Shaun Newman Podcast - #565 - Chace Barber

Episode Date: January 11, 2024

He is a 4th generation truck driver with 14 years experience who is a founder & CEO of Edison Motors which built North America’s first electric logging truck. Let me know what you think. Text me 587-217-8500 Substack:https://open.substack.com/pub/shaunnewmanpodcastE-transfer here: [e-mail] Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/ Email: [e-mail] Phone [phone] – general sales line, ask for Grahame and be sure to let us know you’re an SNP listener.

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And I'm telling you, I've been speaking praises of Kristen and team over there for quite some time. Lovely group of ladies that, well, they deal with me. And that's saying something, folks, when it comes to my taxes. And they're looking for somebody to jump in on their amazing team. They got great wages, flex time benefits, partnership opportunity. locally for a local firm who provides full service accounting consulting tax and financial planning services and if i can say this about christin i think i can she supports this show i should say some things and she supports free speech and starting conversations so if that's uh got you you know

maybe that's got your head uh hmm what wouldn't you oh oh yeah maybe welcome to thursday folks john's in a good mood today if you want to find out more go to mcgowan cpa.ca.ca if you uh Or you can text me. Honestly, I could probably put you in contact with Kristen as well. Just saying. Tonight, for the kids' sake, is live at the Legacy Center here in Lloyd Minster. We got a great group of speakers. Kent Drysdale coming all the way in from Manitoba.

Manitoba Stronger Together. We have David Parker from Take Back Alberta. Ken Rutherford is going to be talking as well from here in Lloydminster. And podcasts, yeah, yeah, all listeners should know those three names, because they've all been on here. And we're looking at the upcoming elections here and open vacant spots on boards, et cetera, in our community. And why not bring in two guys who've done it in Alberta, 1,

and then Ken Drysdale's going around Manitoba right now, talking to their community. So we thought we'd bring in a couple guys from across the provinces and have a little bit of fun. So if you're in Lloydminster around the area tonight at the Lagasy Center 7 p.m., You might even be able to get a couple Tucker Carlson tickets. Maybe you just come and find out what I'm talking about. I would suggest being some of the first people there and bring a hundred bucks.

That's what I would suggest. There, enough of clip hanger for you. Or go to for the kids' sake substack and go do some digging. You can find out more information. Now, let's get on to that tale of the tape. He's a fourth generation truck driver with 14 years of experience. He's also the founder and CEO of Edison Motors. I'm talking about Chase Barber.

So buckle up. Here we go. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. Today I'm joined by Chase Barber. Sir, thanks for hopping on. Yeah, you betcha. Thanks for having me on the podcast. You know, it's funny, since I mentioned, no, I shouldn't say that.

I have a military roundtable that they come on roughly once a month and we talk about a lot of different things. Anyways, Edison Motors came up about about. I don't know, three weeks ago. And since I started talking about Edison Motors, it's like I find you guys everywhere now. I'm like, it's almost like my phone is listening to me, but that's not quite the case because it's like listeners and everything talking about you and different things like that.

So I'm like, well, I've got to get these guys on and hear the story and then see what you guys are working on. And I'm hoping you can fill in some of the holes, because I don't know a whole lot about you. This was just kind of like they're in Canada. Cool. and let's see if I can track down these guys. Awesome. Yeah, I can.

So yeah, it's crazy how it seems to be spreading. And we seem to, for whatever reason, people soon to be tuning into what we're saying. It's awesome. I love it. So to give us a background on us, we're a bunch of log truck drivers from up in Canada. So we've been hauling logs and doing that sort of thing for the last 15 years. and we got tired of seeing the way electric vehicles were going, and we said, like, screw it, we'll build our own electric truck. You were originally from BC?

Yeah, that's right, yeah. What part of BC are you from? Merit, BC. You are Merritt. Yeah. And, you know, growing up, like, I'm Lloyd Minster or that vicinity, so right in the smack middle of the oil field, I assume, you know, like when you're growing up, logging is just a part of the way of Merit BC, correct?

That's right. Pretty well, everyone that works in town works in logging. So you, when I read your guys' stuff, when I've been watching some of your stuff, I'm like, you know, people out here, when they hear of electric semis doing what we do in the oil field. And I believe you guys moved service rigs at one point in time. Am I correct on that? Yeah, yeah, we moved our trucking company to Grand Prairie when for a few years. Things kind of took a, the logging industry took a shit kicking. And yeah, we went over to Grand Prairie and moved around some service rigs, some dunes that did some low betting. Well, I was like what I find interesting about not only what you're doing, but just like your story in general is a lot of us out here are just like, you know, I screw off with these EVs.

Like it ain't going to do what we do out here. And yet you're in logging in the mountains and you found a way to maybe to prove all of us folks out this way. And I don't mean everybody. I'm giving myself a hard time here, folks, a way of maybe doing that. Before we get into all that, I'm like, who is Chase? Who are these guys? I get it you from merit. I get it that you're loggers.

