I kind of became the expert in the space within Freightliner.
I started literally printing out articles about the Tesla Semi and the Nikola
Electric Semi and things like that, leaving them on executives desks.
Quickly graduated to email and some newsletters that went around internally.
We grew from three to three thousand on the email newsletter distribution list
within about three years.
And so, yeah, it just kind of grew to position myself to be ready for when
Daimler was ever going to take that electrification leap.
Funny story was when I was first hired, the new employees had a chance to kind of
raise their hand in one of these all -employee meetings and ask a question of
one of these high -level executives.
And so I raised my hand and I said, so when do we plan?
to divest ourselves from diesel engines and move to the next generation of
whatever's going to propel our trucks and what's that look like?
And he literally laughed and said, oh, diesel will be the fuel and engine for the
next foreseeable 30 years.
So there's no need to change.
To which I said, I don't think so.
And I kept doing what I was doing.
And then, uh, Fretlander decided to start, actually Roger, uh, who was the CEO at the
time, uh, decided to start an internal, uh, what they call a swarm with
Enzymeland, which is the German version of a school of fish, which is kind of a, uh,
an internal startup.
And we call ourselves, we got to name ourselves in a little bit.
And so you have the, um, Mercedes AMG, which is the performance side of things.
And we call ourselves EMG, the e -mobility electric mobility group.
And we were tasked within two years to come up with, is this a feasible thing to
do as far as electrification of our trucks?
And within three months, we had built a class, an EM2, so class 6 -7, and a class
8 eCascadia.
We built them from the ground up using existing chassis and cabs and proved that,
yes, the technology was there.
We could do it.
We could build them.
And then we had to prove the market case, which took us slightly longer.
But by about five to six months, we were essentially done and said, yes, it's
technically feasible.
There's a business case for it.
And not only that, but regulation is going to push this in this direction.
So we need to do it.
And we quickly grew from 11, which was the initial group, to I think there's over 300
now that call themselves EMG within Daimler Truck.
So it was a pretty cool thing to be involved in and to help start up.
And...
I'm excited about the fact that we have series production now, Freyliner,
eCascadia's and EMQ's being sold to customers.
They're even on Gen 2 for the eCascadia's, which is really, really cool.
Yeah, no, thank you for sharing all of that.
And that, that actually has brought up so many more questions with, uh, with that,
but I know we've got some stuff we want to go over, but I guess real quickly, I would
be curious in that.
Um, cause one of the things I wanted to ask you about was if you could, how much
you could share of it, but it's around the organizational change required and kind of
pushing that because that is such a big change.
And it's funny you share that anecdote about them be like, no, we'll be diesel
forever.
And.
Coincidentally, one of my best friends actually took a job a couple of years ago
and he now lives in the Midwest selling Volvo semis.
And so he's got his own, uh, he's, he's, I would say, uh, optimistic, but very
skeptical.
And then of course his buyers are very skeptical of electric trucks.
Um, but I, I'm just kind of curious of what you saw and if there was any, maybe
tactics is the wrong word, but any tactics or other ways to kind of win people over.
Or to kind of highlight and show to them that this can actually work and that there
is a future for this.
One of the first things we did was...
tried to get as many executives into electric cars as we possibly could.
Now the problem is Mercedes didn't have any to speak of.
They had a B class that was built by Tesla that was honestly not a great performing
vehicle.
And so we got them into Tesla's Model S, Model X that was available at the time.
And just we'd rent them on Turo and we'd say, here's the key card, go drive this
car for a week, a month, whatever it takes, and then come back to us with
questions and concerns.
And obviously anybody who's driven electric, any sort of decent recent
electric, you know, there's all the torque, there's the smoothness, there's
the quietness, there's the practicality, and then there's the challenge with
charging.
And so those are the things that came up, you know, wow, this is really smooth, it's
really torquey, it's fast, it's quiet.
but it's a bitch to charge and so how do we solve that?
And so we said well, for trucks we need to be able to show that charging
infrastructure can work for trucks but it probably needs to be purpose built.
And so the next step was we built a charging station.
And as far as we know, it was the first public truck and bus charging station in
North America, if not in the Western world.
And it was actually a partnership with Portland General Electric, which was the
local public utility, which serves the Portland area.
And it's a 50 -50 split.
In fact, we got PG into a little bit of trouble because they agreed to that
without getting express approval from their...
body that manages them or approves what they can spend their money on and about
three quarters of the way through that project actually moved over to PGE.
a funny story I need to tell you about that.
We'll talk about that offline.
And what you're referring to is, I believe it's called now Electric Island, kind of
in North Portland there by the Daimler headquarters.
Yep, that's the one.
And so I actually jumped over to Portland General Electric about three quarters of
the way through that project.
And so I managed it.
So I started it, helped design it, helped build it and get the partnership going.
And then I jumped over the fence and helped to finish it on the PG -E site.
So that was pretty exciting.
And so we kind of had to show the world what charging for trucks could, should
look like.
And as part of that, charging speeds is an issue or it's a question.
So a Tesla Semi or any large Semi that's going to travel for a full eight hour or
10 hour day probably needs to carry between 700 kilowatt hours to a megawatt.
