Insider's Guide to Energy EV

33 - The Future of Electric Trucks: TELO Trucks' Compact, Urban-Focused EV

September 18, 2024 • Chris Sass, Niall Riddell, Jason Marks, Forrest North • Season 1 • Episode 33

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TELO Trucks is transforming the electric truck landscape by introducing a compact, urban-friendly solution that challenges the trend of oversized vehicles. In a market dominated by large electric pickups, Telo offers a mini truck that maintains the full capabilities of a mid-sized truck but within the footprint of a two-door Mini Cooper. This innovative design caters to both commercial and recreational users in densely populated urban areas, providing the power and utility of a full-size truck without the excessive bulk.

Unlike traditional electric trucks, which often prioritize size and power at the expense of efficiency, Telo Trucks focuses on balancing capability with practicality. The vehicle features a five-foot bed and an additional mid-gate that allows for extra cargo space, making it versatile for various uses, from construction work to outdoor adventures. With a range of over 300 miles and advanced safety technology, Telo's electric mini truck is built to meet the demands of urban contractors, commuters, and recreational users who require a functional yet compact vehicle.

TELO's approach to electric vehicles extends beyond design. They leverage cutting-edge battery technology and manufacturing processes to create a truck that is not only efficient but also cost-effective to produce. By avoiding the pitfalls of previous EV startups and focusing on delivering a profitable, sustainable product, Telo is poised to disrupt the electric vehicle market. With plans to roll out their first models in the near future, Telo Trucks aims to set a new standard for what electric trucks can be, making them smaller, safer, and more suited to urban environments.

We were pleased to host:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonmurraymarks/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/forrestnorth/

Visit our website: https://insidersguidetoenergy.com/

Transcript 

00:00:00 Jason Marks 

Trucks have gotten too damn big, and making them electric. Though trucks have gotten too damn big, and making the giant truck electric is not solving the problem. 

00:00:10 Jason Marks 

We develop battery and safety technology that actually lets us solve this problem. Telo trucks is building an electric Crew Cab pickup truck, the same capabilities as a mid sized truck in half the space. 

00:00:24 Chris Sass 

Your trusted source for information on the energy transition. This is the Insider's Guide to Energy Podcast. 

00:00:37 Chris Sass 

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00:00:51 Chris Sass 

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00:01:07 Chris Sass 

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00:01:27 Chris Sass 

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00:01:40 Chris Sass 

Welcome to another edition of the Insider's Guide to Energy EV and with me is my co-host Neil Rydell. Neil, what are we talking about today? 

00:01:47 Niall Riddell 

So I need to introduce this one particularly carefully because we're talking about trucks, but being British, that doesn't necessarily mean big trucks. That also means mini trucks. So we're here to talk with Jason Marks and Forest north of Tello trucks. 

00:02:00 Niall Riddell 

About the product that they're bringing to market. 

00:02:03 Niall Riddell 

Hey guys can. 

00:02:03 Niall Riddell 

You tell us a bit more about what you're doing. 

00:02:06 Jason Marks 

Yeah. Thanks for having us appreciate that. So, tell our trucks builds electric mini trucks, so a pickup truck with all the capability of a full size truck, it's built into the footprint of a 2 door Mini Cooper. 

00:02:17 Jason Marks 

Really, we're trying to make it accessible for people to use trucks both for commercial purposes and for recreational purposes that live in dense urban populations. 

00:02:27 Niall Riddell 

So this is something that clearly Americans are hugely in love with big vehicles to move around through cities, across towns and the massive countryside you guys have got on quite broad wide roads. And from what we've seen in past history of vehicles, vehicles are getting bigger all the time. How are you expecting people to respond to this? 

00:02:47 Niall Riddell 

Transition. 

00:02:50 Jason Marks 

Well, I think you have to kind of look at the reason why vehicles have gotten so gigantic over the last 15 to 20 years. So people assume that there's this American feeling of whatever you have it either it's masculinity or anything like that that shows that why vehicles have gotten so much larger. But that's actually not the whole truth. Sure, there's plenty of people that do love their giant. 

00:03:11 Jason Marks 

Raised vehicles with 46 inch tires, but there's actually incentives for the automakers to build vehicles larger and larger every year. 

00:03:19 Jason Marks 

And that doesn't necessarily align with the American consumer and what they actually want. So you know, if we look at actually the regulation that's passed over the last 20 years both in. 

00:03:30 Jason Marks 

Safety regulations and for environmental regulations. It's really given automakers really no other option but to build their vehicles substantially larger every single year and I'm sure we'll dive into the details of that shortly. 

00:03:41 Chris Sass 

You're talking about a vehicle that you said fits in a smaller footprint. Neil talked about our our massive trucks. I see you know, for those of you watching the YouTube, you can see a picture of a truck behind you and it's a four door truck pickup truck looks like a standard truck. 

00:03:57 Chris Sass 

What size bed do these have though? If it's a small footprint like that are, are these 4 foot beds 6 foot beds? How? How big is the bed? 

