MotorTrend's Ed Loh & Jonny Lieberman sit down with Founder & CEO of Range Energy
Category
🚗
MotorTranscript
00:00:00Hi there, and welcome to a very interesting episode of The Inevitable.
00:00:20Yes.
00:00:21This is Motor Trends Podcast, our vodcast about the future of the car, the future of
00:00:25transportation.
00:00:26Ed forgot to ring the bell.
00:00:27We don't have a sponsor this week.
00:00:29However, man, do we have a guest?
00:00:31We do have a guest.
00:00:32I'm not doing a read right now.
00:00:33We're not going to...
00:00:34We're going to skip the question.
00:00:35We're going to go straight to the guest, Ali Javanan of Range Energy and so much more.
00:00:41Tesla, Dynan, Zooks.
00:00:44Ground Control.
00:00:45Ground Control.
00:00:46Google.
00:00:47I guess I wrote about him in Sport Compact Car back in 2005 or 2006.
00:00:50We went 30 minutes over in what we're supposed to do, and we didn't even really get into
00:00:56it.
00:00:57We didn't really get into it.
00:00:58He's a...
00:00:59Range Energy.
00:01:00Range.Energy.
00:01:01It's all about the future of electric commercial long-haul trucking, Class 8 trucks.
00:01:07But before we get into that, we're going to talk all about him and where he came from
00:01:10and his awesome, amazing existence.
00:01:13So without further ado, let's talk to Ali.
00:01:16All right.
00:01:17All right.
00:01:18Ali Javanan from Range Energy.
00:01:21I've heard so much about you, mostly from this guy.
00:01:25Let's spend...
00:01:26Let me set the...
00:01:27Do you want to do the first part about how we got here?
00:01:29So Pebble Beach.
00:01:31So a lot of people wonder what goes on at Pebble Beach.
00:01:33Are you just talking about cars the entire time?
00:01:36The answer is yes, really.
00:01:38But so I'm having cigars at the fire pits at Spanish Bay, my favorite thing to do, and
00:01:43my buddy Matt Farah's there.
00:01:45And Matt's like, bro, you got to get this guy on your podcast.
00:01:49That's a good one.
00:01:51And I'm like, oh yeah, why?
00:01:53And Ali started talking.
00:01:55And I think I even texted you four whiskeys in from the fire pit, like, boom, boom, red
00:02:01alert, red alert.
00:02:02You got to get this guy.
00:02:03Cool story.
00:02:04That's flattering.
00:02:05Yeah.
00:02:07And ignored it.
00:02:08Here we are in December.
00:02:09Hey man.
00:02:10Just in time to book the hotel for car week next year.
00:02:11Exactly.
00:02:12So yeah.
00:02:13I've heard a lot.
00:02:14You got to check this guy out.
00:02:15Tesla, Zooks, I just heard, Google, Dynan.
00:02:21Dynan.
00:02:22Who was before Dynan?
00:02:24Toyota.
00:02:26Ground control.
00:02:27Ground control, suspension.
00:02:28Oh, mountain bikes?
00:02:29No.
00:02:30No, no.
00:02:31Oh, the other ground control.
00:02:32Ground control, suspension.
00:02:33Got it.
00:02:34Okay.
00:02:35Honda, BMW.
00:02:36Right, right, right, right.
00:02:37Sorry.
00:02:38I went to a dark place.
00:02:39Toyota EV.
00:02:40Yeah.
00:02:41The RAV4 EV.
00:02:42So where do we start?
00:02:43Ali Javedan of where?
00:02:44Grew up where?
00:02:45So I grew up, actually, just outside of Sacramento, California.
00:02:48West of there.
00:02:49Right.
00:02:50Auburn?
00:02:51Elk Grove?
00:02:52Folsom area.
00:02:53Folsom?
00:02:54Yeah.
00:02:55I grew up in a little town next to Folsom.
00:02:56Okay.
00:02:57All right.
00:02:58Been through it.
00:02:59I grew up in a family of immigrants.
00:03:00Okay.
00:03:01From where?
00:03:02From Iran.
00:03:03Okay.
00:03:04And my uncle, a few of my uncles, but specifically one of my uncles who had a son that was exactly
00:03:09my age, owned a mechanic shop.
00:03:11Okay.
00:03:12And I had just always been into Hot Wheels and all of this stuff, and growing up, I was
00:03:15just like, I want to be doing something with cars.
00:03:19Graduate high school, go into junior college, trying to figure out what I wanted to do.
00:03:23Got pushed into civil engineering because it's a good, steady job for an immigrant child,
00:03:28and then you can do whatever you want after you're done with your state job in the afternoon.
00:03:33Did that for several years.
00:03:34I basically came up to my civil engineering degree, took the state licensing test, and
00:03:39I was working on bridges at Caltrans, doing bridge retrofits and designing new bridges
00:03:44up in Northern California, mainly in the Sierra Mountains on the 80 and the 50 corridor.
00:03:49Beautiful work.
00:03:50It was incredible.
00:03:51That's awesome.
00:03:52I remember living on Donner Lake, fishing every single afternoon for rainbow trout.
00:03:56Oh yeah.
00:03:57It was spectacular.
00:03:58Gorgeous.
00:03:59Yeah.
00:04:00But I got, the funniest thing, I got a bit tired of doing roadway work, and it was really,
00:04:06honestly, I had seen two people die on the roads.
00:04:10I'm standing on the roadside, measuring concrete and looking at rebar and all this stuff, meanwhile
00:04:16trucks are driving by at 70 miles an hour.
00:04:19Caltrans, I've always heard, pays extremely well.
00:04:22Is that true?
00:04:23Extremely well for that type of work.
00:04:24I would say that the base salary is the same base salary that you would get pretty much
00:04:29anywhere.
00:04:30Okay.
00:04:31But what Caltrans did for me at that time was that they said, here's a strong daily
00:04:35stipend, here is your rental allowance.
00:04:38So I was able to live up there completely expense free.
00:04:42They gave me a car, all of that stuff.
00:04:44I was able to do everything I needed to do so that basically it kind of, that's where
00:04:50all my extra money came from back then.
00:04:52Okay.
00:04:53Gotcha.
00:04:54Gotcha.
00:04:55Gotcha.
00:04:56And so anyways, I did that for a long time and I had this crisis that I was like not
00:04:59going to be happy with my career at Caltrans.
00:05:01Quarter life?
00:05:02Quarter life crisis?
00:05:03Yeah.
00:05:04Let's say quarter life crisis.
00:05:05I went back to my faculty advisor at school.
00:05:07I studied at California State University, Sacramento.
00:05:11I went back to my advisor and his first comment was, hey Ali, you need to be making weapons
00:05:17not targets.
00:05:19And I was like, what do you mean?
00:05:20And he said, civil engineers make targets, mechanical engineers make weapons.
00:05:24Interesting.
00:05:25Go make, and you know, I'm like, I'm not like a war type of a person, but it kind of clicked
00:05:30for me.
00:05:31Sure.
00:05:32And for me at that moment, it was race cars.
00:05:35And I saw the school formula SAE program.
00:05:37And from that moment on, it was just race cars.
00:05:40So long story short, went back to school, took the last two years of school all over
00:05:44again now in the mechanical engineering domain, joined the formula SAE team.
00:05:49Within a year, I became the president of the student SAE club and ran the formula SAE team.
00:05:55We did really, really well.
00:05:57Out of college, then I got recruited by ground control.
00:06:01Real quick.
00:06:02What did your immigrant parents think of you giving up the good civil engineering job and
00:06:07going back to school to play with race cars?
00:06:09Um, it was still an engineering job and I still had my, my civil engineering license.
00:06:18And so my parents were just like, you got your fallback, you can sign off on drawings
00:06:23now.
00:06:24Worst case scenario, go back to your state job.
00:06:26You'll be okay.
00:06:27It always needs roads.
00:06:28Yeah.
00:06:29You're a, you're a, you're a, how old when you get out of mechanical engineering to your
00:06:33second degree?
00:06:34When I finished mechanical engineering, uh, it was 2004.
00:06:38I was almost, I was 29 years old.
00:06:40And before all of this, I actually wanted to be a photographer.
00:06:43I'd won a bunch of national awards for landscape photography out of high school.
00:06:47Well, it seems to love this year.
00:06:49And I had like an, I had a scholarship to Academy of Arts College in San Francisco to
00:06:53do, to start up their landscape photography program with them.
00:06:56Like all of this.
00:06:57But my dad was like, pause.
00:06:58Yeah.
00:06:59Yeah.
00:07:00Yeah.
00:07:01You can buy cameras when you're making money from state funds.
00:07:02Sure.
00:07:03Sure.
00:07:04Sure.
00:07:05Sure.
00:07:06I'm a big camera.
00:07:08I used to shoot four by five film exclusively.
00:07:13And now I do mostly medium format digital.
00:07:15So that's how you get poor.
00:07:17Yes.
00:07:18Exactly.
00:07:19Yeah.
00:07:20Before we get into the deep in the car stuff, just because I don't think there's any other
00:07:22way to circle back to this.
00:07:25You've spent a lot of time looking at bridges and rebar and concrete and retrofitting old
00:07:29bridges.
00:07:30Yep.
00:07:31Do you have any thoughts on the aging infrastructure of this country and all this fear of these
00:07:35heavy ass EVs?
00:07:38And if everybody drives, this is an argument, we actually talked to the Gensler guy about
00:07:42this.
00:07:43If everybody drives an EV and they all weigh X percentage, well, I know you're going to
00:07:46say they don't all weigh that much, but your Rivian does weigh a lot more than-
00:07:50Average goes up.
00:07:51Yes.
00:07:52No matter what you think that, I drive an R1T also.
00:07:53Right.
00:07:54But the average goes up.
00:07:57Do you have any, have you thought, do you think about, do you like being sitting like,
00:08:00oh man, I wonder what's going to happen?
00:08:01I think about it literally every day, every mile that I drive, because I do have a really
00:08:05deep scar.
00:08:06When I was up in the mountains working on the 80 corridor between Truckee and Reno,
00:08:11we got an emergency call one day from the CHP saying there's a hole in this bridge and
00:08:16the bridge roadway surface had finally crumbled to show that the structure beneath the roadway
00:08:21was gone and the surface was falling into the river below.
00:08:27And so that's a demonstration.
00:08:28It's like a cartoon.
00:08:29Exactly.
00:08:31And what it was, it was after an expansion joint on the road surface and there's trucks
00:08:36going on the 80 corridor all day long.
00:08:38When you say trucks, you mean big rigs.
