https://youtu.be/_1hgPAx1fEo
Matt had an opportunity to talk to the co-founders of Edison Motors, Chace Barber and Eric Little, about how they’re electrifying trucks. Not just any kind of truck, but the heavy, workhorse trucks used in everything from deliveries to hauling logs for the timber industry. Their approach is really unique and one that makes you wonder, why haven’t we been doing this all along.
YouTube version of the podcast: https://www.youtube.com/stilltbdpodcast
Matt had an opportunity to talk to the co-founders of Edison Motors, Chace Barber and Eric Little, about how they’re electrifying trucks. Not just any kind of truck, but the heavy, workhorse trucks used in everything from deliveries to hauling logs for the timber industry. Their approach is really unique and one that makes you wonder, why haven’t we been doing this all along.
YouTube version of the podcast: https://www.youtube.com/stilltbdpodcast
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What is Still To Be Determined?
Join Matt Ferrell from the YouTube Channel, Undecided, and his brother Sean Ferrell as they discuss electric vehicles, renewable energy, smart technologies, and how they impact our lives. Still TBD continues the conversation from the Undecided YouTube channel.
This week on Still to be Determined, we're talking about electric trucks. Hey everybody. Welcome to Still to be Determined. This of course is the follow up podcast to Undecided with Matt Ferrell. And as always, and I'm tired of saying this, I'm not Matt Ferrell.
I'm Sean Ferrell, I'm Matt's brother. And I'm always happy to be a part of these conversations that follow up on his previous episodes. But this week we have something different for you. Yes. Once again, we are happy to share a long form interview between Matt and Chance Barber and Eric Little. We always like sharing these videos.
They seem to spur on a lot of good conversation between you guys in the comments and us, so we can follow up on that and answer some questions and dig deeper and Matt of course shares a more compressed version of the interview on his main channel and all of that gives everybody an opportunity to weigh in.
So we're looking forward to your thoughts about this one. Chance and Eric are the co founders behind Edison Motors. And Edison Motors is developing electrified trucks. And these are going to be the, the heavy trucks. The ones that are used to deliver everything from logs for the timber industry and going into locations where, well, where you're going to find a charging station if you're hauling lumber.
Hmm. Maybe that's what they're working on. So, Matt's long form interview with them is taking a look at their unique approach to developing this new tech and Matt has a simple question to ask. Why haven't we been doing this all along? So I'm going to go now to the long form interview between Matt, Chance, and Eric.
So Chace, Eric, thank you so much for joining me. Um, I've been wanting to talk to you guys for a while. Cause I've been to the, uh, Everything Electric show in Vancouver a couple of times. I've seen your stuff. I never was able to connect with you. And this last time I finally like reached out to people to see if I could get in touch with you.
Cause it's like, I had to talk to you with about what you're doing. Cause what you're doing is very unique, very cool. And I describe it, I describe technologies like this a lot of times as like a facepalm technology like when you hear it described, why were we not doing this all along? It's one of those technologies of like, good God, this is so, it seems obvious in hindsight and I'm so glad that somebody's finally doing it.
Just to kick things off, can you kind of introduce yourselves and like who you are and what you do?
Yeah, I'm Chace Barber. I've got Eric Little, my business partner for the last nine years next to me, and we are Edison Motors. So we actually built one of the world's first hybrid diesel electric semi trucks.
What inspired you to do this?
Well, there's, I guess, two stories, a long story and a short one, but a short story is that we were out hauling logs with a trucking company. And I was making TikToks about logging, and I was making some TikToks about the Tesla Semi, and me and Eric had reserved the Tesla Semi beforehand.
And I'm like, okay, like, it's good in theory, you're going up empty, you're coming downhill a little bit, but if I was going to build an electric truck, I would do this, I would do this, and this, and I would change it. And I was making some comments online, and Someone said, why don't you build your own electric truck then?
And I said, I will, I will build my own electric truck. And I asked for my reservation back on the Tesla Semi, because it was like five years that we'd sent our money in without receiving it. So I'm like, give me my money back, Elon. And I'll start my, I will build my own electric semi truck company. And I'll call it Edison Motors because we're stealing Tesla's idea to build them all out.
Oh my God. So your background is in trucking. That's right. So you've been, you probably have a lot of experience driving trucks in very, I would say, dangerous terrain and pushing trucks to their kind of limits. Would that be correct? That would be correct. Yep. All right. So you're, you're coming at this from a very unique perspective that, no offense to Tesla, but it's engineers sitting in a office in California.
Who may not have ever driven a truck like this before designing a truck. So you're coming at it from a very different point of view.
That's just it. In the EV space, we like to say that we're the only company that really understands trucks. Like, we're unique in that we understood the trucks first. We knew trucks really well.
And then, we decided to learn about the EV part. Eric is brilliant about, we, we had done a bunch of hybrid power systems. That's a, yeah. With through the trucking company. That's, so we had some background in doing diesel generators, solar battery storage for off-grid sites. Uh, we did that with our trucking company.
That was one of the things we used to do was install power systems. Um, but yeah, we, we had the knowledge of trucks. When me and Eric started this business nine years ago after university. We were pretty well, some broke university students. And I think I had like $10, 000 at the end of like year four, we realized that the job market kind of sucked, so we said, why don't we start a trucking company?