And if you're going to charge that at one C, that means you need to be able to put
in one megawatt of charging power.
And there's no...
that's a totally great point.
And I didn't mean to cut you off, but just in case anyone's listening, what one C
refers to is essentially the charge rate in comparison to the battery.
So, uh, as, as you kind of said there, Rustin, when, if you have what let just to
keep it simple, if you have one megawatt hour size battery, you almost need to have
one megawatt of power.
And then you're at one C if you go to two megawatts and it's a one megawatt hour,
then you're at two C.
But I'm sorry, continue.
the time that it takes to charge in an hour, give or take.
So if you have a 1 megawatt battery and it was a zero and you charged it for an hour,
it would get to full 1C, 1 megawatt.
None of those things are exact because it's going to charge faster when it's low
and it's, yeah, anyway.
It's a rough approximation, 1C, 1 megawatt, 1 megawatt charging speed.
So...
That came up fairly early on in 2018 when we started to get into what needed to be
done for charging speeds and public charging for the trucks.
And Tesla actually rang us up and said, hey, we wanna work on this project with
you.
We can't charge at the speeds we want to with any of the existing connectors in the
marketplace.
And so we need to come up with a new charging standard for...
our Semi because they had announced the Semi as well as any other commercial
vehicle and the idiot that I was I raised my hand and said sure I'll leave the
global effort to try and standardize this having never participated in a global
standardization project before I never should have done it I'm not an engineer I
don't have that background nor experience but
What we have today now after almost four years is an MCS connector.
So if you look for the megawatt charging standard, MCS online, it's a triangular
shaped connector that has now been essentially almost completed from a
standardization standpoint and will, I think, be rolled out later this year in
2024.
and put into use on trucks in public charging stations.
I believe that some of the first will be in Germany on a partnership site with
Chaiton and a couple other manufacturers between Berlin and Düsseldorf along kind
of the east -west axis there in Germany.
So that's pretty exciting that those are going to use.
You've seen another connector that Tesla's using at their Pepsi site.
They were required to deliver those trucks in a certain amount of time based on the
state funding that was being applied to that Pepsi site.
And in order to meet that timeline, they had to go to market with the stage of the
development of the MCS connector that we were on at the time.
And that was that square connector.
And so...
We've had a couple iterations since then with that global project and we've reached
that triangular plug.
The hope is that Tesla will come to the market with the series production of Semi
with that same triangular shaped plug on the truck so that any fleet that has a
mixture of Volvos and Mercedes and whoever else is out there and Tesla will simply be
able to use the same charge plug and won't have a mixture of DC charging plugs that
we do.
cars today.
And that was the intent.
The intent was to make this plug so that it would be a worldwide standard so you
could have a truck in Germany that could run in Portugal, that could run in Russia,
that could run in the U .S., that could run in Venezuela, and everyone could
drive.
Yeah.
And from what I've seen, yeah, there's been a few different iterations of it, but
the last one I saw, and I believe this is the one you're talking about is
essentially looks kind of like a rounded triangle from the outside.
And then there's essentially two main DC pins and then I think two or three like
communication pins as well.
Um, and so,
and you have an in and out on the comms.
Yeah.
And so it's actually, I mean, it's pretty big, but it's still like smaller than like
the traditional Chateau Mo plug.
Um, so it's not like absurdly big.
And when you're talking about the power it's dealing with, you're like, yeah, this
seems totally reasonable.
Um, and it, and anyone that's ever been by like a commercial fueling station or ever
just even dealt with, uh, using a gas pump there, it's actually would be, you just
plug it in and it goes.
So it's really not that, uh, from a user experience, it's probably just.
is good if not better really, because you can just kind of leave it and walk away
and it's still a pretty light device.
I'm curious as you're going through the evolution of this, you talk about the one
that Tesla goes to market with and I've seen that one where it's maybe people that
are listening have seen on TV where it's almost like square from the outside kind
of and there's two like main vertical pins.
Yeah, is there as you're going through this, what did you find was the
biggest thing dictating this evolution through these different styles?
Was it the communication protocols?
Was it the need for kind of over and beyond safety for delivering this power?
Or is it maybe a mixture of all of the above?
Communication protocols was an active conversation throughout the, from the
start to the finish, honestly, and it didn't really get finalized until late
last year through a voting process in the standardization body in Europe.
Primarily, we made the decisions we made as a group.
We really started with the use case and we started with the customers and the OEMs.
the utilities and we said okay let's help define what this needs to do.
how it's going to be used.
Do we want people to have to use safety equipment in order to utilize it?
We said no, so there should be no safety equipment.
Who's going to use it?
Well, essentially anyone is going to be driving a commercial vehicle, so it has to
fit a use case of maybe a small young female or an older elderly driver that has
to be able to climb down and plug it in.
So it can't be too heavy, it can't be too unwieldy.
It has to be usable by not only the peak of safety,
human condition but the edges as well.
So how do we make this so that the...
insertion forces and the removal forces aren't obscene and people can actually use
it.
But then again, at the same time that it's safe, that it can conduct these one
megawatt levels of power or more in a way that's not going to put anybody at risk.
So we said, you know, safety, usability, no safety equipment, things like that.