00:04:04 Jason Marks 

Yeah. So the the bed in this vehicle you see behind us, the one that we bring. 

00:04:07 Jason Marks 

To. 

00:04:07 Jason Marks 

Market is 5 feet long. It's a full 5 foot bed 60 inches now. One of the beautiful things we designed into our vehicle is a true mid gate that folds completely flat where the 3rd row, the second row of seats folds all the way flat. So you get that additional space which is almost three additional. 

00:04:23 Jason Marks 

Feet of extra bed space so you can fit a 4 by 8 sheet of plywood and that actually does a lot of interesting use cases. If you're a surfer of course, as long as you have like a tono cover that covers the bed, you can put your full surfboard in there and lock it up and nobody can access it. And if you're a camper or you like to be out in the wilderness, it's a great way to have a full size bed that you can lay flat in there. 

00:04:44 Jason Marks 

And sleep in while not having to worry about pulling the tailgate down, having a cover in the back of the. 

00:04:48 Jason Marks 

OK. 

00:04:49 Chris Sass 

But hasn't that concept already been tried with things like the Avalanche and some other products that probably aren't with us anymore? 

00:04:56 Jason Marks 

Well, I mean, if we're going to talk about there are, it's actually on vehicles today as well, including new vehicles that are coming out that have just been released recently. So it's not necessarily a new concept and if you talk to people that have it, they they generally love it. 

00:05:08 Chris Sass 

Awesome. 

00:05:10 Niall Riddell 

So the key thing, the key thing that interests me at this stage is you're bringing this to market as an electric vehicle. What? What's the status of bringing electric vehicles to market today? I mean, we've seen some quite high profile businesses struggle in the current market. Why do you think now is a good time to bring an electric mini truck to market? 

00:05:10 Forrest North 

Yeah. 

00:05:29 Jason Marks 

I think now is an awesome actually time to be developing and getting ready to deliver vehicles as we climb up the through the dissolution and in the hype cycle of a product delivery. But I mean, let me kind of break that question down into two things. There's a lot of there's, there's a graveyard of electric vehicle companies that have kind of come before us over. 

00:05:45 Jason Marks 

The. 

00:05:45 Jason Marks 

Last 10 years or so, a lot of things that are common amongst them. 

00:05:49 Jason Marks 

Is they've taken an existing vehicle platform and said we're going to build that, but make it a. 

00:05:53 Jason Marks 

Patrick and I don't think that's really the right mentality to have when you're trying to bring something new to market. If you look at how the automobile became popularized in the early 1900s, you know it used to be that people, the first ever automobiles were just horse drawn carriages with engine in them. And it was this one box horse drawn carriage that engine in it and it slowly. 

00:06:13 Jason Marks 

In addition to this two box solution with this big motor in the front and that's what remained for the. 

00:06:20 Jason Marks 

120 years, right? We're at this really unique standpoint where we no longer need this 2 box solution to actually solve all the problems of an automobile. So I think that everyone that's kind of taken what's been true of the internal combustion engine and trying to apply to electric vehicles are just giving people something that's markedly worse in many ways without actually. 

00:06:39 Jason Marks 

Capitalizing the advantage of electrification, so 1/4 of what we do is actually capitalizing on advantage of electrification that lets us build our solution like A1 box solution and actually make it into the footprint that's useful in many ways. So that's one thing that we're doing different. We're building our vehicle completely differently than the people that came before us. 

00:06:56 Jason Marks 

But on top of that, building a vehicle company is very challenging, as you've seen people like to tout that it costs a billion dollars to build an electric vehicle company, extremely capital intensive, but a lot of that means that we're looking at what it takes to build a high volume manufacturing capability in a vehicle company. What we've looked at is what does it take to build a profitable vehicle company. 

00:07:16 Jason Marks 

As quickly as possible, which doesn't, which means that how do we get to profitability at the low and mid volumes of vehicle development and a lot of our decisions and even what's been possible is only actually been possible because of the last five years and what's kind of rolled out. So three major things allow us to actually build a new company right now it's different than any time before. 

00:07:34 Jason Marks 

One, we have a mature supply chain for a lot of the components that don't differentiate our vehicles. So that's like the drivetrain completely off the shelf, things like the interior components, glass, all that can be made completely off the shelf that we don't have to design from scratch ourselves. The only thing we innovate in is we're innovation matters and that's the battery pack and the safety system of our vehicle. 

00:07:54 Jason Marks 

Second thing is is manufacturing capabilities. So we can do low and mid volume contract manufacturing and you can amortize the cost of manufacturing amongst many different automakers and that's made it possible to build medium volume profitable. 

00:08:07 Jason Marks 

EV companies and the biggest thing that's really different right now is software. So software has enabled us to not only develop components of the vehicle as a software defined vehicle, but also to validate our vehicle virtually completely. So a lot of automobile companies before they build hundreds of prototypes to do and breadboards, they call them, which is the vehicle just on on the table. 

00:08:28 Jason Marks 

And that costs so much money and so many hours of Labor to actually do the validation process of the vehicle we've already crashed our vehicle in software 100 times. 