And we took our $10, 000, we bought a truck from 1969, that had been sitting in a fireworks field for the last 15 years before that. And we fully restored this truck from the frame rails, uh, new paint, electrical, airlines, rebuilding. And we just basically used that money to rebuild the truck and we put it to work and then we quickly bought another truck and another truck.
But that's what we knew. We started restoring all of these trucks and we were hauling logs. And then the logging moved into low bedding. And then the low bedding moved into hauling generators. And then hauling generators, we realized we could make more money installing the generators. Like, the actual contractor makes more money, and me and Eric were really passionate about solar.
Eric, who is brilliant, he came up with the idea of taking, like, your peak low in power. So you'd go in there, and a lot of times they're like, Why are we putting a generator in that's so thick in these places? So why do we need a 95 kilowatt hour generator? What's their average load? Their average load was like 20 kilowatts.
This was like seven/eight years ago, don't quote me 100%, but it was like about 20 kilowatts, right? Yeah, it was pretty low compared to what the size of the generator was, at least it's named. So we put in a 35 kilowatt hour generator, and they would have a peak load demand that would spike in the evening. So you would have everyone get home at the same time, little tiny First Nations reserve, and And the power would spike, so the battery could meet the peak load demand.
We put a bunch of solar for when it was sunny out. When it was sunny, the solar recharged the battery, and then in the wintertime, or anything, the generator would fire out. So we did that for one of our first projects, and it went awful. There's no lying about that. If we had, we learned, and we learned, and we started doing it.
Same as we learned with Edison, and that became a, uh, staple part of the business. That during spring break up, when logging would slow down, We would go out and do some solar jobs and battery jobs. And that gave us the confidence, like we were doing hybrid power systems. It gave us the confidence to build hybrid power systems.
And then that hybrid power system gave us the confidence to build a hybrid truck.
Wow. So you guys can't have come a long way from. It seems like a kind of a winding road for how you got to where you are, but you're using all the experience that you gained along the way to do this. To get into the truck specifically, could you walk me through like the, the hybrid electric system that you came up with for trucks?
Yeah, for sure. So yeah, you can appreciate, we kind of started off with 12 volt solar systems, 28, and then we went to like 48 and then we jumped, right? With the first version car with a 400 volts nominal system. Now we're actually doing 614 volt battery, nominal. And, you know, what that does is that battery is kind of like the beating heart of the system.
It is an electric vehicle after all, so there's only electric axles for propulsion, there's only electric motors for moving shaft, and to power that battery, you have an on board charger, similarly to any other electric vehicle. Ours is six kilowatts, which is pretty generous, right? It's It's something that you can plug into a 120 or a 240 volts, but also you have on your engine and traditionally on an engine, you have a transmission that goes to a drive line.
But for this particular truck, we have a generator on board, it's a PMSM motor, and it produces a continuous 250 kilowatts of power. It's a lot of power that goes directly to the batteries as well as the additional power would go to the axles where you're operating the vehicle. And that's what we're trying to accomplish here, right?
Is fuel savings by using the vehicle as a purely electric vehicle when it makes sense, and then turning on the engine to kind of bring the charger system with you, right? So you can turn it on and off while you're operating. And this provides so many cool applications and use cases, because you can operate now in a city completely quietly, right?
But you have that reliability of your generator. And you know, it's not just the motors that we put a lot of thought into. It's, it's just the way that we also like power the vehicle, you know, Tesla is a great example of this. They made a really cool axle, but I think ours rivals their site. We have a really powerful dual motor axle solution, uh, which does torque vectoring.
It produces 360 kilowatts at peak per axle and it's, it's just game busters. More importantly, the ton rate. Yeah. Yeah. Way higher.
You can put way more weight on the axle.
Yeah. Yeah. That's another thing too. Later. So, to make sure we were good rivals from the beginning, right, even the names are rivals. We wanted to make sure that we started with the vocational side first, and then work our way to what we see as the lowest common denominator, which is the highway market.
So, to do that, we need to build insanely tough trucks, and because we have a background in logging, that's kind of all we know already, but, you know, it's funny because, like, you know, it's, it's a very small part of the market overall for trucks, but that's just what we're comfortable with already. So we designed for that.
And the trucks are way more expensive.
Yeah, that helps.
That helps. You're going to be building a truck at the startup. Like, I'm sorry, but like a Freightliner Cascadia, that's like a $250, 000 truck. When you get into like a Kenworth C500, that's a $600, 000 truck.
Like,
that's over two and a half times the price.
You're like, why, why compete against like the lowest margin with the cheapest? Like, let's build those custom, heavy trucks. That's what we know, and that's what pays the best. And, a lot of people don't know it, but like, at the highest spec, even the big manufacturers, do small assembly line builds. They're basically built by hand by a team of mechanics.
Like I can compete in that. I can't compete with, uh, Tesla's, their giga
practice. Like that didn't. We're still operating out of Chase's backyard, right? So to, to do what we could is just building it by hand with a lot of love and care and thoughts. And, uh, I, I actually got to say, like, I think our electrical system is very good too, right?
