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In 2017, when Tesla announced plans to sell an electric semi-truck, Chase Marber was in. I reserved a Tesla semi on the day of their revealing. They put out the little thing of like reservation numbers and I'm like reservation number five on this Tesla semi. This was the co-owner of a small trucking company in British Columbia. He and his partner bought and restored old trucks and they drove them to haul logs and set up power systems for remote towns in northern Canada. So Chase was excited about the possibility of an electric truck. Then a few years passed and a few more and the Tesla semi still wasn't available. So we thought while we know how to build a truck, we can make a truck, we've been building and restoring. Why don't we just make our own electric truck and I said screw it, we can actually do this and we can make it as a company. And well, we canceled our reservation. I got the $25,000 US back that we had to put down for it and I used that $25,000 to start Edison Motors. I'm Jacob Goldstein and this is what's your problem. A show where I talk to people who are trying to make technological progress. My guest today is Chase Barber, co-founder of Edison Motors. Chase's problem is this, how do you build electric logging trucks in rural Canada with money you raised from people who follow you on TikTok? Before he started his company, Chase drove a logging truck and he loved it. It is such a good job. It's the only job logging on the West Coast where I think you can be scared driving at like five mile an hour, 10 mile an hour and you're going to white knuckled on the wheel. I love it. I love being up in the mountains, going up into the bush every day. The roads are challenging, there's no traffic, it's just pure driving. Did you ever almost die? Oh yeah. Yeah. So many times. That's just a fact of life. How'd you get from driving a logging truck to starting a company? Well, that started back in university. I decided that I should go back after I was tired of driving truck for like three years and I'm like, okay, I need a backup. Like in case I don't want to do this my whole life, I'll go to university while I'm still young and single and have, you know, it would be a good time. But after four years of university, you know, I did really well. I had like a 4.0 GPA in economics and it's not Greg and it's just to tell you how bad the job market is. At least when I was graduating is I did a bank of Canada economic forecasting contest, where I came second place in Canada and got offered a job as a junior economist at the bank. Bank of Canada. Bank of Canada is the central bank of Canada like that's right ahead in the US. Yeah. Like the US Federal Reserve is an economist there. And after four years of university, the salary was 45,000 a year Canadian. Like what? I drove truck and I made more money driving truck in one summer at university working four months of the year than I did if I was going to live in the center city of Canada working at this prestige job. I'm like, that's insane. So that's where I met my business partner Eric and I said, hey, we should just do a trucking company. We got business degrees. I've got a real great background in business, so we had the last of our money that we had left after the year. We pulled it up and we had about $10,000. So we bought a truck and trailer for $4,000. A 1969 Kenworth came with an old long, long, longer setup and we put that to work. And that's how we started out in business, both six, seven years ago now. And were you driving that truck that you bought then? Were you like owner operating? Oh, yeah. Your owner operators, we spent the whole last semester of university restoring this old truck, fixing it all up at sat in the field for like 15 years. And then we got a job and we went up to the Yukon with this truck. So up in Northern Canada, up in the Arctic Circle in a 50 year old log and truck. And that's how we started our little business. So okay, so far, so good. You got your truck, you're driving your truck, you're getting paid. I mean, lots of people spend their whole, their whole careers doing that. Oh, yeah, that probably would have been a good career, but we started doing like hauling generators and a haul and heavy equipment. And like we expanded with the low bed into generators and machinery and then we thought, well, like rather than just doing the trucking, you can see that the money is doing the installs. We can do some of these installs and construction. So what are you, what are you installing? Off-grid diesel generators. So there's a lot of mines, remote places, there's actually over 350 towns in Canada that aren't hooked to the North American grid and rely 100% off diesel. So that's super expensive. You got to bring in the fuel to these remote places. It's inefficient, big carbon footprint. It's bad. Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, we did a lot of trucking of the fuel in there. That's how we really like, you know, all the generator in and we're like, oh, well, we can haul fuel in. And are these mostly sort of kind of industrial settings? I mean, is it like mining and that sort of thing or like what are the places that need it? Somewhere industrial, somewhere mines, there was a few mines in the Yukon and a lot of them know we're residential. Like just First Nations reserves up in Canada or other normal cities. So like Native American reservations. We would call them in the US. Yeah, okay. Yeah, that's what you would call them. Yeah, Native American reservations. So you're shifting your business now. You're going from being just truckers, basically people moving stuff for a fee to being sort of, you're in the power business now for these remote settings. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah, I guess we were. You didn't know that. That's a good way to put it. I still thought of ourselves as probably right. You're probably right. Okay. Yeah. So we did our first big hybrid system install. It must be about four years ago now, and it was a community way up northern BC. A grade on the Yukon border. And what we did is they had a huge peak power load. So everybody would get home from work at five o'clock. Everyone comes home. Everyone turns on the power. We see it in our national grid. Huge peak power demands at like five o'clock because everyone gets home. Well, they had that. So what they had is the old way of doing it is that you would size a generator to meet that peak power load to have that power demand when you needed it. So they had a 95 kilowatt generator running. But what we did is we went in. We start install the large battery bank, a bunch of solar. And then we downsize that generator to 35 because that battery bank met that peak power demand. And you had a lot of people there, their whole lives. They've grown up there. They've listened to these diesel generators always running in the background. For the first time in some of their lives, their little village in the mountains has been quiet. No sound. That's nice. That's a nice detail. So okay. So there's a town that had a giant diesel generator and you got them set up with solar panels and batteries and a much smaller generator that could charge the batteries when the solar power wasn't enough. That's right. Yep. Okay. So keep going. I'm waiting for the big moment. Are we at the big moment? It's coming soon. There's no big moments in business. No, no fair. That's a very business is made of a lot of little moments that add up to a big moments. There's always a little tiny steps forward, steps back. It's a store. Good story is a lot of little steps. That is a very wise point, very, very fair. So what's the next little moment? The last next little moment is one day we were looking at all these diesel light towers. And we thought, well, why do we make those solar? So on an napkin, I sketched out this little solar light tower and caterpillar love that. Fitting love that. They turned that into a 100% solar. So rather than running a diesel generator on site with all the emissions and noise pollution and having to pay for fuel, we now have made a 100% solar one that we designed that works up in northern Canada. And then that started some manufacturing. And in between that, I was just driving log and trucks doing solar. But the solar install was going really smoothly. So I actually transferred back into hauling logs for a while. Finally, we had this kind of a-ha moment when we did a project. And we were sitting there thinking that a semi truck is a lot like these little diesel-powered communities. It's got a huge peak load. So it takes a lot of power to get that weight moving. Like to build that initial inertia takes a lot. Once you're at speed, it takes very little to maintain that momentum. So that moment when you're getting the truck going, it's like the moment when everybody comes home from work and turns on all their appliances. It's just this moment of peak demand that's way higher than the kind of baseline. That's right. It's exactly like that when you think of a truck like an off-grid power system. So we thought about it. And well, why don't we just optimize the truck? These are the same way, and this is what electric can do. Like, we were at the point where all the electric technology for trucks is there. The electric drive motors, the batteries, the electric control gears, well, why don't we make this efficient and run this like a freight train. Freight trains have been diesel-electric and they move tons of weight because the electric motors have tons of torque, tons of power, super efficient. We have regenerative braking to capture your energy slowing down. When we built our prototype, we were finding like 50-60% fuel savings on these log and trucks. So, and can you plug it in or no? Yep. Oh, yeah. No, we plug it in in the evening. So you pull up next to the house and pull it up next to the shop and plug it in. It just charges. So you always start your day with 100% battery and you get about two hours of driving out of this thing. And then the diesel generator turns on, runs for