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The TELO Truck - An Electric Solution For An Urban Problem
841 Plays1 year ago
Welcome to the Plug In For More podcast! Mike, Tom, and Bryant are here to help you on your journey to an Electric vehicle future. Each episode we discuss current events, trends, and a specific topic of education related to EV's. We bring together a diverse experience set, and pair it with guests who are experts in the field. For even more information on EV's, check out www.EVUniverse.com.
In this episode, Tom sits down with Jason Marks and Forrest North who are the Co-Founders of the TELO Truck. The TELO truck is a fresh take on the modern pick-up, designed to thrive in an urban environment. Jason and Forrest's passion is contagious and we are excited for their dream to come to fruition. For more on the TELO Truck, check out their website; www.telotruck.com
Be sure to follow PIFM on our various social media platforms, for more exciting content on EV’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pifm_podcast/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PIFMPodcast
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Transcript
Introduction and New Video Format
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome back to the plugin for more podcast. In this episode, we're going to try something a little bit different. Uh, we've always had the audio version of the podcast, which has been our bread and butter, but now we're going to try to incorporate a video version of it, which is going to be the same exact content, except you're going to get to see what it is that we're talking
Meet the Founders of Tele Truck
00:00:18
Speaker
about. And in this particular episode, we're meeting with the founders of the tele truck, Jason Marks and forest north.
00:00:25
Speaker
Both of them have a really impressive pedigree and the truck that they're working on is super cool. Forest North was on the early Tesla team where he developed the battery pack for the roadster that's on his way to Mars. He is also the founder of Mission Motors, which is one of the first electric motorcycle companies to set a land speed record for electric motorcycles. And he also founded Plugshare.
00:00:46
Speaker
Like we all know plug share on this podcast and we love it. And I think it's really cool that he's responsible for all of that. And now he is the CTO for tele trucks. His partner in this venture is Jason Marks. Jason led the autonomous vehicle and driver assistance system for national instruments. He was the chief business development manager there and he developed test systems for major us automakers and
00:01:13
Speaker
their ADAS test systems for their 2024 model years. He's experienced in sales, marketing, and a research and design leader with Patents and Lidar. I really enjoyed this conversation with Jason and Forrest. They are really squared away guys that have a pretty impressive passion for what they're doing with this tele-truck project.
Introducing the Tele Truck
00:01:33
Speaker
As you'll hear getting into it, tele is different, but it's impressive.
00:01:38
Speaker
Enjoy. Welcome to Plug In For More, brought to you by evuniverse.com. EV Universe is your one-stop shop for all things related to the electric vehicle. Here on this podcast, our goal is to educate, inspire, and hopefully make your transition into the electric vehicle marketplace a lot less intimidating. And now, here are your hosts, Mike, Tom, and Bryant.
00:02:06
Speaker
So as you can see in our background, we're building electric pickup trucks, specifically built for city purposes. So we build a pickup truck with the same capability as a mid or even a full-size pickup truck built into the footprint of a two-door Mini Cooper. So all the utility that somebody needs for a work truck, for a play truck, or for someone that lives in a really densely populated urban area that can't navigate those areas.
00:02:30
Speaker
So we didn't want to give up anything in building the world's most useful pickup truck. Now, one of the problems we're really trying to solve is that pickup trucks have gotten absolutely massive.
00:02:45
Speaker
And it wasn't always that way. Back in the 90s and early 2000s, the best-selling vehicles on the road were a two-door Ford Ranger. And now it's this massive Ford F-series vehicle on the road. And a lot of people think that was driven by consumer demand. That's like the general consensus is that Americans just love big trucks.
00:03:04
Speaker
And while a lot of Americans might actually love big trucks, it actually wasn't driven specifically by the consumers. It was driven actually by government regulations and automotive industry reacting to government regulations. I'm sure we're going to jump into that, so I'll save that one as a teaser. But the government regulations forced the hand of automakers to build giant trucks who then subsequently built a whole brand and market around that.
00:03:29
Speaker
And now that's what we have and that's why everybody competes in that space. But the usefulness of a small truck isn't lost on the world. Like we not only do a bunch of consumers love small trucks as we proved by our launch and our pre-orders, but we had a ton of fleet companies reach out to us that just said, this is the thing that we need to actually do our jobs. And we can't actually do our jobs well with the offerings on the market today. And that's why we're super excited to bring this to market.