We, we got a really smart team, you know, young team. And it's been incredible to just where grassroots effort builds upon obviously the shoulder of giants. The chemistry for batteries has come a long way. So, you know, credit where credit's due. But I think we've done such a good job with such a small amount of resources to build a great truck.
And I can't wait to get into production and build more.
Yeah. I mean, one of our saving graces for that is we don't use custom parts to us. We just reach out to parts that are on the shelf that we can order, and we have a really smart team, the electrical engineers and Eric heads up. And we just basically say, go out, find a part that works, grab that part off the shelf, and we'll bring that for them.
Like, no custom parts. I want this to be a thing that anybody can service by running into a parts store. Need a contact or go get a contact or you know, you need a brake pot. Just go into any parts store, getta, break pot. We're not doing anything. And one of, we couldn't afford custom parts . Go get that. That's true.
But you've, you've come at this from like a different direction. You got Tesla making the semi-truck, which a lot of people question, how long is the range actually going to be? How durable is it going to be? And you're coming at it from the incredibly challenging logging kind of point of view of making a truck that is super robust.
And can go for as long as you can, because as you mentioned, you're bringing your generator with you. I mean, that's the, that's the key to make it very clear is like, yeah, in the front of the truck is the generator. So your, your power is there, but it's still got the batteries. It's still a full electric drivetrain.
So correct me if I'm wrong. This would make it a very modular approach, which means right now you have a diesel generator in the front, but it could be, A hydrogen generator at some point or fill in the blank, it could be whatever you want.
Natural gas actually might be the next obvious choice. You agree with me?
Yeah. I was like, because what's interesting about natural gas in particular is that it's like super cheap. Um, and. You know, it's obviously less intensive for emissions, but when you use it just alone for mechanical driveline, it's terrible, because it's got like the worst power conversion, like it's not torquey, uh, in a truck you want torque.
So if you just run it as a generator, it's insanely clean and efficient, and you just get power out of it.
Yeah, they wash out their cylinders on the bottom end. Natural gas doesn't like lugging it out. It washes out the cylinders, it drops liners, it doesn't like to shift gears. Lose that boost, come right down to the bottom end and then pull hard and heavy real fast.
But as a generator, well, you see natural gas generators all over the place running for a long time. That's what they love to do. So like, okay, natural, we can play it around natural gas. Cause we looked into hydrogen, but like $800, 000 for a fuel cell and setup. Like,
yeah,
right now, right now it's
a
million dollars.
I'm like, at a certain point, you need to get the economical, like. If a customer can buy two normal trucks for the same price as one hydrogen, they're just gonna buy two normal trucks. It's double the revenue. Like, even if you're telling them you're gonna save 50 percent on your operating costs, yeah, but I can buy two trucks and double my revenue, which is more than my So, like, that's a hard sell to make.
This one, at least with hybrid, diesel, you're like, well, hey, you might save 30 percent on your fuel, Uh, and it's only 30%, 20 percent more than a normal diesel truck. Like, it's not that much more marginally expensive, but you can see real fuel savings that it actually makes an economic use case. And then, once you've got them on there, diesel's tried and trusted, diesel's everywhere, then the customer's comfortable, well, why don't we try a natural gas?
And then maybe, as battery technology, I'm a firm believer that batteries is going to be the way to go. We're going to see more fast charging. We're going to see more grid infrastructure. We're going to get more power in batteries. So as batteries get bigger, well then you just increase the size of the battery pack.
You didn't mean instead of a 9 litre diesel, well now you got a 4 litre diesel. Now maybe you got a 2 litre diesel. Now maybe you have a one liter putt putt diesel that's an emergency backup if you're like for running auxiliary stuff, but like it's a nice transition that the diesel can get smaller as the batteries get and charging infrastructure get bigger.
That's what I love about your system is that it seems very modular like you're going to be able to adjust this over time as you go. It's very flexible, which is the coolest part.
Well, we started off building modular hybrid diesel systems with solar, right? So we just, we actually had a walk after building one of these projects and said, man, it wouldn't be cool to just put this tech in our truck.
That was the light bulb. It was like, yeah, we literally installed the generator that day. It was like, we could do this. You just, you know, we got to figure out the axles. You know, it's crazy a few years later, we figure all these things out and now have a team of software engineers, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, and we're, we're doing it.
It's pretty amazing.
It's awesome. So how does the performance compare between your truck and a typical logging truck? What's it like to, what's it like to drive and what's, what's the performance like? Is it, does it just outperform existing trucks or is it like on par?
No doubt in my mind that it outperforms.
I'm not gonna lie, like, we're a pretty open company. And there's been times where we've gone through, like, development and testing where, like, I've been like, Why are we building an electric? This is so hard to program. I'm like, Eric, just put in an 18 speed. Like, just put in a mechanical engine. I want an 18 speed.
And then the, like, Then I pulled, pinned on to a 160, 000 pound load, and I moved it like it wasn't even behind there, and I'm like, nevermind, 18 speed is stupid, this is like, as soon as you haul it, it just kicks ass. Every driver, we've let a lot of other truck drivers, trucking companies try this truck out, every single time a truck driver tries it, they say, I don't want to go back to my normal truck.