00:08:36 Jason Marks 

We've done things like electrical validation. We've done structural validation, vibration analysis, suspension kinematics, all that can be done virtually now and you can build very few prototypes to actually verify that your validation is good. 

00:08:49 Chris Sass 

So I get that the cost structure and and building profitability is good, but the market was pretty rough for new entrants into the market. So are we past that stage are are people funding and looking to be engaged and bringing new concepts to market then? 

00:09:05 Jason Marks 

Well, I think that comes down to, you know, we've seen electric vehicles have like a lot of negative news in the past. 

00:09:12 Jason Marks 

And there's a bunch of different reasons for that negative news. I think that one of the things is there's a lot of resistance in the market for the incumbent players to have new entrants come in. So they're really pushing hard to prevent that, that hype cycle from from peaking for the new entrants. But I think that people are just looking for something different, not the amorphous BLOB that is at the general crossover in the world. That doesn't really differentiate on anything. 

00:09:33 Jason Marks 

Specifically, they're looking for actually use in their vehicles. How am I going to particularly use my vehicle? So I think that because we position ourselves as something unique and different in that case, we're able to get a lot of interest in that. 

00:09:46 Chris Sass 

And what about go to market? I think you know Tesla disrupted with their go to market strategy. It didn't necessarily pan out well for others that tried to emulate that. And the dealership kind of structure we have in North America. How do you guys handle that? 

00:10:00 Jason Marks 

Yeah, it's it's a. It's a great question. It's funny if you talk to a lot of people that have worked in this space over the last five years, they they were very gung ho and no dealers. Never ever will go directly to consumers. And then they've kind of backtracked a little bit on that and said, hey, the finances were interesting and didn't really work out that well. So we're actually. 

00:10:20 Jason Marks 

You know, we kind of bifurcate our solutions into when we're selling to consumers versus selling to commercial applications. 

00:10:26 Jason Marks 

And I'll talk on the on the commercial and Forrest can talk on the consumer, but on the commercial side of things, it's really unique in that. There's two different buckets of commercial fleet customers. There's the bucket of the actual fleets where you have a fleet identification number and you can buy directly from the automakers themselves, which is really the big names in the world. 

00:10:46 Jason Marks 

And there's a bucket of the commercial customers that don't have a fleet identification number, but they buy maybe up to 10 vehicles every year, but they have to go in person to a dealership, get their background check every single time they'd buy new vehicle. 

00:10:58 Jason Marks 

And the go to market strategy is different for those two in and. 

00:11:01 Jason Marks 

Of. 

00:11:01 Jason Marks 

Itself. So if you're a fleet identification, because we can go direct to you, you can finance it yourself. You have the mechanism and capability to do that. It's actually relatively straightforward, but we have to establish ourselves as a pretty big player to actually support them on the commercial side, we still need a a mechanism for which they can apply fund financing. 

00:11:18 Jason Marks 

To actually get their vehicles in house and we're evaluating a couple of unique opportunities. 

00:11:22 Forrest North 

I think you've kind of covered it. I did want to kind of go back to your earlier question just on the timing of when you start and. 

00:11:29 Forrest North 

You know, a lot of the the automakers that have succeeded actually started in downturns. And the ones that started in these times of like free money didn't do so well. So that is something that's interesting that we watch. And I think at least from my experience, part of that is when you started a downturn, you make decisions that are. 

00:11:49 Forrest North 

You know you're in lean times and you're making really kind of practical, logical decisions as opposed to just like throwing hundreds of millions of dollars around. So I and I think that that ends up making a better product as far as reaching consumers. 

00:12:02 Forrest North 

Yeah. I mean right now we have the tool is more tools available to reach consumers than anytime before. So right now we're having a good influx of consumers coming directly to us. We're still working on the, the the go to market plans as far as whether we work with franchised dealerships or or how we do that. 

00:12:22 Forrest North 

And it is really important to have service and distribution, so that's that's probably the direction that we're going to go is through larger franchised dealer groups. 

00:12:35 Niall Riddell 

And when we were introducing what you're doing, you identified 2 really important USP's to you guys. One of them was battery tech. The other one was safety. Can you open them up a bit more for us and tell us what you're doing that's different in that space and why and how you're introducing it to the tellow truck? 

00:12:53 Forrest North 

Yeah, our battery tech is. This is like my 6th now generation of of battery pack. So a lot of what makes a good battery pack is, is understanding just the fundamentals, what's possible in kind of holistic design, right? So I I can't like maybe point to any one. 

00:13:10 Forrest North 

Specific parameter that that that makes this better than everyone else, but one of the things we've focused on is the vertical height of the battery pack, because any vertical height of the battery pack essentially translates into the vertical height of the roof, which then creates more arrow drag. So that's that's been one focus. The other is in. 

00:13:30 Forrest North 

Energy density and bringing that energy density kind of more to the central part of the pack. So we have really good protection against collision and and ingress from the sides or the tail side of the the battery, everything is cooled liquid cooled. 