The Shift from Motorcycles to Trucks
00:03:53
Speaker
Now, the vision for this, you guys both have a pretty impressive background in the electric vehicle industry, engineering space, and all that. Where was the vision? Where does that start? Where did you come up with this idea that we're going to make this truck?
00:04:08
Speaker
Yeah, so it actually originated back when we first met in 2018. Forrest, as you probably know from his background, built one of the first electric motorcycle companies, Mission Motors, and I was looking at trying to solve this problem around city mobility. I live in downtown San Francisco and I really can't navigate the city all that well.
00:04:31
Speaker
And I was thinking, you know, Southeast Asia does this really well by doing two wheels. So maybe two wheels is the solution in America, too. If we can just build a motorcycle that's more akin to what Americans want, maybe we can, if I live in the city, maybe we can do something really useful and innovative here. So we took off a project to build, and I just want to quickly pan over here, an electric motorcycle. Gotcha.
00:04:54
Speaker
Cool. And we built that together, self-funded that, and went to go launch it in 2021. Found out we both actually pole vaulted at the same high school in Washington state, so we hit it off pretty well. And then realized that electric motorcycles isn't a great market in the US. About 5,000 electric motorcycles were sold in 2021.
00:05:17
Speaker
There's definitely a hobby aspect to motorcycles in the US that people don't have in Southeast Asia where they actually use them for work and utility and commuting all the time. And for that reason, electric motorcycles wasn't a great market position for us to be at. But we developed all this technology to really build
00:05:32
Speaker
small vehicles efficiently because we were building an electric motorcycle that had highway range, but also was able to be maneuvered, transported by hand. So we had all this technology we developed that enabled vehicles to be built extremely space efficiently and size efficiently. And we created a roadmap of all these different vehicles that we could build with our technology and surveyed a couple hundred people in various cities, LA and San Francisco mostly. And even like the staunch motorcycle riders looked at our chart and said,
00:05:58
Speaker
I want the truck. That's very clearly what I need. I can throw my motorcycles in the back of the truck, take it down to Laguna Seca, and race it for a week, and then go back and park outside of my favorite bakery in
Tele Truck Prototype and Engineering Focus
00:06:09
Speaker
the city. That's what I want. So 89% of the people we surveyed, out of all the vehicles we showed them, pointed and said, a crew cab pickup truck the size of a two-door Mini Cooper would be extremely useful in my life. Perfect.
00:06:22
Speaker
So now how far along are you in the development process? Would you say like, are, are we going to see this in production anytime soon? Where how soon can our people expect to see this? Yeah, it depends on your definition of soon. Um, so we're, we are in our, we would see behind us is our first prototype. Okay. And this thing, we will have a event in a few weeks. And I know that we have being a little coy about this, but I will show this vehicle driving.
00:06:49
Speaker
So that is our first major milestone. We showed our vehicle design, our vehicle shell. Just the chassis. Just the vehicle shell at our launch. And that was in June.
00:07:05
Speaker
And then the next stage is showing our vehicle able to drive. This won't be a fully functional press-ready vehicle. That is the next phase of our company. And then following that, while we're doing that, we're building our engineering validation vehicles. And we're doing the virtual validation process to go through homologation. And we're prioritizing that because a lot of companies have not prioritized that.
00:07:28
Speaker
A lot of companies have built a ton of press vehicles to get to show off their vehicle and get people excited, but weren't quite ready to start delivering vehicles to consumers. So we want to start that process as early as possible, do it as leanly as possible, as quickly as possible, so that we can actually start building our low and mid volume vehicle runs as soon as possible. Okay. Do you guys want to talk about specs? Yeah.
00:07:56
Speaker
So I drive a crew cab Toyota Tacoma, and I've had it for 200,000 miles. So everything that I kind of said is it has to be able to perform at that level from an interior volume, from a bed space efficiency. It has to be just the hair better and all those specs. We went out and meticulously measured
00:08:18
Speaker
the headroom, the legroom, because you can get those specs online, but it really matters when you actually sit in the vehicle and how it feels. So we went and measured headroom, legroom, bed space, and everything we've done is at parity or slightly better than my Toyota Tacoma that I have. So headroom, legroom for five seats, slightly better than Tacoma. Bed space is slightly larger than a Tacoma.
