Season 2, Episode 20 - Mike Hallmark from Hellwig, Advanced Clean Transportation (ACT) Expo, Nikola CEO: Michael Lohscheller

 

 

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Holman (8s):

All right here we are in Lightning’s, T R X. We just had Mr. Mike Hall marker as the industry knows him as hell. Mike from Helwig is in Lightning’s. T R X. We just installed Sway bar. So let me just lay the story out really quick before you start driving Lightning. Okay. The story is, Lightning got this truck and he’s like, Ooh, it’s Kind of soft. I didn’t expect there to be that much body roll du, I’m Lightning Don. Don’t

Lightning (33s):

Think that that happened.

Holman (35s):

Actually you did. You did say that. But don

Lightning (37s):

Don’t think that wasn like, yeah

Holman (39s):

Dude. That’s what you, that’s what you sound like when you Talk to me. You’re wi

Hallmark (43s):

You’re witness chiming in here. Heard it. Yeah,

Holman (44s):

There. Exactly.

Hallmark (45s):

Go. Sounded

Holman (45s):

Just like that. So he was talking about how the rad ass T R X was a little bit sloppy for his taste because he’s driving around, you know, Mercedes AMGs rather than pickup trucks and he had to recalibrate his butt. But that’s when Mike said, well hey, I can fix that for you. And he offered up a set of sway bars. Now the T R X does not come from the factory with a rear sway bar. So this is brand new sway bars front and rear. And Mike, if you wanna just give us a quick rundown. What did you install today?

Hallmark (1m 11s):

So what I installed was our, with my

Holman (1m 13s):

Help of course. Oh with,

Lightning (1m 14s):

Yes, with under guided

Holman (1m 16s):

Supervision While Lightning was working on something else. Yes. All you

Lightning (1m 18s):

Did was hand him a Dr. Pepper and a

Holman (1m 20s):

Sandwich. It’s not true.

Hallmark (1m 21s):

More than that. Switch the old ba. There’s a whole story behind the story of a story. That’s a story. But we’re gonna tell this story. So Helwig sway bars 41 40 Forge K Molly Steels is that race car? That’s race car So. we pulled off the factory bar, we put on our solid 41 40 Forged Omo steel bar. and then out back we installed a rear sway bar. ’cause you did not have one since you do a lot of street driving here in Southern California and you’re a little bit passionate about that driving. We put you on the middle setting of our sway bar to give you really optimal sway control for both on and off road. And now this is our very first drive once it’s been installed.

Holman (1m 57s):

So Yeah Light Lightning has not been in his truck since it got parked on the hoist. And to Mike’s point there, there are three settings on the rear sway bar that are three different leverage points. So you can tighten up the rear or you can loosen up depending on what you want to do with it. And it’s on the middle setting for our friend Lightning because while he prefers and spends most of his ti time on pavement, he claims he might occasionally get it dirty off road. So we’ve accommodated him for that someday.

Lightning (2m 21s):

Alright, so shall we go? And what type of course do you want me to go on? Just, just

Holman (2m 25s):

Drive it, train, do All.

Hallmark (2m 26s):

Right? Just if you can get us on thermal racetrack, that’d be great. Because We just turned this into a race car. At least that’s my opinion. You’re gonna tell us. Gotcha. Also, for those that are listening, Lightning was asking all kinds of questions, wondering how bad this product was gonna

Holman (2m 41s):

Mess up his truck. You got super nervous. don. Don’t, dude,

Lightning (2m 42s):

I did not insult you that way. Would you

Holman (2m 44s):

Stop it? Here’s what’s hilarious about Lightning. Once you spent some time with him, you realize his, his personality defects. And one of them is, is when he gets really worried about something, he starts asking passive ago aggressive questions. They’re not passive aggressive. And he goes, he says things like this. So what, what, what’s happening on the sway bar? What, how does it work? Where, where do you, where do you put the thing and how’s it gonna affect my truck? And da da da. And it’s like, why don’t you just come out and say you’re worried and you need Mike to make you feel better. It’s

Hallmark (3m 14s):

A lot of jabber draw. We just took a turn at some pretty good speeds. So I want to hear lightning’s firsthand impression here. So immediately I notice it’s not as wy. I’m right out of the gate and right here, if I go left right on this,

Holman (3m 25s):

Also I get carsick in the back seat. So just so you know, I My barf

Lightning (3m 28s):

All, right? Okay. I’m gonna make a hard right right here. Okay. That was dude. Much tighter than I’ve ever taken that turn at that speed. Wow. That was nice. I’m gonna slow down here ’cause there’s railroad trucks. So Flad land going over some bumps I noticed no major difference. Which is exactly what I wanted going through here. Oh, that’s

Holman (3m 55s):

Nice. You know how the rear sticks and comes around on you. It

Lightning (3m 57s):

Is. Yeah. I like that. It’s predictable. This is nice. I’m gonna make a hard left out of this parking lot right here and then we’re gonna go here. Oh that, that’s

Holman (4m 7s):

Nice. The rear. The rear feels much more planted. Yes it does.