They're like, this is, it's better in every way. It's better for fuel mileage, it's better for power to the ground, we're pulling out twice, there's no gears to shift. When the generator's off, it's quiet. Like, it just, it outperforms. This is the way we should have been doing it for the
last 20 years. Yeah, like, you know, even, even with lithium ion technology coming to the fold, right?
So maybe that's what we had to wait for as, as the world, right? As a society to kind of wait for lithium technology to get better. It's still wild how trains have been electric, diesel, since the 30s. And we haven't applied that same concept to trucks. Because that, that's, that was kind of our, because I mean, we're a bunch of kids, right?
It's like, how can we possibly pull this off? And Chase was like, well, freaking trains have been doing this since the 30s. It can't be that bad. And it was very bad, but it still worked. The
first one was very bad. That truck was like, that truck could move itself around empty. It could drive, but like, we looked at some of the technology and La Terno, the, the mill has a La Terno log loader that it uses to unload hundreds of logging trucks a day.
They've got three of them. One was built in 1969, 1971, 1973, and they're fully diesel electric hybrids. They are hybrid trucks that can lift, er, forklifts, I guess, hybrid electric loaders that can lift 110, 000 pounds of logs. Built in the 1960s and 70s and these hybrids were running around and we're like, well, it's not new technology.
People out here know how electric works rather than just like being an electric vehicle company that starts off as EVs. Like the truck is the hard part when we know the truck.
I mean, you've already, you just mentioned it a minute ago, but the reaction of truck drivers when they try it or like, I'm not going back.
Is that kind of universal? I mean, like, cause I would look at truck drivers as being probably very resistant to electric vehicles. Cause. It just doesn't seem like it would ever do what they need it to do. Are you seeing like any person that gets behind the wheel is just blown away? Like, is the reception really that good?
Oh yeah, we have one guy that we let drive our truck. Old boy, Clint. And Clint is retired and his only passion is restoring classic trucks from the 1980s, 60s, 70s. He's got 30 classic trucks that he's restored from the frame rails up. He would be a diehard old school mechanical truck driver. We let him drive our truck and he's like, wow, this is awesome.
He stepped on the power, we had 140, 000 pounds hooked up to it, and it just got up and it moved it, and he's like, wow, this is the future. Like, it's, truckers aren't against electric because they don't like the electric. They're against electric because they're being told you need to have, you need to suffer for it.
You're gonna be limited on range, you're gonna have to find a place to charge, you're gonna have range anxiety, you're gonna have to almost buy two trucks to do the job of one truck, and it's gonna be more expensive, and you're gonna have reduced payload because you have too many batteries. We don't have those issues.
So, we got the advantage of electric, but we're not making truckers swallow the pill of not being able to do the job. That's what they're worried about with electric. I mean, yes, it is nice to go through the gears, and I am one of those truck drivers that I'm not a big fan of the electric drive, only for the reason of, I like shifting gears.
I love being able to throttle in, shift gears, drive my mechanical car. But it's like, akin to this, it's like driving a sports car. I love hopping in a sports car, getting on a mountain pass, banging through those gears, and uh, but I don't want to daily drive that. That would be annoying. Like, if I daily drove a rally car, every single day, with four point harness, banging gears, drifting the corners, like, that's not what I want to drive.
Like, shifting gears is fun. I love shifting gears. But if I don't have to do it for work, and I can just do it for fun, and have, like, one night show truck that I can take out, like, I st we still have one mechanical truck that I love driving, because I love doing it. But after about two hours in the truck, I'm like, okay, I should hop back in my electric truck now.
What kind of steps have you taken to incorporate any kind of customer feedback you're getting as you've been evolving, like your builds and your approach? Have you taken customer feedback or your own feedback and testing? How has it evolved things?
We actually, with our customers, we have, we have weekly design meetings.
So we get together with our customers and our engineering team, basically on Thursdays. And we meet down, and they discuss what's going on in the build, what are they like, what are they not like. Uh, we're building them in conjunction with a couple of our customers mechanics, so their mechanics are helping us with the build to help us understand, so, and also learn how to service the truck, as well as, like, with Royal, we just, uh, let them drive the truck for the last couple weeks.
We send it over to their yard, they had a couple weeks with the truck, give us some feedback, what are they like, what are they not like, how are we going to incorporate those features into their truck, so, It's just, it's a really, really, we're at a chance to have really unique partnerships across a few different industries.
That's really, really cool. And your approach is you can, you can build the truck, but you can also have conversion kits uh, from my understanding. Does it take special training for somebody to do the conversion kit? Cause I'm curious. Cause like this, this to me seems like it would be a kind of a bottleneck potentially.
Like does it take special training or is this the kind of thing that any kind of mechanic Could get this and understand it and do it themselves. Well, there is special
training involving the batteries. You're gonna have lockout tagout procedures. You want to make sure that your batteries, you basically disconnect the batteries.
You put a lock on it, and then you verify that the path put on special high voltage gloves, and then you verify that the power is discharged. That is definitely, but it's similar that you would have if you were working with high voltage and say a sawmill as an industrial mill.
Right, I can also touch on this a bit, right, because I don't want anybody kind of touching high voltage, so.