00:08:40
Speaker
And that's kind of the crazy trick of what we do is we're able to fit that into the footprint of a two-door Mini Cooper. So it's only 152 inches long.
00:08:49
Speaker
which is, we get all that in the footprint of that. Just to give you a comparison point, the Tacoma I have is 212 inches long. The smallest truck on the market, whether you call it the Ford Maverick or the Hyundai Santa Cruz, Ford Maverick is just about 200 inches long. So we're talking about four feet shorter still than that. We're packaging all that capability and giving you a five foot bed.
00:09:12
Speaker
Our mid gate folds flat, which allows you entrance into the passenger space of the rear seats, and you can put a full four by HE of plywood in the vehicle with the tailgate up.
00:09:26
Speaker
which is really important to us because people, one of the things in my Tacoma you can't quite do is the wheel wells are too narrow, so you can't slide a piece of plywood into that vehicle. So it's really important that you get a piece of plywood, you can slide it in, you can close the tailgates. On top of that, we have an extremely performant vehicle. So Forrest, do you want to talk about some of the performance specs? Sure, yeah. So we have 350 miles of range and 500 horsepower as four-wheel drive.
00:09:54
Speaker
kind of in the expectation of a normal EV, something that can take you to Tahoe from San Francisco, something that you can go on a road trip in. You really need to have more than 300 miles to do that.
00:10:11
Speaker
We have over 100 kilowatt hour battery pack in this small footprint. So in the same footprint that, for example, the Mini Cooper only has 30 some kilowatt hours in with 114 mile
Challenges of Electrifying Large Trucks
00:10:22
Speaker
range. So I'm surprised that any companies are putting out EVs with such small range. And I think it's a bad idea being in this electric vehicle space for so long.
00:10:32
Speaker
So it's really important to us. You need to have range for those. Even though the average trip people take is 30 miles a day, you've got to be able to handle those longer trips. We're going to be the Tesla Supercharger standard, which is the NACS standard. We're going to be native to that charging standard. So you'd use an adapter to use a different network. And that choice is because that Supercharger network is by far
00:10:59
Speaker
I would say really the only network that's actually viable currently.
00:11:06
Speaker
One of the big important things to us was when we rethink the form and footprint and function of the truck, that we look at what challenges exist in today's EV truck space. A lot of where the EV truck space is, is they're electrifying existing vehicle platforms, which means that you're adding an additional 2,000 to 3,000 pounds of batteries on top of an existing vehicle platform. What you're doing is you're making a vehicle that
00:11:32
Speaker
used to weigh maybe 5,000 pounds, weighs seven to eight to 9,000 pounds. We've seen EV vehicles that have been even touting upwards of 10,000 pounds of their vehicle. It's crazy. When you do that, you've got a ton of rolling resistance, a ton more energy required for the vehicle, and you actually reduce the amount it can actually pull and it can carry because of how heavy it is.
00:11:50
Speaker
On top of that, you add those battery packs. They're actually fairly tall in the battery packs they add. And they add to the frontal area of the vehicle, making more wind resistance. So you're doubling down on the energy requirements of your vehicle when you electrify an existing truck line.
00:12:05
Speaker
So if you're a 10,000 pound vehicle, you're extremely aerodynamic inefficient with a huge frontal area, now you require even more energy to get you a range. So a lot of vehicles are touting 300 plus miles of range in the EV truck space, but it requires 200 kilowatt hours of battery pack to do that.
00:12:24
Speaker
It's massive. Absolutely massive. Tearing up streets, you can't actually see over the hood. It's dangerous for pedestrians. The crazy thing to me is that even when you electrify these vehicles, these pickup trucks,
00:12:40
Speaker
Because the energy comes from the grid to use the charging, it isn't always clean. In a lot of instances, you actually end up, on average, in the US, earning more carbon per mile driven for these big electric pickup trucks than you do for a small gas car. Now, one thing you hit on earlier on with a circle background to it here.
00:13:05
Speaker
I drive a Mustang Mach-E now. Before that, I drove a Dodge Ram, a 2020 Ram, 1500. I love my Hemi. I love the big truck. Now, I like what you're doing. And I'm not being critical of it. But I could see an audience out there who might say, what am I going to do with that little thing? And since there are no other small trucks in the market like this, this is a very unique vehicle. Can you speak to the EPA?
