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TELO E-Truck: Redefining Design Norms For Urban EVs
68 Plays1 year ago
Meet Forrest North, TELO's CTO, and Jason Marks, the CEO, the inventive minds revolutionizing the electric pickup landscape. Their company, TELO, is all about defying the norm, especially when it comes to size.
They're introducing the MT1, a compact electric pickup that challenges the enormity of traditional trucks. The MT1 has a game-changing design, skipping the engine bay for a compact cab-over structure. Incredibly, it fits a four-door cabin and a five-foot truck bed into a Mini hardtop's length, making even the Ford Maverick look oversized.
What's fascinating is that this compact wonder seats five comfortably. But that's not all—TELO offers an add-on that expands the seating capacity to eight. It's a whole new level of thinking when it comes to electric pickups.
In this podcast episode, we're about to uncover the exciting story behind this innovation with Forrest and Jason.
🕑 KEY MOMENTS
==================
➜ [01:14] Introducting TELO
➜ [04:17] Truck Size Evolution
➜ [07:11] Electrification Trend and TELO's Stand
➜ [10:11] TELO's Sustainability Impact
➜ [16:02] Marketing TELO Effectively
➜ [17:12] TELO's Design Philosophy
➜ [23:04] Making TELO Accessible
➜ [26:00] EV Market Trends and TELO's Role
➜ [34:03] Emerging EV Trends and TELO's Adaptation
📚 RESOURCES & LINKS
========================
- Website: https://telotrucks.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/telo...
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/telotrucks/
- Discord: https://discord.com/invite/MQJ8CpKRJn
👉 Interview with Forrest North & Jason Marks: https://www.npws.net/podcast/urban-ev-trucks
🌍 SUSTAINABILITY PODCAST CREATED BY NEW PERSPECTIVE
========================
This podcast is proudly sponsored by New Perspective Marketing, a dynamic growth marketing agency in Boston, MA, celebrating 20 years in business. We help sustainably focused B2B organizations grow their brands and scale up revenue. If you or your organization is looking to grow, visit npws.com for more info.
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#electrictruck #electricvehicle #cleanenergy #evs #electriccar
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Transcript
Introduction to Green New Perspective Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi, you're watching or listening, depending on the streaming platform of your preference, The Green New Perspective, a podcast where we talk about innovations happening within clean tech, nature tech, agri-tech, biotech space. This episode is proudly sponsored by New Perspective, a Boston-based marketing agency working with clean tech clients. So if you want to learn more about our sponsor, please check out the info in the description of this episode.
Focus on Tello's Electric Truck Innovations
00:00:25
Speaker
So, what are we focusing on today? We are redefining electric trucks with Forest North and Jason Marks, the CTO and CEO of Tello. Tello is a company that's breaking the mold, introducing a compact electric pickup
00:00:40
Speaker
challenging traditional truck sizes. It's a game changer, it's fitting a four-door cabin and five-foot truck bed into a mini hardtop's length, shaking up the standard. So join us as we talk about the secrets behind these groundbreaking innovations and get ready to get a whole new perspective on electric pickups.
Creation and Challenges of Tello's Truck
00:01:10
Speaker
Hi Jason, hi Forrest. It's really lovely having you here on the Green New Perspective podcast. So let's talk about Tello's brand story. What motivated the inception of Tello and what market opportunities did you identify that led to its creation? It all kind of started from us having a big problem around commuting in dense urban areas. I live in downtown San Francisco. I have a 150 pound dog that I take to the beach every weekend.
00:01:37
Speaker
and there's no way he's going to the back of my sedan or even my SUV because he gets disgustingly sandy. So having a truck is kind of a requirement for me.
00:01:45
Speaker
Having a truck, I could throw them in the back with a cover on the top and I can go snowboarding or mountain biking. It was just such a useful thing for me as a consumer that lives in a downtown area, but I couldn't ever really navigate the city. It was stressful to drive downtown. It was stressful to find parking and it was just impossible to actually use my vehicle for actually enjoying the city I live in. So there exists this big fundamental problem with
00:02:11
Speaker
commuting in downtown areas and we set out to try to find the way to solve it. This wasn't our first guess at it. We started by actually thinking about the small micro mobility and two wheel transport between scooters and motorcycles and worked on those projects for a while.
Urban Commuting Solutions with Tello
00:02:30
Speaker
It's actually where we got to know each other pretty well.
00:02:32
Speaker
We were working on a scooter project. I was working on a motorcycle project. We ended up working on the motorcycle project together for many years. And then we realized that that wasn't a good marketplace, a good way to actually change the game and change the way that we actually commute. And there existed this huge problem around trucks in cities that was fundamentally causing the pain that I was feeling.