00:08:40Big rigs.
00:08:41Now, hold on.
00:08:42Let me, so that takes me to my, my point is that the average load across the road is not
00:08:48a problem.
00:08:49It's these point loads.
00:08:50When you get a big rig that needs to get loaded with eight or 12 EVs and that big rig is asking
00:08:57for a 20,000 pound allowance over its 80,000 pound normal weight.
00:09:04Now that 20,000 pound allowance is what's putting those point loads on those axles.
00:09:10Now if you think about states like Washington or other states that offer that, that allow
00:09:15multi-axle trailers, three or four axle or five or six axle trailers, or in Europe where
00:09:21the three axle trailer is standard, that's where you see a lot more leniency around being
00:09:26able to load these trailers up high, but on net passenger vehicle, filling our roadways,
00:09:32you could fill, you could put, you know, back to back Hummer EVs on the Golden Gate Bridge
00:09:38and yes, it'll flatten out, but it's not going to be any problem.
00:09:41It's really those concentrated point loads from commercial vehicles that are causing
00:09:45the roadway surface problems.
00:09:46It's fascinating.
00:09:47Yeah.
00:09:48My dad always said that to me.
00:09:49He always said that like semi-trucks are the only things that damage the road.
00:09:51He's like, that's-
00:09:52I like this guy.
00:09:53Let's get him on the podcast.
00:09:54Okay, cool.
00:09:55All right.
00:09:56Okay.
00:09:57All right.
00:09:58That's fascinating.
00:09:59So bridges, you're fine.
00:10:00Okay.
00:10:01Ground control.
00:10:02So I went to ground control, did a bunch of racing, worked on touring cars, moved up
00:10:07from ground control, went to Dine-In, worked on more touring cars, left Dine-In because
00:10:11Steve and I, still friendly, but can't work together very well.
00:10:15It's like me and him.
00:10:17Yeah.
00:10:18Went to Time Attack, spent a bunch of time with the Japanese folks working on Mitsubishi
00:10:23Time Attack cars.
00:10:25And right about that time, I was getting burned out.
00:10:27And around 2000-
00:10:28Just from the lifestyle, the racing lifestyle?
00:10:30Just the racing lifestyle.
00:10:31Yeah, it's a lot.
00:10:32You're like never home on a weekend.
00:10:33Right.
00:10:34It's just, it's exhausting.
00:10:35And especially-
00:10:36Bad food, bad motels.
00:10:37This was the beginning of Time Attack in North America.
00:10:38So the first global Time Attack, we won it in our Cyber Evo, in the Cyber Evo, was the
00:10:42car that we built.
00:10:43Oh, you did the Cyber Evo?
00:10:44Yeah.
00:10:45Did I?
00:10:46We did cover that in Sport Compact?
00:10:47Tarzan Yamato was the driver.
00:10:48Did I do-
00:10:49Yes, you did.
00:10:50We did a write-up in Sport Compact Car?
00:10:51Yeah, yeah.
00:10:52I did a lot of write-ups on my suspension from Ground Control, too.
00:10:54That's right.
00:10:55Okay.
00:10:56Yeah.
00:10:57Good guess, huh?
00:10:58Yes.
00:10:59That's crazy.
00:11:00Yes, yeah.
00:11:01Just wait.
00:11:02Shout out to Sport Compact Car.
00:11:03Yeah, it's SEC, baby.
00:11:04So yeah, it was just an exhausting lifestyle, and it really became like, do you want to
00:11:09move to the UK to work in F1, do you want to move to North Carolina to work in NASCAR,
00:11:13or do you want to go to Japan to really take on Time Attack globally?
00:11:18And I just didn't have the appetite for any of that stuff.
00:11:20Right.
00:11:22So I decided to kind of settle down in Silicon Valley, where my girlfriend at the time, or
00:11:26my fiance at the time, had gotten a job at a small search engine startup called Google.
00:11:31Oh, yeah.
00:11:32I heard about it.
00:11:33And so I said, okay, I think this is going to go ... Literally, this was pre-IPO.
00:11:37I said, I think this is going to be good.
00:11:38Girlfriend at the time?
00:11:39I'm good.
00:11:40Fiance at the time.
00:11:41Fiance.
00:11:42So we're still married.
00:11:43Oh, good.
00:11:44But that's a whole different story.
00:11:46Yeah.
00:11:47So you're rolling.
00:11:48I'm not rolling.
00:11:49Come on.
00:11:50I'm not rolling.
00:11:51So we're going to talk about-
00:11:52When do you hear the story?
00:11:53Okay.
00:11:54When do you hear what he's telling?
00:11:55So anyways, moved to Silicon Valley, took a standard job working on some manufacturing
00:11:56line, designing little process equipment thing.
00:11:57And I got a call in the middle of the night from a guy named David Vespremi.
00:11:58I know David.
00:11:59So David calls and he says, hey, Ali, we worked on the Time Attack car with K&N together.
00:12:00He used to work there.
00:12:01And I was like, oh my God.
00:12:02And he was like, oh, that's great.
00:12:03And I was like, yeah.
00:12:04And he was like, oh, that's great.
00:12:05And I was like, oh, that's great.
00:12:06And he was like, oh, that's great.
00:12:07And I was like, oh, that's great.
00:12:08And I was like, oh, that's great.
00:12:09And he was like, oh, that's great.
00:12:10And I was like, oh, that's great.
00:12:11And he was like, oh, that's great.
00:12:12And I was like, oh, that's great.
00:12:13And he was like, oh, that's great.
00:12:14And I was like, oh, that's great.
00:12:15And he was like, oh, that's great.
00:12:16And I was like, oh, that's great.
00:12:17And he was like, oh, that's great.
00:12:18And I was like, oh, that's great.
00:12:19And he was like, oh, that's great.
00:12:20And I was like, oh, that's great.
00:12:21And he was like, oh, that's great.
00:12:22And I was like, oh, that's great.
00:12:23And he was like, oh, that's great.
00:12:24And I was like, oh, that's great.
00:12:25And Microsoft is coming, and the car handles like, and you're the only suspension engineer
00:12:30I know around here.
00:12:32I went there, and it was a garage in Redwood City, and it was the red Tesla Roadster, first
00:12:37one.
00:12:38Wow.
00:12:39Nice.
00:12:40They couldn't figure out how to get it to work.
00:12:41They didn't want to pay Lotus to come and re-engineer a bunch of the suspension.
00:12:44And this was one of their first mules that they had basically just converted a Lotus.
00:12:48This is 2007?
00:12:492007.
00:12:502007, yeah.
00:12:51Late 2007.
00:12:52And basically, I came in, and I used all of my suspension knowledge.
00:12:56And at that time, I still had access to the shock shop that I had at Sonoma Raceway.
00:13:00Still have a shop at Sonoma Raceway.
00:13:01Gotcha.
00:13:02So I took the shocks off of that Lotus.
00:13:04I went and revalved them.
00:13:06I changed a couple of little tiny steering geometry things on the first Roadster.
00:13:11And then that became the new kind of setup for Roadster.
00:13:14And basically, the Microsoft commercial went well, and all of these kind of press things
00:13:20went well.
00:13:21And then in early 2008, they said, can you come back?
00:13:24And over the course of about a month and a half, they interviewed me, and then I joined
00:13:28in 2008 full-time.
00:13:29They?
00:13:30Who interviewed you?
00:13:31The Tesla team.
00:13:32The original small core Tesla team.
00:13:33Because this was before.
00:13:342007 is before Elon.
00:13:35Before Elon.
00:13:36Yeah.
00:13:37So I joined.
00:13:38A month later, Elon kind of took over everything, and that whole situation happened.
00:13:43And then a month after that, there were layoffs and all of this.
00:13:46Right, right.
00:13:47And through all that kind of turmoil is when Franz and his team were hired.
00:13:52Right.
00:13:53And they decided to build something to go raise the next funding round off of, which
00:13:55was a sedan.
00:13:56Right.
00:13:57Back then we called it the White Star.
00:13:58Right.
00:13:59You remember Roadster was Dark Star.
00:14:00Yes.
00:14:01Model S was White Star.
00:14:02I remember White Star.
00:14:03Yeah, yeah.
00:14:04Model 3 was Blue Star.
00:14:05Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:14:06And next generation Roadster was supposed to be Dark Star.
00:14:09Okay.
00:14:10So.
00:14:11So wait.
00:14:12Did Tarpening and Eberhardt, did you interview with them?
00:14:14Or was it like, were they-
00:14:15With Martin.
00:14:16With Martin.
00:14:17Mostly with JB and the original-
00:14:18Oh, so JB was already there?
00:14:19Yeah.
00:14:20JB was there from day one.
00:14:21Oh.
00:14:23JB was there from day one.
00:14:24JB Straubel.
00:14:25JB Straubel.
00:14:26Yes.
00:14:27Who is now the founder and CEO of Redwood Materials.
00:14:28Redwood Materials.
00:14:29Yes.
00:14:30Who are we trying to get on here?
00:14:31So we're going to get him on here.
00:14:32JB was my hiring manager.
00:14:33Got it.
00:14:34So what, because it's topical, what, like when this Elon guy shows up, what was that,
00:14:38what was your initial impression?
00:14:39Man, what a crazy time.
00:14:40Cared about what it's like now.
00:14:41What was that like?
00:14:42There's, so you have to remember, I'm like a month and a half into this.
00:14:50This is my second startup.
00:14:54I came out of the racing industry and into Silicon Valley and there was just kind of
00:15:00this whole weird like scene where in the racing industry, pressure is everything, deadlines
00:15:04don't move.
00:15:06You have to perform because if you don't, there are 11 other teams that are going to
00:15:10perform.
00:15:11That will beat you.
00:15:12And they will beat you no matter what.
00:15:13So you have to show up no matter what.
00:15:16And so I came into this with that mentality and they were almost nobody else in the company
00:15:20kind of had that like impatience.
00:15:24And then when Elon kind of started to take over, he started to ask kind of like, who
00:15:29do we, you know, who are the superstars here and who do we look at kind of moving on or
00:15:34whatever.
00:15:35And that's when that first big round of layoffs happened.
00:15:37At the same time, that's when we were fundraising, we were getting ready to fundraise for the
00:15:43next round and we needed that sedan.
00:15:45We needed that kind of next thing.
00:15:48And the, there was this mix of emotions of like, who is this like PayPal guy that's showing
00:15:55up and just fired the guy, the founder that we all look up to.
00:16:00But then also by that time there was this kind of undercurrent of frustration that the
00:16:05roadster wasn't shipping yet and it was just problem after problem and quality problem
00:16:09and production problem and all of this stuff.