00:13:30
Speaker
changes
Tele Truck's Market Position and Consumer Appeal
00:13:31
Speaker
that you were mentioning earlier and how we got here. Yeah, it's actually a fascinating story. It actually started in the 1970s when the US had a gas crisis.
00:13:41
Speaker
And the Environmental Protection Agency said, hey, automakers, we're going to make sure that you're using less gas on your vehicles as you're providing to consumers. So they set up a bunch of requirements, said here are the fuel economy requirements, the mile per gallon requirements for your vehicles, but it's only going to apply to passenger vehicles. So hatchbacks, sedans, wagons.
00:14:02
Speaker
those type of vehicles. They exempted trucks because trucks were work vehicles and they felt that, okay, it doesn't really matter. You guys are doing your work. You need to do your work. We're not going to, they hold you to this. But a lot of automakers said, okay, now we're going to start building crossovers and call them trucks. And we built a ton of more trucks over the past of the next 50 years. And the EPA wizened up and said, hey, you know, we're going to pump the brakes on this one.
00:14:27
Speaker
In 2010, they said, okay, we're now going to require you to meet fuel economy standards for your trucks, but our way of exempting you this time is going to be based on the size and length of your vehicle, the footprint of your vehicle.
00:14:43
Speaker
So they set up these automakers with the intention of saying, hey, you can build a less fuel efficient vehicle if it's bigger, because we think that what we want you to do is say your semi trucks can burn more gas per mile driven, but your small trucks shouldn't.
00:14:58
Speaker
But instead, what automaker said was, well, if I just build my vehicle a little bigger, it's a little easier to hit these fuel economy standards. I keep building it a little bigger. I keep making it easier for me to hit fuel economy standards that are being required. Now, every single year, the EPA gives these automakers requirements that fuel economy they have to hit.
00:15:18
Speaker
and they project them years into the future. So the challenge is automakers are looking here and saying, okay, maybe my vehicle at this size meets my fuel economy standards today, but in five years I have to build a pickup truck that has 50 miles per gallon. That seems impossible. So instead I'm just going to make it big enough so I cover all my bases. So five years from now I don't have to change my vehicle platform.
00:15:39
Speaker
And I'm going to meet the requirements. And so now every single automaker ends up, that line eventually flattens out where every single car, actually every single truck. Around like 80 square feet. Yeah. It's a 75 square feet of, if you multiply the track width times the wheelbase, but every single
00:15:56
Speaker
automaker now builds their mid and full size vehicles right at that inflection point that flattens out because there's no point in building it any bigger at that point, just more materials. They're at a point where they know that they're not going to have to get any more leeway by building their vehicle bigger. That's a huge location. It left this huge gap in the market. For what used to be the Ford Rangers, the old Toyota SR5s, those
00:16:18
Speaker
small trucks, the dot sons of the world that people love, that people use, especially fleet vehicles use. And everybody built their brand around a big vehicle, big trucks. Big trucks is American. And so they now exist in that space. And what's really interesting to us is EVs aren't beholden to this problem. Electric vehicles don't have to go out and meet these fuel economy requirements. They're electric. But because the market exists,
00:16:44
Speaker
in this space of the big vehicles, they said, okay, if I'm going to do something, I'm just going to electrify the pickup trucks that exist. I'm not going to try to recreate a new market because I don't have any data on that market. Because if I look back the last five years, trucks have just gotten bigger, not realizing that it's not consumer driven. It was really regulatory driven.
00:17:04
Speaker
As someone who's had both, I've had a very large F250 diesel and I've also had the SR5 Toyota that was very small. Honestly, it was way more useful. I got so much, it could go places that the big truck couldn't.
00:17:24
Speaker
I could put longer things in it, which has always boggled my mind because you get a big truck and then you go to get a 16-foot piece of lumber and you're like, wait, how do I put this on? I need a lumber rack now? I thought I had a big truck. I think that our truck is going to serve a lot of needs and certainly people have multiple trucks.
00:17:49
Speaker
just looking at driveways, I see one in between where I live and where I work. There's this guy that has a giant truck in his driveway and he has a little K truck next to it. So I've been really curious to go talk with him. But we've talked to the number of people who have ranches and farms and they end up getting K trucks imported from Japan. These are these little tiny trucks that a certain regulation kind of created in Japan.