00:02:55
Speaker
So when we actually went out and did a market survey of around 200 people in LA and San Francisco around different types of modes of transportation, we gave them opportunities to look at like small cars, low speed vehicles, vans, sedans, hatchbacks, motorcycles, everything. We offered an opportunity to look at a small truck and almost everybody, 89% of the people we surveyed said the most useful thing that they could have in a downtown area would be a small
00:03:22
Speaker
truck. And so we've decided that that was the best way to pivot our direction. I have to say I'm surprised because there's a perception that Americans like big trucks. Yes, there definitely is. And we'll get into that. My interest has always been in getting off of fossil fuels since I was a kid. So I built a radio controlled
00:03:46
Speaker
electric solar car when I was in high school. Then I did that when I was at Stanford, did the Stanford Solar Car Project. That turned into Tesla. That turned into my first motorcycle startup. So I've been working in EVs my whole life and trucks since 2010 have just been getting bigger and bigger. And it really felt like we were going the wrong direction to electrify these enormous trucks. And so it was really struck a chord with me when we made this switch.
00:04:17
Speaker
I also have been a truck owner of large trucks and small trucks. And so really like the idea of a high capacity, high utility, small truck that you can maneuver, not just in the city, but also I grew up in the country and there's a lot of small roads getting in between trees. Like big trucks are actually not that useful in a lot of outdoor situations.
00:04:43
Speaker
Can you tell me where do you see the Telos stands in the EV truck market?
Truck Size Evolution and Regulations
00:04:50
Speaker
The truck market in general is a really interesting and really bizarre story. I'll actually take you all the way back to the 1970s.
00:05:00
Speaker
where we had a gas crisis in the US. And so the Environmental Protection Agency created a series of laws that they gave to automakers that said, hey, you need to save fuel. You'd have more fuel economic cars. But they only applied it to passenger cars and they exempted trucks.
00:05:19
Speaker
Since the 1970s, a lot of automakers started moving their vehicles to trucks, SUVs, crossovers and calling them trucks so they could skirt the EPA's rules around a fuel economy. The EPA wizened up in 2010 and said, hey, we're not going to let you guys just call everything trucks and get away with this anymore. We're going to give you rules for trucks.
00:05:42
Speaker
We're gonna give you fuel economy standards. So that means how many miles you can drive per gallon of fuel you consume. We're gonna give you these standards. But what they did is they based it on the size of the vehicle. They based it on the length and width, the footprint of the vehicle. And what they did is they said, the bigger you build your car, the bigger you build your truck, sorry, the worst fuel economy you're allowed to have.
00:06:07
Speaker
So what that means is that they tried to say, Hey, if we're building a semi truck, then you can, then that's, then you can have really bad fuel economy because you're doing a big job. Maybe it requires a lot of fuel, but if you're building a small truck, you have to be more fuel efficient.
00:06:24
Speaker
But in reality, what the automakers were able to do is say, hey, I'm not able to actually build my vehicle this fuel efficient. So I'm just going to build it slightly bigger because that makes it easier to hit these requirements. So every year, the automakers started looking at the projections of what those fuel economy standards were, and they made their cars bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. So now every single truck that's made by the US automotive industry and many in Japan and other places all reside at the biggest point they can be at.
00:06:53
Speaker
where that line for fuel economy flattens out, they all sit there. So to your question, it left this massive market of small trucks untouched because all the automakers were forced to move larger. Now it's really interesting in terms of the electric pickup truck market.
Fleet Interest in Tello Trucks
00:07:11
Speaker
is that electric pickup truck makers started building their trucks as an electric version of those big trucks the automakers are making. So they were not beholden to the fuel economy standards that the other automakers were beholden to.
00:07:27
Speaker
But they chose to go compete against them in the same size and footprint of truck. So they now exist on that far edge of the size. They're the big trucks, even electric, they're big and left this huge gap in the market that they could have filled because they're electric, but they didn't. And that's where we live. We live in that small, ultra compact, but high performance truck space.
00:07:51
Speaker
And one of the interesting things after we launched in June is, and I think that speaks to this market, is that we launched to consumers to show there was demand. We were really surprised by the response we got. It was great. But another surprise was that in the week after we launched, fleet companies called us because they said they couldn't buy trucks now that were small enough to do the things they need to do. So it's like, there's this kind of weird,
00:08:18
Speaker
culture of like these big work trucks are for work, but they're really not. They're kind of just big puffy trucks that don't do much more than a much smaller truck did in the past. And so companies that actually do work are looking for vehicles that fit.
00:08:36
Speaker
Yeah, and without using the names of the companies, just the examples they gave us were pretty astounding. Like people that have to go downtown and pick up a garbage bin out of an underground parking lot in a condo and bring it to the city. It requires a truck that can lift a 2,000 pound garbage bin, but if it's too big, you actually can't make the turns in the underground parking lot. So you're out of luck. It's too big to do. So you need both a small compact vehicle and also one that's got a high capability to lift.