You know, what we've been designing on the next versions of trucks is, um, you know, finger safe everywhere for all the connections that come out of the power distribution unit. Um, you know, preset harnesses. If you need to, let's say, extend a harness, you just order a longer harness. But more importantly.
You know, high voltage interlock is something that we see a lot in North America for, for electric vehicles. And with that, we know that if anything has been disconnected inherently, you know, it just shuts off the system, right? And there is going to be warning and fail safes. And something I really worked hard on this year was I did a keyed approach for my connectors.
Technically, it was Chace's idea. I just kind of executed it. What we do is We actually have our battery connections, the positive and negative, instead of just being lug connectors, so you can like, accidentally mix them up and shock yourself. You have a slotted key, uh, with a locking mechanism, so you actually, it's impossible to get your batteries wrong.
And more importantly, because they're in series, you have all the connections preset with that harness. So you basically just connect, connect, connect, connect. And there's no chance of reversing the polarity. It'd be the only safe way, in my opinion, to do these conversion kits. So, that's the first, but it's the first step of many.
We're going to learn a lot here from customer feedback.
But long story short, yes, it's surprisingly easy. Let's be honest here. If a bunch of truck drivers, working out of their mom's backyard, can build this thing I feel like most mechanics, like, we're not, like, Eric is brilliant, but I could wire this truck in, and I am not brilliant with electrical.
I am very much the mechanical guy, but you got two wires, and they only fit in one way, and you plug in and unplug it. Once you teach the basic safety things of lockout, tagouts, disconnect, and make sure that you're mechanic safe, I think it's way easier to work on an electric truck than it is on a mechanical truck.
You ever opened up an 18 speed transmission, it's just shafts and power shafts, and it's like, Forty different gears that all have to be shimmed and placed, and like, that's complicated. You've just got two wires and then you've got a motor with some windings, and some magnet, and a big stator that spins around in magnets with a couple bearings.
Like, an electric motor is really, really simple.
And something else too I think we'd all appreciate here is, you know, we're good at making videos, so You know, I think leveraging the power of social media, especially YouTube, like just to put out videos of, you know, how people are doing their own builds or doing installation videos ourselves.
And saying, okay, this is the process that you should be taking. And you know, it just adds more comfort level and safety to the whole thing. And I think we should leverage that for sure.
The conversion kits I'm assuming are appealing because these trucks, as you mentioned, are like $600, 000. You buy one of these, you're going to have it for decades.
So you don't have to reinvest in a whole new truck. You could take your existing truck, convert it. What kind of cost would it look like to convert a truck?
It's more than buying a new truck with the incentives. So we haven't sold any conversion kits because in Canada you get a hundred and fifty thousand dollar grant if you buy new.
But you don't get the grant if you retrofit. So it's very frustrating, you're like, it's way better for the environment if we don't have to build a whole new truck and we can just retrofit it. Like, we're making them electric, we can make these existing trucks hybrid, and then when we approach the customers, and that's just federal, there's provincial incentives that stack on top, and when they look at the incentives they're like, I can buy a brand new truck, because I get the incentives for the same price that I could retrofit an existing truck, why wouldn't I just buy the brand new truck?
And we're like, yes, it doesn't make any sense, we got into this to do retrofits, because I'm a firm believer, environmentally, that it's better to reuse, repair, and recycle an existing truck, than it is to just build a new one, but we can't do that because the government is just Funding new trucks and not
Have you reached out to see if you can get that rule changed?
Because this seems like that needs to be a rule that changed. Like, your truck should qualify for that same, like, rebate. Like, I could totally see a conversion kit getting a nice chunk of change knocked off of it. This is the
wildest thing that, like, if there's any evidence that we're living in a simulation or something, this has to be it in my mind.
Because we reached out to it, and the party of the government that was interested was the Green Party, which is the very pro environmentalist party. And we were talking to them, actually connected on TikTok of all places, with the leader of the Green Party, and like, like what they're doing, and talked to him, and like, talked to her, and Sonia was fantastic, she's like, that doesn't make sense.
If the goal is to get electric trucks, and we can do more trucks, our taxpayer money will go farther, because if our goal is to get electric, if we rebuild, it's better for the environment, and our tax money goes farther, because we can almost do two trucks, For this retrofit for the same price as one new truck.
And they're like, so they put forward legislation. But do you realize how insane it is that the Green Party has partnered up with a bunch of loggers to keep old logging trucks on the road. They're like, hey, the old Long Nose Kenworths and Peterbilts, we want incentives to make sure those loggers can keep their old trucks on the road for longer.
Like, the fact that that happened in our life is wild.
This is kind of crazy. This
is like
the winding road that we were talking about before. It's like, this is a really weird path that's kind of unfolding in front of you for this. What, what, what are the biggest hurdles that you've come across? Is this one of the big hurdles that you've come across?
Are there other big ones as you've been like developing the trucks?
From the engineering wise, Eric, you might as well touch on this. I'm gonna sit in. I could bore you to death on all the, all the intricacies. So like, I feel like every day that we either test top C or we're actively designing trucks with customers.
