UP.Partners’ Post

Transcript

I'm the founder and CEO of Range Energy, and I'm here to talk about what may be the most boring thing on the road, which is these big boxes that we actually use all the time. There we go. A little background on myself. This is actually very early December at about 3:00 AM. And in fact, one of my heroes, one of our heroes, JB, is in the back seat of that car. This is the first ever Model S A1 and. Ever since that moment, I've been kind of looking through my career and, and kind of the opportunities that come my way to see what else I could have, what, what else I could create to have an equal impact or, or as close to an impact as we had in these early days at Tesla. And we learned a lot. We worked really hard. And, and one of the things that we always focused on was what is the end effect of these products that we're building? It's not about building technology for technology's sake. It's really about what does this really mean for the people that are going to be using this? In the, in the long run, so as I started looking around one of the areas that is always interested me and, and as a kid, even at about 14 was the first time I ever drove a truck and a trailer. I grew up around farms and things like that. And, and so trailers have always been part of my life. And as I started to look at what else could be out there for me to, to kind of, you know, bring my skill set to my network and, and my, my knowledge to the commercial trucking industry really caught my eye and there's an. A tremendous amount of pressure for good reason, to help decarbonize the trucking industry. These trucks account for about 5% of the vehicles on the road, but they account for about 30% of the total emissions on our roadways. And so as I started to look, I noticed a lot of great ideas, some marginal ideas, but one of the things I noticed across the board, if you look here, same exact box, every one of these ideas has the same exact trailer. And So what do I like to do? I like to think outside of the box, but this time I started thinking about the box. And, and like Lisa from Bell said, I, I tend to try to make the ordinary extraordinary. And this is one of those, one of those moments that, you know, it was, it was pretty obvious where, where I should put my attention. So for over the last two or three years, sorry, over the last two years, we, we've been developing this product and this product is here outside. You guys are more than welcome to come and check it out, but the way the system works is very, very simple. Essentially, we replace one of the axles in the back of the trailer with an electrified axle. We add a battery pack underneath the trailer, and we put some intelligence in the kingpin. And the kingpin is that main mechanical connection between the tractor and the trailer. And if we can measure and read how hard the tractor is pulling on the trailer in real time and we send that information back to our powertrain, we can essentially make this large box, in some cases 60,000 lbs feel completely weightless to that tractor. And what does that mean? What that means is that we could get up to 40% and in some cases more than 40% better fuel economy from the existing diesel fleet that's on the roads today. And that accounts for almost 4 million or over, sorry, over 3 million. Vehicles 3,000,000 tractors are on the road today, and if we can help decarbonize those tractors that are there today, it's a great thing. But what what happens after these these tractors move on to electrification or, or hydrogen or whatever future fuel we can come up with What we want to make sure that the trailer continues to provide utility to these new emerging fleets. And the way we do that is that in the trailer, because it's not requiring any data feed from the tractor, works just as well on a 2024 Tesla Semi as it does on a 1976 Peterbilt. And the nice thing is that the effect on an electric semi is that we can now extend the range by as much as 200 miles. And this is going to solve a massive problem for these fleets because a lot of the fleets that are out there, they they operate on this kind of 180 to 200 and 42150 mile daily route. Daily routes and the challenge is that a lot of the tractors that are being presented for new electrified tractors, they, they'll get 160 to 180 miles if they're lucky. And, and we've all seen images of unfortunately images of tractors on the side of the road being towed in. Well, with our trailer hooked up to a new electric tractor, we've actually been able to expand the utility of these new electric solutions so that now we can actually address the majority of the fleets that are out on the road. A couple of other side benefits and we'll talk about one of them specifically as far as the safety goes in a second. But now because the tractor has to do less work, essentially the trailer is doing all of its own work now we can see knock on effects like for example the duty cycle on the brakes can be multiplied by three to 5X now because the what was lost in friction breaks is now put back into the battery pack through regen when the driver. Hits the brakes on the tractor. And Speaking of the tractor, we all you know when when we go to buy these big tractors, we want to buy the ones with the biggest power and the most features as well. Because the trailer is doing all of its own work, including breaking the tractor can now be a much simpler solution and eventually as we go on. The the