And so that's that's how we kind of came up with defining what it should be able to
do.
And then we defined from a technical standpoint that
what it should look like.
So there's what's called creepage and clearance distances so that you don't have
any voltage that decides to leak out when it's under power because voltage can jump
if given the chance if it's on a dirty surface things like that.
So I learned a lot.
We actually had one whole lesson about the physics of energy transfer and how close
things can actually get under you know what amount of pressure is kind of useful
and what is too much or you know essentially
longer useful, doesn't give you any additional contact force and reduce the
amount of heating between the two materials, things like that.
So again, I'm not an engineer, but I learned a lot during this process.
And we learned that it's easier to tighten the connection on a round face than it is
on two square faces.
You can kind of push with two square faces, but...
it's easier to cinch down a round face and get the kind of connection.
I don't know, durability over time so that you can have the insertion removal forces
that you want but still get a nice clamp force, things like that.
So that's how we came up with what we did.
Then we chose the V shape because as a user it's easier to kind of slot that into
the V, then tip it up and push it in, things like that.
And then we defined where it should be on the truck, which makes the cable length a
little shorter.
So that was a bit of a fight, but in the end we said left side of the left hand
side of the vehicle in all markets.
So whether it's in the UK or in Germany, it's on the left side of the vehicle,
roughly hip height on the average human.
So that, so the instruction removal forces aren't too bad.
And then behind the most rearward forward axle and in front of the most forward rear
axle.
So which is a fancy way of saying it.
Between the axles, because sometimes you have a double steer in the front and you
have two axles in the back.
So between the axles, left hand side of the truck, roughly hip height.
So it gives you kind of a chapazoid shape to put the connector in.
And that way your cable doesn't have to be too long, so you don't have a really long
cable that's liquid cooled, being draped around and have to run.
You you're talking a class eight truck, you potentially could have, you know, 10
meters of cable if the connection point was on the back or the front or the nose.
It's a giant vehicle.
You see the long cables with passenger cars today.
So that's how we defined it.
And that's what we
yeah, that is actually a really interesting point and pretty smart to make
sure that doesn't matter what market it's kind of in the same place and especially
on the same side.
Cause I guess in a different realm, the Tesla superchargers opening here in North
America, and I guess they have actually been open in Europe for a little while.
The whole issue around what side it's on kind of causes where the car and blocks
and other chargers.
That's very interesting and makes a lot of sense.
Now.
I have a Volkswagen ID .3 here and I end up blocking two spots when I charge using
the Tesla charger.
So I've come to start to use the last one on the road and I parked sideways to it.
So I only take up one spot.
But you can't do that with the semi.
With the semi and a pull through with a trailer, you kind of have to have the
charger where it needs to be.
gonna, you're gonna definitely get into some, uh, not so friendly conversations
with, uh, with that.
So electric Island, when that went in, uh, I mean, it's still in and I remember
hearing they're going to do like a second round of upgrades to it.
I don't know if that's happened.
I don't know if you do, but when it originally launched, it was essentially
just, uh, CCS one connect.
High voltage ones, but yeah, essentially that's what the Daimler trucks would use
is they would plug that in.
The idea was, and I think they eventually did open it to the public to use as well.
It was open to the public from day one.
Actually the day we opened it, it was open to the public.
In fact, it was free for about the first six months because we couldn't get the
payment software to overlay correctly on the multitude of chargers that we had.
And so if you rolled up and you were a rideshare, you got free electricity for
about six months.
So there was some pretty happy people there for a while.
But yes, it was all CCS -1 connectors.
We had a couple of Chattemo.
We had all the way from 50 kW for like an overnight style charge all the way up to,
I think I've got a 450 there now.
And we've got a stretch between 400 volt, 800 volt.
We've got the capability to put in the automated connector system like a robot.
And then obviously we planned for MCS, so the MCS capability to, the ability to
install an MCS, multiple MCS, as well as a BESS and solar there are all there.
So we've, we made the site as flexible as possible.
In fact, if you look at the overheads of Electric Island, you'll see kind of a
concrete strip that runs through and under all of the chargers.
That's actually a
with a cement top and you can just pop that trench, drop new cables in, close it
back up, and you can actually switch out a DC fast charger probably in about two
hours where at most sites it would take you two or three days.
So it's got a tremendous flexibility.
So it seems like there could be like in the quickest version of that, could you,
or maybe it's dependent on the actual charger, you know, might not be able to
speak the language, but could you literally just swap the cord out and then
it would have MCS or does the charger also need to be replaced to, I guess what I'm
curious about is like the communication protocol.
Is it CCS based?
Is it its own thing?
Does that make sense?
Like how you can swap out a, uh,
there, I believe you'd have to drop some new cable.
I don't know 100 % the answer on that.
I think what they finally decided in the standardization body was to go with
Ethernet.
And I believe that cable is different than going via PLC or CAN, which are the other
two communication protocols out there that we're considering.
So I believe you would have to drop a new cable.
Gotcha.
And does it, uh, is there a kind of version of plugin charge or something
supported or would it also kind of require the payment side of stuff where each time
it plugs in it?
I mean, I'm just kind of curious about that.
Yeah.
is to use 1511 -8 -20, which does have plug and charge integrated.