Lightning (4m 9s):

A lot more planted. This is good. And if I do this, it makes Holman sick in the back. Left, right,

Holman (4m 16s):

Left right. Yeah. But the jokes on you, it’s your truck.

Lightning (4m 19s):

Those of

Holman (4m 20s):

You that I’m fine barfing. It’s no problem. Right.

Hallmark (4m 22s):

Can’t see what this was it. That was Lightning drinking the steering Wheel back and forth in a SLA motion. Right. And I’m pretty sure he just got a 9.9 from the 9.9. 9.8.

Holman (4m 33s):

They definitely have a bruise on my carotid artery from the seatbelt

Lightning (4m 36s):

All. right. And we’ll do a, we’ll do kind of a hard Right. Right here. Alright. Oh wow. Dude, that back end just comes around predictably now. That’s awesome. Gimme a good one. We’re we’re doing a U-turn now. All. right?

Holman (4m 53s):

You didn’t think you were gonna make it, did you? No, I didn’t think I was gonna make it. I thought that wasn going right into the fire hydrant right there.

Lightning (4m 58s):

Oh that was nice.

Holman (4m 59s):

All. right. So Lightning, on a scale of one to 10, what were your expectations of the ha Helwig sway bar? I had high expectations. Expectations. No, no. I had going

Lightning (5m 7s):

In, listen, I know Mike jokes and all I I know Mike, I know Melanie who runs the company. They make a solid

Holman (5m 13s):

Product. That doesn’t mean you weren’t worried. I was a little

Lightning (5m 15s):

Concerned.

Holman (5m 15s):

I

Lightning (5m 16s):

Was a little

Holman (5m 16s):

Concerned,

Lightning (5m 17s):

But this is exceeding my expectations. This is dope

Holman (5m 21s):

All. right. Scale of one to 10, what do you, what are you feeling like now?

Lightning (5m 25s):

Oh that’s awesome. This is a, this is like a 9.975

Holman (5m 31s):

And the judges are holding up multiple cards. Yeah.

Hallmark (5m 36s):

So somebody just bought a T R X or has a T R X

Holman (5m 39s):

And they’re like, and maybe they tow maybe, should

Lightning (5m 42s):

I get a hel sway bar? What? What would you say? Yeah. The answer is absolutely yes. Great for

Holman (5m 46s):

Towing, great for daily driving, great for people who maybe spend a little more time on pavement than off. I think you’ll really appreciate how the rear especially plants in the back and the fact that it’s adjustable so you can dial it in for your specific need. It’s pretty cool. Oh my

Lightning (5m 58s):

God. it just such a different driving experience. This is dope. Yes. Thank you Mike. I’m excited by this. Oh, you’re welcome. You are here first get yourself a

Holman (6m 7s):

Hellwig. Also change your phone ’cause he may call you with questions after we’re done here.

Lightning (6m 10s):

That’s possible. So there it is. Live from Lightning’s, T R x Hellwig live

Holman (6m 16s):

Video. You re-recorded from your T R X. We’re live from the pothead.

Lightning (6m 20s):

Maybe they thought that wasn live.

Holman (6m 22s):

So admit that you were worried. I

Lightning (6m 25s):

Wasn’t

Holman (6m 26s):

Worried You came up to the lift. I wasn’t worried. You looked behind it. Nope. and then you started asking all these really dumb questions. Wasn’t worried. Oh is it, is it really stick out behind the axle like that? Oh what, what are you connect it to? Where’s that? Where’s that ling go?

Lightning (6m 41s):

Nope. None of those things. You asked

Holman (6m 44s):

All of those things.

Lightning (6m 45s):

I didn’t ask those things because I was worried. I was asking because I was curious. I asked a lot of questions about everything. You should know this by now.

Holman (6m 55s):

I do know this by now. And I saw

Lightning (6m 56s):

Silly questions, scares of our guests. I asked,

Holman (6m 59s):

I saws the scare in your eyes.

Lightning (7m 1s):

There was no scare in my eyes. Mike

Holman (7m 3s):

Saw it. We both looked at you like, oh he’s worried.

Lightning (7m 6s):

I wasn’t worried.

Holman (7m 7s):

All. right.

Lightning (7m 8s):

I honestly was not worried. I didn’t know where they mounted. I looked up, I couldn’t see where the end links, where the top points of the end links mounted. I was curious, did they drill new holes? Did they put them in Existings? Did they

Holman (7m 19s):

They drill new holes. Nope,

Lightning (7m 20s):

They didn’t. That’s right.