00:09:04
Speaker
You've also got vehicles that are clearing trees in downtown areas. They are cleaning up the roadways. They need to be able to go on the highway to navigate the city. So a small golf cart-like vehicle won't do it. But they need to be small enough to fit in the alleyways that they're driving through. And there's just so many examples of if you have a smaller truck with the same capabilities as a full-size truck, you can do your job better. One person that really resonates with me is I was speaking to a contractor that works in downtown San Francisco.
00:09:33
Speaker
And he was telling me that he has to go park a mile away from his job site every day. And he has to walk his 50 pound bag of tools to the job site, a mile.
00:09:44
Speaker
When he goes out to lunch, he has to leave his tools there because he can't bring them back to his car and lock them up. When he comes back from lunch, people will take his tools, they'll be gone. So he's spending an extra hour of his time just walking to and from his car, and he's losing his tools every single time he does it. So he's just in this really stressful situation that if he could just park next to his job site, he would be fine.
Environmental Impact of Large vs. Small Electric Trucks
00:10:05
Speaker
But one thing I really want to point out is that because I know this is very much a sustainability conversation, these problems are problems that exist for the consumer and for the fleet vehicles, but that has so many downstream climate negative effects.
00:10:21
Speaker
Right. So one of the big things is if you electrify just that big truck, the big truck that exists, you're effectively just adding two to 3000 pounds of batteries to a big truck. And that has so many negative consequences because it adds to rolling resistance. It adds to because the batteries are tall. It actually
00:10:40
Speaker
requires you to take up more space in the car. So now it adds to wind resistance and it's so much energy now required to move that vehicle. So in order to get a 350 mile range vehicle, you have to have a 200 kilowatt hour battery pack and a vehicle that weighs 8,000 pounds. So you're tearing up roadways.
00:10:59
Speaker
You're extremely dangerous for pedestrians if they get hit that they're done for. You have issues with tire particulates because these vehicles are so big going into roadways. Then the crazy thing is that if on average, the grid isn't completely clean right now. If you look at on average, the carbon emissions burned per mile driven of a big electric truck,
00:11:24
Speaker
is about the same as the carbon emissions of a small gas vehicle. So there's not much of a difference there. And what is amazing about your truck is also the price because, well, we are used to, like you said, big EVs like, let's say, Rivian R1T, which is 70K plus.
00:11:47
Speaker
So how did you manage to keep the low price?
Tello's Efficient Design and Performance
00:11:50
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, part of the beauty of creating a high performance but compact vehicle is that it requires a little fewer materials and a little less powerful of current draws and motors to actually get the same performance you would get with another bigger vehicle. So we have a smaller battery pack.
00:12:09
Speaker
And that smaller battery pack still gives us 350 miles of range. It's still 106 kilowatt hours, but it's not 200 kilowatt hours, which means that we have almost half the amount of raw materials in the battery alone. And that means that the vehicle's lighter. When the vehicle's lighter, you need less structural material in the vehicle to carry just as much. Our vehicle's shell itself is a smaller footprint.
00:12:33
Speaker
less aluminum material on the exterior of the vehicle. All of these things add up without actually compromising the experience of the driver. And we're also not going for a lot of luxury items. We're going for fit for purpose, which is where our name comes from. We really want a vehicle that can do a lot, but can still be accessible to a lot of people.
00:12:59
Speaker
But can we talk about your ideal customer? Because you mentioned that you wanted to be a utility car, but you also would like people to use it for like you mentioned, to go to the beach, to go to the forest, to go hiking, biking, whatever. So what would actually be your perfect customer, your target audience? About 60% of the market is commercial and 40% is consumer. So it's about that split, but we're not going...
00:13:28
Speaker
In past experience, it's hard to go directly to fleets without having a consumer product. And you see this in vehicles as well. So consumers help build the buzz, they help build the brands, and they help fleet companies believe you're going to exist, right? Because you're out there. Fleet companies have a longer sales cycle, and it can be a little bit hard sometimes to launch a startup directly towards fleets.
00:13:57
Speaker
And so for our ideal customers, for ideal fleet customers, we're talking about people that currently drive pickup trucks and vans in downtown areas, people that are working in construction areas and plumbing and electricians, everything that does work in downtown cities in LA, San Francisco, Seattle, you name it, like big downtown metropolitan areas that have this challenge of being able to
00:14:22
Speaker
park their vehicle in a downtown area. For consumers, we actually have a pretty good understanding of where our pre-orders come from and who our demographics are based on the conversations that we have in our Discord channel, which is a highly active Discord channel.
Target Customers for Tello
00:14:37
Speaker
We have a good understanding of who our consumers are.
00:14:39
Speaker
For the most part, they do live in downtown areas. There are plenty of exceptions. Don't get me wrong. Any of you Discord listeners are listening to this one. I recognize that not everybody is from downtown. We have a lot of downtown livers that love mountain biking. They love surfing. We have a ton of surfers.