So essentially you would carry the ID within your vehicle of who you are and
who's paying for your charging.
You simply plug it in and walk away.
That's the intent.
Very cool.
With that, I think we've, unless there's anything else you can think of, it seems
like we covered a lot on the MCS for that.
That's really fascinating.
And I really appreciate that because we really don't get to talk about that too
much.
Um, it's usually around CCS and Tesla standards.
So.
behind MCS was essentially to try and put a bullet into hydrogen.
I will admit that I feel that hydrogen is a little bit of a...
It's a push by the oil and gas industry to stay relevant.
You know, kind of what they do is drill and refine and pipe and ship liquid and
gaseous fuels and that's their business model and so that's what they would like
to do with hydrogen.
The only substantial difference between, performance difference between a hydrogen
and a BEV truck is that you can fuel a hydrogen fuel cell truck faster and you
get slightly more range.
Well, we know batteries continue to improve from a gravimetric, gravimetric
and let's see the term, density, power density capacity.
And so they're able to hold more power and accept more power.
over time as they improve.
And so we know that we'll have the capacity on a BEV truck as much or more as
a hydrogen truck.
And with MCS, the charge time is roughly the same.
So it essentially puts the hydrogen fuel cell truck to bed because cost per mile of
BEV beats it every day.
Yeah.
And that's really interesting because that's something I've talked with people a
lot.
And from like a energy and scientific standpoint, I kind of get the argument for
hydrogen.
Uh, but when you look at, once again, like it, to me reminds me of where consumer
electric vehicles are maybe like five to 10 years ago in some ways, because like,
obviously back then there was a much larger argument for hydrogen for consumer
vehicles.
And now that's kind of fallen away.
Uh, we're even seeing the few that were still open in California or even closing
down and.
argument.
If you have the electricity to make the hydrogen, then you've created a hydrogen
that then you have to compress and ship.
And then you have to put it into a storage tank at a dispensation facility.
You have to dispense it.
And then you have to turn it through a fuel cell to electricity into a battery
that you then drive.
You're already five steps behind an electric motor and a battery because
electric motor and battery, you simply put the electricity into it and that the
battery.
So if you simply take that electricity that you're going to use to make the
hydrogen and use it for the truck, you're already ahead of the game.
Yeah, and I mean, I don't mean to be a fear monger, but I think the concept of
using hydrogen and the Hindenburg analogy to it, but then the fact that it's under
pressure, there's just all these things that really compound it to like make it
not as energy dense, because you have to have under pressure, you have to have a
much larger thing to keep it.
But even then, I think the thing that I'm even consistently surprised by that people
don't fully realize, because I think the biggest area where we're seeing this, when
you talk about the traditional fossil fuel industry,
is around natural gas and making the conversion from natural gas to be hydrogen
moving.
And the problem is hydrogen is the smallest atom and it's not like slightly
harder to contain.
It's much harder to contain.
hydrogen embrittlement.
So if you use those same pipelines that you use for natural gas and you try to use
them from hydrogen, they will just start to crack.
And again, the hydrogen is a small atom, so out it goes, and it will come in
contact with the source of flame and you've got a big boom.
So.
Yeah, I mean, it's a very different form of transportation, but if anyone that's
curious, the best thing they can do is go research the space shuttle, uh, because it
was a mostly hydrogen powered and it just, it is one of those things kind of in
theory.
And when you first think about it makes a lot of sense, but then in practice and
execution, it really starts showing it shortcomings and how much is required to
make it work.
And unfortunately it can go wrong very quickly.
So.
We've said enough, I think about hydrogen on that.
Um, but no, I, I really appreciate that.
And one thing you mentioned that I hadn't really thought about before, and I kind of
like to hear more about is you said it takes roughly the same amount of time to
fuel hydrogen as it is with an electric truck.
And I know one of the things I've talked to my friend who does, um, sell class
eight semis and there, these are people are doing big trips in these semis, but I
mean, even with new regulations and I will say, uh,
I'm always there's a fine line with regulations, but as a person who drives a
lot on highways, the idea of like making drivers have to take more breaks and be
safe about I'm okay with that one.
Um, uh, because everyone's human and there's just a point that you can only
push someone so far.
And what is interesting is I believe it's, is it every eight hours or 10 hours now,
um, that yeah.
Europe it's actually shorter, I believe it's four or five hours in Europe.
In the US, I believe it's 10.
But yeah.
Yeah.
essentially brought it down to 10, which is still a long day behind the wheel.
And, um, and once again, not to say they can't do it, but I think that's a pretty
fair compromise, honestly, at 10 hours.
And so what is interesting is like, when you look at how big these trucks are and
how fast they can go, you get into certain States here in the U S where it's like,
you could be going in the seventies and that's obviously kind of hitting your
efficiency and stuff, but it's.
It's kind of now at the right point that as long as you have the charging stations
at the right location, when these drivers have to take breaks anyway, the charging,
even with the current technology aligns pretty well with how long they and how
frequently they have to break to recharge.
And I'm kind of curious when you mentioned, is that kind of what you were
alluding to?
And is that similar with what you've seen with hydrogen trucking?