solution set for the tractors don't don't have to be so robust and and you know, as an example, there's no reason to put a MW hour or 800 kilowatt hours of energy on the tractor if you have another generator and a battery pack in the trailer. So this is a, this is a snapshot of, of some data that we took during one of our pilots. And one of the biggest pieces here is how do we charge these things? We know charging infrastructure is incredibly complicated. It's it's very, very expensive. And part of the reason that the trailers make sense is because the trailers spend a majority of their time parked. This is when they're being loaded and unloaded or overnight. And as anybody that runs a fleet knows that you need to keep those tractors moving. They have to be moving because every time they're part, they're not making you money. But the trailers on the other hand, based on their utilization patterns have a huge opportunity to charge either overnight with a level 2 charger utilizing shore power that's already at the loading dock. So no more trenching, no more buying more property and and building MW charging infrastructure off site. We can actually charge at your existing loading docks. And if you do want to fast charge, let's say some of these fleets like Walmart or Amazon that have dwell times that are in this kind of 30 to 45 minute time zone, we can actually deploy a lower power DC fast charger. The kind of 350 kilowatt range at the loading docks and again we can load completely transparent to the to the operation. I had to put a video on. So this was on our way out to a section of highway in Southern California called the Grapevine, and I'll put an eye chart up here to kind of finish off the conversation. The Grapevine is this section of highway in Southern California on I-5. It's about 42 miles long, 6% grade in both directions. And and I'll give you kind of the typical drivers experience from a, a 53 foot or a big rig driver, class 8 driver. Essentially, you start at the bottom of that hill with a loaded trailer, your foot to the floor and you're lucky if you can get above 45 or 50 miles an hour while people in Model 3 is in Priuses are passing you like you don't exist and God. Did you have to slow down? Because now your momentum is gone and you have to get get up that hill all over again. You get to the top of the hill, you're taking a nice deep breath and then you see the that, that descent coming engine brake all the way on making a bunch of noise. Friction brakes are going. You're putting particulates into the air, putting heat into the air. All those particulates work their way into our water systems. And by the time you're down at the bottom of that hill, you've counted every single runaway truck ramp and every single car that can possibly knock you off. And when you get to the bottom of that hill, you take a deep breath, maybe park, and then you keep going. In fact, this hill is so dangerous that some of our major fleets, these are very large fleets, they drive around this hill because of the safety implications and other things like brake wear and fuel economy. And this whole hill typically on a standard 53 foot truck. The trailer, you get about 5 miles per gallon. This is our data set. We did that same exact run with our driver Jeff that's out there. Any of you guys should go out and talk to Jeff. But if you can do the real quick calculations, we got 11 miles per gallon over that hill, 55 miles an hour up the hill, 60% throttle. The driver had all the confidence he needed to know that he could pass whoever he needed to pass or maneuver through traffic. We got to the top of the hill. He was excited to see the backside of the hill. He got there. You basically in our system, you used the brakes to set your speed. As soon as you get to the speed you want, you let it go and the trailer does all of the work to hold you at that speed. And anybody that knows kind of these dynamic systems. It's a lot better for a a system to to pull from the back than it is to try to slow down from the front. So now you have a much safer system. The driver doesn't touch the brakes on the backside of the hill. And in fact, if you look here, everything in red on that, on that graph is energy that we put back into the battery pack. So we put over 10 kilowatt hours back into the battery pack just by coasting down that hill at 5055 miles an hour, slow down for the 40 mile an hour zone and then get back up to 55 miles an hour. But best of all, all of this and remember I said, you know, this is really all about what does the driver think? What do the fleets think? Our driver who's been driving for over 30 years got out of the the tractor for the first time after doing this route. And he said that he felt more secure and safer and more relaxed and this driving experience than anything he has ever driven before. And he was a test driver for some of these electric tractor companies that we've seen shown up here. And for me at the end of the day, if I can make sure that. We develop products that is operationally transparent to the fleets and makes the drivers very happy. Then I think we've developed a solution that will really, really scale. And we know that because one of our customers in fact said that they want to start using our trailers as a recruiting tool to attract new recruits in into their fleet. So that's it. We're we're deploying beta trailers in 2024 and we're gonna be doing our first customer deliveries in 2025. Thank you.