00:14:55
Speaker
Ever since Kelly Slater placed pre-order, we've been just getting tons and tons of surfers coming our way. We have a lot of mountain bikers. We have a lot of people that have small children, so a lot of people ask about being able to fit car seats in our vehicle. But really, it's all like we have a lot of active lifestyle metropolitan people.
00:15:13
Speaker
Do you feel there's a shift there in the mindset from buying big, heavy? We don't think from the consumer side, we're going to get a lot of people that currently drive an F-350 to move over to our vehicle. We're going to get that, which is okay. The truth is,
00:15:31
Speaker
In the not too distant future, about 70% of Americans are going to live in downtown metropolitan areas. So it's the biggest market. And it's a good way to really influence that market because we really want to make the biggest dent in our carbon emissions. It's going to be through the biggest market. So we think that people that are buying crossovers, like vehicles that are capable of doing some level of off-roading that are either considered crossovers or SUVs, that's really our target demographic.
00:15:59
Speaker
I have to say when we were planning to do a podcast with Alo, we had a conversation in our agency and I'm in Europe and most of my colleagues are in Boston and they were so skeptical. Like, who is going to drive a small truck? And I was like, it's perfect for you.
00:16:18
Speaker
It's perfect for Europe. Yeah, we're driving small cars. We have small street pieces. This is perfect. Perfect solution. And you don't have many options with smaller trucks, actually. So like you said, they're usually made to be big, big horsepower, everything large. So yeah, I really like this idea. I personally do. Yeah. I appreciate it. We have a lot of European interests, actually. We haven't announced our European launch, but it really doesn't exist like a pickup truck for Europe, is what we found out.
00:16:47
Speaker
There's been some people that have hinted maybe they would do that in the past, but no one's actually released that pickup truck. So we're talking to actually governments and municipalities in Europe right now and trying to understand, does it make sense for us to maybe have a branch office over there and work towards delivering a vehicle for Europe?
00:17:06
Speaker
One other thing I wanted to talk about with you is about design, because you have a quite famous head of design, Yves Bérard, so can you tell me about the design philosophy and principles that guide you to develop Teletruck as it is? And the brand, the brand looks great.
00:17:21
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, really, Eve would be the best to talk about that. He's got an amazing team, and he's really taken on all of the design side. So the exterior, the website, the branding, all of that. So one thing that did drive us towards Eve is I've worked with Eve before. We launched a motorcycle project back in 2009 at TED. And so I worked with him, and I knew what he could do.
00:17:50
Speaker
love his modern and simple modern approach. And that's really, we wanted that in the truck. So, you know, we, so that was, he was just the perfect fit for that. Um, there's a bunch of benefits. Like one, there isn't, isn't really kind of a clean modern looking truck, I believe, um, that has that kind of modern aesthetic. Um, so, you know, we see a lot of like weird wrinkles and, um, kind of like badging.
00:18:19
Speaker
on the kind of trucks that are out there now that I personally don't think fit in the kind of urban environment as well. Also, there's some interesting things around like really clean lines in simple form make tooling and prototyping and things easier. So it's actually a good path to go for this truck. So it really fit in a bunch of different ways. Just to reiterate what Forest is saying there in a different way.
00:18:45
Speaker
There's been a trend in automotive design right now to move to a very sharp angular thing. It's like the current trend in design of that real sharp angular. They call it tension. It's like you're pulling a sheet over something, and it creates tension. It creates a crease. And that's the current status of a lot of vehicle design right now. Almost every vehicle you see on the road has an abundance of these creases in there. And while that may give you an aggressive look in some ways, I can see how you can make that argument.
00:19:12
Speaker
It also actually makes it more costly to build the vehicle because every crease you have creates a really hard way to actually implement that in tooling. So it requires like a concave curve and has to peak and come out. That is actually a fairly expensive way to do it. So not only are we looking at a modern aesthetic, a more sculptural design.
00:19:31
Speaker
breaking away from a lot of the automotive kind of trends of this aggressive creasiness. But we're also looking at ways in which we can actually save costs in the actual tooling of our vehicle where it makes it so we don't have problems like large panel gaps because of the ease of tooling in the vehicle.
00:19:49
Speaker
And one other thing that I think Eve is really excellent at is he spends his whole life in design. So when he's looking at design, it's in the future. And that's exactly what you need in a vehicle program because the cycle is fairly long to go from concept to being out on the street. So your design can't be what someone would love today. It's got to be what they're going to love three years from now.
00:20:16
Speaker
And he's great at that, and I've experienced that in the past. His design with the motorcycle, it was polarizing. There were motorcyclists that hated it. There were motorcyclists that loved it. I think when you look back at it, it looks beautiful. I still get lots of compliments on it. And I've seen that with his other products as well. So a great designer will really look. Is living in the future?