It's what's fun, right? There's just a continual litany of challenges. You know, the, the ones that I appreciate a lot are, um, the electrical, right? Making sure that we have like a high voltage bus that does its job and that we maintain that voltage level, but then it's everything else, right? Like. Making sure that all the mechanical parts that we get off the shelf, right, are essentially building that puzzle that'll work, knowing that, you know, what we're doing here is not an assembly line process, but in fact a custom build every time.
So understanding, okay, what is the true cost of this vehicle when you gotta throw a whole bunch of variables on every single build. But what's so fascinating is that it doesn't really matter what the wheelbase is, or you know, how many cool trinkets we put into it. You know, just seeing motors spin and doing its job, it's all worth it.
And I can't wait until we get to a point where this new axle that we developed over the last year, we can now start testing this. This has been a big push for us. We're now doing a dual motor system, both for the rear and the front axles. And as you know, I mean, you probably drive an electric vehicle now.
Brilliance of Tesla is their dual motor design. Now we don't have a team like Tesla or even Rivian because they got a phenomenal dual motor as well. For us to be able to already do this so early on in our company, we're at three years old and we're already doing traction control, modulation, you know, torque vectoring.
You know, it's crazy to have access to the technology right now. And it's because, funny enough, we're using motors that typically you don't see in an automotive. You see them in trains, right? Like, it's so crazy that our problems that we're, that we're experiencing at the company are the same problems that like high speed rail development companies are facing, right?
Like, how do you modulate your motors for a high speed rail in Japan or China? Or, in this case, we're using Bombardier Motors, which is a Canadian company, and they build high speed and sort of like regular transit rail. It's funny how we're literally building a trail on rubber tires, and all the cool amount of problems that we get to face.
It's uh, it's pretty astounding. The challenge too, we've got a small team, but you know what's really fun is you They got loaded. Sorry, this The sets.
They got I'm sorry, I know we're live, but before this meeting, the meeting was delayed because our Guys in the yard are using the crane to load up a bunch of our pickup axles that are going down to one of our installers, and they do try to load it, where I'm launching them out the window, so that's exciting!
This is the first installer we're sending off a set of pickup track axles to, so it's actually kind of a cool moment. Oh, that's awesome!
Touches on too, what I was going to say is, like, we don't even have, like, a proper shop yet. So we're looking forward to, you know, potentially having an investment round, you know, it'd be incredible to be able to get some investment soon so that we can move into a proper facility and really get going here.
I think we got a lot of potential.
Yeah, definitely that has been one of the challenges that you asked. Like we're working out of a tent we bought for 5, 000 from an auction. Like a small tent that we set up in my parents backyard. We've got a dirt floor, we've got no heating. And this is what we've been able to accomplish.
So, there's one of the resistances and challenges when we reach out to people. They either, we get two reactions. You guys aren't a real company, you're working out of your parents backyard out of a canvas tent. That's not a real company, you guys aren't serious. Or, we get the other reaction of, Holy crap, look what you've been able to accomplish out of a tent On a dirt lot, what can you do if you actually get a real shop?
So we're hoping we'll find more of the latter, but I can't wait. We can actually get into a shop, start building the next customer's trucks in a heated bay with a level floor. Winter is coming. It's going to get really cold. It
was super cold. I'm definitely in the later camp. But the other thing is that Tesla built a, a tent extension off of their Fremont, California plant.
So if Tesla can do it. Hey, you guys can do it, too.
Put your copycats in.
I guess we are speedily tested the idea right down to the tent.
So what is the next step for you guys? Like, cause you've, you've built a truck. You're on your next evolution of that truck. What's the next like six months to a year look like for you guys?
So, we're starting on the, we're, we've actually just started on the next four customer's trucks right now. Those frame rails have already been laid, parts ordered, axles going in.
The next big step is, like I say, just finding a proper shop. We gotta find a real shop that we can actually be in long term. Cause it, it's hard to find, hire people when they gotta work outside in the winter time.
And your mother's back there.
Yeah. And then, uh, so, Next steps. We got four trucks for customers, trucks that we can build now.
That's all the space we have, and we were only able to take on one of those customers 'cause that customer agreed to build it in their shop. Same town, they have a shop and they bought a truck and they're gonna build their truck in their shop. That was the only reason we could even add that fourth one.
So we've got another six trucks to build on top of that. We need to build 10 trucks for prototypes in order to get these trucks out and delivered. So we need to grow and expand. Build these next 10 trucks, then that'll happen over the next year, and we're not gonna rush to production. I'm a big advocate that I think a lot of these EV companies have tried to rush to full production too soon before they flushed out the problems.
Then you have companies that will remain nameless, but start with Nikola Motors, that built under the trucks and then they found out 40 50 of those trucks lit on fire and had to recall all of them and all the BEV trucks were on fire in the yard if not all but like a bunch of their trucks were shots fired we went to production too soon and they're like oh no we're totally doing a hybrid don't even look at those batteries like like maybe get more trucks out maybe don't just release the brakes on a truck and then push it down a hill and say that you have a working truck and you're going to production like I joke, but we've seen it happen with a lot of companies where they get there.