about half an hour, shuts back off. You get another hour, two hours of driving and then it runs for another half hour. So is it right that part of your like thesis in building this diesel charger is that a purely electric truck just won't be able to carry enough, you know, batteries enough, enough battery power to do the kind of work that these trucks need to do? That was one of the issues is that electric trucks for 80%, 85% of the trucking industry will not work and probably won't work until batteries and charging infrastructure massively improves. But we're looking at 20, 30 years until we can get to that point, but going diesel electric is kind of that best of both worlds. Oh, I can recharge the batteries like, yeah, you're not going to eliminate diesel, but you're going to massively reduce the amount of diesel you need. It's a step in the right direction. So that's the basic idea, it seems like it would be super hard and capital intensive to turn that into a business much harder than buying one $10,000 logging truck in a field and driving it for fun and profit. It was hard. Yeah. I know. You're right. That's not an easy thing to do. But thank God we kind of went viral if a company can go viral and it's been one of those things it's really helped you are your big on tiktok, which I would not have cast tell me about your life in tiktok and how that helped. Well, it was when I was still hauling logs. One of the guys that used to work with us, an older guy in the late 50s, early 60s was it kept making tiktok videos. And I'm like, okay, I better download tiktok and see what the hell shane's posting about me. And I probably scrolled tiktok for like six months before I even made a video. And then I first made a truck video and it just went really big and then I started making more videos. What was it? What was the first one that went big? I think I was shifting gears and dances. I think it was one of those 10, 15 seconds dancing tiktoks, but it was doing like a trucker version of the dance, whatever it was dorky and then yeah, when I announced that we were doing Edison, it all of a sudden took off millions and millions of views. We had our own page. We had a little crowdfunding and I'm like, okay, well, we'll crowdfund this first build. And within five days, we had raised almost half a million dollars and closed the crowdfunding out off of just this one tiktok. So that's amazing, half a million dollars is a lot of money. But when I think of starting a truck company, it's not even, it's many orders of magnitude away, right? And this is partly because the way you are starting a truck company is different than what I would have thought of, right? You're not building a factory to mass produce trucks, right? Tell me, tell me about the way you're doing. No, we're starting with a very common sense approach. Let's build one prototype and let's raise enough money to build one prototype to make sure that our idea is valid. Let's take it in a truck, we'll retrofit it with a diesel motor, we'll connect the control systems that we design and we'll just, we'll try it out, we'll see how it works. And we did that and we built the truck. And did it work? Oh yeah. Yeah, no, it worked great. Lots of good power, great acceleration. There was a few little things that we needed to go back to the drawing board. I did not like the drive line system. He snapped the drive line a couple times trying to do some heavy stuff and then trying to drag race the truck. Is that the way you stress test a truck? Is A haul, haul a bunch of logs up a hill and B, drag race it? Apparently, yes, yes, I let, I let another truck driver in town, real good truck driver and we were letting all the truck drivers come out and try it. And I'm like, all right, Jim, like giver, just giver the beans and he throttled into it and ping, rain were like, okay, I guess that ends the testing for today. That ping, that was a key part of the truck breaking. So they tried a different part, so I'm called an E-Axel that's designed to be used with electric vehicles. The E-Axel worked. No more pings. Just to, just to zoom out for a quick sec here, I want to just highlight a thing Chase said a minute ago. But idea that sure, electric trucks sound great, but for lots of uses, full on electric trucks just aren't there yet, right? And so I really like this sort of practical incrementalism of his approach. This sort of, let's build what we can build now because it's better than the existing thing, even if it isn't perfect. Still to come on the show today? How Chase built his company on top of an old law from the Cold War. Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than add supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. I'm going to show you at iHeartAdvertising.com, that's iHeartAdvertising.com. I'm Robert Smith. On our new show Business History, we tell the stories behind the inventions and entrepreneurs that shaped our economy, and we try to understand the lessons behind their success and failure. Sears, rise, fall, America. Done. Listen, wherever you get your podcast, a full video episodes to search, Business History podcast on YouTube. Now back to the show. And just to be clear, when you talk about building a truck, I mean, you're not like machining all the parts from scratch or something, right? No, that is our biggest saving grace. We looked at these things and what a truck company is. Now we realize really quickly that we couldn't afford to compete if we had to make all our own parts like Tesla. And we realized a lot of people don't want to buy custom parts. So we went to the parts that trucks have been using for the last 50, 60 years, those common core parts. And we used the simple off the shelf. We actually had a great partnership with CBS, Fleet Break, these truck supply stores, sat down with their parts experts. And we said, "What parts do you always have in stock? What are you finding out that the people aren't complaining about it, aren't breaking. Give us your most reliable parts that you always have in stock." And then our team of mechanics worked with our few engineers and they said, "Well, let's just put putting these parts on. Let's pick those parts so we can grab off the shelf." And you know how much time and money that saves you in development cost. It's going to save our customers money. It's going to save downtime. And it got us into production. We're now starting on our first production truck already in just a year and a half of starting the company. When you talk about going to sort of trucking parts stores and using parts that have been around for decades, I mean, I wouldn't, it makes sense on a certain level. I would never have thought of it. Like, it's almost like you're building the trucks from the parts that are just sort of around, like from spare parts or something. I mean, how much of the truck can you build that way? Can you build a whole truck that way? I reckon pretty well except for someone like the high voltage controls and the electric specific parts, trucks have shared for the last 40 years a very common core parts. You can take a break pot, a type 30 break pot off a 1955 Kenworth and that's the same type 30 break pot that's still on a 2023 freight liner. Turn signal on my 62 Kenworth is the same turn signal that Western Star used up until like 2007. Like a lot of the parts were just all the same. Why is that? Like, that's not true for cars at all, right? It has a lot to do with the US Defense Procurement Act of 1955 actually. Okay. US Defense Procurement Act. Okay. Go on. I believe that's what it called. It's something along those lines, but it's basically the US NATO and these places, they are worried about the Russians. Sure. And they saw what we did to Germany was we bombed the hell out of their factories in World War II. In World War II. Okay. I realized like, well, if the Soviets attack us, the first thing they're going to do is hit our factories. Well, trucks are so vital to the defense industry and just people surviving. If you run out of trucks, you run out of food in cities. Yeah. And they thought like, well, okay, well, they'll hit Detroit. We need to be able to figure this out. So they started making all the parts the same. So did the government sort of put out a set of specifications and said, whatever, the turn signal has to look like this? I mean, was it something like that? That's exactly what they did. It was right down to even the shift knobs, the shift knobs were all the same in color coded on trucks. If you have a 15 speed, it'll have a blue button for your thumb. 13 speed will have a red, 18 speed will have a gray. And it's the same across Europe. It's the same across Australia, like you often do an Australian truck and you look at your shift knob, even on a brand new truck. If it's gray, you know, you can split the bottom and top end so that the drivers could shift. Like that is how common and standardized we had trucks for 80 years or 60 years. That is amazing. And it's really interesting to think about that, right? Like the thing about sort of the economic implications of that and the technological implications of it, right? Like, I mean, on the one hand, it seems like it would be really bad for innovation, right? Like if somebody came up with a better way to make a part, they kind of wouldn't be able to do it, right? That seems like a downside of it. On the other hand, you can always get spare parts and the company isn't going to gouge you if the turn signal breaks because you can buy somebody else's turn signal. I mean, are those the basic trade-offs? Am I thinking about it right? Yeah, that's probably about right. So they relax these laws in the 80s. What innovation have we really seen in trucks? Well, I don't know anything about trucks. So you tell me, what innovation have we seen in trucks? Well, we still have a turn signal, but nowadays, you know, that turn signal for my old 60s is about 40 bucks on Amazon. Okay. I can just order it. They still have it. Like all the parts are there, $40. Now you want a turn signal for a brand new truck. It's $500. So are you the rare, you