00:20:38
Speaker
Yeah, that's true. That's true. I mean, he's quite famous for that. So where do you feel your main competitors in the EV truck market are?
Tello's Unique Market Position
00:20:50
Speaker
And if you feel like you have them, because from this conversation now, I feel like you're unique, quite unique. Yeah.
00:21:01
Speaker
I think that you're going to differentiate your brand. Yeah. Well, fundamentally, if you look at how we kind of tell people about our vehicle, the first thing we tell them is it's a crew cab pickup truck with the range of a Tesla.
00:21:14
Speaker
in the footprint of a two-door Mini Cooper. And they go, what? A two-door Mini Cooper? That's crazy. But we think about it. There doesn't really exist a vehicle that kind of fits all those capabilities. It's only really been possible by electrifying the powertrain, by using the state-of-the-art and safety and materials technology. It's only really been possible now to do this vehicle even. So that's why it doesn't really exist in the marketplace. There are people that are kind of moving and taking baby steps in the direction that we've taken.
00:21:43
Speaker
And we feel that there are people that are dipping their toe in the water, but we're taking a full-on cannonball into the water. So we realize that you have to swing big to make the biggest impact. And for that reason, we don't think there's a ton of people that are really competing with us directly. We think there's people that look at our vehicle and they would compare it against other vehicles in the marketplace. They would say,
00:22:06
Speaker
Well, if I want a truck with the same utility, am I willing to trade off an extra six feet of length? That doesn't sound like it's useful to me. Or if I want a vehicle in this footprint, am I willing to take a third the range of doing that?
00:22:23
Speaker
which is really the only other vehicle that exists in this footprint, have a third of the range. So for that reason, we're really trying to be a market leader in this space, but we do think our consumers and our fleet customers will be looking at other vehicles to solve the same need. And that's why we want to come out as very clearly using our size as an advantage. It's not like
00:22:43
Speaker
We're like a low-cost, slow, lethargic vehicle. We're 500 horsepower, 060 in four seconds, five seats comfortably. A 4x8 sheet of plywood can fit in with the midgate down. We've got all the things that you really want, the bells and whistles you want in a high utility truck, and the fact that it's small is a selling point.
00:23:02
Speaker
It's like, yes, now it's small too. I can use it. And we've had like, you know, I wouldn't necessarily advertise this out too much, but we've had a lot of our consumer or like pre-order, um, consumers just show up to our office sometimes and we're like, um, uh, okay, let me show you around real quick. I don't, I won't encourage people that listen to this to go do that for us, but they do show up. We do have usually a very good short conversation with them. They tell us, here's why I love the truck. Here's why I'm so interested in it. Here's how I'm going to use it.
00:23:28
Speaker
And so we hear from them about the fact that it's small is the selling point. Yeah, you tell them, join our Discord group. Yes, exactly what you tell them. It's great to meet them, too.
00:23:39
Speaker
Well, listener joined the discussion. So since we're in marketing agency, I have to ask you some of the marketing questions. So can you tell me what strategy did you use to promote the product and what channels have been most effective?
00:23:58
Speaker
in reaching those customers that we mentioned. Yves has so much influence and sway in the space and around the minds and hearts of people. So his just presence and his involvement and his general excitement about what we're doing has been a huge marketing push for us because he has social reach, he has regular PR reach, he has that reach in general. I will say that we launched our vehicle in June relatively like
00:24:27
Speaker
leanly, I would say. I wouldn't say cheaply, I would just leanly. We had a great PR agency in Deris who you've met. But we really, between Eve's team and Deris, we did not necessarily swing for the walls when it came to a marketing push, but we're just so much organic interest. If you look at our Google Analytics,
00:24:47
Speaker
A lot of what people came about were organic interest or clicks from news articles that came out and then growth from there. So it's actually really interesting to look at. If you get super excited about a product, you want to tell all your friends. So it's so funny if you look at our pre-order list, you'll see one person purchase from some obscure town in Rhode Island and then 10 other people purchase from that same town in Rhode Island. So you can see the trend of somebody just be like, oh, I'm so excited about that. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. All my friends now know it too.
00:25:18
Speaker
And that starts with us being excited about it, right? So we're making a product that we want. Like we are waiting for this product. We're making it. Our customers have that same kind of passion. Yeah.
00:25:32
Speaker
All in all, our customer acquisition cost is relatively low, like extremely low, less than a tenth that of an other automotive company. And that's simply because there's just so much excitement and it's so organic what people do here because it doesn't exist in the market. It's not just another truck that I have to go compare. I don't have to create an Excel sheet with all of the different trucks lined up and compare the specifications. It's very clear what we're doing and it's very different. And how do you plan to make it accessible to customers in the USA?