00:13:49 Forrest North 

We have both active and passive mechanisms for keeping the pack very homeostasis, essentially like keeping everything isothermal and we also fuse every cell. So there are other companies that do that, but some of the large companies don't, which I actually think is is crazy. 

00:14:09 Chris Sass 

I have a question based on what you're saying in batteries, is there a minimum viable product for range for a new vehicle? Is there is the expectation change from the early days of let's say a leaf or something like that to what I should expect? If I look at one of your trucks for either commercial application for a fleet or individually. 

00:14:09 Jason Marks 

That's it. 

00:14:27 Forrest North 

I think it might be different for fleet, but for me personally, from what I've seen in the market and what I kind of grew up with, going working at a large OEM, we'll mention here. But is that you really want to be over 300 miles of range and the benefit is that once you're over 300 miles of range, you have so much battery capacity, you can use energy cells, which gets you that. 

00:14:47 Forrest North 

High energy density, but because you have so many cells, you can actually have crazy performance because you have a lot of cells that you can draw a little bit of current from. 

00:14:56 Forrest North 

And then what? And then what? The other nice thing about that is that people don't actually drive the full range of the vehicle every day. And so there's a benefit to having these kind of very small, you know, most people drive 20 miles a day around that, which is about 8 kilowatt hours. So you have 100 kWh pack. 

00:15:16 Forrest North 

And you're mostly drawing 8 kilowatt hours a day on average. It means you have a really long life, so you get a couple of benefits of long range. You get extra power, which is always fun for people and. 

00:15:27 Forrest North 

You get long life. 

00:15:29 Chris Sass 

But I guess. 

00:15:30 Chris Sass 

You know, I understand that from the commute concept, but if I'm a contractor I probably tow or I probably have ladders on top of my truck or I probably do other uses. That's why I have a. 

00:15:41 Chris Sass 

Truck. 

00:15:42 Chris Sass 

So how does that factor into building a brand of a truck like the Tele? 

00:15:47 Jason Marks 

Yeah. So I'll talk. 

00:15:49 Forrest North 

Jason can talk about that a little bit, but he's he's interviewed construction folks, but it's really geared more towards. 

00:15:54 Forrest North 

With the urban driver as opposed to the long haul towing, so we we just don't believe long haul towing is something that an EV truck can accomplish and and so why go after that market. And if you're going to make a big, big long truck you you're kind of you know you're always going to be 1 down from the diesel ram that can tow across the country with your. 

00:16:15 Forrest North 

With a fully loaded horse trailer, right? Like an electric truck is just not going to be able to do that. 

00:16:21 Jason Marks 

Yes. If you look at the the person that you're talking about, the contractor, the plumber, the electrician that does the work than in the downtown city, you know more often than not what they do is they live about 45 minutes to an hour and a half outside the city. They drive into the city, they spend the day in the city and they drive their vehicle back. 

00:16:38 Jason Marks 

And we've, we've interviewed a number of different general contractors and one of the really interesting things that they say, especially in California, where they have to keep track of all their carbon emissions. So they've done analysis of all their carbon emissions over the duration of an of a project, the duration of a year. And you would think that the majority of carbon emissions comes from building supplies. 

00:16:59 Jason Marks 

And transport. 

00:17:00 Jason Marks 

Like big objects, long distances, or maybe the actual work going on, the generators being driven at the job sites. But actually 80% of their emissions come from their workers vehicles. So these are workers that are driving to and from their job site every single day they take their vehicles on the weekends to pilot to maybe pick their boat up and drop it off their house. But they're not driving it. 

00:17:22 Jason Marks 

Hundreds and thousands of miles. That's actually really the the use case that we see our vehicle for the work that's being done in the city, the people that maybe live outside the city going into the city, then they require 250 plus miles to do that job almost every day. 

00:17:39 Niall Riddell 

So at this point I'm going to freak out without asking a question about EV charging, because charging is such a critical part of what we're seeing in this transition. So first question obviously is going to be, are you running those batteries at a 400 Volt architecture or an 800 Volt and therefore, what kind of charging speed might we expect on the truck? 

00:18:00 Forrest North 

That's a great question. We we are designing for for both. We started focusing on 400 volts because that's actually what's existing. We've been in talks with various charge station makers, one of which I used to work for and most of them come in online are supporting 800 Volt. 

00:18:21 Forrest North 

So we are looking at an. 

00:18:22 Forrest North 

Architecture that would that would support. 

00:18:24 Niall Riddell 

That as well so. 

00:18:26 Forrest North 

Charging is is, you know, we will be nacked native. 

00:18:32 Forrest North 

That's that's our goal. And so part of that goal is to have the maximized charging speed. But the other part of that goal is to have a charging network that's not a dumpster fire. 

00:18:42 Niall Riddell 

Which then gives us something what 150 kilowatt capable charging? Possibly higher. 

00:18:48 Jason Marks 

They definitely higher they they can do up to 250 and then with the 800 for all picture they can do up to 350 our you know our battery pack isn't. 

00:18:58 Jason Marks 

Ginormous. But it's good sized, so we can expect charging times in the 20 minute range with those rates. 