know, founder, entrepreneur making the case for kind of government top-down regulation of like all detailed specifications? Oh, God. Am I? I don't know. Maybe I am. It seems like it. You know what? That's what it's, that's what it takes. Why not have a little bit of regulation in here? We do need something. It's not a pure free market we exist in anymore. It's very much a more of a, do I say, crony capitalism system, but there's only a few big truck suppliers. Like you look at some of the big brands are all owned by other large brands. Maybe we need something in there to protect the owner operators of key vital industries that look what happened just with China during COVID and it wasn't even malicious. But the, there was the computer chip shortage. You couldn't even buy new trucks. They couldn't put them off the assembly line. The you couldn't repair trucks like the price of trucks went crazy. And that was just from a few month interruption in the global supply chain. Imagine what would happen if a war broke out with China. What would happen to our trucking industry overnight if it was some economic war? It doesn't even have to be a full-on-hot war. But if we had another Cold War with China where they stopped supplying us, we would lose our ability to move anything in North America. So when you decide to try and build a prototype, you decide you're going to go back. You're going to basically draw on this sort of reservoir of interchangeable parts from this Cold War policy. And you kind of build your truck out of those parts. Yeah. That's exactly what we did. So okay, so you got your prototype, is it around now? Is it like, out back? Yeah. Yeah, we parked here for the winter time. We got a lot of snow here. We only took it out a couple of days when it was minus 35 below to see how it did in the winter. But other than that, we parked it and we're now just building the new production truck. So okay, so right. So you did the prototype, it worked. I mean, then did you, well just tell me about the financing. Did you raise, you must have raised more money to go into production? We did. We did another round of crowdfunding. And same thing again, within five days, we had raised $1.5 million, which is more than enough to build the first production truck, we're calling it the production prototype. And we've settled on four or five really good first trial customers that are going to be financing the first few truck builds. So. You think the first truck driver is going to drive your truck to go, get a bunch of logs. I'm hoping by the end of this summer. Okay. So what, what do you have to figure out between now and then? I mean, I know you made a prototype, but what do you have to solve to actually have your trucks out in the world? Well, sell them to these first customers, we'll get that real-world feedback, we'll figure out. It's kind of that old way of engineering, but let's put it out in the field. Let's see what works. Let's see what breaks. Let's go back in, let's change the parts of break, let's improve it, and then let's go into the general public. I mean, in terms of the maintenance piece, I know you said you used, you know, as many sort of core, old, cheap parts on your trucks as possible. But, you know, clearly it's not all old, core, cheap parts. You're doing new things. Is that going to be a challenge for the people who buy the truck, like getting that part of the truck maintained? It'll be a little bit different on that part. So we did design a lot of these and we had some brilliant electrical engineers and we took electrical parts that were common for the high voltage world, people working in like power plants and so you almost need like a mill electrician, like a saw mill that has all these electric motors or a mine, has those people that can service those electric motors. That makes sense. It does seem like in this sort of period of transition or just when your trucks are new and there's only three of them in the world or ten of them in the world or a hundred of them in the world, like it'll be hard for the person driving that truck to figure out how to get it fixed, right? Like it's not obvious how to solve that piece of it. Even if there is some industrial electrician who would know, like figuring out who that person is and getting them to fix the truck seems hard, no? So we took advantage and we partnered up with some universities and we bring a lot of summer students now in for the summer. Like heavy duty mechanic summer students that are in their second, third year apprenticeship. And what we do is we've been training them up as part of their co-op education, pay animal wage, they learn, they work on these trucks in the summer and now these few companies that want to buy our trucks, they're larger fleets and they said the same thing, how are we going to maintain these and like rather than just always coming back to our shop, we're going to send you this guy, these people's contact information so you can hire a diesel mechanic that already has the knowledge of how these trucks work because