I just want to build 10 trucks. Those are good 10 trucks that are going to go out to our, basically our customers who are our partners who are invested with us. And they're going to use those trucks. They're going to give us feedback and they're going to improve the trucks. Once we know we have 10 trucks, then maybe we built 30 trucks.
Maybe we built 40 trucks then, and once we get the problems inked out, then you can raise that big amount of money. Then build a big shop. I think too many companies, they want to raise 300, 400 million dollars. They want to build the, or a billion dollars, they want to build the biggest, fanciest facility that they can, right at the very start, like they're going to be building a thousand trucks a year.
And then they find they have problems, but now they've already tooled up a production line, an assembly process, and it's, we're just going to go slow. It's going to take longer. It makes it harder to raise investment money, believe me. Oh my god, venture capital is awful. The amount of them that wanted us to make I'm not even kidding you, like, we've had so many investors that said, we want you to basically lie to people.
You're going to tell them that you're going to be at 10, 000 trucks a year within the next three years, and we're going to rush you to IPO as fast as possible because we're going to pump that valuation. We're going to come in, we're going to give you 10 million dollars right now. You're going to make all these promises.
We're going to rush to IPO to make it so that you can do it, but you need to be able to do that within two years, and that's not a realistic goal. Take your money, you can leave, and we're going to do it slow, and we're going to do it the right way, but you can see Investors are one of, venture capital is one of the biggest issues in this thing.
We've been pressured so many times. Yeah, just
imagine this, like, if it's happening to us, I mean, this is what's impacting some of the companies that I, like, cherish and, and support dearly, right? Aptera, like, other companies that are trying to do this. Seems pretty good. Like, I can't, well, I just can't imagine the pressure they feel.
Oh, I'm sure they have pressure. I'm sure it's the exact same thing. So, I'm just, like, we We definitely want to acknowledge that technology keeps improving, parts are only going to get better and easier to source, and the slow and steady horse, I think, will win the race here. That's kind of our approach.
What's been the most rewarding part of what you guys have been doing?
Honestly, one of the most rewarding for me, on just a purely personal note, is when people tell us that we inspired them to do something. They watched a bunch of guys online that we shared our story, the successes, the failures, the ups and downs.
But we showed a lot of people that, look, you can start up a business that's a truck manufacturer in your parent's basement with just an idea. We had one guy, for an example, that like, that I love. He showed up here about a year ago. And he wanted me to sign his brand new Dodge service truck, like a $130, 000 truck.
Shows up, and he wants a signature because he said a year before that, two years ago, we inspired him to start his own Mechanical Mechanics. He was debating, do I start a mechanic service company? Like, I don't know, can I start my own business? And he's like, well, watch these kids. Go from, like, an idea to actually a working prototype.
If they can build an entire truck from scratch out of their backyard, I can start a mechanic service body. So, like, we've heard so many stories like that throughout the years. That, like that guy went on over the years, he bought an old used one, he worked, he got a good contract, he saved up, he bought a new one, that's when he signed the new one.
But stories like that have happened again and again, and more people have been, I think that's been the coolest thing for me. That has by far been the most rewarding, is how many people we've inspired to go do their own thing. Eric, what about you?
It's on the same vein, for sure. I mean, I surprise myself all the time of what I've been able to learn, and it also inspired people to do.
And it's great to see a team grow, it's great to see our community grow as well. Right, we have a great, uh, and very motivating, passionate group of fans. And It, it is kind of humbling to be able to build something for them, for us, and potentially too for, you know, the future of the industry, right? I think that the industry will benefit greatly from this technology and it's just amazing that we can have a small kind of like influence or a push in this direction.
Um. So I'm always bewildered. It really, it just has been a really rewarding journey. Of course, one of the other big rewards is when you're, turns out when you're single, if you own an EV company, it makes dating real easy. That's, that's definitely been a reward. But there's no doubt about it. We are broke as fuck starting this company because turns out when you tell all the investors, fuck off, you don't have a lot of money to spend on things.
But like, that's got to be a reward in itself. But
That is awesome. What piece of advice, I like asking this question of everybody, like, I love talking to innovators like yourself that are really pushing the envelope, doing something new and unique. What advice would you give to another entrepreneur that's aiming to disrupt some kind of traditional industry?
Oh, that's a good question. My biggest advice I would have them is just go for it, but prepare to be broke. Like, just don't expect to have any fancy toys, but just get started. Like, I've met so many people with great ideas. And they have a hard time getting off the ground because they want the perfect execution.
Lord knows our execution has not been perfect. We've more or less failed with our first truck. We wanted it to haul logs. It worked as a prototype. It drove. We proved it with the generator, but it was not a great truck. We, but we learned from that, and we built a way, way infinitely better truck on the second go round.
So, If you're an entrepreneur and you're nervous about starting because you're worried about failing, just fail. Just fail and learn from that failure and get it
right on the second time. And not even like the second time, really. Do you hear the bell ringing? Chase and I, we had to quit many a times and go back to our regular day jobs, right?
Like, we I think it was like the third year back. I just got paid somewhere. Oh yeah. No,
we definitely like, the amount of times we had to haul logs or do other jobs to fund this thing, it's worked.