00:16:11And so there was a big hope that Elon is going to show up and help us fix it.
00:16:15And we remember we had a couple of interim CEOs.
00:16:17We had Mark something, I forgot his name or something.
00:16:21Oh yes.
00:16:22I do remember that.
00:16:23And then we had Zev from Clifford or Clarion or something like that.
00:16:29And so yeah, and so there was a hope that, okay, well, you know, Elon, he's going to
00:16:37just take all of this seriously and just fix a lot of these quality problems.
00:16:41But there was this still kind of like, ah, we're not sure.
00:16:44We're not sure what flipped the moment that everything flipped was Elon hired Franz, Dave
00:16:50Morris and the entire studio team.
00:16:52At that time he pulled me out of, I was designing like a dynamometers for the, for the motors
00:16:57that we were building for roadster.
00:16:59He's like, that guy's got race background.
00:17:01And he kind of pulled a few folks together and built this like crazy R and D team.
00:17:05So I led the vehicle platform prototyping Franz and Dave Morris led the studio team.
00:17:16They took Heinrich Fisker's not good at all design, made it look beautiful like it is
00:17:22today.
00:17:23Yeah.
00:17:24And then we were building the platform and our job was basically build us a freaking
00:17:28electric sedan as quickly as possible.
00:17:31What we all knew were, was Mercedes.
00:17:34Cause I had a bunch of, um, BMW master texts and Mercedes master texts on my team at that
00:17:40time.
00:17:41And so back then there was no like Motech or these engine, you couldn't buy our even
00:17:45Arduinos and, and microcontrollers, everything was done manually or analog or whatever.
00:17:51So we, we chose the platform that we knew the best, which was the Mercedes E class and,
00:17:59and the CLS had the silhouette that was the most, other than the Aston Martin repeat,
00:18:05which wasn't even out, but the CLS had the closest silhouette to what the model S was
00:18:09going to look like.
00:18:10Right.
00:18:11And that became the kind of geometrical blueprint for model S.
00:18:14So I was, uh, at SpaceX and I think it was 2008 or nine when white star model S very
00:18:22slowly rolled out and somebody was like, that's an, that's an E class.
00:18:27Like how, how much E class was in that thing?
00:18:30That was me driving that car.
00:18:31That was you driving that?
00:18:32Yeah.
00:18:33Really?
00:18:34Yeah.
00:18:35That was wild.
00:18:36Um, I remember I, I actually, that was the first time I met Elon and I interviewed him
00:18:37and he was just out to lunch.
00:18:38He was so crazy.
00:18:39I mean that you have to remember at that time, all of us, this was, especially in that moment
00:18:45was three weeks of literally no sleep.
00:18:49We had cots around SpaceX where people would go hide and sleep for an hour or two and come
00:18:53back.
00:18:54Sure.
00:18:55And Elon was there around the clock.
00:18:56Yeah.
00:18:58So how much E class?
00:18:59So what we did was we wanted to, we wanted to start with first, what is an electric sedan
00:19:04feel like?
00:19:05Right.
00:19:06What does a roadster powertrain, which we have engineering models for physics models
00:19:10for feel like now when we up the weight up the vehicle geometry, all of that stuff.
00:19:15So first was get a CLS and an E class and figure out which one you want to integrate
00:19:19and integrate one of them as quickly as possible.
00:19:21So we went down the street to Autobahn Motors in Belmont, California, the land of the E63
00:19:28wagon on display and bought a CLS.
00:19:36Essentially then in parallel, I had a team taking a roadster powertrain apart, the battery
00:19:40and everything, all those 11 modules, make it flat, create a flat battery pack, take
00:19:45the roadster motor, redevelop the oil or change the oiling inside the motor so we can lay
00:19:50the motor down now so we can put it in the differential pumpkin area of the CLS, cut
00:19:55the entire floor out of the CLS, reinforce the body of the CLS, graft the entire powertrain,
00:20:02some battery and electronics under the hood, and then everything else in the floor and
00:20:05in the rear trunk space under the floor, re-engineer the suspension, get everything working right,
00:20:12remap the gauge cluster, all of that stuff, and build the first electric sedan in the
00:20:16world.
00:20:17Right.
00:20:18Wow.
00:20:20The first car without, with a Mercedes body on it took about four months.
00:20:26Wow.
00:20:27Okay.
00:20:28Which was very fast.
00:20:29Nobody had ever done anything that fast ever.
00:20:31Yeah, yeah.
00:20:32By the time this prototyping team was good at what we were doing, we were doing full
00:20:36electric conversions with full CAN bus reverse engineering, the fuel gauge was state of charge,
00:20:44the RPM was power meter, we would re-scree print the gauges, you would get in the car
00:20:50and it would look and feel gas until you started driving.
00:20:54We could do that in 13 days.
00:20:55That was the fastest we did a car.
00:20:56Oh, wow.
00:20:57Wow.
00:20:58So that was the first, that was literally the first mule.
00:21:00That was the first-
00:21:01For the white star for Model S.
00:21:02That was the first Model S mule.
00:21:03And were they driving around the street?
00:21:05Yeah, so that was a, it looked like a Mercedes and we primarily used that to fundraise.
00:21:09That's where we got the Mercedes investment.
00:21:11That's where we basically demonstrated to the investors that this is what a sedan is
00:21:15like.
00:21:16Right.
00:21:17We used that for fundraising and then in parallel, as soon as that first car hit the ground and
00:21:20we started driving, we went out and bought a second CLS and did that whole thing all
00:21:23over again and didn't make it look pretty.
00:21:26We took the skin off of the car and shipped it down to Franz and his team in Southern
00:21:29California.
00:21:31Then they made it look beautiful and then our team, entire team moved down to Southern
00:21:35California for a couple of months while they were doing all of the, uh, the a surface beautification
00:21:40on the outside.
00:21:41Right.
00:21:42We would come in at night and make sure everything worked again, plugged everything back in and
00:21:47then do our development.
00:21:48And then by nine o'clock in the morning we had to be all unplugged, battery pack out
00:21:51of the car and then back and then they could be back welding, grinding, bondoing, carbon
00:21:56fibering on the body itself.
00:21:59And we did that for two or three months until that show car was done.
00:22:03This was a Tesla design right next to a SpaceX.
00:22:05Nope.
00:22:06This was in a tent in the back corner of SpaceX before we had our own design studio inside
00:22:11the back corner.
00:22:12That, that gray Model S that rolled out that day was this second CLS.
00:22:17That was the second CLS.
00:22:18Okay.
00:22:19So it wasn't, it wasn't even, I mean the CLS is a modified Eclipse.
00:22:20So many crazy stories.
00:22:21So there's a bunch of tells.
00:22:23If you look at that car now, that car is now in the Peterson.
00:22:26Okay.
00:22:27So a bunch of tells.
00:22:28So the wheels on that car were originally inspired by the Volkswagen, what was that
00:22:34Volkswagen CLS thing that they made?
00:22:37Oh, the Ayrton?
00:22:38Uh, uh.
00:22:39No, Phaeton.
00:22:40No.
00:22:41No.
00:22:42No.
00:22:43No.
00:22:44Something like that.
00:22:45Yeah.
00:22:46So it had those turbine wheels.
00:22:47Right.
00:22:48Right.
00:22:49Right.
00:22:50And then we wanted those turbine wheel, that design on Model S. Lorenzo made those turbine
00:22:53wheels.
00:22:54Those are Lorenzo wheels.
00:22:55Those are Lorenzo wheels with the Lorenzo logo sanded off and body filled.
00:23:00Uh, Google Lorenzo, uh, bad body kit S class right now.
00:23:04Oh yeah.
00:23:05Performance CC concept.
00:23:06Yeah.
00:23:07The CC.
00:23:08The CC.
00:23:09Because that came out in 2006.
00:23:10Oh yeah.
00:23:12So that's the original inspiration for the Model S wheels.
00:23:16Okay.
00:23:17Yeah.
00:23:18Turbine.
00:23:19Oh yeah.
00:23:20Yeah.
00:23:21Okay.
00:23:22Okay.
00:23:23Yeah.
00:23:24Yeah.
00:23:25All right.
00:23:26So anyways, that was the beginning of, of the thing.
00:23:27And then from there we basically split my team.
00:23:28One part of the team would support Franz and all the design activities with subsequent
00:23:30Model S's.
00:23:32And then we would also run the alpha program of the prototypes and then help hand off the
00:23:36beta program to the production team in the factory.
00:23:39And then in parallel, we were working on other projects like powertrain projects.
00:23:43Cause you remember Tesla in the early days, over half of the revenue was from powertrain
00:23:48sales, third party powertrain sales, right?
00:23:51Looking for the best off-road trails on X off-road has you covered with over 750,000
00:23:57miles of trails and comprehensive offline maps.
00:24:00You can explore without worrying about cell service, easily find trails for four by fours,
00:24:05ATVs, dirt bikes, and more.
00:24:07Our app provides detailed trail info, including difficulty ratings and open slash close dates.
00:24:13OnX off-road also helps you navigate public and private land boundaries, ensuring you
00:24:18stay legal.
00:24:19Try OnX off-road free for seven days and discover why it's the go-to app for off-roaders.
00:24:25Download now.
00:24:26Real quick though, before we move on from that day, the model, like how, how did, how,
00:24:32how did it go in your mind?
00:24:33Cause I remember very clearly the journalists were of two opinions.
00:24:37One was before the thing rolled out, I had no idea you were driving it, uh, that like,
00:24:41this is just vaporware.
00:24:42It's garbage.
00:24:43Yeah, I'm not a PayPal guy.
00:24:44What does he know about building cars?
00:24:45But then when it, it like showed up and it really was a good looking thing.
00:24:48I mean, you know, and, and, and it, you know, and again, you have to remember there was
00:24:53no Model S then.
00:24:54Yeah.
00:24:55Um, like, you know, that a lot, I remember a lot of us were like, whoa, like that's an
00:24:59electric car.
00:25:00Sedan looks good.
00:25:01That's not the roadster.
00:25:02Not a door mobile.
00:25:03And you were claiming like at the time, like, I don't know, 250 miles range, which seems
00:25:08insane.
00:25:09Yeah.
00:25:10Like insane.
00:25:11You know, like, so, so one thing actually, just to back up a few steps, when you asked
00:25:15kind of what was that like, that, that moment where us early people at the early team at
00:25:22Tesla leaned in and said, hell yes, Elon is, is the one to take us there.
00:25:28Right.