But like, you know, like, were you always destined to be a trucker? And then, okay, you become a trucker. And then who looks at this problem and goes, I can figure this out. Like to me, it's about as blue color as it gets, and I love it. Yeah, that's a, y'all, you hit the nail on the head. We were pretty well always truckers, like fourth generation trucker at this point. And a bit of background about me. So I went out of high school, joined the Army for a couple of years,

and then I was old enough to get my trucking license, went trucking, did that for three years, made a bunch of money, went to university, and that was a mistake. That, that, do not do that. I was convinced my mom's like, you should go to university. Because, like, at the time, I was young, I was single. And I'm like, they're like, well, you can't drive a truck forever. You should go to school. And I'm like, I looked into it, talked a few of my buddies.

And they're like, well, there's a lot of good looking girls that go to university. And I thought, well, the worst case, that's not going to be the worst thing for eight months to go hang out with some girls. anyways i'm a fine diontie would hear me hate me uh saying that part but um yeah go in there and i completed it did all four years and i got offered a job for 45 000 a year after four years of university and 45 000 a year i made more money in that working a camp job driving truck like just going out in the middle of nowhere and hauling logs i could make 45 $50,000 in the summer break.

And now after doing the university, you're going to pay me less money working an entire year than I did in four, three, four months driving trucks. I'm like, that's stupid. And my business partner, Eric, he had kind of, he said the same thing. He's like, this is dumb. The wages, I'm like, okay, well, I know we can make good money driving truck. Why don't we take the last of our student loans and we'll go buy. buy an old Kenworth.

We'll go hauling logs. Like, we'll make more money. We're running one truck. And so we bought a 1969 Kenworth for $4,000. Truck and trailer, old long logger rigging. We spent the last semester of university fixing this thing up, repainting, restoring, changing electrical airlines. And we put it to work.

And then we ran it. And then we bought a truck. And then we bought another truck. And then we bought another truck. And then things took a bit of a day. downturn. We moved to Alberta. We started hauling logs in Alberta. Then we moved into more low betting. And when we were doing all the low betting in Alberta, we got into generators, hauling generators, hauling equipment. And from the generators, we figured out, we're like, oh, well,

we could make a lot more money if we were the ones that stalling the generators. Like, this isn't hard. We haul these generators to site. Then a crane comes out and a crane sets it down. And then a mechanic comes out, hooks a generator. And then the electrician. comes out and hooks up the electrician like they hire out the electrician like we know how to repair tracks like a generator's the diesel motor we can hook a generator up so we started to hooking up the generators and doing that and then that expanded further where eric was an absolute genius he is really the brains of the operation here at edison he came out and we were doing this little tiny first nation's community and they had a 95 kilowatt generator we're like there's no way that this community

needs a 95 kilowatt generator. Why don't instead? Let's have a look at what their average load was. And this little First Nation community only had a 20 kilowatt average load. So instead of putting in a 95 kilowatt generator, because what would happen is the demand would spike. So 20 kilowatt average load,

but the power would peak up to 70 kilowatts. So what we did is we put in a battery bank. The batteries met the peak load demand, and then we downsize the generator from 90 to 35 and that just maintained it we went and put a bunch of solar because they were way up north by like the Yukon northwest territories border so we were able to like sun time 24 hour daylight that would maintain prop up the batteries the generator would just fire on for an hour at night or a little bit in the winter to top it up and we build 140,000 dollars for that system, which was about $40,000 more than if they just put in the 95 kilowatt hour generator.

So for about that extra $40,000, $50,000 more, they ended up saving $85,000 in fuel their first year of operation just by shaving that peak load demand. And then, so we were kind of looking at electric trucks. Like we had moved back to BC at this point. And in login, it kind of made sense to me. You're going uphill empty. You're coming downhill load. it so you have regenerative braking and i was thinking i'm like okay the torque of electric the

regenerative braking when you're coming downhill in a log and truck in bc all of these things made sense and then we looked at it like okay the batteries aren't enough to get a log and truck through a whole day like it's not going to work on fully electric so why don't we do what we did with the generators and we'll just stick a little generator in there the batteries will be there to be there to take care of the peak load demand. So that initial inertia, if you're climbing a heavy hill, you're starting out from a red light, takes a ton of power to get a truck moving. Once you're up to speed, it doesn't actually take that much to keep it moving. Plus, you have all the region breaking. So realistically, it made the truck way more efficient. And then we'll just, instead of running

like a 15-liter engine, we'll downsize to a 9-liter engine. And that'll just be the average base load. So we'll do what we did for these tiny little communities. in a truck and why don't we do this and basically what happened was i had a tick talk and we were hauling logs and because i mean generators were not a full-time business at the time it's a nice side business but mainly we were home logs and i made a little video on tictock where i'm like why aren't electric trucks done this way and they could do them with a hybrid and this is dumb like i'm just i'm tired of the way electric vehicles are like it makes sense for this application and it should be done like this and someone said well why don't you just do it then and i said screw

it, I will. And that led to Edison Motors. You know, I'm chuckling on this side because the first ever Guardian plumbing and heating blue collar roundtable is about to happen in like two weeks time, folks. We got a guy coming in from Manitoba, we got a guy from Rocky Mountain House, and then a guy here in Lloyd Minster. And I'm like, oh my God, Chase would fit that bill just perfectly. Maybe we'll have to do a virtual blue collar roundtable on this side. Because, you know, one of the things I love, about blue collar is you look at a problem and you can already see the solutions.