00:18:12
Speaker
And they get them in the hills of West Virginia, Tennessee. They get them here in Santa Cruz Mountains where there's windy roads. The utility of a small vehicle isn't just in the city, is my point. And people who love trucks have multiple sizes.
00:18:31
Speaker
And people that are living, like I used to live in Texas and people love their big trucks in Texas and I doubt will persuade a lot of people that drive giant trucks in Texas to move to our vehicle because they have the space that allows them to have that truck. It's not as critical of a problem to them.
00:18:46
Speaker
Really, what we're trying to do is getting people that live in dense urban areas that maybe really want the utility of a truck, but have never even considered buying one simply because they are like, that's just way too big to solve my requirements. So maybe they're buying crossovers right now or off-road
00:19:04
Speaker
smaller SUVs. That's really what they're looking at right now. But they're avid mountain bikers. They go snowboarding. Those are the people on the consumer side that are really pre-ordering our vehicle. And they live in downtown Seattle. They live in downtown LA. They live in downtown New York. That's the people that I think are going to really be interested in what we're doing.
00:19:24
Speaker
And I agree with the assessment for us about the utility of the large truck. Cause how many times do you really put something in the bed of that thing that really needs it? And I was worried about that when I transitioned away from my Ram to that Mach-E that I really liked that freedom of being able to grab a two by four or two at the home depot, burning errands randomly during the day. At the end of the realistic side of it is that I don't grab that many two by fours. Right. And I don't, I don't need that all the time. So I get that. And it's, it's a good point.
00:19:53
Speaker
Even the average F-150's bed size right now is six and a half feet. It's a little less than six and a half feet. The average full-size truck like the 2500 to 3500 are six and a half feet. We're still not talking about like eight foot beds are pretty rare these days actually in a lot of vehicles.
Safety Features and Market Entry Challenges
00:20:12
Speaker
So having the ability to lay down or mid-gain and have an eight foot bed actually gives you potentially more utility than a lot of the big vehicles on the road today. I spent 17 years in law enforcement as police officer. I've seen thousands of car crashes. And in that I learned that the size of the vehicle is going to increase your survivability as an occupant.
00:20:39
Speaker
How does that translate for your guys's tell-o and what your expectations would be for crash test ratings? Yeah. So my background is actually in automotive safety and doing not only just crash tests, but driver assistance features to assist with crash test and a lot of what is missed and a lot of the work that people do because
00:20:57
Speaker
simply because the industry's been around for so long. They kind of have best practices in how to do crashing. The science of the crash really hasn't fully been explored to the extent that it could be explored. So a lot of what we're doing actually, you'll notice that we have very little hood of our vehicle. We still have 18 inches of mechanical crumple in our vehicle. Don't get us wrong. It's a little bit deceiving.
00:21:17
Speaker
There's still a decent amount of mechanical crumple. There's a lot of work we do to look at the science of the actual crash itself to make that as safe as possible. There's things that happen inside, outside, around our vehicle that happen predictably and reactively
00:21:33
Speaker
in our vehicle to actually make that crash significantly safer than a normal crash would be in a regular vehicle. And we haven't really announced much of the safety features that we've kind of innovated and implemented in our vehicle platform because we're still waiting to showcase a lot of the results of that crash testing that we're doing. But we're confident we're going to have a vehicle that's significantly safer, not only for occupants, but also for pedestrians and bicyclists and vulnerable road users on the road.
00:22:02
Speaker
than any other vehicle on the road. So trucks are notorious. They kill three times more pedestrians than any other vehicle on the road. We're going to have a vehicle that's extremely safe for occupants. It's also going to be extremely safe for pedestrians. That's great.
00:22:17
Speaker
We're at all time pedestrian, death high right now. So the question of safety is a lot about perspective and what kinds of crashes you see. So with your experience in law enforcement, you may have seen some horrific crashes. I don't have the numbers off the top of my head, but there are a lot of crashes that happen. Vehicle
00:22:38
Speaker
without vehicle to vehicle, just drivers going off of the road. In those cases, I don't know if the larger vehicles fare better. I think that I've seen some that have- Rollover in particular is a tough thing for pickup trucks to be survivable for. Things like that are really important. That's why the holistic survivability and the science of the crash is so important. It's so important to look at all the aspects of that.