00:25:30started to go visit SpaceX and you start to see SpaceX and you're like, wait a second.
00:25:36He's not just some PayPal guy.
00:25:37Yeah.
00:25:38This is way more than that.
00:25:40And then people would come back to Tesla and say, uh, yeah.
00:25:43When you would hear hallway conversations about, is Elon really going to be able to
00:25:46do this?
00:25:47Yeah.
00:25:48Like, Hey dude, like I just got back from SpaceX.
00:25:50That place is freaking crazy.
00:25:51SpaceX is wild.
00:25:52Yeah.
00:25:53It's totally wild.
00:25:54Yeah.
00:25:55So anyways.
00:25:56Okay.
00:25:57Yeah.
00:25:58So when we first got the CLS, we knew we had something really special.
00:26:01And then that first model S, I mean, for us, it was the same thing.
00:26:05Like we had seen it like driving around.
00:26:08I have photos in my pocket of like all the different stages of us driving in and, and
00:26:12all of this stuff.
00:26:13But until that, that was real where you can like play the radio and like close the doors
00:26:19and roll the windows up and down.
00:26:20And yes, it was just a reskin Mercedes CLS, but that feeling of having four people in
00:26:26the car.
00:26:27And it went from like, this is a clunky electric conversion, or this is a refined electric
00:26:33sports thing.
00:26:36That's been converted to like a fully built out product.
00:26:41And this you have to remember no matter how, what we say about that era where people were
00:26:46comparing us to the bolt or sorry, to the volt or to the, um, to the leaf at the time
00:26:51or even the Fisker.
00:26:52Yeah.
00:26:53This was the other than the, I'm Eve.
00:26:57This was the only, and, and the EV one, this was the only ground up vehicle platform to
00:27:03be built for electric code.
00:27:07The leaf was a Nissan Versa, right?
00:27:09Everything was something else.
00:27:11And so this was the first time that we could really realize as an automotive industry,
00:27:15what happens when you start to think about this vehicle to start electric and be electric
00:27:20from the beginning.
00:27:21So we've heard a lot about, um, like what, what, you know, Tesla, one of the first things
00:27:26that really blew me away besides the electric part of Tesla's was that the over there updates
00:27:30were like massive functionality changes would happen and the car would get better the longer
00:27:35you own.
00:27:36Yeah.
00:27:37And we've heard that like that happened because nobody would work with you guys back then.
00:27:41And so you had to write all your own software anyways.
00:27:43And then it was, Hey, we write everything we can, we can, it's easy to upgrade.
00:27:47Is there any truth to that?
00:27:48It's a combination.
00:27:49So yeah, there's definitely some truth to that.
00:27:50So you have to imagine we're a bunch of like Silicon Valley startup laptop folks that know
00:27:56a little bit about batteries and all of a sudden now we claim to know cars.
00:28:01And then we call, yeah.
00:28:03And then we call Bosch and we're and Continental and ZF and say ZF or ZF whatever, ZF and you
00:28:11call them and you say, Hey, I'm building this like sedan.
00:28:16We don't really have money.
00:28:17I don't know how many I'm going to sell, but I need a full body electronics suite.
00:28:21Kind of like what would be in an S-class.
00:28:23Yeah.
00:28:24And by the way, by the way, my CEO is crazy and we want to be able to write all the firmware
00:28:31and the software and we want to be responsible for everything.
00:28:35So many doors got slammed.
00:28:39And so we ended up having to go to a small scale body controller supplier for those first
00:28:46model S's.
00:28:47The first generation model S had exactly the same body modules as a Ford fusion hybrid.
00:28:55Yeah.
00:28:56Carry over like plug and play carry over.
00:29:00And it was that Pektron was a supplier back then that made all of that stuff.
00:29:05And we couldn't get the attention of the big guys.
00:29:06And you were probably getting paid.
00:29:08You had to pay a premium.
00:29:09We had to pay everything.
00:29:10This is the same as when RJ was on, he's like, dude, we could not get anybody to answer us.
00:29:16They were paying so much more than the big guys because the big guys are dealing in volume.
00:29:21And you would get the crappy engineers and everything would take a long time.
00:29:25And when you would ask for some firmware change, they would laugh at you or they would have
00:29:29to like double and triple check why you would need this firmware change or whatever.
00:29:33And so when you start to stack that up and then you realize, well, at the end of the
00:29:37day, again, we're at that era where like Arduinos are starting to come up and microcontrollers
00:29:42and like all of this maker stuff is getting commoditized.
00:29:46And now we're like, well, wait a second, this is just a controller with like a can chip
00:29:51on it.
00:29:52Like we can just communicate to this thing.
00:29:54And we're all computer engineers back in our previous lives.
00:29:57And so let's just build this stuff from scratch because then we can, uh, we can control our
00:30:02own destiny here.
00:30:03And in fact, we can build an integrated system because the challenge is you have to remember
00:30:08even today when you're Mercedes Benz or Daimler and you have an S class, the, the amplifier
00:30:15in the infotainment system is made by a completely different supplier than the guy that's controlling
00:30:20the taillights.
00:30:21But was there pushback when you said, all right, we're just doing everything ourselves.
00:30:25Was there any, I don't know, automotive industry veterans were like, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, like
00:30:29don't do that.
00:30:30Yeah.
00:30:31They all stood back and laughed at us and said, good luck.
00:30:32Yeah.
00:30:33Okay.
00:30:34There was no pushback because we were just like, you're in our, the only, so the only
00:30:37It was their internal pushback.
00:30:39Anyone at Tesla who knew better?
00:30:40No.
00:30:41Okay.
00:30:42No, because anybody that claimed that they knew better would get exited from the company.
00:30:45Yeah.
00:30:46You had to have an open mentality.
00:30:47You had to have for her first principles thinking at every single juncture.
00:30:51I'm glad you, so, so that's not bullshit.
00:30:53So you like, it's a lot of, a lot of credit or flack for, so he's truly the first principle.
00:30:58Absolutely.
00:30:59Can you explain to the people who don't know what first principles are?
00:31:01Yeah.
00:31:03I'll give, I'll give an explanation that, that may kind of be a little bit too much
00:31:07in the weeds, but early conversations of model S we were talking about how we, how we could
00:31:11beat the M five.
00:31:12The M five was one of the first performance benchmarks that we had.
00:31:15I think it was the, uh, it was the E E 39 and then the E 60 M five.
00:31:20And then we were thinking about the next M four, what was, what came after the E 60 M
00:31:24five 30 F 30 M five.
00:31:27And, and, and so what was, we were mid E 60 and I had come from dine-in where we were
00:31:31doing the F 80, but yeah, we were doing the six liter M five.
00:31:35And I'm like on Monterey highway with Steve dine-in doing 200 miles an hour.
00:31:39And I'm like, we have to build a car that's faster than that.
00:31:42So, um, and so, and Elon is like, yeah, we can't be slower than an M five.
00:31:47Like he's the one that led the charge on this.
00:31:49Right.
00:31:50Cause he's driving a 997.2 turbo S day.
00:31:52Right.
00:31:53No, I remember when I interviewed him, I, he was saying like, uh, this is back at that
00:31:57event and I said like, you know, so why is this so quick or whatever?
00:32:02And he's like, well, I have a, I have a turbo S, but I have a lot of kids.
00:32:03So I want to put like my five kids.
00:32:05He only had five kids.
00:32:06He's like, I want more seats, not a slower car.
00:32:08And I'll never forget.
00:32:09I said, I said, so are you like a car guy?
00:32:11And he's like, um, no, not really.
00:32:14Oh, I had a McLaren F one, but no, not really.
00:32:17Yeah.
00:32:18That's pretty good.
00:32:20Yeah.
00:32:21I'm good.
00:32:22And he's, he's, he appreciates those things.
00:32:23But anyways, so the example of this first principles thinking was we were looking at
00:32:26the M five performance numbers and we started to talk about what do we need to do all the
00:32:32way down to how much current do we need to flow through these chips in our inverter to
00:32:36get to the power that we need to be able to put it down to get to a zero to 60 time in
00:32:41three seconds or whatever it was.
00:32:43Yeah.
00:32:44Yeah.
00:32:45And so we would do all of these studies and, and, um, uh, drew who was one of the, who's
00:32:49recently just left a Tesla drew Baglino, who I would say is one of the smartest people
00:32:53I've ever met.
00:32:55Drew would do all of this modeling and he would say, you know, theoretically we could
00:32:58get to 1.7, zero to 60 with tire grip and mass, which is where the new cars are now.
00:33:04But today we could get to this much because of these things.
00:33:06And Elon would just say, well, why, why can't we go faster?
00:33:10Well, you know, we could, we're not at tire limp, tire grip limit.
00:33:14Why can't we go fast?
00:33:15Well, we can't flow more current.
00:33:17Why can't we flow more current?
00:33:18Well, it's the cables too small.
00:33:20Are the cables too small?
00:33:21No, no, no.
00:33:22It's, it's this chip.
00:33:23We can't get enough heat out of this chip.
00:33:25Well, what's the substrate?
00:33:27Well, the substrate is alumina.
00:33:28Well, could you use Silicon carbide or some other substrate that's better at heat rejection?
00:33:33Well, yeah, but you know, it's not, it's not available and it's just kind of university.
00:33:38Okay, well if that material science is the fundamental problem, go hire a university,
00:33:43make the material science better and put a better substrate under that chip so that we
00:33:46can get to the core.
00:33:48And the thing is that suppliers don't like that.
00:33:51Suppliers want to sell you what's on the shelf that they've been building for the last
00:33:53two years.
00:33:54Or get a huge contract to build or get a huge contract, but then you're at the mercy of
00:33:59the supplier and that supplier is always looking for other people to sell that thing that they're
00:34:03making for you to also to make some money on the backend.
00:34:07And so that's where a lot of this came at.
00:34:08And the only real supplier that we were kind of cuffed to and, and really needed to use
00:34:14for legacy information was Bosch.
00:34:16And that was really on the brake controller and the ABS system, the iBooster, Bosch had
00:34:21just productized the iBooster by that point.
00:34:25And in fact, we kind of induced a complete revision change in the iBooster to the next
00:34:31generation of iBooster because...
00:34:33What's an iBooster?
00:34:34What is that?
00:34:35iBooster is basically a standalone brake control, ABS controller that Mercedes and Bosch came
00:34:40out with and it started getting used.
00:34:42Now everybody uses the iBooster.
00:34:44It's an all-in-one unit with its own accumulator and, and, and boost assist and ABS controller
00:34:50and module and like all of this stuff built into one little box.