Whereas there's, you know, if you don't know how a truck works, if you don't know all these different things, you just, you never see the moving parts and how they can be worked together to be like, oh, this would actually work. Not that I fully understand everything you just said. I want to be very clear. Um, but I get how your brain's working. I'm like, this is stupid. You're, you're channeling, um, you know, like, this is how this is how this is how this is how the the argument has been going here is like all these EVs. It's like, okay, but what about like, I don't know, the service rigs? What about all these different things?

I don't think this is working. I just have, and once you have, you know, I think our population where I sit, like as soon as they haven't addressed all the different ways in which you need vehicles to work out here to power industry, it's like, I'm not getting on board with this. And what's interesting about what you're talking about is, you're finding ways and applications to make it useful and not only that, extremely cost effective. When you go back to the Northern community on just the fuel and taking that knowledge and applying it to trucks, I assume you're starting to see or that's where it leads to is not only

are you getting the same type of torque or power, but I assume there's going to be savings and a whole bunch of cost benefit like this is awesome. Yeah, we were showing like a 50% reduction of fuel savings. Like your fuel savings makes a truck payment and the increased power and pork is a bonus. Well, and the thing is, I don't need to tell a guy from British Columbia this. But here in Alberta, you know, fuel isn't cheap and it keeps going up. And if I hop across the border to British Columbia, I'm like, whew, no, you guys are like insane with your cost of fuel. I guess I'm curious

like an electric so it walk me through how your engine works because I guess I you know I grew up around my dad drove truck so I grew up around you know this big engine like hauling giant loans going through the mountains and having to pull up this is operating off of batteries

or am I missing that? Yeah it operates off the batteries the batteries, best way to describe it is that it's a fully electric truck that packs around its own level three fast charger. And that's the generator. That's a generator, yeah. It works the same way as like a, you know like freight trains, how a freight train works. It works the exact same as a freight train. Like a freight train's got a big diesel generator and then it's got AC traction motors and then they run like a capacitor battery bank in there to deliver the power.

How many of these you got on the road right now? Just two of them. Just two of them. Yeah. So they are like prototype. Oh yeah, yeah. And how was, you know, like labor of love, obviously. Like when you finally got the first one, when was the first one done?

July 2020. Yeah, somewhere around there. August 2020, no. Yeah, 2022. I'm getting all my dates mixed up. Okay. So that's that's that's two years ago. That's well, what are we at?

No, that's not two years ago. It's 2024 show. It's less than two years ago. Roughly. And has it been, you've been using it since then? We used it real hard for a few months. We figured out and did some engineering and what we learned from it. And so a bunch of things kind of sucked on that first truck.

It was a crude proof of concept. We showed that we could build the electric vehicle. The generator could charge the batteries. it ran and drove, but there were some weak linkages. We were snapping U-joint, snapping drive shaft. The electric motor was delivering just too much torque for the drive line to handle. So when we try and load the truck fully, everything else worked, but it would just snap that drive line.

So that was an issue. We ran into heating. So we put the generator and the EV cooling on the same radiator, and we figured the same rad. And then we ran into overheating issues when we hit like 40 degrees out. We were overheating the bath. We actually fried an inverter due to it just got too hot and an air compressor. But so that is, so we took those lessons we learned from the very first truck.

We sat down again and said, okay, well, how do we do it better? How do we make it get it to a production prototype? A truck that we'd be comfortable selling. And we changed up some things. So we got rid of the drive shaft. So we went to electric axles, which allowed us to put the batteries inside the frame rail instead of it mounted externally because now we didn't no longer out of drive shaft which made the batteries more protected in the case of an accident we instead of one of the issues was we pulled apart

a generator that was just a standby generator like you got to remember this was a crude proof of concept during the middle of supply chain crisis during covid so we ripped apart an old 3306 cat generator it had an open stater we then found a waterproof end that's now an ip 68 rated generator so we go in the mud, the snow, the road salt without getting into the stator. And we separated the two coolants onto their own circuit, and we'll be testing that over the next six months before we start building the next trucks. But we learned a lot of lessons. We took what we learned.

We redesigned it. Then we built another truck, and we unveiled that truck in September. And how has that been going to September? Really, really well. So we spent a few months on computer programming, really dialing it in. So we learned that, yes, electric has a lot of torque. And we were just doing burnouts everywhere, just leaving rubber. So, and not even intentionally.

Like, it's not like I was trying to leave rubber. Just the amount of torque in an electric engine is insane. So we did a bunch of throttle mapping. How should the basically... You're talking to... You know, man, there's, I've had a few different semi-truck drivers on here, okay? I don't drive truck. I actually, if I'm being very honest, my father, once upon a time, two of my brothers and my dad

have a trucking company, and I was working for them. And, you know, the offers there, well, get your class one. And I'm like, I'm never getting my class one. I do not want that life. I'm not doing it. So I'm going to try and ask a very simple question to the hardcore truck drivers. It's hearing that an electric motor has that much power. When you're talking to the truck driver from across Canada,

how can you explain it to him? And maybe you're doing a great job, and I'm just dense because I don't fully understand everything you're rattling up, which I'm laughing at myself, folks, because it's 100% true. When you drove truck, you said your fourth generation trucker, right? I guess what I was trying to ask is, you know, if you're talking to a hardcore trucker, and maybe I should just explain it from my mind. My brain goes, I guess this, I don't know if it shocks me or if I just am a little surprised by it.