Well, the MCS again, so when we started, before we got into any sort of design
parameters of what it should look like, we said, what does it need to do?
And one of the things that we decided that it needed to do was hit that driver brake
and get it to 80 % roughly.
so that they can get back on the road again and continue until their next break.
And so that was the intent was to hit that 20 to 25 minute window to get them from 10
% to 80%.
So how do we do that?
Well, we need to dispense at 1C, 1 .2C.
Okay, what connector needs to be able to do 1 megawatt, 1 .3 megawatts, okay.
So, you know, then what does it need to look like?
How much power does it need to dispense?
Those sorts of things.
So that's how we got to there.
And so we started with the kind of that short break, you know, that 20 minute
break.
What does that look like?
And that's what we tried to try to hit.
So that's why we came up with the parameters we did from power.
We also wanted to stay under 1200 volts because if you go above 1200 volts, it
gets into some safety regulations in some markets where you do have to wear safety
equipment or have to have special training.
in order to operate the equipment.
And so if we stayed under 1200 volts, we didn't get a board of those things.
Like I said, it was a lot of learning.
But at 800 amps, 1000 volts, it starts to, that's a lot of power, but you can start
to hit those 20, 25 minute top ups.
And you see the Tesla Semi doing it already with Pepsi.
And they're only operating at 700 kW.
where they can do a 30 minute driver break at lunch, get that truck back up and
running and they did that 1200 mile day when they're doing the drive on that.
So we know it's possible for sure.
It's interesting you mentioned the Tesla semi and you said 700 kilowatts Do you
know if that's limited by the truck or is that limited by the charging
infrastructure?
They're using currently?
I don't know the answer to that question.
I just know that that's the number that they've shared with everyone.
I have had some conversations with engineers on both truck and charging side,
but those are private.
Now I'm sure I, and I realize you hadn't worked there.
I just wondering if, uh, there's more of just a general question, but I mean, even
if you can make it even work at 700 kilowatts and you have it already kind of
almost future proof to get to that make a watt thing.
Um, that makes it a pretty, I mean, that's.
on top so we knew that we could hit certain things now, but we also wanted
room for growth because both of the CCS -1 and CCS -2 were essentially topped out.
There was no more room for growth when they were standardized.
So we said, okay, let's make this connector able to grow, give it some
headroom so that if somebody did want to push it, they could.
And the funny thing was is we only set out to do this for trucks and buses.
And then here comes a marine and...
Here comes aviation and then here comes mining and here comes all these like event
space and like, can we use this?
And we're like, sure, whatever.
So now it's like, if it rolls, floats or flies and you need a lot of power, have
that.
So MCS is the solution to a lot of interesting problems.
That's pretty cool.
And that, that is actually something else I wanted to ask you about because they're
all, uh, whether you're bearish or bullish on is there's all these new VTOL companies
coming out.
They were, I was watching an interview recently.
Um, I think there's definitely a market for it.
I don't know if it's a large disruptive market unless you're a helicopter
business, but there's, there's definitely certain areas, maybe in Europe and
definitely like the Bay area in, um, the U S where it's like, yeah, I could see that,
but there's, there's definitely a use case for that.
And one of the things they were talking about is like, Oh, we don't know what
charging equipment we're going to use yet.
And so it's really interesting.
You mentioned that because like that almost seems like, cause their batteries
aren't nearly that big.
I figured it'd be like something more like even just using a Tesla, the new North
American charging standard actually would be like perfect for it.
And so I was kind of curious.
They hadn't announced anything, but like even once again, using something like
that, um, where it's a pretty well -known standard and.
Could be used for other things.
I mean, they're talking about putting them on the top of garage, uh,
parking garages.
So I don't know how many semi trucks are going to go to the top of parking garage.
But, and that's where I was counting.
I was like, well, yeah, if you did like the next thing, then while you're, if, uh,
if you're not charging a, uh, uh, if you tall, you could be charging someone's car
and charging money for that.
But that's a whole nother thing.
And I'm not in that business.
So with that, that's,
seem to think that they can get close to a Megalight out of a Naxx connector, which
if they can do it, power to them.
Maybe that's a cheaper way to do it.
Getting power to the site is another question entirely.
And I'll be getting utilities to provide that power to the site.
Right.
I think, um, I, I kind of agree with you.
I think it's really cool that they designed it and they kind of pushed it to
be that.
I don't know how practical, but I, like you were saying earlier, CCS one and CCS
two were kind of maxed out as it was.
And from a future proofing standpoint, if your plans to only use it mostly for, um,
regular vehicles, then yeah, that gives you so much headroom and then some that it
does seem to be pretty well future -proofed.
If you wanted to go up to semis, I don't know.
But you can at least even as like a backup have it that like, even if you can get to
like we're talking about 700 kilowatts, it's kind of a nice backup thing to have
if you're building a site anyway.
Um, but no, I, I'm, I, I'm curious, have you had many discussions with the
traditional like fueling stations around like the, the pilots, the flying J's or,
um, kind of the commercial Pacific's that are traditional fueling stops for truckers
around moving to kind of an electric future.
And it went.
feedback they have because the reason I bring this up is one of the things we've
talked about a lot on this podcast is especially around CCS2 is the challenges
at least domestically around Electrify America not to point finger point, but as
an example that have struggled with charging infrastructure.