00:34:55It works perfect for electric cars because you don't need a vacuum source to get power
00:35:00assist.
00:35:01Right, right, right.
00:35:02The electric cars at that time we were using, like literally I was using a second generation
00:35:06MR2 electric steering, steering pump and...
00:35:11To create, to create pressure.
00:35:14To create pressure for the power steering and then, and then a, just a weird little
00:35:21vacuum pump that we had to, to have vacuum for the brakes.
00:35:25But when iBooster came out, we started using that, but the processing in the iBooster wasn't
00:35:30fast enough to respond to the response time that we got from the electric motors.
00:35:34Oh, interesting.
00:35:35Right, right, right.
00:35:36The electric motors were able to respond to torque requests so much faster than anything
00:35:41Bosch had ever experienced before.
00:35:42Sure.
00:35:44Yeah.
00:35:45I mean, people forget you can just do whatever you want with an electric motor.
00:35:46So there was a mix of a bunch of different things and I think still the iBooster is still
00:35:49used or maybe not used or whatever, but the, the whole idea there was that we didn't want
00:35:55to go through all of these different layers of complexity to be able to make the door
00:36:01actuation more smooth for a customer because all of this boils back down to the experience.
00:36:06And at the end of the day, Elon or Franz would walk up to the vehicle and they wouldn't feel
00:36:11that experience.
00:36:12And when there's a disruption in that experience, or if there are too many steps to get to a
00:36:16menu or something like that, that's when they raise the red flag and they would never say,
00:36:21fix it this way.
00:36:22They would just say, fix it.
00:36:24I don't want to have 15 steps to get to the C heaters.
00:36:27Right.
00:36:28Okay.
00:36:29And was it how, I mean, we could, we could run a time, let's fast forward.
00:36:34We haven't talked about range yet.
00:36:36Well, yeah, we should, I mean, we can make this a two-parter, but he does have a company
00:36:41he's pushing called range.
00:36:45But fast forward to this car magazine called Motor Trend gives the vehicle a car of the
00:36:53year.
00:36:54Were you still there?
00:36:55Yeah.
00:36:56Did you go to New York?
00:36:57You didn't go to the party in New York.
00:36:58Did you?
00:36:59I left in 2012 before the Motor Trend party, but I was there for the test that got it the
00:37:06car of the year when, when I forgot what, who the team was, but they, when they first
00:37:10came to the Fremont factory before, yeah, that it was the whole team.
00:37:15They came out to the Fremont factory before we had occupied it, but we had, we had possession,
00:37:20but we weren't in it yet.
00:37:22But I had resurrected the test track and we were using that test track for a few different
00:37:29things and the Motor Trend shoot or the Motor Trend test was one of the first.
00:37:34So how did that, you know, obviously you put a lot of blood, sweat, tears, time into the
00:37:38Model S and was it, what was that like?
00:37:41Were you like, they get it or what did you like?
00:37:43Yeah, we did, we did one gut check test before Motor Trend showed up and discovered a few
00:37:48little things in the suspension.
00:37:50Basically the chassis team and myself just spent, you know, a bunch of time just driving
00:37:57the car, going over bumps, just feeling all the little like nuance things.
00:38:02We were very, very lucky that we had an incredible benchmark fleet, like Audi S8, BMW 7 series,
00:38:13Mercedes S class and E class, the A7, Audi, Porsche Panamera, Jaguar, whatever it was.
00:38:23XJ, big XJ.
00:38:24Yeah.
00:38:25Great car.
00:38:26XF, XF?
00:38:27No, the XJ with the steering.
00:38:28It had like really special steering.
00:38:29Yeah, it was great.
00:38:31So we used that Jaguar for the steering, we used the Porsche for the chassis controls.
00:38:35We basically kind of put this hodgepodge together and we would drive a course and it was almost
00:38:42kind of like process of elimination.
00:38:44And we would just be like, all right, take the Panamera on here because this is all about
00:38:48chassis control.
00:38:49And we would just go do this loop and come back and try to match it with the Model S
00:38:52and then take that same Model S and go do the steering loop with the Jaguar against
00:38:56the Model S.
00:38:57So we did a bunch of that.
00:38:58It required a few bushing changes, some simple stuff, a bunch of damper changes.
00:39:03And then that ended up becoming the P90 plus, or P80 plus, the first generation.
00:39:09P85 plus.
00:39:10P85 plus.
00:39:11P85 plus.
00:39:12That's right.
00:39:13The plus was the Motor Trend suspension calibration.
00:39:15Got it.
00:39:18That's awesome.
00:39:19So how was, when you heard the news, like how did that go down?
00:39:23Why'd you leave?
00:39:24I had just left.
00:39:25You burned out?
00:39:26I was in Tahoe.
00:39:27I was there for five years, didn't have a day off.
00:39:31And it just, you know, I took some time.
00:39:34So first Model S shipped and that's the day that I just said, I need a break.
00:39:40And it was mutual.
00:39:42I think we both kind of like, at that point I was casual and around with Elon, but a lot
00:39:49of time was spent with JB and we were really kind of growing the company up a lot.
00:39:54The prototyping team, we wanted to move the center of gravity of that prototyping team
00:39:58from up here North, down to Franz's area and actually we're down South now.
00:40:05Down here.
00:40:06Yeah.
00:40:07And it was just a good time for me to kind of take a break.
00:40:08And I took a break from Tesla, I took about a month off.
00:40:12And then this team at Google called and they said, Hey, we heard you may be available.
00:40:16Come and Google recruited me right after that.
00:40:21And personally, were you like married?
00:40:22Yeah, I was married.
00:40:24I had one kid and the second kid on the way.
00:40:30But how did Tesla feel about, we know how Franz and Elon felt, but how did the troops
00:40:36feel about the award?
00:40:37Was it-
00:40:38Oh, it was one of the most prideful moments, I think, in the company's history.
00:40:43Everybody was so proud.
00:40:44And, you know, I was incredibly proud.
00:40:46I was really bummed that I wasn't able to get a photo with the award.
00:40:49Oh man, I could have brought one.
00:40:52Yeah.
00:40:53I got to bag them.
00:40:54Next time.
00:40:55But I think everybody was proud.
00:40:56It was, it's just, you know, there's, there are these, as you develop a product, especially
00:41:08a product that you know in your heart is going to be important and you start to see that
00:41:13everybody starts to see that it's important as well.
00:41:16Right.
00:41:17I had a few of these moments.
00:41:18The first real moment was when somebody like you wrote about the car and I just saw a photo
00:41:24of me sitting in the car in a magazine and I was like, crap, like this, I've had my race
00:41:30cars in like, like sport compact and all of this stuff.
00:41:33But that was like, this is real.
00:41:35That was one of the first.
00:41:37And then the next big one was when I was driving and I just saw a Model S in the wild.
00:41:45I didn't know who the person was, it was a customer.
00:41:48And it was just, for me, it was like so crazy.
00:41:53And then there's, you know, there are all these other moments that you just kind of
00:41:56think about everything that, that the teams accomplished together to bring this vehicle
00:42:02to the market.
00:42:04I really do believe like up until we got that Model S going and it started to go into production
00:42:10like 2012, 2013 was really kind of that moment when I started to see that car come off the
00:42:15line, even though I wasn't there or the first time I thought, holy crap, this is a very
00:42:21important car.
00:42:22Like this is really, cause then you start to see the response of everybody else in the
00:42:25industry changing.
00:42:27It was a slow response.
00:42:28It was a slow response, but you know, hindsight being what it is, 2015 is when the tide started
00:42:34to really turn.
00:42:35Well, I feel like it was, I tell people, cause we look, I love it, then this is very self
00:42:39Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:42:40Tell us how much, we were two of the 11 people that voted for it.
00:42:45Exactly.
00:42:46Tell us how much you love us.
00:42:47No, but we were, it was for us, it felt like a historic moment when, when, when you remember
00:42:51how it was like, like Chris Theodore was like, like he's like the car's perfect, but the
00:42:55business plan makes no sense.
00:42:57It's a moonshot, the whole thing.
00:42:59And yes.
00:43:00And our leader at the time, Angus McKenzie was on record numerous times.
00:43:03Like Angus, he was there.
00:43:04Yeah.
00:43:05Angus was there and Angus was famous for pooping all over it.
00:43:07What is it?
00:43:08And now Silicon Valley is going to learn a thing or two about hitting up Detroit.
00:43:11And then, and then we drove it and we're like, holy.
00:43:14And that was every, it was, you could watch that.
00:43:17Dan Neal was brutal too.
00:43:18Yes.
00:43:19Yeah.
00:43:20Watch the tide change when the, when you actually get behind the wheel, it was the New York
00:43:24investor crowd.
00:43:25That's why we did the party in New York, Christina Ra, the PR was like, we got all you automotive
00:43:31journalists in the back.
00:43:32Cause you love, you love cars and you know what this car's like to drive.
00:43:34It's all these dummies over here in New York who think a car is a yellow taxi cab.
00:43:38We were so skeptical up until we voted.
00:43:41Cause I remember, you know, we do the vote and it's unanimous, unanimous.
00:43:44First car of the year.
00:43:45There's been a truck of the year that was unanimous, but as far as I've been involved
00:43:48with, first unanimous ever car of the year, hands go down and we're like, and then I remember
00:43:53I said, who here has ever publicly or privately said this thing's vaporware that we just voted
00:43:59car of the year.
00:44:00And 10 of the hands went up.
00:44:01This guy's didn't.
00:44:02And I looked at him and he, I remember he said, he said, Hey, my mom said, if you have
00:44:06nothing nice to say, don't say anything.
00:44:08And it was, it was just like, it was a real, like for us, like eating crow moment.
00:44:12Yeah.
00:44:13Cause there was so much doubt, you know, cause I walked away from the SpaceX thing where
00:44:17I was like, Oh, it's just, they put an electric motor in a Mercedes.
00:44:20Big deal.
00:44:21That was my, I was young and stupid, but you know, no, I mean you could definitely see
00:44:24it that way.
00:44:25Yeah.
00:44:26Cause it drove real slow.
00:44:27Well, no, the first one was relatively fast.
00:44:29Like you drove it in front of us.
00:44:31I drove it slow.
00:44:32Okay.
00:44:33So I blame you.
00:44:35A lot of different things.
00:44:36You have to remember we had, so there was so many, okay, I'm going to tell this last
00:44:40story and then we'll talk about trailers.
00:44:42We had so much going on that night at that event, there was a hanger on the other side
00:44:47of the parking lot that used to be a jet engine test lab.