I think of an, I think of an electric engine moving, logging truck up and down mountains. I guess my simple mind goes, hmm, that kind of surprises me a bit. Like that isn't the first place I would think to put an electric motor. And I guess the reason I bring up the old school trucker who's been driving truck all his life and talking about power and, you know, and like moving loads and everything. What is it about an electric motor that just has so much power? Like I don't know. I don't even know what the question has. It just surprises me.

Oh, I don't know how to answer that question. I'm not a physicist. I don't know exactly why it has more power. But it's like noticeable, Chase. You're like this thing, this is like insane. It's insanely noticeable. So it's got almost twice the amount of power of a normal truck. So electric motors are incredibly torquey.

The reason why when you see it, it's why I've been saying that electric vehicles are being used in the wrong application. Like they're being used for light city delivery vehicles. Like people that just run around town carrying the mail, like the guy that just dropped off that delivery. And the other probably, they're doing it because the issue isn't the electric. motor it's the batteries traditionally when you see electric motors being used you see them in very industrial hard applications like freight trains are electric the old laturnal log loaders from the 1960s and 70s were all diesel electric you look at a sawmill all the stuff in a sawmill is electric the cat haul trucks that haul 200 tons are electric drive you have the a lot of doze like you've

seen new dozers now electric drive like heavy equipment has leaned hard in the electrification because electric can deliver a ton of power, a ton of efficiency. They just powered off of the diesel motor and a diesel generator. That's just how it works because they don't have battery doesn't deliver the range. And in the move to electrification, the biggest issue has been the batteries. The batteries suck. They're not great. They don't last long. We don't have the density in order to move a truck for the full work day that the truck needs to do. But the electric motors are just giving insane power. Like, you ever watch that video of the cyber truck, the Tesla cyber truck? It drag races a Porsche and it

blows past the Porsche. And while doing that, it was pulling a trailer that had a Porsche on it. So the cyber truck beat the Porsche while towing another Porsche. Like the torque and power out of electric is absolutely insane. Like, if you think about it this way, it's like, look at all the tools you have in your shock, the impact guns, the drills, they're all electric. Imagine using them like a mechanical drive drill again. Yeah, you have to bear with me here. For the people just listening, bear with us for the people watching, well, I guess I'm pulling

it up. Screw it. Here. Now, is this the right video? Yeah, I think so, yeah. Beats it off the line while towing the car that it was racing. A quarter mile time under 11 seconds, 0 to 60 and 2.6. Yep.

Forgive me, when I was thinking of a truck, I was thinking of like a big semi. and what we're talking about here is a pickup truck, right? Yeah, we're just talking about the pickup truck here. I was just using it as a comparison. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry, yep. No, and I get you. In my brain, I'm like, did I see this semi go blown by a Porsche?

I'm like, geez, how did I miss that? But it's the cyber, I get you. It's even when we did our load testing with Topsy, when we were loaded to 100,000 pounds, that thing accelerated, like that load wasn't even, behind it. Like, you can see in the one place where I'm driving and I'm already rolling at five kilometers an hour.

Like, I'm already cruising. I put my foot into the floor and I spin all four tires on the truck while having 100,000 pounds. Like, I've never seen that in a truck before. The power, the acceleration, the torque, the region, the hold back is better than a Jake brake. So you have better slowing down ability, better acceleration, more. more torque, more power, will burning less fuel.

So what's the holdup on the big rigged side, on the semi side? So we're working on that. Right now, we just finished all of our testing that we had to do. We've got our VIN number issued, so we now have our truck. It's now a legal traffic and drive on the road. Next, we're going to be doing some road testing. And in the meantime, we've taken a few customers. We've shown them the truck.

They've been impressed by it and they placed order. So we're only going to be doing about four trucks next year. That's it. I don't want to be one of these EV companies that builds one prototype. And then all of a sudden thinks that they can build 2,000, 3,000 trucks the next year. No, we're just going to do four. We're going to do four with the companies that we've strategically selected, test those ones out. And then we're going to start looking at production.

I don't know if you're allowed to say. I assume you can. but who are the companies that are testing it out? Some of the companies don't want us saying, just due to NDAs we have, but for example, one is a municipal works, truck that works in a heavy residential area.

The reason why they wanted the truck is that they are constantly in residential areas. So they want to be able to run off full electric, shut the generator off. They can do their quick job on electric that they need to do in the residential area, leave the residential area, fire the generator as they're on their way to go dump their load,

recharge the batteries on there, and then come back in, shut the generator off, do their work on electric so they've reduced noise pollution. Another one we're doing is going to be a snow plow, and that's going to allow us to test the winter part of it, the salt, the road grime, see how this vehicle performs in the wintertime. Another one's going to be for a mine haul application

that's going to be running 24-7. And then the other one we're doing is a service rig. the oil and gas industry, which I'm... You answered my question beautifully, because I actually wasn't worried about the company. I was more worried about the... I was more curious about the industries. So you've checked off a whole bunch, essentially.