00:19:06 Niall Riddell 

Yeah, that's gonna be a huge part of the journey. Because if you're dropping a 300 mile capable vehicle into the market with a 200 plus kilowatt capable charge, 20 minute charge times are gonna get you around the country fairly comfortably for the kind of use cases you're imagining. 

00:19:22 Jason Marks 

And to be clear on the use cases thing like a lot of our the people that we interviewed that are going to be our customers are charging at home. 

00:19:29 Jason Marks 

So they're using level 2. They're using wall Chargers and the majority of the time and and for us to actually, I don't know if you guys are going to introduce him, but Forrest was the founder and and of plug share. So he has and if anybody in the world has worked on charging infrastructure, he has the most data on people that are actually utilizing these these stations and we see. 

00:19:49 Jason Marks 

The opportunity for this, the urban commuter and the urban worker to be charging majority of the time either at job sites that have availability and charging or at home. 

00:20:00 Niall Riddell 

Yeah, so with plugs share your experience is all about building it from a from a beginning of the charging infrastructure in the US through to ultimately a very successful exit I believe. 

00:20:11 Forrest North 

Yeah. When we started, there were only, you know, several 100 stations across the US between 300 and 600 stations. We let people share their home as a, as an additional place people could charge, and that increased the number of spots to about 5000 pretty much. 

00:20:25 Forrest North 

Night that really helped us stay like relevant in the, you know, kind of data collection and understanding where all the stations were. And then we kind of created a score for scoring stations and I still use that all the time because the score really varies depending on how people have succeeded at charging. 

00:20:45 Forrest North 

That location. So it's a really good you know. 

00:20:50 Forrest North 

It gives you a good idea of whether you'll actually succeed at charging, and right now, as more and more people come in line, there are some places that are getting crowded, overcrowded, really quickly. And so I think that's one of the biggest issues, frankly, to Evie adoption and and maybe why it's kind of stalled out recently is that or the perception of that. 

00:21:10 Forrest North 

Anyways, is that these charging stations that aren't Macs are really terrible to use. 

00:21:17 Chris Sass 

Where are you guys on the journey? We've been talking a lot about future. You've talked about having multiple generations of batteries, so it doesn't sound like you're just. 

00:21:23 Chris Sass 

Starting. 

00:21:25 Chris Sass 

Where are you in the journey? Where where is the Telo truck to be seen? 

00:21:30 Jason Marks 

Yeah. So we have prototypes in our offices in San Carlos. We actually share a backyard with one of those early companies that that started right next door to us, but. 

00:21:40 Jason Marks 

So we have drivable vehicles downstairs as well as stationary box that kind of define both the interior and exterior of our vehicle. We're currently building our gamma builds of our vehicle. These I wouldn't call these full pre production builds, but our battery pack, our safety systems, those are in place for these vehicles that you will be able to see. So there will be a big announcement. 

00:22:01 Jason Marks 

Next year and everyone will get really excited about our our vehicle showcased around the world, but that you won't be able to see him driving on roads before then. 

00:22:09 Chris Sass 

And how much of the technology in the truck is important? So for example, we always talk a lot about our V series. You know, Teslas have kind of got the lock or perception of the lock on the technology angle. How important is that for a new company emerging? And is that a differentiator or is it off the shelf and being able to get into the price point in the right market? 

00:22:29 Chris Sass 

More of a different. 

00:22:30 Chris Sass 

Dinner. 

00:22:31 Jason Marks 

So I think that there's a differentiator in the market space and one of the big differentials we have in the market space is that we have an identified market that's unserved. We have this market of people that really want small trucks that aren't able to go out and go buy a small truck. And so they're just begging for them. And the way that they're solving those problems right now is they're either buying side by side or low. 

00:22:51 Jason Marks 

Feed vehicles or golf carts or buying a big truck and just dealing with it. Or maybe just going with a Prius and putting your four by two plywood and hanging out the back here. Plus that's what we see and market identification. I think that's what really makes us unique in. 

00:23:04 Jason Marks 

Sense we have technological differentiators in our battery and our safety technology, and that's the area that we focus on. We're not trying to vertically integrate everything because that's a daunting task and there may be a state in the future where we can do that, but which really enables us to go after this market are those two core USP's and for us to identify the battery one and to summarize the battery one. 

00:23:24 Jason Marks 

We have a battery pack that's extremely volumetrically space efficient because of how we electrically and thermally connect it. Like that's what makes our battery pack so. 

00:23:32 Jason Marks 

And forest is like has the the background. The expertise has worked on battery packs since the 1990s on developing this for the electric vehicle craze. And so we are like really well established in what's capable and what's possible in that. 

00:23:45 Jason Marks 

Space. 

00:23:47 Jason Marks 

The other piece of the pie is on safety and safety. Has a lot of different factors to it we've seen. 

00:23:52 Jason Marks 

A lot of vehicles overtime as safety. 