00:44:50We had an entire second vehicle's worth of components sitting there on a lift in case
00:44:55this car first prototype failed.
00:44:58I could go out on my drive loop by myself instead of with somebody in the passenger
00:45:02seat.
00:45:03We're all taking a 15 minute break to see Anthony Kiedis perform on stage while I'm
00:45:09changing the powertrain on this prototype and bringing it back out.
00:45:12Fortunately, we didn't have to do that, but I had that rest of that night full of like,
00:45:18I knew Arnold was coming that night.
00:45:19I knew everybody was coming.
00:45:22One of my biggest heroes, Rick Rubin was coming.
00:45:24I was like, Holy crap.
00:45:25Like I want to show him our sound system, like all of this stuff.
00:45:29I was very careful with that car, but then towards the end of the night, we had a lot
00:45:34of fun.
00:45:35We were doing drifting in the back parking lot.
00:45:37That car is fast.
00:45:39It wasn't as fast as a modern Model S, but you have to remember it had 80 something kilowatt
00:45:46hours in it, a battery pack, and it had a Roadster motor and it was relatively quick.
00:45:51It was good.
00:45:52Cool.
00:45:53Awesome.
00:45:54Before we get into Range Energy, your new hustle, and we're going to just jump over
00:45:58the Google and the Zoox and everything and just get into that, but...
00:46:01Yeah, we don't want to talk about level five autonomy.
00:46:04Ugh.
00:46:05We'll get there.
00:46:06Trailers, please.
00:46:07You have this racing background.
00:46:10You have this BMW, this Dinan, this whole thing.
00:46:13Yeah.
00:46:14You like EVs?
00:46:15I love EVs.
00:46:16What are you driving?
00:46:17What's your daily?
00:46:18R1T, baby.
00:46:19R1T.
00:46:20That's it?
00:46:21Okay, that's it.
00:46:22Okay.
00:46:24Did you?
00:46:25Did you have one?
00:46:26I had a Model Y for a while.
00:46:27Great car.
00:46:28Okay.
00:46:29Just, it was too much of an appliance for me.
00:46:32Okay.
00:46:33Do you own a mint green Porsche Targa?
00:46:35Yes.
00:46:36I have a...
00:46:37Now one of one, because there were two.
00:46:38There was one in Hamburg that just got rear-ended on a test track.
00:46:42So one of one manual mint green 991.2 Targa GTS with a bunch of roof parts all over it.
00:46:50So you left with some equity, is what you're saying, when you...
00:46:52I work very, very hard.
00:46:54And I will say that every piece of a fortune that I've had from my companies has gone into
00:47:00property and into my kids' bank accounts.
00:47:02Good.
00:47:03Yeah.
00:47:04And all of this...
00:47:05And his wife's a Google founder, you know?
00:47:06Yeah.
00:47:07She's a Google pre-IPO.
00:47:08Let's...
00:47:09Yeah.
00:47:10I had a lot of friends at Stanford that were like, you should invest in this company, Google.
00:47:13I'm like, Google?
00:47:14That's stupider than Yahoo.
00:47:15Well, we'll ask again.
00:47:16Do you want to sponsor this podcast?
00:47:17Or your wife?
00:47:18Are you kidding me?
00:47:19Right.
00:47:20Or your kids?
00:47:22All these kids.
00:47:23Last question.
00:47:24Do you have any thoughts on...
00:47:25How's Elon now?
00:47:26You talk to him?
00:47:27I don't talk to him now.
00:47:28Can you pick up the phone and say hello?
00:47:29No.
00:47:30I haven't seen him in face-to-face in several years.
00:47:31I'm sure if I saw him, we'd high five and how's everything going and move on.
00:47:32He's definitely aware of the company that we're building.
00:47:33His team is very aware of the company that we're building because it really helps the
00:47:34Tesla Semi program as well.
00:47:35But we work together.
00:47:36We would talk every day.
00:47:37We would talk every day.
00:47:38We would talk every day.
00:47:39We would talk every day.
00:47:40We would talk every day.
00:47:41We would talk every day.
00:47:42We would talk every day.
00:47:43We would talk every day.
00:47:44We would talk every day.
00:47:45We would talk every day.
00:47:46We would talk every day.
00:47:47We would talk every day.
00:47:48We would talk every day.
00:47:49We would talk every day.
00:47:50We would talk every day.
00:47:51We would talk every day.
00:47:52We would talk every day.
00:47:53We would talk every day.
00:47:54We would talk every day.
00:47:55We would talk every day.
00:47:56We would talk every day.
00:47:57We would talk every day.
00:47:58We would talk every day.
00:47:59We would talk every day.
00:48:00We would talk every day.
00:48:01We would talk every day.
00:48:02We would talk every day.
00:48:03We would talk every day.
00:48:04We would talk every day.
00:48:05We would talk every day.
00:48:06We would talk every day.
00:48:07We would talk every day.
00:48:08We would talk every day.
00:48:09We would talk every day.
00:48:10We would talk every day.
00:48:11We would talk every day.
00:48:12All right.
00:48:13Pitch us.
00:48:14Range.
00:48:15Okay.
00:48:16So, Elon knows about range editor.
00:48:17Tell us.
00:48:18What does range editor do?
00:48:19So, worked on Model S. Made a big impact in the automotive industry.
00:48:22Went to Google after that.
00:48:23Worked on a bunch of random stuff.
00:48:25After that, I went to...
00:48:26Firefly?
00:48:27You didn't work on Firefly.
00:48:28I worked on the very, very first vehicle architecture for Firefly as a consultant within Google.
00:48:32So, I was in it.
00:48:33That was a little pod car.
00:48:34A little dork mobile with a smile on his face and a soft nose.
00:48:37A Roush built.
00:48:38That was a Roush built that was autonomous.
00:48:39Yes.
00:48:40So, that was the first kind of little level five autonomous thing.
00:48:43The Firefly team was a different team than the team I was working in.
00:48:47I was working more on the devices and R&D team.
00:48:52But they knew I was an automotive person.
00:48:54So, on the first few Firefly kind of brainstorming sessions, they pulled me in on vehicle architecture.
00:49:00And anyway.
00:49:01So, spent time at Google.
00:49:03After Google, I went to Zoox.
00:49:04Zoox got acquired by Amazon.
00:49:07And I was running the vehicle prototyping again at Zoox for the Highlanders and the
00:49:11level five RoboTaxi.
00:49:13And after the Amazon acquisition, I started to think, well, what can I do that has a more
00:49:18near term impact than the potential for level five autonomy?
00:49:22And I started to look at the commercial vehicle industry.
00:49:24I really became passionate about this kind of idea that the commercial industry only
00:49:30is about 5% of the vehicles on the road, but accounts for 20 to 30% of the harmful emissions.
00:49:34So, it's got an outsized negative impact.
00:49:36And these are big diesel trucks.
00:49:38These are big 18 wheelers.
00:49:40The truck is in the front.
00:49:41The trailer's in the back.
00:49:43And could I build a piece of technology that has an outsized positive impact, that cleans
00:49:48up better than the gas that it saves?
00:49:53And so, I started to look at the Tesla Semi.
00:49:55I looked at the Freightliner E-Cascadia and the Volvo stuff and everything that was being
00:49:59built and in addition to infrastructure.
00:50:03And I just saw that one thing was being left behind, which was the box, the trailer itself.
00:50:08In every single case, the trailer is still a dumb box.
00:50:11And every piece of technology that's being slapped into the cab is so that it can control
00:50:16the box better.
00:50:17Well, why can't we just make the box control itself, leave the cabs alone for now, let
00:50:22them eventually become electric, hydrogen, whatever the world dictates, or a mix, which
00:50:28is what really is going to happen.
00:50:30Let that all happen and let's build a piece of technology that helps all of it.
00:50:35And so, if we can get that box now to make itself weightless in all times to the tractor,
00:50:42to the thing that's towing it, then that tractor can have a far lighter, smaller burden.
00:50:49So, as an example, we take a standard Freightliner Cascadia with a big block.
00:50:54And by the way, I have this working on my Rivian as well with a small scale bumper pull
00:50:58or kingpin trailer.
00:51:00No problem.
00:51:01Because it's fully scalable.
00:51:02260 miles on my Rivian, towing my race car on the back of it.
00:51:06No problem.
00:51:07Nice.
00:51:08One charge.
00:51:09Nice.
00:51:10What we do is we basically say, here's your truck and trailer, full size, 18 wheeler.
00:51:16We electrify the trailer itself with our range system.
00:51:20This includes an e-axle and not a small axle.
00:51:23This is a 300 kilowatt or 350 kilowatt peak e-axle.
00:51:28Tiny axle that's used in things like the E-Cascadia up front.
00:51:32We add a battery pack, 300 kilowatt hours, not 600 or 800 or a megawatt hour, which is
00:51:39what's being put in the tractors.
00:51:41Because we're not a primary mover and we fail operational.
00:51:44So when everything falls apart or when everything, if everything shuts down, we're just a free
00:51:49wheeling trailer.
00:51:50So you just have that extra burden of about 5,000 pounds.
00:51:53So those are the two core elements, but the key to this is our ability to control.
00:51:59And this is where the unique piece of range comes in is that our ability to control, again,
00:52:04goes back to those first principles thinking.
00:52:06Originally we were like, do we connect a CAN bus?
00:52:09Do we do cameras?
00:52:10Do we do all of this other crazy stuff?
00:52:12And how can we get to functional safety?
00:52:13And we want to kind of be in that level five domain of functional safety or as close as
00:52:18we can get.
00:52:20Which means what?
00:52:21Break that down for the level five.
00:52:22Basically what that means is that we are minimizing the opportunity for this powertrain
00:52:30to do something we are not expecting it to do.
00:52:33And we're doing it in a very, very specific way and we're doing it in a way to where we
00:52:38can actually interrogate in the engineering term all the way down to the chip level and
00:52:44make sure that we have consistent communication, redundancy, all of those bits and pieces.
00:52:51So that we can always have a closed loop of feedback.
00:52:54So for example, if we say something that has functional safety, basically when I'm pulling
00:52:59on something, if I'm just pulling on it and the trailer is just helping, it's not really
00:53:05safe if I don't know how much it's helping and how effective that help is.
00:53:09But then we close that loop through the system to make sure that we're safe.
00:53:13So that if all of a sudden we're pulling, our powertrain, so essentially how the system
00:53:18works is no CAN connection, no data connection.
00:53:22At that connect, that mechanical connection, the hitch or what's in the industry called
00:53:26a kingpin, at that mechanical connection, we measure the forces in real time between
00:53:32the tractor and the trailer or the truck and the trailer.