Yeah, the first one we did was a logging truck, so we're just trying to cover all the industries we can, and we'll see what the feedback is from these different industries. Is the service rig, is it an Alberta service rig, or is it over there? It is. Yeah, it's out of drinking. Valley. Interesting. Is there a way, just, just the, you know, me being not that far from Drayton, is there a way to go see this thing in action? Like as, as we go along? Oh, I'm sure. We're working

with actually a shop in Drayton Valley that's going to be helping us out with the retrofit on it is because we're trying to train other people on how to work and service these EVs. So, yeah, we're going to probably be starting on that project around June, July. That's when it's roughly scheduled to start going through its process of stripping it down. Right now they're doing a full level four rebuild. It's a 1982 rig, so it is a 40-year-old rig, and they're tearing it all down. They're rebuilding the Derek and a mast and all the drawworks. You've got to be...

Everybody wants new, you know? Look at farming. New. Everything's new. GPS out of the wazoo. That thing can drive itself. on and on. What year of a service, Rick? 1982.

So is it like these retrofits? Yeah. You're looking at a certain vintage of, of, of, of, uh, model of, of year or model of year, year of model, like, or does it matter? We did the first truck we did was, uh, a, a 1962, so. But that's what I mean. Uh, sorry, that's what I'm getting at. Not that it has to be 1971 and that specific vintage.

I just that you're not picking on a 2016, whatever build. You're like, they're, they're just older. And you can retrofit them and make them better than they probably have been. Yeah, I've seen some other EV companies that are doing retrofits, where we're doing, they're no longer doing them. But they were only doing retrofits on brand new Peterbelts. And Peterbelt wouldn't sell a glider. So what they were doing was taking in the motor,

taking in the diesel motor, ripping the diesel motor, ripping the diesel motor out, putting in batteries, putting in electric axles. So you'd rip out the transmission, the differentials, the motor, and you would gut these. Like, why are you buying brand new trucks just to gut them? There's plenty of good old trucks out there that have good bones but need a new drive line. Like a service rig right now is like $5 million. Why would you gut a brand new service rig that just rolled off the line? there's no difference between a service rig from 1982 and a service rig from

23. The design principles of the service rig has not changed in those 40 years. The only thing that's different between a 2023 and a 1982 is the amount of rust on it. And then probably some bells and whistles. Not really, no. Believe it or not, they are very simple machines at their fundamental core. I know they seem real complex, but you look into it. All we need to do is we've got to put one electric motor in there for the hydrolyx,

and we got to put one electric motor on there for the drawworks. And that's it. Two electric motors, and that runs the whole service rig operation. You know, I have such a foul taste in my mouth for eBs. Even though I've written in a Tesla, and I was very impressed with, like, how it handled. and forgive me. What's the type of breaking it has? Regenerative.

Regenerative. Like I found that like super cool, right? Like I was like, wow, that's actually pretty slick. But, you know, the way media has gone about it or maybe government or maybe all the above, I'm not sure, is every time you say EV, I'm like, oh, man. But your way is, it feels rather creative or maybe just like, I don't know. Creative using the finest 1930s technology. That's right. But that isn't,

come on, Chase. That people are saying, you're like, it's creative. How could Edison think of it? No, it's only been in this way.

For over a hundred years, we've been doing diesel electric, and it's proven to be very efficient, very reliable. And now it's just everybody else has missed that transitional step. And that's the problem is that we've gone diesel, and they're like, okay,

well we need to move away from just diesel mechanical let's go electric because the benefits of electric look how powerful it is but the batteries but we're missing that transitional gap of diesel electric because eventually in theory batteries are going to improve over time batteries will get better we'll invest more in our grid infrastructure we'll get more electrical power and as the batteries get better the generator can get smaller and smaller until maybe 20 30 years in the future you don't even need the generator because the batteries have the density to get everybody through their day. Well, at that point, great, but they're trying to hop right to that end zone and they're missing. And the problem is, is that everybody I found that's anti-EV, they're not anti-electric, they're

anti-Battery. And I'm on that board. I don't like the batteries. The batteries have a long way to go. Our grid infrastructure has a long way to go. But the electric motor itself, like anybody that's driven a Tesla, when it slams them into the seat, when it regents, it's like, oh, that's awesome. It's just too bad it's not, doesn't have the range of anything else. And it's like, just put in a generator in it. And then you have the performance of the electric with the range of the gas and diesel. Yeah, when I say creative, I more mean, you know, there's two sides. Well, I don't know if I'm bang on on this, but it feels like there's two sides. There's the side that goes, everything you just said about batteries. This is a stupid idea.

and I'll put myself pretty firmly in that camp. Like, what are they doing? You know, I read the story of the Emmington buses, right? They bought a couple of EV buses and then had to spend a crazy amount of, it was like $100,000 on blankets to try and keep the batteries warm. And then they wouldn't even last the full day and on and on. And you're like, why are we doing this? Yet the EV, the climate, we are killing the world,

whatever you want to put it at is. Or like, they have to work. They have to work, even though there's a whole bunch of people going, but they don't work. Like, it's showing that it doesn't work. And so when I say creative is, although you have your foot in one camp of like the batteries, yeah, they're crap, you've found this like bridge, if you would. Because most people, if they've been in a hybrid vehicle, aren't like, this is a dumb idea. I'm never driving this.