00:23:56 Jason Marks 

Safety regulations change. People like add an extra 6 inches of bumper to that vehicle and make it look uglier and bigger, and that's like we don't think that's the appropriate way to actually look at safety when people actually do the ******** engineering to actually validate crash safety systems on vehicles. They make a lot of assumptions, and those assumptions may not be true. 

00:24:15 Jason Marks 

Nowadays, so one of the big assumptions they make is if we measure the change in acceleration at the base of the vehicle platform that that has some correlation to the change in acceleration of the head and the heart of occupants. 

00:24:27 Jason Marks 

So what's really important here is that what really matters is the head and the heart of the occupants. That's where you need to measure from. So you truly be look at the holistic science of the crash rather than just approximating it based on the acceleration on the vehicle platform. So we're able to not only pass crash safety, but pass crash safety with a good amount of margin without having this. 

00:24:47 Jason Marks 

Giant hood of our vehicle. 

00:24:50 Jason Marks 

On top of that, having a giant hood really makes it very difficult to see over that hood and thus potentially hitting pedestrians, dogs, you name it, right an all time high in pedestrian deaths in the US, approaching 10,000 pedestrian dying per year. In the US there was an incredible economist article that came out this week. 

00:25:11 Jason Marks 

On this topic specifically, but it's like, wow, have we got to the wrong space where maybe we've saved a few occupants in return for killing far more pedestrians? 

00:25:23 Niall Riddell 

And that's really interesting that you highlight that point because it's something that on our smaller British and European roads, we really noticed is you bring some of these vehicles over and a lot of them, you know, a small child, their head is well below the bonnet height. They did a fantastic test many years ago, people sitting in trucks and looking behind them. And you can't see anything behind you so bringing. 

00:25:43 Niall Riddell 

Vehicles into a big vehicles into a smaller urban environment is really challenging, so the work being done here is really. 

00:25:49 Niall Riddell 

Or are you looking at things like the drivers seating position, the way they can visualise around the vehicle that you know rear view, all that sort of stuff as well? 

00:25:59 Jason Marks 

Absolutely. Like every time we we build something in our vehicle, we pull in the model of the human and their eye ellipses and we look at where their ellipses can see and that's core to how you design the entire vehicle. So our downward vision angle will beat out any vehicle on the road to. 

00:26:12 Jason Marks 

For example. 

00:26:13 Niall Riddell 

And do you do that as physical models or as you highlighted earlier, is this all done with computer simulation? 

00:26:20 

Both. 

00:26:21 Jason Marks 

So we do it all 100% virtually, but we do have a seating buck that we built as well just to make sure that we're not too crazy. 

00:26:28 Forrest North 

And our design firm Fusion Project has a seating book, an interior book, and so there is a lot of back and forth between the the the, the buck that's kind of foam core and plywood and seats and stuff and how it feels. And then is that how how is that matching up in cab? 

00:26:46 Niall Riddell 

And and what I'm hearing there for is you're you're kind of pushing the boundaries of vehicle design and how you tackle the challenges of meeting regulations and requirements. How's that journey been between pioneering a new approach to developing a vehicle as well as also satisfying, you know, fairly old school regulators in the way that, you know, they? 

00:27:06 Niall Riddell 

Classify safety, for example. 

00:27:10 Forrest North 

Yeah, I mean, it's nice that we, you know, a lot of vehicles have come before us to and have pushed on the regulators. So it seems like mostly regulators want to see EV's out there. We we have experience in this field. So both Jason and I getting various systems passed. 

00:27:30 Forrest North 

Regulations and and understanding them. But in addition to that, we also hire contractors who are experts in these spaces to kind of go over details because it is important. So our next step after the the the vehicles we're building right now will be homologation, which is passing all the laws at once that for the. 

00:27:50 Jason Marks 

And to be clear, we're not going to just start it after this phase. We've already started it in our last phase of our company and crashed our vehicle hundreds of times already. We know what's capable of doing from a changing acceleration perspective, from a lot of the core components that we've integrated into our. 

00:28:03 Jason Marks 

Vehicle already. 

00:28:04 Jason Marks 

What's really important, though, is that regulations can be can, can. 

00:28:08 Jason Marks 

Oftentimes be working in the favor of, you know, keeping everybody safe and regulated, but they can also have unintended consequences, which I think is really unique and especially talking about this space. So the regulations around the Environmental Protection Agency trying to encourage more fuel efficient vehicles are actually core to the reason that we have giant trucks. 

00:28:27 Jason Marks 

In the US right now. 

00:28:29 Jason Marks 

So a quick story on that. In the 1970s, EPA was established to build more fuel efficient vehicles because we were in a gas crisis, they exempted all trucks saying if you did work in a truck, you can do what you want because we need you to be doing work. We need the economy to work. But in 2010, we changed our regulations and brought in trucks to the story. 

00:28:49 Jason Marks 

But in doing so, we actually tried to have that same story of if you're doing work, you need to be able to continue doing work. So the thought process was, if you build, if you, if you were driving a bigger truck, things like a dump truck or a garbage truck or anything large. 

00:29:04 Jason Marks 

Then you should have a little bit more leeway in your fuel economy regulations and the thought process was good. It was like saying, OK, like you're carrying more weight driving further range. You can get a little bit of leeway, but in reality what happens is. 