I'd say, yeah, the, the one thing I'd say is just like, you have big breakfast in the morning and you know, you're going to have to have a strong stomach and also just don't give up. Right. Because you know, a good example for us is like, there were many a times we had to kind of. I wouldn't say shelved it, but we had to refocus our lives, but we're young, we're passionate about what we're doing and yeah, just don't give up.
It's as crazy as that sounds, it's that simple, uh, because I think 90 percent of it is just keeping on track and keep trying because, um, it's going to take you many and many failure attempts like Chase is saying. I think our first product that we developed, it took at least seven prototypes to get to scratching the surface.
Okay. And, um, yeah, it was like on prototype 10 that we went to production with. So, you know, keep that in mind when, you know, you're doing things and it could be anything. That, that's the goal. Never give up.
And what, what excites you most for, uh, the Edison Motors future?
Oh, well. I mean, every day is pretty exciting.
Um, I'd say, you know, having our own shop to, to really throw ourselves in and have a bigger team to have more capacity is going to be really exciting, not only just for us, but like our shareholders, like all of our fans, because at the end of the day, They don't want to see this just on YouTube. They want to see it up and running.
So, you know, it's going to be amazing to be able to, uh, to improve the technology as well. Because the technology is, um, you know, what we've been able to accomplish so far is pretty incredible. But once we have a bit more capital You know, it's amazing the things we can develop. Just imagine what we can make next.
Um, after all, we're building a train on wheels, so the power that we have access to is, is unbelievable. We got a lot more room to work with than a car. So we can, like, rip the rubber off these things if we want to. And that's kind of what Chase and I love doing the most, is just building the craziest, most powerful rigs.
And, um Yeah, it's going to be, yeah, we, we definitely, um, I, I'm, I personally, I'm really excited to apply where we could challenge, let's say, uh, Tesla and just say, Hey, let's do a haul. Let's do some crazy thing where we can haul like, you know, in California or even Canada and just say, Hey, let's do a side by side.
Let's just see how you do, see how we do and, and make a good splash out of it, right? Tell the industry that we're capable of doing these things.
Oh, man. You got, you have to make that happen. I want to see that happen. Well, uh, that was the bulk of what I wanted to talk about. Is there anything we haven't touched on that you'd want to touch on?
I think we covered a lot of things. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, uh, definitely go visit our website. Um, you know, there's a lot of information on there about us and, uh, you know, we are looking for capital. So it's, you know, there's a potential there. So if you keep exploring the website, um, and we're always open for people asking questions and learning more about what we're doing.
And then I guess one of the cool things that I really found from this, and it kind of goes back to that entrepreneur thing of the question. You don't know what you're. Target market is when you started. We started this to build logging trucks. It's funny, out of the trucks we've sold to customers, not one logging company has come out of there.
We built it, and then all of a sudden, companies from other industries started reaching out. They're like, hey, this makes sense for, say, a concrete truck. I've got noise bylaws, so I can't operate. Between 8 o'clock at night till 7 o'clock in the morning, but I want to pour the concrete 24 7, like, I can't let concrete sit overnight and then re pour.
I gotta keep that batching plant going. So, I can't, but I can't run a diesel engine, so they can run in on electric, unload on electric, and then fire back up on their way to the batching plant and run that one truck 24 7 with two drivers, just not disturbing residential areas. I'm like, Other places, like, I want to build a crane truck, but the crane, like, the problem is, I'm on site, and I've got this big engine revved up on site, just holding a crane, and everybody on that job site's talking and yelling over the noise of this big revved up engine.
What if we could work quietly, and then the generator just fires up? Like, I can't have full battery. Because if I'm in the middle of a hoist, I can't have my battery die on site, and I can't have If I've got 30 employees out working on the ground, and all of them doing a job because of a crane truck, and the battery dies, how do I operate my crane?
And there's not a lot of fast chargers on construction sites, so like, that was an industry that had a real need for a product, so it's, it's one of those things We didn't even expect that when we started out, but all of a sudden these companies started reaching out to us to buy a truck, so, if you're an entrepreneur and you're thinking about starting, don't worry about that perfect plan, in our perfect plan we would have approached the logging companies, cause that's where it makes sense, you're up empty, downloaded for the region, like we would have just pitched it to all the logging companies.
And we wouldn't have sold a single damn truck. Like, we all make that mistake when you're starting out with your business? You don't know who's going to come to you. You've got to be flexible to be able to tailor your product to what your customers and they just listen to that feedback.
That's a really good piece of advice, but it also kind of does prove that your choice to build a logging truck to start was a good place to start because you built one hell of a truck that clearly showed all these other industries and people, oh crap, if they can do it for that, they can do it for me, which is.
It worked out. That's, that's really cool. Yeah. So I do appreciate your time. I love talking to innovators like you. Cause like I said, you're inspiring to me. This is why I do my podcast. This is why I do my videos. I love seeing what people that are trying to build a better world are doing. And you guys are doing it.
So I really appreciate your time.
Thanks, Matt. It's been a pleasure being on here. Thanks for inviting us. Yeah, thanks, Matt. Love the
channel. Keep up the good work.
Thanks. So viewers, listeners, what do you think about all of this? Jump into the comments and let us know. As I mentioned at the top of this recording, your comments really do drive the content of this program.
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