00:53:36And as the truck starts to pull, we can see what direction it's pulling, how hard it's
00:53:40pulling.
00:53:41We can see the inclination of the trailer.
00:53:42We can categorize what's happening.
00:53:45Are you going through an intersection shifting?
00:53:47Are you going around a bend?
00:53:48Are you going downhill or uphill?
00:53:51And then based on that categorization, we assist in that trailer to make it feel weightless
00:53:55in real time, all the time in region.
00:53:59And when you're slowing down, we actually turn the region up on the axle and we actually
00:54:04act as a second braking system.
00:54:05So now you can do one pedal driving on your semi truck.
00:54:09Your brakes are cold.
00:54:10You're going down the grapevine at 55 miles an hour.
00:54:14The trailer e-axle where all the normal load is the highest, where all the stability is
00:54:18the best because you're holding from the back now and the weight is all back there, 60,000
00:54:23pounds back there versus 20,000 pounds at the most upfront.
00:54:27Now that is holding everything down, putting 10, 20, 30 kilowatt hours back in the battery
00:54:33pack, just coming down a grade like the grapevine.
00:54:35And you know, the run between, uh, Bakersfield and Las Vegas, this is one of our kind of
00:54:41standard tests, 2000 foot net elevation gain, right?
00:54:46Typically on our Freightliner, uh, we have a 2022 Freightliner Cascadia with a bigger
00:54:50block engine sleeper cab, typically get about six or seven miles per gallon nominal driving.
00:54:57With a loaded trailer, with a loaded trailer, not Bobcat, like, no, yeah.
00:55:01With a loaded trailer.
00:55:02And I would say around 60% load, not fully loaded, but, but that's a typical, yeah.
00:55:07Six to eight miles per gallon.
00:55:12Our tractor trailer did that with 15.1 miles per gallon.
00:55:15That's nearly triple.
00:55:16It's it's about double.
00:55:18It's, it's double.
00:55:19Okay.
00:55:20So we're, so our, our baseline numbers are that we can double your fuel economy and reduce
00:55:24your emissions by 70%.
00:55:26And the reason now, when we go back to that outsized impact, what we do is now we use
00:55:31modern robotics and intelligence to sense, okay, well this tractor now is in between
00:55:37a shift.
00:55:38So we're going to torque fill so that the transmission has less work to do.
00:55:43We can actually shift now in the semi-automated transmission in about 500 milliseconds or
00:55:47half a second, where it would take a second and a half before.
00:55:51And then you all know this when the emissions, when you take your foot off the throttle and
00:55:55then you put your foot back on the throttle, the engine controller is dumping a bunch of
00:55:59fuel all over the place to keep the piston from melting.
00:56:02And this is where a lot of that black soot comes from.
00:56:05And now there are particulate filters.
00:56:07And by the way, we don't see soot coming out of the tailpipes.
00:56:10It's there.
00:56:11Everybody.
00:56:12It's just being caught by a filter that then gets thrown in a dumpster later, right?
00:56:15It's not in the air yet, but it will get in our water.
00:56:17Right.
00:56:18And so, and not, not only that, the brake dust, all of that stuff that is washing off
00:56:22in our roadways, we're putting all of that energy back into the battery pack.
00:56:27Right.
00:56:28And there's no modification whatsoever to the tractor.
00:56:30Zero.
00:56:31How does that work?
00:56:32I love this.
00:56:33Go back to the, you're not using CAN bus.
00:56:36There's no other physical connection.
00:56:39It's so, so there's a sensor on the kingpin.
00:56:42There's a, there's a, there is a modification at the, where the mechanical connection between
00:56:46the truck and the trailer.
00:56:48We are not modifying the kingpin.
00:56:50The kingpin is, has ISO standards.
00:56:52It's got safety stuff.
00:56:53We want to make sure that the fleets can still weld on it and work on it and repair it and
00:56:58all of that stuff.
00:56:59It's not something like giant.
00:57:01I was imagining there's a giant hockey puck like sensor that goes right on top of the
00:57:04fleet.
00:57:05If this was 10 years ago, that's probably what we would have to do.
00:57:08Okay.
00:57:09But with modern, you know, modern sensing, modern, you know, automotive compute and,
00:57:14and with an understanding of robotics that we have today as a, as an industry and as
00:57:20a society, we're able to do this in other ways than just measuring pure strain.
00:57:26It sounds like the, the, that's something I'm asking with the core IP right now.
00:57:30Yeah.
00:57:31It's in our patent.
00:57:32You can go read our patents.
00:57:33Are you going to tell us at all?
00:57:35Is there anything like where, where, what, what is it if I had to look at it or if you
00:57:38had, I don't know anything.
00:57:39It looks just like a standard kingpin.
00:57:40The thing is that I want to roll this trailer.
00:57:42Like one of the things that we do when a pilot, when a, when a customer calls and says, Hey,
00:57:47we want to try your trailer out.
00:57:48We go there.
00:57:49And at this point we have a really good inventory or understanding of what's in the yard.
00:57:53We, we take pictures of toolboxes.
00:57:56We talk to the mechanics.
00:57:58We make sure this trailer is not scary to anybody in the yard.
00:58:02Right.
00:58:03And that includes making a kingpin look exactly like it did before.
00:58:06And in fact, can we just, you know, as Elon taught us in the old days, the right part
00:58:10is no part.
00:58:11Right.
00:58:12So yes, we can instrument the kingpin.
00:58:13And in fact, in our first trailers, the kingpin had a bunch of strain gauges all over it and
00:58:17all of that stuff.
00:58:19And now we have a more integrated system.
00:58:21And in the future we were going to have an even better system for, for some new technology
00:58:25that we're rolling out.
00:58:26But the goal here is to have this trailer be ubiquitous across every fleet and every
00:58:32single tractor in that fleet.
00:58:33So even if you put a kingpin plate on the back of your mountain bike, you'll be able
00:58:37to tow a 53 foot trailer that's loaded up to 60,000 pounds with no problem.
00:58:42So, okay.
00:58:43But okay.
00:58:44So that's, that's the key.
00:58:45That's the key.
00:58:46Can I do that?
00:58:47We haven't, we actually have a K truck in our lobby and we're going to put a kingpin
00:58:51plate on the K truck.
00:58:52I'm just trying to find out how I'm going to get tires to handle that, that normal load.
00:58:57We may put casters on the, on the outriggers for the trailer itself.
00:59:01So it doesn't fall over, but it absolutely, you know, you guys come to Mountain View,
00:59:05I will put you behind a 6,000 pound or 7,000 pound trailer and you can walk it around like
00:59:09it's on an air hockey table.
00:59:10Just pull it with your, yeah.
00:59:12Yeah.
00:59:13Huh.
00:59:14We call it shopping cart mode.
00:59:15What is, um, that's wild.
00:59:16Feels like an Ikea shopping cart.
00:59:17So the rest of the, but the rest of the trailer, where's the battery?
00:59:21The battery is slung underneath on the outside.
00:59:25So we take up no physical volume of the trailer.
00:59:27We add about 5,000 pounds total to the system.
00:59:30About over 70% of the loads on the road are cubed out versus masked out, which means only
00:59:36about 25 to 30% of the boxes that are on the road run out of mass allowance.
00:59:41And these are just like beverage distribution for example.
00:59:44But guess what?
00:59:45The heavier your load is, the more the assist is.
00:59:48So if you have a fully masked out load, we're actually not 50%, we're 70% better on fuel
00:59:53economy.
00:59:54And so there's, so the economics kind of work backwards in the same way that an electric
00:59:58vehicle gets better economy in the city on stop and go than it does on the highway.
01:00:03It's the same type of thing.
01:00:04The more we can stop and go, the more we can reclaim that kinetic energy, the more the
01:00:09trailer adds to the efficiency of the entire stack.
01:00:12So even though we're taking one pallet out of the Coca-Cola or PepsiCo or whatever beverage
01:00:17trailer, the unit economics are so good.
01:00:20Yeah, the fuel savings.
01:00:21Okay, yeah.
01:00:22Every 14 loads, we have to take one extra trailer.
01:00:27Fine.
01:00:28We're saving over 50% of our fuel bill.
01:00:30Right.
01:00:31So excuse my...
01:00:32And you charge.
01:00:33This is fascinating.
01:00:34We have to talk about charging.
01:00:35Yeah.
01:00:36Excuse my trailer ignorance, right?
01:00:37So this is essentially like three lucid air battery packs slung, right, 100?
01:00:42No.
01:00:43Lucid's 112.
01:00:44Lucid's 100.
01:00:45This is like three P100s.
01:00:46Yeah.
01:00:47Three P100 batteries slung between the hitch and the two rear axles.
01:00:53Yep.
01:00:54And this is where on some of these trailers, you'd see those aerodynamic side skirts.
01:00:57Right behind the side skirts.
01:00:58Right behind the side skirts, okay.
01:00:59You don't even see our stuff.
01:01:00It's hidden behind the side skirts.
01:01:01How tall are we talking?
01:01:02What would the stack drop down to be?
01:01:05It's around 18 or 20 inches, so you don't even see it.
01:01:08When the skirts are back on, you don't even see the system.
01:01:11And the slider, you remember...
01:01:13So one of the things to remember is that if you think about a big rig on the road and
01:01:16you think about the box that's on the back, that's the trailer, and it has those two axles,
01:01:21that's the suspension tandem.
01:01:22We call it a bogie.
01:01:24That suspension tandem is meant to move forward and back relative to the box based on how
01:01:29it's loaded so that you can balance the load of the trailer.
01:01:33We maintain that functionality.
01:01:34In fact, we automate that functionality with our system.
01:01:37We can automate that functionality with our system because we have an e-axle.
01:01:41So all we have to do is just retract the pins and then use our e-axle to drive the system
01:01:45up to the right point.
01:01:46And because we're measuring at the kingpin, we actually know what the trailer load is,
01:01:51so the driver doesn't even have to hop out of their trailer to balance their load.
01:01:55But if I've got three Honda CR-Xs and I want to steal some DVD players, they can't fit
01:02:00under the trailer anymore because of the battery.
01:02:02That is a problem.
01:02:03Okay.
01:02:04Well, that's a safety...
01:02:05Theft prevention.
01:02:06Challenge.
01:02:07You need to go to NSX.
01:02:08Right.
01:02:09Double question.
01:02:10Which axle has the e-axle?
01:02:16Basically, we are electrifying the forward axle.
01:02:18Okay.