They're like, actually don't mind some of this. Like, this is actually pretty good. And that's what's creative about it. And I guess I don't know if creative is the right word, just that you've found. a way to remove the emotion from it and be like listen you got everything you need right there let's just put these two things together and make it work and all of a sudden you got best of both worlds and maybe in a hundred years 20 years I don't know what it is 10 years 50 years whatever it is maybe there's a way that you slowly wean

off all of diesel but it isn't today it isn't tomorrow but I have a solution that might actually work and you know in a world where everything costs for you know every every It's just going through the roof. This could actually work and save you a bunch of money is what I'm hearing. Yeah, that's essentially it is we just used a bunch of parts that we could find that's been in existence for the last hundred years. And we, okay, well, this is what Laterno used in the 1960s. Someday. Some day Chase Barber folks might be just this billionaire, you know?

Like, how do you ever get him on the show? And I'll be like, I don't know. he came on and he's just like you know we're just throwing together parts we went in the back shop and we said you got this metal thing you got a generator let's slap it on let's see if this works and i'm like man i miss i miss these like this is uh this is what the blue collar roundtable is supposed to be all about you know funny story on blue collar right down in new zealand in the middle of protest in the middle of all the covid and mandates and everything right they had this huge protest so what did the government do they they didn't bring in uh

They had outhouses, but they didn't come in to drain the outhouse. Okay. And so what did the blue collar people did? Well, the plumbers got there and hooked it up to the sewer so that it just drained itself. And I'm like, that's brilliant. Like, don't mess with blue collar people. They look at problems and they don't go, oh, can't do anything about it. They don't dump a crazy amount of money that they don't have on it.

They create solutions. They just look at it and go, well, what if we just did that and solved the problem and carried on with life? Oh, okay, done. I've been saying that, and I've said that very public. that I would rather have 10 really good heavy-duty mechanics, and they will be able to build a truck better than 100 tech engineers. You take 10 good mechanics from any shop in a BC, Alberta, and you say, hey, I want you to build me a semi-truck.

They will build you a better truck, more reliable for cheaper than 100 Silicon Valley Tech bro sitting in an office in San Francisco. Guarantee you. And I have seen that before where there's been other companies. And we're flying down to Texas to go have a look at that company's equipment because they have a bunch of equipment that we use, but they're out of business now and selling it on a fire sale for scrap prices because they had over 180 engineers trying to design an electric truck and then, okay, the electric and then, okay, maybe we can do hybrid and we'll do hydrogen

hybrid, a natural gas hybrid or this hybrid, and they had it confusing ways where they had a diesel engine to an automatic transmission to a drive shaft, to a single rear axle, and then they would put in a natural gas generator that would then power an electric axle at the back, and that would be a little assist and a little bit of region with a tiny, like, it's just so convolutedly complicated, or you look like Tesla, where they redesign the entire braking system of the truck, Like semi-trucks have had standard type 30-30 break plots since the 1950s. Spring parking brakes, you release the brake, the spring applies, locks on the air to a red and yellow button in the cab. Since 1950, they had the red and yellow buttons in the cab.

Release break. Tesla decided that, no, they didn't know what that was or didn't want to use it. They're going to redesign how the entire parking brake system works on a semi-stop. truck. They got rid of the yellow and red buttons that every trucker uses where the spring brake fails on and they put it into this touchscreen system that's integrated in there and it's proprietary to the Tesla semi. But guess what? They had to do a bunch of recall on all their semi trucks because the parking brakes would release and they would just fail. They would randomly come off and the truck would roll away while it was parked. So all of your engineers, billions of dollars spent and you couldn't

just not one trucker, one mechanic, one blue-collar guy, I'd be like, hey, guys, this is the parking brake that we have used since 1947. Why don't we just use the parking brake since the 1940s that's on every other truck, every manufacturer to this day, Kenworth, Freightliner, Western Star, Peterbilt, all used that brake pot built in 1947, still available on a 2023. But no, Tesla was going to redesigned the whole thing and then it failed and the trucks rolled away without their brakes like jesus like and then we get these people of like oh edison motors is so revolutionary you're doing things that nobody else is done i'm like no we're doing common sense approaches yeah but common sense today is revolutionary that that that doesn't happen but it is like and then like people are

wondering how did you get a truck built so like we got investigated hard by the government because Because they said that there's no way that you're going to be that. This is clearly like embezzling funds or something's not right or you're taking investor money and not declaring it. Because there's no way that you could build a truck for when companies are spending $2 billion, $3 billion. There's no way that you can get this done for a million. And then they looked at her books and they spent six months investigating to see if we had anything fishy going on. And we're like, nope, turns out we did it. And we actually did it for that price.

And we actually did it for that price. well how did you do it while we didn't reinvent the parking break we didn't we didn't make custom 1500 dollar headlight assemblies for our trial you know if this fails you could be a stand-up comedian chase i i personally common sense i'm like who i i'm uh i don't know if i've laughed this hard in a while on the podcast because it's like you know like there's nothing revolutionary except it is everybody has gone away from common sense is it you know if to get to your destination hang a left we're going to hang a right and actually we're going to hang a right and actually we're going to drive right for a very long time and then maybe we'll turn around to go back to our destination

nobody uses common sense anymore it's i mean look at pierre pull he's running on common sense and lover hate the politics side of it uh folks you go well that's what everybody wants it's just like can we get some common sense answers and and move along and carry on this is uh my videos so much though hey that guy steals my content so much pierre pull oh every time we just make a joke now when we say something or like I do something and you're like oh how long until pierre paulie i said like i did this video on i know we're slightly getting off that's all right welcome to the sean newman podcast chase perfect perfect so the leader of the green party was opposing the natural gas pipeline to kid a mat and i did a little tic-tac youtube short on it saying that no like her argument