00:29:15 Jason Marks 

The. 

00:29:15 Jason Marks 

Automaker said, huh? If I just make my vehicle a little bigger and call it that? 

00:29:20 Jason Marks 

Then I can have a really great opportunity to pass these fuel regulations. So every single vehicle got a little bigger and then the story here is that every single year, those regulations ratchet up, they get harder and harder and harder to hit. So every single year, the automaker goes, oh, I need to get my vehicle a little bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger every year. And that's how we ended up in the space we learned today. 

00:29:41 Forrest North 

And and we're the only country that has based those fuel economy mileage requirements on this footprint of the vehicle to my. 

00:29:48 Forrest North 

Knowledge. 

00:29:49 Jason Marks 

Yeah, I mean, you look at Japan, you go to Japan, you see these small mini chucks everywhere. These these K trucks, they call them Kei trucks, and they're awesome, by the way, if you get a chance to go there. 

00:30:00 Jason Marks 

Uh. 

00:30:00 Jason Marks 

The reason that those exist is is because Japan did the opposite in their government regulations. They tax incentivized automakers to build these vehicles that fit in this tiny little footprint. 

00:30:11 Jason Marks 

Because they were realizing they were taking up so much space in city streets, this is the only way that they could encourage that to happen. So they that. 

00:30:17 Jason Marks 

Had the opposite effect. 

00:30:19 Chris Sass 

Alright, so we've covered policy. We've covered kind of the technology you're bringing and and you you said we're expecting something next year, some sort of announcement. What's the future look like for Telo where where you guys going? 

00:30:31 Jason Marks 

Well, the short term future is that we think that every single F-150 in the city should be a teletrack every single pickup truck in the city should. 

00:30:39 Jason Marks 

Truck there's a longer term solution where we think every single vehicle in the world is 50% larger than it needs to be and burns three times as much as is three times as inefficient as it should be. So we see a future where every single vehicle from the small passenger vehicle up through the Class 6 big trucks should be 50% smaller. 

00:31:00 

Right. 

00:31:00 Chris Sass 

And and you already talked about this and just to recap, you suggested that most of your users will be charging at home. They're not likely to need charge stations added. So from what you've said, charging is that. 

00:31:09 Jason Marks 

So I need to clarify. 

00:31:10 Chris Sass 

Really an issue? 

00:31:11 Jason Marks 

I'll clarify that. 

00:31:13 Jason Marks 

I don't think most of our users will 100% of the time charge at home, but the majority of the time they are charging that will be at home. They will still use superchargers when they go down and want to go to from San Francisco to Los Angeles. 

00:31:25 Jason Marks 

For. 

00:31:26 Jason Marks 

Example core opportunity, but that's going to be the one to 5% of their time in their use case. We have a lot of data to support that expectation. 

00:31:33 Chris Sass 

So does the infrastructure we have today support your kind of growth without the additional need for charging infrastructure? From what you're saying? 

00:31:39 Jason Marks 

We, the US, needs way more charging infrastructure outright, and that's not just for us, but for the adoption of electrification. 

00:31:48 Jason Marks 

Holistically. So that's 100% the case and I'm never going to argue that we're good enough. 

00:31:53 Jason Marks 

As it is right now. 

00:31:55 Forrest North 

Yeah. And we're I'm a strong believer in the automakers, us putting chargers in the ground because it is the thing that enables the the sale and the only only company that's done that you know of and they've made the knacks. 

00:32:11 Forrest North 

Standard and their stations are by far the best, and that's because they needed to do that to actually sell the vehicles. And I think that's going to continue and we've kind of seen that kind of stall off. I think it it's a, it's a really difficult business model for people putting in charging stations and so it needs to tie in to the purchase of the vehicle. 

00:32:32 Jason Marks 

And there's a lot of reasons why an automaker is the right person to install charging networks, and a lot of it does comes down to the financials of actually building a single charger. And if you're building vehicles. 

00:32:45 Jason Marks 

And you build 10 like 100 vehicles to 1 charger. Well, you can actually amortize costs significantly better than if you're just. 

00:32:52 Jason Marks 

Building chargers. 

00:32:55 Niall Riddell 

So a lot of what you guys are doing doesn't sound that cheap and you've highlighted the idea that historically people used to believe that you need to raise a billion dollars to be able to to build an automotive manufacturer. 

00:33:06 Niall Riddell 

How do you see your financial journey progressing? You know, when will we see first units hit the market? When will you hit first revenue and how are you gonna fund that growth trajectory? And do you see yourselves as a a volume manufacturer over time or is this always gonna be a smaller mid play in the mark? 

00:33:21 Niall Riddell 

Yeah. 

00:33:23 Jason Marks 

No, we're absolutely going to go big in the future, but part of the problem, the story you heard about people raising incredible amounts of money has been that they've gone right to high volume manufacturing without proving out enough of the technology and processes in place to actually get there. So they just burn tons of capital, making poor decisions that were could have been ascertained with $100,000, but spent $100 million. 