00:26:00
Speaker
First, it comes from getting a price point that's reasonable for the performance you get in our vehicle. I think that's really important. We did a lot of market research on that price point and what that price point would be for a vehicle like we're trying to deliver. I think that we nailed that price point. It's not a slow, low-speed vehicle. It is a performance vehicle, but still at an accessible price point.
00:26:22
Speaker
And so you get all the value you would get in a big electric truck or in a big truck at the same cost point as the market leaders in the regular truck space. So that was really important to us, as well as really targeting the demographic of people that we think would benefit the most from our vehicle. Showing our vehicle in dense urban areas, getting people excited like, oh, that looks just like my neighborhood. I can envision my vehicle being parked in that same location in my neighborhood. That's the kind of area that we really want people to get excited about.
00:26:52
Speaker
And when we talk about EV trends, EV truck markets in, well, we mentioned here, Europe and America. So let's talk about, well, Europe and America. What trends have you observed and how does TEL align with these trends?
EV Market Trends and Tello's Future Vision
00:27:07
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of trends that we're seeing in the world of EVs. I'll start at the very high level, please, right, please.
00:27:15
Speaker
One, we see a lot of people that are really hyper focused on price. So we see a lot of people that are talking about a price war to happen between a lot of different companies. We see a lot of excitement around the low cost version of EVs coming out of other areas of the world. So there is a lot of people that are talking about that.
00:27:33
Speaker
And I think the reason they're talking about that is because they've commoditized a lot of the EV space now. It's like, what's really the difference between this EV sedan and this EV sedan, or this EV crossover and this EV crossover? You get that same problem where you have to create the Excel sheet and compare all the specs individually, because there aren't people that are super excited around it as something that is different and uniquely solving their problem. Did you want to? Yeah, I think there's several other trends that we could talk about.
00:28:04
Speaker
You know, one trend is on charging.
00:28:08
Speaker
It's been a great trend to see other automakers shift over to the Tesla standard, which is the NACS. I mean, my last company before, the scooter company actually, so two companies ago was PlugShare, and it's an app for finding electric vehicle charging stations. And through that, we got all the data from basically the charging world. And I can tell you that Tesla is the only network that's essentially fulfilling, I would say, the needs of people to have a reliable network.
00:28:36
Speaker
There's nothing else out there that you can rely on from a whole network standpoint. And so that's just critical for EVs to take hold with more than the early adopters. And I do want to talk about a great trend. And so we are going to be native for that standard, which other companies will be as well. But I think that's a great trend for the whole market.
00:29:02
Speaker
The trend that I want to talk about though is something that's actually probably kind of worked as a disadvantage for a while and now is kind of like an advantage. We saw a bunch of EV companies spring up in the last 20 years.
00:29:16
Speaker
We saw a ton of different companies, some of which have met astronomical success like Tesla, some of which have not, and some of which have failed. They've been in the news a lot lately. And we see that a lot of people got super excited around the success that came from Tesla and tried to replicate it, but they made a lot of mistakes along the way. And the biggest mistake they made was trying to get to high volume
00:29:41
Speaker
high volume sales to get to profitability, so 100,000 plus units per year and making decisions as if they could do that, as if that money were free. So spending a billion dollars trying to become a major automaker without actually even delivering vehicles, going through crash safety, testing the market to see if it's even there. So all that happened
00:30:03
Speaker
and companies just failed to deliver on a lot of different areas. And it's led to this downward trend in people's minds of like, oh, we need a startup that's really hard to do. It's never going to come to market. But the reality is the things that have happened over the last 20 years have kind of crafted what's been possible in the last two years.
00:30:20
Speaker
So one thing that happened over the last 20 years is companies had to build their own drivetrain components. They had to build motors and inverters and BMS and they had to build all these different expensive components of the vehicle. And now it's gotten to a point where the tier one suppliers to automakers have figured it out. They've commoditized a lot of those components and we can now buy them off the shelf.
00:30:39
Speaker
for inexpensively per unit cost, which is crazy to me because that's a part of a company that had to spend $100 million to develop this product, and now I can go buy it for $1,000 off the shelf. So it's a big trend. On top of that, there's been probably two other things that are really unique. One is that we're seeing a big growth of contract manufacturing in vehicles across the world, but particularly in the US, we're now winding up and realizing that we have to actually compete in that space.
00:31:07
Speaker
not just the big names of contract manufacturing in the world, but even smaller shops that can build vehicles at 100 to 5,000 units per year, and they can do so profitably and share that amongst a bunch of other companies. So there exist companies in California, Detroit, and actually all over the US that can actually build 5,000 vehicles per year for an automaker
00:31:29
Speaker
by amortizing their cost of their tools and everything over time and all the things associated with that, which is like really unique because that's typically been the valley of death of startups is to go between a hundred press vehicles and get to profitability. Like if you can do that early at 5,000 vehicles, that's amazing. Then you can scale and get to profitability at 50,000 vehicles if you've done that. And the last big thing is really how software plays the role in vehicle development and vehicle testing.