01:02:19But our system has modularity.
01:02:21We can electrify either or both.
01:02:24There's a bunch of different things, but our first product is a very basic, straightforward
01:02:28system that is meant to service the refrigerated industry and the dry van industry.
01:02:33Refrigerated industry is where the most pain is, especially in places like Southern California.
01:02:38Why?
01:02:39Why is there pain?
01:02:40Because one of the things you have to remember, a refrigerated trailer has that kind of refrigeration
01:02:43unit on the front.
01:02:44It's kind of like a scab or something on the front.
01:02:46I'm learning this for the first time.
01:02:47I'm not remembering.
01:02:48So if you look at these big trailers and you look at the very front in between the tractor
01:02:52or the cab and the trailer itself, it can either have a flat surface or it can have
01:02:57that kind of domed refrigeration surface.
01:02:59Right.
01:03:00Okay.
01:03:01That's what that is.
01:03:02Yeah.
01:03:03One of the biggest problems with, especially in places like Southern California, is that
01:03:06to keep that box cold, the refrigerator has to run.
01:03:08That unit has to be running.
01:03:10What most people don't know is the bottom two thirds is a diesel engine burning about
01:03:14two gallons an hour, just sitting there, right?
01:03:18We remove that entire diesel engine.
01:03:20We use our E axle as a generator and the battery pack is the power storage.
01:03:24And so now we can actually sustainably run a reefer unit, a refrigeration unit.
01:03:29And now this solves all of the dock problems, a bunch of the different problems that are
01:03:34around zero emissions refrigeration.
01:03:37That's why we have a partnership with Thermo King, is because we are the only solution
01:03:41currently that solves that problem to go pure electric.
01:03:44I'm sold.
01:03:45We break down in Needles, California, it's 117 degrees.
01:03:50How long with 300 kilowatts could I run a reefer unit?
01:03:57Our current model shows anywhere between 20 and 30 hours is the last that I remember.
01:04:01But so at least, and that's like during the day.
01:04:04So yeah, um, we can, you know, you can stretch it.
01:04:07You don't need to always be running the compressor, like a bunch of different, it really depends
01:04:11on the efficiency of the box and keep the refrigerator door closed kids.
01:04:14That's right.
01:04:15You're not burning diesel, not burning diesel.
01:04:18Now there is an exception where, for example, we've even been approached by like DoD and
01:04:23like Red Cross to build mobile command centers out of these trailers.
01:04:27This is the power infrastructure.
01:04:29And then they're like, what do you do if you're in the middle of the desert and you can't
01:04:32get solar because there's a wind or the sandstorm or something like that, hook it up to a diesel
01:04:36tractor and go for a one hour drive.
01:04:39We go in and drag charge, we put the energy back into the battery pack and go back and
01:04:42park it and run your hospital again.
01:04:44So those are all future applications of, you know, niche applications of this type of technology.
01:04:51But currently we're laser focused on the refrigerated and the dry van, you know, material movement,
01:04:57commercial trucking industry for specifically the class eight trailers.
01:05:01Let's get back to hopefully some of the guys.
01:05:03I don't know if we have a big trucker audience.
01:05:05I don't think we do.
01:05:06No, we definitely don't.
01:05:07Explain this, sell it to me like I'm Sylvester Stallone from over the top.
01:05:12Like when you talk to the drivers, what's their benefit?
01:05:15These are our biggest fans.
01:05:16Yes.
01:05:17Oh, great.
01:05:18If they're skeptical, what are their initial concerns?
01:05:21And then how do you, what do you win them over with?
01:05:23Yes.
01:05:24So, um, the drivers, you know, you have to remember I came from racing and I was a race
01:05:30engineer.
01:05:31And one of the first things I learned as a race engineer from Carol Smith himself, the
01:05:34guy that wrote all the great books was that your job as a race engineer is to get the
01:05:38driver as confident as possible behind the steering wheel.
01:05:41You drive race cars, you know that.
01:05:43Not very well, but I do.
01:05:44You know, the more confident you are, the more performance you're going to extract from
01:05:48that vehicle.
01:05:49It's not about my tire.
01:05:51My tires aren't like, let the engineers think about what the tire pressure looks like and
01:05:55what the tire temperature gradient looks like and all of this other stuff.
01:05:58No.
01:05:59Yeah.
01:06:00I mean, this happened when I, the other week I was like, Hey, something's wrong with the
01:06:02rear end.
01:06:03That's right.
01:06:04I came in and two minutes later I was back out and it was, it was fixed.
01:06:07So whatever it was taking that over to where we are now in this entire stack, the most
01:06:11important group of people are the fleet operators and the drivers.
01:06:15These are the folks that are actually doing all of the hard work that allow us to take
01:06:19delivery of these microphones and everything else that we love every single day.
01:06:23And so, and because I've been driving trucks and trailers since I was 14 years old, I have
01:06:29this like very specific, we all in my company have a very specific empathy for the driver
01:06:33and the fleet operator.
01:06:35And so what we do is we actually tailor all of our driving algorithms, all of our assist
01:06:38algorithms to give the driver confidence and safety.
01:06:42We have anti jackknifing stuff.
01:06:43We have a bunch of different bits and pieces.
01:06:46When we torque fill, we'd never, we'd never pull confidence away from the driver.
01:06:50We give them confidence.
01:06:51We get quotes like, Holy crap, you turned my old freight liner into a new Tesla.
01:06:56And so now the drivers are fighting to drive with our trailers and, and it's really because
01:07:02it gives it, you know, imagine you're a driver and you're sitting at an intersection with
01:07:07a, even a 3% grade, you're fully loaded and you're waiting for the semi-automated transmission
01:07:12to shift into its next gear.
01:07:14We kill, you can accelerate up the grapevine at 55 miles an hour, fully loaded at 50% throttle.
01:07:20There's no other truck and trailer in the world will do that.
01:07:22Not even a Tesla semi when it's all loaded up.
01:07:25And so maybe a Tesla semi will do it, but pretty much nothing else will do that.
01:07:29Right, right.
01:07:30Um, well, so I, that, that steady state climb sounds interesting, but when you're leaving
01:07:37an intersection and the driver's got to do whatever the 15 gear shifts just to get across
01:07:42to the next light.
01:07:43Yeah.
01:07:44Does this, does this, it just smooths it out completely?
01:07:46There's no, there's no, it makes it feel like you're shifting in the parking lot, just completely
01:07:50standing still.
01:07:51And then everything just goes right into gear.
01:07:52That's the torque fill.
01:07:53That's the torque fill.
01:07:54Oh, okay.
01:07:55Imagine the first time you drove, I don't know if you drove a modern Porsche with the
01:07:59blip shifting on the downshift and you're like, Oh, that makes it a lot easier.
01:08:03Yes.
01:08:04Right.
01:08:05And it's just, everything just kind of falls into place.
01:08:06Right.
01:08:07So we use our intelligence to do, to the, do the torque fill specifically to give the
01:08:10driver confidence, to give a, a, a uniform sense of torque, but also to pay attention
01:08:18to those torque transients inside the transmission.
01:08:20So whether you have a manual or a semi-automated transmission, we multiply the service life
01:08:26by a lot in these vehicles because we're not requiring these huge torque transitions.
01:08:30Yeah.
01:08:31No shift shock.
01:08:32So how much, what's the cost?
01:08:33If you're making everything better, well, let's talk about charging for a second.
01:08:37Okay.
01:08:38Yeah.
01:08:39So this is something that I'm particularly proud of because one of the things that I
01:08:42noticed early on was that if you have these tractors with 600, 800 or megawatt hour of
01:08:47energy, 600 kilowatt hours or megawatt hour of energy charging infrastructure has to scale
01:08:51up as well.
01:08:52Well, we all know that there are 150 kilowatt chargers all the way up to 350 kilowatt DC
01:08:58chargers, kind of all over the place at this point.
01:09:00And you can pretty much short of buying them on Amazon.
01:09:03You can get them when you need them.
01:09:05Nobody's able to give us 600 kilowatt or megawatt DC fast chargers on a regular basis.
01:09:10They're hard to get.
01:09:11The infrastructure is very difficult, right?
01:09:13This is why we have a 300 kilowatt hour battery pack.
01:09:16And in some cases, in fact, we have a specification for a 200 kilowatt hour battery pack because
01:09:23we have, we have these smaller battery packs.
01:09:25We can now utilize automotive levels of DC charging, still use commercial hardware there,
01:09:32but we use automotive levels of DC charging 150 to 350 kilowatt DC chargers.
01:09:38And now we can actually use the shore power that's already at the loading dock.
01:09:42And unlike tractors that are burning money when they're parked and charging, the trailer
01:09:46has to be parked to get loaded and unloaded.
01:09:49You're not going to throw things at it, so it has to be parked.
01:09:52And so what we did was we did a survey of the fastest fleets.
01:09:55The fastest fleets are the Amazons and Walmarts of the world.
01:09:59These folks load in at around 40 to 45 minutes a box.
01:10:04Can we charge our entire trailer in 45 minutes?
01:10:07Well, yes, on a 300 kilowatt DC charger, we can get to 80% SOC in 45 minutes.
01:10:12No problem.
01:10:14And now we become operationally transparent using power at the building.
01:10:18The buildings already have power.
01:10:19The problem is when you need to call SoCal Edison to trench two miles from your substation
01:10:25to this new lot that you just bought to charge all your diesel tractor, your electric tractors
01:10:30that are way out there.
01:10:32How many, because I'm imagining a Walmart distribution center and the lineup of those
01:10:38trailers.
01:10:39You can't charge, you couldn't plug all of those into the building power.
01:10:42It's regulated.
01:10:43So all of the new loading docks, especially ones that support refrigeration, have to have
01:10:48this power.
01:10:49And a lot of these folks are more than willing, like our first pilot, we used employee charging
01:10:54and just pulled the cable over the fence and plugged it into our trailer.
01:10:58So we have incredible charging flexibility.
01:11:00We even tell our fleet drivers, worst case scenario, just pull it up in front of your
01:11:04house and run a cable from your dryer into our trailer and it'll charge.
01:11:08Yeah.
01:11:09Well, because, you know, so 300 kilowatt hours, the Hummer and the Silverado EV, those batteries
01:11:14are, I don't know, usable is like 212 or something like that.
01:11:18And they charge fast, you know?
01:11:20And so I remember I had to take one to 100%, but it did it in less than an hour.
01:11:26So if you just get to the 80%, because that's where we're going.
01:11:29I just remember when Kyle was here, everyone thinks you can just go to this bank of 350s.