And now you're starting to see some of it through federal funding.
Others just come through general interest.
You're starting to see the flying J's, the pilots.
Enter that space.
And for them, there's never really been a strong business model in fueling.
It's the stuff they sell when people stop to fuel.
Exactly.
And
that the conversations with the Travel Americas and the Loves and the Flying J
folks were really, really frustrating back in the early, the late teens and the early
twenties.
There was a real lack of any interest or desire to get into the charging space by
any of them.
I'd say that's substantially changed now.
Every single one of the major fuel refueling rest stops slash, you know, Buc
-E's, you know, what's what have you, they're, they've all got some sort of a
charging partner and they've all got some sort of a strategy that they're going
into.
Some are well thought out, some are less so.
Not all of them have consideration for larger vehicles than light duty.
Some do, some don't.
So, you know, the proof will be in the pudding.
Everybody's in the early stages of it.
But it's an area of industry that's right for disruption, which is why I consult and
I'm on the advisory board for Watt EV.
So when we built Electric Island,
It was this couple of guys from down in the LA area that kind of kept calling me
up and asking me questions.
And I've always been one that's like, one company can't do it all.
We need as many people in this space to be successful as possible.
If you're an honest broker, you are honest with the market and honest with what your
technical capabilities are.
and you're in it for the right reasons, I think you should succeed.
So there's a couple of companies that maybe fall outside of that exclusion zone.
I won't name them, but if you're honest and upright, forthright with the market,
let's see you succeed.
So YDV came about as an idea from these guys that they wanted to provide
essentially identical versions of Electric Island scaled up for the market.
And so...
power to Portland General Electric and a couple of my predecessors in the utility
industry up and down the West Coast.
There had been some pre -work done to establish what a West Coast clean transit
corridor would look like.
I did some more work on that when I was at Portland General Electric.
It's a partnership between all the different utilities up and down the West
Coast.
And it was a pre -plan as to what needs to be done in order to allow freight to move
from San Diego to Vancouver, BC.
And so the sites have been reviewed, the desk reviews have been done, the upgrades
have been identified, and essentially all the utilities are waiting for is a
customer to come in and say, I plan on asking you for 12 megawatts at the site,
or two megawatts, or whatever it is, let's get it done.
And they can pull the desk review out that they've recently done and move forward.
and Wadi V and others have started to do that.
So it's really exciting to see them move into a business that's never been a
business before.
It's truly unique, it's new, no one's ever built.
for -profit public truck charging and bus charging sites before.
They saw a unique opportunity in that if you have a public charging site, you're
only making money if you're dispensing energy.
So if you've got only a small volume of trucks out there, you're not gonna have a
lot of customers.
But there's also within the Los Angeles area for the ports of Long Beach and LA.
Most of the drayage carriers, the folks that go and pick up containers are small
fleets, the mom and pops.
They run from two to five trucks.
And the way to get them into an electric truck is to lower the barriers to entry.
And so YDB has actually purchased a number of electric trucks.
and offers them as truck as a service and charging as a service to these customers.
So they can simply pay a monthly fee, charge up with the Wadi V sites and then
go pull freight, zero emissions out of Port of LA and Long Beach.
So it's kind of exciting and it's neat to see them succeed.
They've got one site up and running and they'll have three more open, I think by
the end of this year, one in Bakersfield, one in Inland Empire.
And it's really exciting to see them grow.
Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned ports because I've had a interesting
conversation recently with a company that's focused in the commercial charging
space, but they're approaching and there's a couple doing this, but they're
approaching it with wireless charging.
And I was kind of curious with MCS, are there any protocols or any standards for,
or kind of like future proofing built to do it MCS level of charging wirelessly?
Or is that kind of still a little bit of a wild west and a separate thing?
I know.
You also mentioned doing just having a robotic charging to kind of automate the
process anyway.
So I think that that chapter has not been completely written for charging yet.
You made a mention of truckers and being on the road for a certain length of time.
As we reach automation for driving, and I don't know what kind of electric car you
have, but I had a model Y and I had a model three in the US.
And I drove through Wyoming without touching the steering wheel.
And I literally took...
I think 97 pennies and stuffed them into a rubber racket ball and hung it with a
string over my steering wheel so it had enough pull on the steering wheel.
And on the freeway, that car drove with 100 % degree of certainty.
And so it's entirely within the capability of autonomous driving on freeways for
trucks, I think, to operate on freeways autonomously.
And so if you extrapolate that further, if you have autonomous trucks,
they need to be electric so that there's zero emission.
And if you have electric autonomous trucks, then you have to have some way to
autonomously charge them.
Whether that's a robotic arm, whether that's induction, I don't have an answer
to that.
I don't think anybody knows what that answer is yet.
Induction does have some challenges as far as the orientation, making sure that
they're directly, the coils are directly oriented, that there's no misdirection
because you get a lot of heat and you get a lot of...
power loss between the two.
The coils being carried on the vehicle can be quite heavy if you're going to convey
that much power, whether or not that's efficient because you have some energy
loss there.
Those things need to be solved.
Again, I don't know.