00:31:57
Speaker
So I worked as an automotive supplier for vehicles. I did a lot of safety systems, autonomous driving, driver assistance features over the last 10, 12 years. In fact, I worked on some of the very first radar and LiDAR chipsets that went into ADAS and autonomy. There's been a big shift in having to build hundreds of prototypes, having to build breadboards of vehicles, doing all the design manually to how we use software to develop and test vehicles now.
00:32:25
Speaker
So there's a big trend in the automotive industry called a hundred percent virtual validation, which is really a process of saying that I can develop my vehicle entirely in software and I can test it entirely in software so that by the time I build a prototype vehicle, all I'm doing is checking that my software tests were correct, which means that I don't have to build tens or hundreds of vehicles. I can build five. I mean, Kona's egg is kind of famous for this. They built, they crashed one vehicle.
00:32:51
Speaker
to get European and US regulatory crash safety. Just one. That's amazing. Like everything else is done. Yeah, it speeds up the process so much. I wanted to ask you, do you feel like there's challenges when you're communicating these innovations towards the market? You're practically launching some innovative technologies, some unique opportunities for drivers in the USA. So do you feel like
00:33:21
Speaker
there are challenges there when you're trying to present them to the mass market. Yeah, I think that there's a lot of preconceived notions around how the automotive market works. The reason that we're able to do all this is because we have major innovations in safety and battery technology. That's the two core elements of our technological innovations. A lot of people get excited about those and go,
00:33:43
Speaker
Isn't that your core business? You're these two innovations, and we say, well, these two innovations don't exist alone. If you add these two innovations together, you can create a completely different market of vehicles, and then you've got the ability to actually make the biggest dent in climate change. We're talking about, just because we made the most volumetrically space-efficient battery pack,
00:34:04
Speaker
If a vehicle is 10,000 pounds and 30 feet long, it's not going to matter to them. But the minute you try to say, let me create a performance vehicle that's less than 13 feet long, now they're like, okay, well, how do you possibly do that? Well, that's where the battery technology really stands out. It's things like that. So that's the first big notion we get is like,
00:34:25
Speaker
It's kind of why we built this buck and launched it, actually, was because people just didn't believe it. Yeah, yeah, that's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. When I was doing a little research, I saw the articles mentioning it sounds too good to be true. And they still don't. One of our engineers has a Miata, and it's longer than our vehicle, and it's often out in the parking lot, and we'll talk to investors and people about it, and they're like, no, no, no, no, and we'll actually have to measure it, go out in the parking lot and measure it. And they're like, oh my gosh.
00:34:54
Speaker
Oh, we have a seating buck that you might've seen in the Motor Trend article. The Motor Trend editor was 610, and we had a couple other people that were in their six foots. They sat behind him, and they sat in our seating buck, and they're just like, I can't believe we fit. That doesn't make any sense. How is that possible?
00:35:12
Speaker
Yeah. One of the ways we communicated, I mean, it's a good question that you asked is we built actual scale models, you know, cars so that you could actually see these are one 24th models. And we have a little mini Cooper, we have our vehicle, you know, the exact same length, and we've got a Ford and a Tesla. And so just, you know, people like to have something to touch. It's so because it's such a hard thing to communicate.
00:35:35
Speaker
So my last question for you is, where do you see the EV truck market, where it's headed, and what opportunities and challenges do you see for tele? I'm going to use four words here, so I'm going to see how well I do it. We see in 10 years that any vehicle you see with a long hood, a long nose will look dated. Absolutely. What use is that to them? If you have storage elsewhere in the vehicle, what use is a long
00:36:04
Speaker
frunk that's not actually serving any need. It's getting in the way of you actually navigating the roadways. We think that that's the vision. Every single F-150 you see right now in downtown San Francisco and downtown LA and downtown New York will be a tele. That's what we want to see happen. Because if you look at what we didn't say yet, which I really should have said in the beginning was,
00:36:26
Speaker
Light-duty trucks constitute such a major part of carbon emissions in the US. If you look at all the global, all the carbon emissions across all economic sectors, that means retail, transportation, and industry, agriculture, whatever, you look at, you aggregate everything. 10.5% of that is just light-duty trucks in the US.
00:36:50
Speaker
It's a wild amount of carbon emissions that light duty trucks produce. I mean, we're talking hundreds of megatons of carbon emissions on light duty trucks. And if we can have a vehicle that is the most efficient,
00:37:06
Speaker
version of the work of a light duty truck, we can make the biggest dent in climate change. We can see an 8% to 9% reduction in carbon emissions across the US. If you could snap your fingers and make one decision, just move all light duty trucks to telos, how many other things in the world exist that you can do something like that and now you've got a nearly double digit reduction in carbon emissions? That's the change you want to see. But where do you see the challenge?