00:23:05
Speaker
And also, the safest crash is the crash you avoid. So the smaller vehicle with the highest tech safety avoidance is going to do better over time. So that's our goal. Our goal is, we definitely think about safety a lot. That's really Jason's background. And our goal is to be one of the safest vehicles on the road. Yeah, we're going for the five-star crash step trading to give you the answer to the question you're asking. Perfect.
00:23:32
Speaker
Now, of course, I know you've been a part of a bunch of projects, Jason. I don't know as much about your background, but what going into this have you found to be the biggest challenge? You know, if you would have asked me that question a year ago, it would have been a different answer than today, for sure. You start an automotive company with a lot of preconceived notions around how hard it's going to be to build a vehicle company.
00:23:59
Speaker
this press and information you receive around the graveyard of electric vehicle companies, the stress that's happening in electric vehicle companies, and some of the things you think are the hardest to do end up being some of the easiest to do. I think the hardest thing for us is actually getting past those preconceived notions of things that have happened in the past and charting forward in what we know to be the correct way, even though there's a lot of pressure to not do it in the necessarily correct way.
00:24:27
Speaker
I'll give you an example. There are a lot of companies that raised a billion dollars to try to build electric vehicle companies. And they made a lot of mistakes that cost them hundreds of millions of dollars and prevented them from actually bringing a vehicle to the market. And so what we thought was, okay, these companies must be just
00:24:46
Speaker
It just must be really, really expensive to bring a vehicle to market. But if you talk to some of our advisors, like Andy Palmer is the ex-CEO of Aston Martin, ex-CEO of Nissan, he'll tell you that, no, it doesn't require a billion dollars to bring a vehicle to market. It might do that if you're trying to build a vehicle at 50,000 to 100,000 units per year off the bat, but you don't have to do that to reach profitability. You can build 4,000 to 5,000 vehicles per year, get to a profitable standpoint, and scale from there.
00:25:14
Speaker
What I would have answered that question a year ago would have been, well, manufacturing, scale, profitability, that's where everyone's failing massively and trying to deliver to. But the reason I think they're failing in a lot of those areas is because of the fact that they're trying to build a financial model that requires 50,000 to 100,000 vehicles per year off the bat.
00:25:36
Speaker
Probably the answer I'd have right now is trying to battle everyone with that preconceived notion that it requires that type of vehicle scale to come to market.
00:25:47
Speaker
Yeah, I do. I agree. And the companies that were doing that, you know, that Jason's mentioning that, you know, part of it is just the climate that they raised money in. And so they raised money. It was a fairly easy time to raise money to raise a lot of money. And they kept they thought they could raise more at that same kind of pace. And so that kind of created some of those those issues where they were trying to get to market so much faster by spending.
00:26:10
Speaker
10x what they needed to. So it's been a big reset, I think, just in the world. But people's minds haven't necessarily come around to that things are cheaper. And the other thing is just the amount of software simulation tools for every stage of the development has gotten so much better. And the whole supply chain in the US of commoditized EV components is incredible.
00:26:37
Speaker
So we're able to get off the shelf validated parts that are commercially available from very large OEMs easily even in ones and twos that we had to invent completely from scratch at Tesla.
Scaling Production and Meeting Fleet Demand
00:26:52
Speaker
That's kind of amazing. And then I think the other kind of surprise, maybe they're not asking about that, but the kind of surprise is just how slow big companies are to innovate and to move into different spaces. And I think that is a misconception that we have to fight a lot too. It's like, oh, why won't, you know,
00:27:12
Speaker
XYZ large OEM just do this, you know, if you guys do it. And they may, but it'll take them five years, you know, after we were successful. So it's, it's like, they don't move quickly. And we've talked to a few of them. They're like, Oh, we really like what you're doing. We're going to think about that in 2028. Um, you know, and this is like, these are, this is like a quote from a, from an automaker who was, thought that was fast. You know, even Tesla now is a big OEM, right? Like they, they put out one new vehicle in the last.
00:27:42
Speaker
number of years and they're struggling. So fast forward. You've got vehicles out on the road. What's the plan or what's the hope for service centers or deliveries and, and following those lines. Yeah. So we're going to scale kind of from ground zero upwards because we're going to, we're not going to start right at 50,000 vehicles, a hundred thousand vehicles on the road. We're going to start with our first 500 and our first.