MCS was kind of the next step as far as what we could do from a conductive point
of view, whether it's a robotic arm that goes and sticks that in, or whether we
have some sort of inductive solution.
I don't know.
But if you talk about autonomous vehicles, not having a driver, or maybe having a
driver at the wheel that's simply monitoring, then why would you have
somebody that has to go shove the thing into the vehicle?
They've got to be something.
Yeah, it's a, uh, the reason I asked that it was kind of interesting how these
conversations and I kind of go back and forth on the value of the technology
because they're, they, they were approaching using radio waves.
So you kind of get around some of those issues that you were talking about from
the hardware standpoint and you still get pretty high efficiency, but a big part of
it was just the fact that that way they don't even have to train or deal with the
people plugging it in on their break.
And they were talking about for a lot of these were transit electric vehicles, like
the person could just pull up, uh,
Have people get on and off, do a quick charge without even knowing it.
Or when they take their break for lunch or whatever, they just park it somewhere.
They don't have to think about actually plugging it in.
And so from that standpoint, there's some really interesting things.
And the fact that there's really no moving parts versus kind of the robotic thing is
also kind of a long -term value proposition to it.
But right.
I kind of agree with you.
It's like, it's interesting, but it's still kind of early days to see where,
which one's going to really make it out in the longterm.
Yeah, but it's interesting you mentioned it.
Yeah.
and that sort of thing, you've got Pantograph, those go up to really nice
high powers.
You install those Pantos at certain brake sites or places that a bus is going to be
for long, five minutes or less or more, sorry.
And yeah, Panto is a great solution as well.
Yeah.
And I think what we've been talking about today is semis and there's probably a use
case, especially if it's a short trip one, but it seems like a lot of these are more
focused on either transit or maybe even, uh, ports were a big one for them too.
And so, um, but we talk about autonomy and I'm kind of curious what you have seen and
what you've experienced.
Uh, I've actually had a lot of, uh, professional and personal experience
around autonomy, but obviously kind of the light duty side of stuff.
And from what you were even talking about, you're totally right that, uh, I mean, I
actually have a model Y two.
I've driven through Wyoming quite a few times and you're exactly right.
You just kind of hit the thing and it's just straight.
Um, yeah.
Um, and so the, the only thing you really have to worry about, I've done it a couple
of times and you can get a pretty big headwind.
So you just have to figure out where your charting stop is.
Um, but other, I mean, other, other than that,
That other than that, that that's, and as if you're, once again, if you got the
Tesla thing going for you, it's still a pretty straightforward process, but that
is one of the few times I actually got close to getting into trouble was the
headwind was just hitting my range so much, but that's a whole different story.
So with autonomy, um, what, what have you seen around that and what, what, uh,
whether it's your own experience with it or just kind of your kind of.
industry knowledge that you can see the future of that or how realistic and how
soon is that for an option for semis?
So the Venn diagram of autonomy and electric, you would think are kind of the
same circle, but they're not.
So autonomy works really well in commercial trucks, for the longer hauls,
and the long haul and battery electric trucks aren't a great mix just yet.
It's great for driver safety on highway and freeway, but again.
battery electric trucks don't get you on a long haul.
So autonomy is definitely there as we see, you know, with Tesla, there's the, what's
the Ford, there's something blue.
Chevy's got theirs.
I mean, there's the Mercedes has theirs.
Everybody's got some sort of a version of autonomy out there.
On commercial vehicles from a safety standpoint, I would much rather have a
driver with an autonomous software feature available to them to keep them safe.
I mean, that's, I want them,
to have that because it doesn't get distracted, it's constantly vigilant, and
it's not like a human.
It's not gonna get sleepy, it's not gonna potentially be impaired by drugs or
alcohol, and we know it does a solid job in certain operating parameters.
On freeways, it's bulletproof.
When you get into non -freeway situations, that's when it starts to get a little
wonky.
I don't think we're there yet, and I don't think that we're there yet for a while,
but there's a lot of folks working really hard on...
and get it dialed in.
I they'll get there eventually.
But I mean, what was I was reading something about an autonomous vehicle, one
of the Waymo's I think, and they came around a corner one time and there was a
woman chasing a flock of ducks with a broom.
And it's like, how do you program that into your Waymo as you know, what you do
when you encounter a flock of ducks being chased by a woman with a broom?
You know, so it's just as a human, you're just like, oh, you just go around.
But how do you program that into a computer?
Yeah, and it's funny you mentioned that because one of the things that Tesla had
mentioned when they first announced the semi, it's an interesting idea, but they
haven't really talked about much was the concept that you could actually have like
three electric trucks, but one driver essentially, where they would be the first
two would be kind of falling.
And that in theory kind of makes sense.
And you kind of get maybe the best of both worlds, but it still seems like that's a
ways off.
And there is, um, especially with long haul, at least talking to people, there
still seems to be whether.
Even when you take charging outside of it, there's kind of the loading and unloading
and there's still an element of human labor required with that.
So it kind of makes sense to have a driver.
And obviously in those kinds of more dangerous situations, but yeah, if that's
really, if you can get autonomy for that and charging to that point, then it does
kind of make sense that maybe you can get to like three trucks and one driver, uh,
which is an interesting idea.