that it was going to increase bc's carbon emissions by three gigatons of CO2 per year and that'll have give us trouble making our 2030 goals. And I said that my logic was all that natural gas is going to China and they're shutting down coal power plants and they're turning them into natural gas power plants. If you look at the reduction from coal to natural gas, we were looking at about 40 to 50 gigatons of CO2 production by shipping the natural gas over there. And all that coal-powered emissions creates a lot of sulfur dioxide. That sulfuric dioxide goes into the jet stream, travels across the Pacific, where it lands on the coast of BC because you travel across the Pacific,

first thing you hit from China is the mountain range of British Columbia, where all the clouds then try and lose their water, climb over, it dumps his acid rain. So I'm like, yes, we may increase three gigatons or whatever it is of CO2 here, but we're eliminating 40, 50 gigatons globally by doing this while generating jobs and cleaning up our water system. I did this. And then two days later, Pierre Pauliev comes up with a statement that was like verbatim to my TikTok. And like, at least like three, four videos now where it's like verbatim after I say it. And I just kind of like it's cool.

It's cool that it's like somebody's listening, but it's kind of. funny. Oh, well. Well, maybe he's just listening. Oh, I mean, I agree with a guy. Maybe he would just or there's enough people saying these things in the same circles that it could be, but it's just been a long-running internal joke. If I'm just an everyday guy, um, you guys sell, do you sell, what do you call the kits? I'm spacing on the name right now. Is it kit, correct? Yeah, we just, we don't have a fancy name. Okay, cool. Yeah, you're not reinventing the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, you're You're not reinventing a whole bunch of these things. We just have a kit.

Oh, okay. That's fair enough. You don't have some fancy title, like a government title that's like 18 letters long, and you're like, what does that even mean? Fair enough. The kits, if I'm just an everyday person and I want to get one of these, like can, I guess what I'm leaning to is tell people where they can find you. And if they're interested in, say, getting one of the kits for a half, for a truck,

what's the time frame on getting one? Can they order? blah, blah, blah. We're about two years off. So we came out with the pickup kits, and we're training up a few installers to install. We took the same technology from the semi-truck, and we downsize it to a pickup truck.

We realized we can use the same batteries. Instead of using six batteries, we just use two batteries. Instead of five inverters, we just use two inverters. So we can just downsize it, put it into a pickup truck, and that's a great way to really train people on how to do up these pickups. That gets the installers out there. They're going to practice with the pickup trucks. That should be available to the public in 2025, kind of next year.

And all the semi-trucks we're doing ourselves over the next year, two years, just because realistically, if something goes wrong and it's a $40,000 pickup that gets an installer screws up, it's not as bad as a $400,000 hydro back truck that gets screwed up. So it's a great training. it allows us to order some parts in bulk, which gets our cost way down. And so, yeah, about 2025 is the long-winded answer to that. If, okay, if you are, you know, like out here, oil patch, lots of oil hauling, service rigs, tank moves, etc. I just pick her trucks, right?

I got my two older brothers, once again, and a father who run a trucking company. They lift heavy loads, they move heavy loads. they move wide loads, high loads, they go all over the place. Let's say they're like, huh, this sounds really interesting. How do they go about seeing one in action or finding out more information or do they just contact, do they just go to your website and go, hey, Edison, we'd love to be, you know, in line, maybe we could test trial one of these things. You know, you're testing four in the next year in different industries.

What if a company is listening and goes, holy crap, I want, I want to try this. So we've actually, for the semi-trucks, we've filled all of our production until 2025. So unfortunately, the opportunity is kind of out for guys to get in there. Like I said, I don't want to be the EV company that tries to make 1,000 trucks a year before they really fleshed out their product. Let's just focus on making these next four or five. We'll maybe make another 10 after that. Well, we build a production facility.

Make sure those trucks are good. and then we'll start offering sales to the general public. So we pretty well just immediately filled the spots we had. Which is a good problem. Yep, yep. It's not the worst problem. And then there's a reservation for the pickup. If somebody has like a service truck, a tow truck,

just an old pickup or a newer pickup that they want to convert to the same electric drive, we're doing that because this year we're working with three different installers and we're training three, four installers this year. We're going to train another 10 this year. So we're able to expedite the pickup kits for 2025 delivery. But I wouldn't expect anybody to get a semi-tracker have those positions open again until 2026. Okay, so 2026, because listen, I just had Danielle Smith, Premier of Alberta on, I don't know what that was, folks, right before Christmas. And she's talking about Minister Gobot and how basically they're going to,

going to manufacture, I'm going to call it vehicle shortages on lots, right? They're trying to push everybody to EVs. And we all know the different years, 2030, 21, and blah, blah, blah. And by 26 now, what they've come out with is a certain percentage of all vehicles sold have to be EV and that percentage has to climb and climb and climb and climb. So when you say 2026, I don't get all go, oh, I hear, yeah, maybe, maybe this is something we need to pay attention to, right? Because 2026 doesn't feel that far off to me. I'm sure there's companies or people going, but I want in on it tomorrow. Regardless, I like the approach. I think it's a very balanced approach, a very, if I can say this, common sense approach. It makes sense. When it comes to individual trucks, is there, you set it and my brain,

I don't know if it skipped a beat or what, but you got installers, your training installers, there is a waiting list for that what is the weight on something that is you know you'd mention a service truck or just a plain old truck that somebody wants to convert um we filled that list pretty quick so it's probably almost two years now because the list is filling up but yeah it's we're going to be starting getting those kits out and i think we can actually tackle those pretty fast because it's way quicker to do a pickup truck than it is to do a full year but Yeah. What does one of them go for? What's a kit worth? Oh, that's a so, I get that question. That is the hardest question to answer because the basic thing is it depends. And I hate that argument that there's such a difference between vocational trucks.