00:28:06
Speaker
5,000, then 10,000 and scale from there each year. So alongside that, we'll be implementing service centers at third party service centers currently. So we'll be standing them up with the capability to service our vehicle. We built our vehicle in a way that can be easily serviceable, which is kind of unique to the way that we're actually approaching our vehicle. And a lot of it has to do with the design of our vehicle that lets it be serviceable in such a way. Putting the axles more closely to the edge of the vehicle, make actually accessing the components that need to service the axles significantly easier.
00:28:35
Speaker
Decisions like where does that what do you put your steering rack in front or behind your front axle? Those type of decisions make a huge difference in how easily you can service your vehicle a lot of things we hear from and we talked to these service centers these third-party service centers even the ones that did the first-ever services for Tesla and Rivian and they give us these hints around like
00:28:54
Speaker
Here's what you should do there, because when you get into a crash and this thing breaks, it has a risk of puncturing your battery box if it's in this location, but doesn't have a risk of puncturing your battery box if it's in this location. And that type of information is extremely important to actually being serviceable. Yeah, we definitely want to leverage as much as we can existing infrastructure, both for deliveries and services. And there's a lot more that exists now in both those realms.
00:29:22
Speaker
Jason, you hit on a little bit earlier about fleet companies reaching out, but what's the market there? Yeah. Funny enough, if you look at all the pickup trucks and trucks registered in cities, it's about 60% of them are actually registered to fleet companies. It's a bigger market actually than the consumer space right now at least in cities. One of the reasons is that there's a lot of people that do work in cities. There's construction, there's waste management, different examples of different people that do that. There are
00:29:53
Speaker
electricians, plumbers, everybody under the sun that does work, does real work in cities. They have trucks and they have vans and they use them daily. We hear a lot of stories around people that, for example, I spoke to somebody that does construction contracting in downtown San Francisco. They told me the story around, I have to park a mile away from my construction site in downtown San Francisco. I have to walk
00:30:20
Speaker
that 20-minute walk with my 50-pound bag of tools to my construction site. If I'm going to go to lunch in my vehicle, I have to leave my tools to the site because I can't haul it back and forth. My tools get stolen occasionally when I leave it on site. It adds an additional hour to my day and a lot of stress to my day not being able to go find a parking spot near my house, near where I'm working.
00:30:42
Speaker
We have other examples and without using specific names, we have companies that are actually require pickup trucks to do things like pull garbage bins out of underground parking lots or pull them out of narrow alleyways to bring them to the streets with the big garbage trucks to go pick them up. And they have this problem that they have to have a vehicle that can actually attach a lift on them, pick up 2000 pounds of garbage bin and carry it up to the street up an inclined slope. So it's a fairly substantial utility vehicle necessary to do this.
00:31:11
Speaker
But the ones that exist today are so big that they actually can't make the turn into the driveway. They can't make the turn into the alleyway. So they actually can't use these trucks that they're trying to use to actually do their jobs. And I went and visited a couple of these companies after we launched because they reached out to us. And you just see these vehicles have damage on them because they've been trying to navigate these narrow and tight alleyways, but they can't actually do their jobs they need to do.
00:31:38
Speaker
And there's a ton of stories I can give you around people that have had these problems around they need a utility vehicle. Vehicle can carry a lot of weight that can do the job it needs to do. But it needs to be able to actually fit in the city. So there's a lot of people that have actually bought, they look like golf carts with pickup truck beds in the back because they're small enough to do the job they need, but they can't actually carry enough things. They can't go freeway speeds.
Conclusion and Founders' Contributions
00:32:03
Speaker
These are problems that can't be solved by today's existing large pickup trucks.
00:32:09
Speaker
And by large, what we found is that people who have businesses, you know, they don't care at all about the kind of brand of, you know, this kind of masculinity theater that big trucks can kind of wrap themselves around. What they care about is getting the job done.
00:32:26
Speaker
And they're looking at the dollars and the cents and what it can do. And they really reached out to us stronger than we expected after our launch. Jason, for us, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you. What you're working on is fascinating. And I thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. Yeah, thank you so much. Thanks for having us. It's our pleasure.
00:32:45
Speaker
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