00:37:32
Speaker
Well, it's always a challenge to bring a vehicle to market. That's certainly a challenge. We're an automotive company. Let's not kid ourselves. We think we can do this. We can bring a vehicle to market in the most capital efficient way that's ever been done before because of the innovations that have happened over the last 20 years and what we've learned from being in Detroit and Silicon Valley. We think that that's possible.
00:37:56
Speaker
But let's not kid ourselves. It's still a vehicle company. It still requires capital and it still is going to need people to get excited about it and need to prove that you've got to market and prove that people want this and that you can deliver. So we've got all that ahead of us right now. And that is still like, like any company, it's hard, but we're a vehicle company.
00:38:17
Speaker
Yeah. I think another, another challenge is just kind of on the marketing, which you were kind of getting to in that, you know, by cutting off the nose, when you're driving around, it actually feels so much more stress free. Like you, you feel more free. You can see in front of you when you come up to like, you're pulling into a street. You don't have to do that thing where you're like leaning your head way forward and you still have four feet of your car in front of you that if you.
00:38:40
Speaker
You scooch it out and you can't see the cars coming, they're going to run into you. It's hard to communicate the freedom you get when that is gone. It doesn't scale well to just have everyone have to drive something to feel that. Communicating the beauty and freedom of having a vehicle that isn't in your way all the time.
00:39:04
Speaker
I think is something that is a challenge we have on the marketing side. Yeah. I also think that we're doing things in safety that are super innovative and we're using some of the best automotive technology that's been developed in the automotive industry for the last 10 years. There is still some conceived notion that we have very small hood of our vehicle. You see it.
00:39:23
Speaker
We have about 18 inches of mechanical crumple in our vehicle. So it's still relatively small. And the things we do to actually make that an extremely safe vehicle, not only for occupants, but also for pedestrians. Pedestrian deaths are an all-time high on US roadways. Over 9,000 pedestrians died. We'll have died this year from being hit by vehicles. Three times more of them are hit by trucks than any other vehicle. It's wild, like what we've done. We want to make sure that it's very well communicated that if somebody has a family,
00:39:52
Speaker
and they're worried about their children's safety. When they're driving this vehicle, they have kids in the back, they want to make sure they're safe, that we are out of the gates showing how safe our vehicle is and convincing people that even though we don't have this long hood, that long hood is actually not saving your children. It's the other things that happen in that crash, the science of the crash that really save your children. Interesting.
00:40:13
Speaker
Yeah, I didn't know that. I have to say that these challenges are common within the clean tech, EV tech space. A lot of people that we've talked to within this podcast are telling me that communicating innovation is not a small issue, you know? But hey.
00:40:32
Speaker
I guess this podcast is there to help as well. Appreciate it. Thank you for this conversation. If you have something more to add, now is the time. I would like to tell us which channels can our listeners or viewers visit to support you, to get informed about Tello, to get in touch with you if they want to buy. It's on telotrucks.com.
00:40:57
Speaker
T-E-L-O trucks, and we've got a Discord channel that's a great way to engage as well. We'd love to hear from you. We have almost 1,000 active users on Discord right now. And any feedback you give us on Discord, we have a way of actually tagging it and tracking it, and it can go into our engineering channels. So if you want to see something on our interior, which hasn't been fully fleshed out yet, so if you have feedback on that, you say, hey, I really need this type of screen. I really need this type of pass-through for the leg, all that stuff.
00:41:26
Speaker
It actually goes into our engineering channels and becomes part of our product roadmap so that we can actually pull from that when we want people's feedback around what to do next in our vehicle platform, which is really cool because we have like a circular way of like, we then share can share pictures like, is this what you're talking about? Okay, cool. Let's do that. So I think that's a really cool way to interact with us and you actually get a chance to influence the direction we go with our company.
00:41:48
Speaker
Um, we do have an Instagram as well. We haven't posted a ton yet there because we're still kind of trickling out little hints and we want to keep a lot of those, that feedback on discord because it's where we really could interact with our potential user base. Um, and yeah, all of that is available on tele trucks.com.
00:42:13
Speaker
We've come to an end of yet another episode of the Green New Perspective podcast, and I hope that our podcast has become your go-to place to learn more about clean tech, agri-tech, nature tech, or biotech space. If you like this episode featuring Jason and Forrest from Tello, you can check the description of this episode and you can find all of their social media handles there, as well as the link to the Discord group they're mentioning during our talk.
00:42:40
Speaker
Of course, you can subscribe to our podcast and stay updated to all the innovations happening within clean tech scene. Also, you can leave us reviews, leave us comments. We really love to hear from you. This is the only way to upgrade our content, so really thank you for all the support we got from you so far. See you next time in the next episode with our amazing guests that are going to come to the Green New Perspective podcast. See you then. Bye.