Like a hydro VAC is way different than a light delivery truck. Specking out of like an F550 fully done up is going to. to be a lot different than somebody that just wants to put a kit in. They've got a 1980s truck. It's simple. It's easy. They just, they want a two-wheel drive just to work around. Another one wants a giant four-by-four

and they want to be able to run their welder and they want an electric air compressor. And it totally changes. It's like the pickup world. You could walk in. And you could buy a $40,000 F-150 gas-based model or you could buy $150,000

$150,000. Is the price, I guess where I'm going then is, my next question, is it like the price differential that big? Is it 40 to 150? Or is it like, oh, no, God, no. It's like 10 to 20. Yeah, we're probably going to be in that 40 or 30,000 at the low end. And then you can get up to $100,000 at the high end if you really want to be fancy. So that gives, that gives people something to chew on, right?

This isn't a $500 part input, and it ain't a $500,000 input for the low-end kits. I'm not talking about this, you know, the giant getting into service rigs and all that jazz. I don't even want to go down that road. I'm more interested in just the everyday person. 30,000 on the low end, 100,000 on the high end. With putting in a kit like that, not only if you took a 1980s truck and all of a sudden you get to buzz around in that beauty again. What does it do on fuel consumption then?

Like what should you see? Because like right now, you know, like with the gas prices, the gas prices continuing to go up, we'll see what elections bring in 2025. But on, you know, in the foreseeable future, fuel is going up. I don't see a way around that. So what is, what is something like this due to your fuel consumption for, for the purchaser? That's also the same, hard to answer for the same thing. Like a login truck in BC is going to see a lot different change.

than a guy pulling 20,000 pounds down the highway, all in the mail. It's how do you, there's so many different jobs. Like the service rig has a much different fuel consumption than the hydro back truck. They're different job profiles, but essentially-

I could give you some tough questions to make this work. They're always the toughest questions, but I can give like some case examples. So for a logging truck in BC where you're going up empty and you're going downhill loaded, you can see like an 80% to theoretically, if you have the right haul, 100% fuel reduction. You can really see some efficiencies. If you put it on the highway and you're just pulling 20, 30,000 pounds of mail down the highway on an interstate on flatland,

you may only see a 5% fuel reduction. Because I can gear a mechanical truck where you put in a 400 horsepower truck. A highway truck doesn't take advantage of the region, doesn't take advantage of the peak loading. You can gear that highway truck where it's running at 100 kilometers an hour at its peak RPM. There's only like a 5, 10% of efficiency going electric. But you look at the other thing is like say a gravel truck working in the city. A lot of stop and go traffic, region breaking, taking advantage of the peak load demand, can see about a 50% reduction in fuel mileage or fuel.

How about a guy who takes his 1980 Chevy and puts this in? I mean, then you're looking at probably like a 70% like if you consider like an old 454, an old gas naturally aspirated 454, and you put in a hybrid system, you're really going to see like a tripling of your power, like three times a power for like half the fuel consumption is kind of, like it's good.

That's the thing. It's like the farther off you go, it's like, look at a welder. Take a welding rig, for example. They're going to have amazing fuel economy because you go out to site. Most of them, they're running there. They got a Dodge Cummins. They're running that Cummins for 14 hours a day as a truck idols. And then they're running a generator.

They got their old Lincoln or Ready Yard welder running their welder. So a diesel going. So they're running two diesel engines just to do the well. And weld is a perfect piece. low demand it takes a lot of power while you're laying your bead but once you take it off and you're no longer arcing over well it's not that much power so it's a very high intermittent power so you still need a big engine that's running in order to give that electrical power but then as soon as you stop welding you're no longer using that power but you still have that engine running plus the pickup we can

essentially through an inverter take the big batteries from the pickup and the welder could run off of that three phase power so you could run an electric welder which only uses the power you're actually using then if the batteries start getting low the engine and your truck fires off it comes on as a standby it recharges the batteries and then it shuts back off again so you might run your diesel engine for half an hour a day 40 minutes a day instead of running one diesel or two diesels 14 hours a day that welding truck's going to see like an 80% 90% reduction in its fuel consumption Man, I've enjoyed this. You've made me laugh multiple times, and anytime that happens, it's a good day, I think.

A little bit of laughter goes a long way. A little bit of common sense goes a long way. If you've got a couple extra minutes, I'd like to throw over to Substack. I know we'd said top of the hour, and I'm going to make sure that I only keep you for extra five. I got another little bit here. Okay. Well, for the listener, if they've been enjoying this, we're going to switch over to Substack, and we'll carry on for a few extra minutes there.

So follow us on over there if you find folks like, and well, Chase will be back on on the substack side.