they help build the trucks. So that was our way around it. When you look sort of from here on out, whatever, for the next year, next six months, all the things you got to do, what are you particularly worried about? Like what at this point are you worried they are, you know, trying to solve? Actually find a facility to build these trucks. Where are you building them now? We're building them up in a temporary shop. So I couldn't get city permitting to build a shop where we're at. And my house is kind of up a little bit of a log and road, about 15 minutes out of side of town. So we're building them illegally because I can't, I'm technically not zoned to manufacture around any kind of industry. So right now we're building them as many trucks as we can before the government finds out that we're building trucks where we're building them. So the stressful part is now finding a place and our town had a massive flood about a year ago. We lost like 20% of our houses. It wiped out the entire industrial district. There's no land available and I want to own the land. We have the money. We got things in place to be able to do this. But there's just nothing available. So you're telling me that you want to have the trucks on the road in oh six, eight months and you don't have anywhere to build them right now. If you have a spot, just nowhere to legally build. If anyone asks, our shop is for agricultural use. We could build a big shop for agricultural use and then they're like, well, what are you using it for? But like storing my classic truck collection and they come out and they look at the classic trucks and they're like, oh, yeah, I guess you do restore classic trucks. Yeah. No, it's just a hobby. So we're on that zoning right now. And where is it? Where do you live? Where do you live? I feel like I definitely shouldn't say that now. No fair. OK, fair. Let's, let's, let's finish. But it's small town in the middle of, middle of BC in Canada. A small town in British Columbia. Yeah. Well, merit British Columbia. That's as much as we can, we should say. We'll leave it there. We'll be back in a minute with the lighting round, including questions about trucking and tiktok. Think again. And as the number one podcaster, I heart twice as large as the next two combined. Plus only I heart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think I heart. Dreaming, radio and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartAdvertising.com. That's iHeartAdvertising.com. How did seers go from a one man watch company to the biggest retailer in the world to bankruptcy? I'm Robert Smith. Our new episode is about the rise and fall of seers, an incredible story that is really the story of America in the 20th century. Seers, rise, fall America. Done. Listen, wherever you get your podcast, the full video episodes to search, is this history podcast on YouTube? That's the end of the ads. Now we're going back to the show. So I do want to close with just sort of a lighting round. A bunch of questions, mostly fun. Yeah. What's one secret to succeeding on TikTok? Just be real and be yourself. People like the genuine connection. Is it right that you were in the army? I was. Yeah. Yeah. It was in the reserves. What's something you learned in the army reserves? That I was not good in the army. Fair. What's one thing you learn studying economics that's useful, actually useful in running a business? The best thing is cause and effect. You see a lot of things in economics where it's, you know, if this happens, this will move the supply curve left or right. If the supply curve in this industry moves left or right, it affects the price this way, which is going to increase the input cost of this other good. That's like 90% of your first few years of economics that's not the heavy math base is learning that causation. What happens if certain things in business change? It lets you strategize. Listen to music when you drive a truck. Oh yeah. I'll be honest, listen to music about 10%, the other 90% was audio books and podcasts. Okay. My main thing is like I like to learn new things and truck driving is one of those careers where I really, really recommend to any young person because you have all day to sit there and learn as much as you want. What other job affords you the opportunity to go deep into whatever kind of passion that you have and learn as much as you can about it. Chase Barber is the co-founder and CEO of Edison Motors. I first heard him interviewed on the podcast Oddlots. Good show. Today's episode was produced by Edith Russelo, edited by Robert Smith and Sarah Nicks, and engineered by Amanda K. Warren. I'm Jacob Goldstein. I am not on TikTok, but I am on Twitter at Jacob Goldstein. You can also email us at
[email protected]. We'll be back next week with another episode of the show. I'm Robert Smith. We try to understand the lessons behind their success and failure. Done. Listen wherever you get your podcast and full video episodes to search Business History Podcast on YouTube.
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