00:33:45 Jason Marks 

You know, classic example is if you look towards high volume manufacturing for body panels of a vehicle, this is just a very simple example you buy. 

00:33:53 Jason Marks 

Steel tools. Steel. 

00:33:55 Jason Marks 

Tools. The process of making steel tools that's stamped in the ground. If you ever watched movie eight mile, you see and them stamping the big tools, you know those are giant steel tool and they're they're massive and they cost. 

00:34:05 Jason Marks 

About, you know, in total $100 million worth of money to buy those tools. 

00:34:10 Jason Marks 

Now there exists other processes and and materials you can use for stamping sides of vehicles that you can do at 500 to 1000 units per tool and they cost $1,000,000. So the difference is 100 X. But you can build 500 vehicles or 5000 vehicles if you can clean up that tool every time that you spend 500. 

00:34:30 Jason Marks 

Versus you can build 5 million vehicles. So if you make it, if you look at high volume like of course I'm going to buy the high volume toying, but now you just committed $100 million if you made a mistake you have to go back and fix. That's another $100 million versus Viber and $1,000,000 and make a mistake and have to go. 

00:34:45 Jason Marks 

Is it? 

00:34:46 Jason Marks 

Probably a little easier to stomach that one. 

00:34:48 Chris Sass 

Is there still regulation for the size of there? There used to be. If you're a small producer, you could get away with some different safety regulations and things like that, and so you also would hit a tipping point, I imagine between your your numbers when you kind of hit a point where you have different requirements. 

00:35:03 Jason Marks 

There absolutely is, but we're not going to try to, you know, maneuver around the market too much because we feel like if you're going a vehicle to market, it's. 

00:35:11 Jason Marks 

Safe. So we're going to focus on making our vehicle as safe as possible from the get go now to just answer your question from the scientific perspective, if you build less than 2500 vehicles, you're allowed to to claim a hardship exemption. And when you claim a hardship exemption, you can actually say, hey, my vehicle maybe doesn't pass these certain regulations, you call them out specifically, it's it prints out to a sticker. 

00:35:32 Jason Marks 

It goes into the door frame of the vehicle and you say, hey, just so you know, when you're buying this vehicle, we don't pass these regulations because it was hard too hard for us to do it. 

00:35:39 

Yeah. 

00:35:41 Niall Riddell 

That's a a fascinating little journey you've got in terms of basically trying to hit profitability sooner than a volume produced vehicle, you've obviously got a lot of support in the the experience of the other manufacturers that have gone before you. You've used digitisation heavily to enable you to understand how you, you know like you say, set. 

00:36:00 Niall Riddell 

Crash a vehicle. 

00:36:01 Niall Riddell 

100 times without having to build 100 vehicles. What else can we expect in the future of this manufacturing evolution that will enable you to bring more than one vehicle type to market or extend the base or what? Where do you see the vehicle going and how you're manufacturing it over the next 10510 years? 

00:36:19 Jason Marks 

Well, one of the fantastic things we're looking at is we're looking at the classifications of different types of trucks and vehicles. And we're saying what platform can we build, what core platform can we build, can address everything in this category. So right now we're at Class 2 truck, so we can build a lot of things that exist in the Class 2 platform. We looking at one, we're looking at 345 and six as well. How can we spend over the entirety of the market? 

00:36:38 Jason Marks 

And build a platform that works for all those different use cases. 

00:36:41 Jason Marks 

So that's really core to what we're doing. So this can become an SUV, a van even, maybe something a little bit more crazy. You get your minds going different ways, but that's really what we want to do. 

00:36:51 Jason Marks 

So our vehicle is kind of modular in that sense, even though the platform stays the same. Other thing that we're looking at really significantly is material science. So material science plays into both crash safety and making lightweighting slash low, costing a lot of our vehicle platform. There's a lot of really interesting stuff happening in that space that we're excited. 

00:37:06 Jason Marks 

To talk about in the future. 

00:37:08 Forrest North 

There's also a fairly large kind of excess of capacity on the contract manufacturing side. So we are working with contract manufacturers that can make you know, 5000 vehicles a year or upwards of that. And so our plan currently is to to go down that path of contract manufacturing. 

00:37:27 Forrest North 

Because there seems to be so many options there. 

00:37:30 Chris Sass 

Now this is pretty exciting. I'm looking forward to seeing these and and seeing you know them on the road. I can't wait to see one of your vehicles. 

00:37:38 Niall Riddell 

This is hugely exciting and you've taken us on that journey through concept, experience USPS into a world of how on Earth you bring these kind of products to market. So it's been a real delight to have you guys on the show today. Thank you very much. 

00:37:52 Jason Marks 

Thank you. 

00:37:52 Forrest North 

Thanks for having us. 

00:37:54 Chris Sass 

For audience, we hope you're as excited about this content as we are. If you are, don't forget to subscribe, join the conversation, find us on the YouTube channel. Ask these guys questions about their content. Ask them. They'll follow up and we'll see you again next time on the insiders guide to energy. Bye For now.