It still seems like a ways out, but do you see that as being a realistic possibility
or.
I don't know how much exactly I can say on that one because some of the conversations
I've had about that issue were internal when I was working on the topic at one of
my previous employers and with others inside the industry.
I will say that by and large the challenge is latency, which means the time it takes
from the signal to travel from one to the other and whether it's going through a
tower or a satellite.
And so if you talk about freeway speeds, 70 miles per hour, and if you have a
latency of half a second, how far would that vehicle travel in that half a second?
And if the signal is just that much late, potentially you have the vehicle doing
things you don't want it to do.
So it's a difficult one to overcome because physics says that a signal can
only travel so fast through the Earth's atmosphere.
For sure.
And while it's controversial, I think that is always one of the areas that Tesla and
Waymo actually have been really good about is having so much of the thinking, whether
it's them or someone else or a Chinese company that comes up with it.
I don't know.
But like, I do think that core concept of having so much of the actual thinking and
processing being done in the car versus being sent somewhere else and then, or
being remotely done just inherently removes a lot of that.
I think that's a great fallback or.
some safety elements to it, but I mean, we, we see so many times that cell towers
or other things happen where they go down.
And at the end of the day, that car is moving down the road and has to make the
decision.
So that.
something stopped in front of me I need to stop and that vehicle needs to make that
decision without having to go back to the central computer and say should I stop?
Right.
Or is this, yeah, what is this, what is this thing I'm seeing, shooing a bunch of
ducks across the road?
Should I just keep driving?
Do I?
Yeah.
I mean, that's exactly that kind of stuff.
Um, so no, I, I understand.
I appreciate you saying what you can about it.
We've, we've talked a lot about the charging infrastructure and kind of the
design and the sports of it.
So let's, let's talk a little bit about the actual trucks and your experience with
kind of designing and working, um, with companies building those because.
As I said, I've been talking to my friend who works in the industry.
He definitely is focused more on the long haul stuff.
And we are seeing obviously for fleets, it's, and large companies especially have
those, I think more clear business cases.
And then a lot of large companies even have certain requirements that they're
making around sustainability and other promises that are kind of accelerating and
kind of pushing them to go towards that anyway.
But some of the things I've heard that are kind of against, especially if you're a
smaller operator for a truck is one of the big things is actually around the weight
and what can electric truck actually move.
I know that traditionally semis have had like an 80 ,000 pound requirement and
that's kind of changed a little bit with here in the U S I think they increased it
to 82 ,000 pounds if it's electric or something.
If it's got some sort of a zev or reduced emissions drivetrain, I believe natural
gas falls into that as well.
So if you've got that, or in the hydrogen, so they get a two ton dispensation.
Which is something, but especially once you're talking around a megawatt hour of
batteries, it could only be maybe a fifth of that.
So I, uh, but I mean, obviously diesel engines are super heavy, uh, carrying all
that fuel has it's there.
It's not a completely one or the other there.
It's I think closer than most people realize, but I am kind of just curious if
there's any of that you can kind of talk about or share around the practical
applications and.
how much of a difference weight actually plays into the effectiveness of electric
semi trucks.
So weight is definitely an issue.
The initial battery electric trucks were heavier.
I believe the Tesla Semi is still heavier than a traditional diesel ICE.
But I think we're getting there.
Like I said, the gravimetric and volumetric density of batteries continues
to come down, as well as price.
So you have all of these slopes from technology and price that are headed the
right direction.
So we'll get to the point where they're lighter and have just as much power.
power on board, if not more.
And we already see cases where it's cheaper by far to operate electric trucks.
If you have runs that are 100 miles or less or 150 miles or less, and you're
running electric trucks versus the diesel, it's cheaper.
So the question I'll ask you to ask your friend who's involved in long haul.
is that when the industry moved from horses and trailers to gasoline trucks,
did they still take the gasoline trucks to the barn to feed them hay and rub them
down?
The answer is no.
They changed the way they operated, right?
And so when you're changing from a diesel truck to a battery electric truck,
you have to change the way you operate.
Slightly, not totally, but you have to take into account your percentage of
charge when the truck returns, the scheduling of drivers to complete certain
routes, and how far they're gonna go with that route on that particular day, and
what the charge rate of the truck is, and how much power it's got on board.
You have to know these things.
We have the ability to track all this information.
you have the ability of a dispatcher to say choose from four trucks and say, okay,
this one needs to go 200 miles.
And, you know, I've only got one of the trucks that's capable of doing that right
now, because that one's at 95 % steady charge.
So go take that one.
We'll put this other truck on this route.
You know, that's those things are doable and capable of being done on the today's
with today's technology.
As we wrap up the first part of our conversation, we want to extend our
deepest thanks to Rustam Kocher for joining us and sharing his profound
insights into the electrification of the trucking industry, the challenges and
triumphs of implementing the megawatt charging standard, along with the past,
present and future of electric trucking in transportation.
Rustam's experience and visionary work truly illuminate the path forward for
sustainable transport.
I'm really excited to share part two next week with you as well.
I can't thank Rustam enough.
for his time and what we covered.
Remember, if today's conversation sparked your interest or curiosity, we encourage
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