Holman (7m 21s):

That wasn

Lightning (7m 22s):

All

Holman (7m 22s):

Bolt on and that wasn all professional and it works. It

Lightning (7m 24s):

Is gorgeous. that wasn a great installation, great product fit and finish was dead on All.

Holman (7m 29s):

Right. So now that you’ve been driving it for a week. So

Lightning (7m 31s):

First I wanna tell everyone what we got. So. we put on a, a pair of the fronts are inch and three eighths in diameter. Huge thick chromoly powder coated beautifully. The rear is seven eighths inch thick. And

Holman (7m 45s):

They purposely downsize the rear to not make this rear too stiff. So they want your suspension to work on the T rx, you still take it off road. All that kind of stuff. And like we said on the show or on the recording, they had three different settings. So you could basically decide How much rear sway bar leverage you want. So I think

Lightning (8m 2s):

I’m going inboard one more notch to see. So you stiffen it up further. You want

Holman (8m 6s):

It tighter? Yeah. You’re gonna really not like that Offroad. I

Lightning (8m 10s):

Well but here’s the great part. It takes maybe five minutes to change it. Maybe less.

Holman (8m 14s):

Remember the last time you were like, Hey I, I don’t wanna scratch my new wheels Offroad. I’m like, just swap ’em out, don. Don’t wanna do that. And you’re gonna crawl under the back of that thing every time you go wheeling and change your sway bar position.

Lightning (8m 25s):

Honestly, it’s a nut up bolt. It might take 45 seconds.

Holman (8m 29s):

I get it. But are you gonna do that?

Lightning (8m 31s):

I don’t see why wouldn’t, you’ll

Holman (8m 32s):

Do it on the trail, you’ll leave it and you’ll get off road and you’ll go All. right. hold on. And I’m gonna be like, what you doing under the back of that thing? Changing my sway bar setting. I

Lightning (8m 40s):

Mean maybe Yeah. That

Holman (8m 41s):

That’ll happen. But,

Lightning (8m 42s):

But it’s easy. Okay,

Holman (8m 43s):

So you’ve had it for

Lightning (8m 44s):

A week. Yes.

Holman (8m 45s):

And love it. You drove it around town. It drove it on ranch.

Lightning (8m 48s):

I’ve, I’ve put 150 miles on it since we put ’em on s maybe. No, it’s closer to 2 10, 2 20.

Holman (8m 55s):

Any rattles? No. No squeaks, no rattle. Smooth. How’s it feel on the clover leaf? Really? Surefooted really good. You can swing the ass end around and you couldn’t before it had so much body roll you just couldn’t do it. Now even though it’s all Wheel drive full-time, you really feel like you can pitch it out if you wanted to because it’s, it just, there’s just so much less body roll. So you’re happy. Yeah. You highly recommend. This is a recommend on Lightning’s list. This is a lightning’s thumb up lightning’s thumb. Just one thumb. Just one. Just one thumb up. I don. Maybe it’s two. Why wouldn’t I put two thumbs up? Okay, this is Lightning thumb. Thumbs up. Like where’s the thumb thumb go? Lightning endorsed. Yes. Okay. It’s a Lightning endorsed product by the way.

Holman (9m 36s):

It’s not just me. You would endorse them as well. Well I helped install them while you worked on something else. No, but I’m saying But you’ve driven with them before. Remember how you’re like, hey come on down, we’re gonna do this install. And I’m like, yeah, cool. and then I get there, you’re like, Hey, I’m gonna be over there working on a Banks video so don’t even throw me under the bus this way. I tried to do it at a different time and you had to have it a certain time and I had to do double duty. Yeah. I was shooting an install video of a Banks monster Ram. And that had to be done. That’s nice to have other people install stuff on your truck. That’s all I’m saying. He offered, Mike offered and he’s done a million of ’em. So you did you see that I get done right? I helped and I painted all the bare metal you the threads you and I appreciate that. So that your bolts weren’t gonna rust. Yep.

Holman (10m 15s):

Also painted something else under there. If you look hard now if you painted a wiener, I’m gonna be pissed. don don’t know. Seriously crawling or there, where are you painting a wiener with a spray can on the bottom of my truck stencil. Because you can’t, I had cardboard in a knife. Dude, you carried around a stencil. I don’t carry it around and made one live. what you MacGyver of wieners? I’m just saying for

5 (10m 38s):

Some reason, I don’t know why, just kind of sit around all day. Draw pictures of dicks.

Holman (10m 47s):

So it is The, Truck, Show Podcast. I’m lighting and he’s Holman. You went to the ACT convention. A C T. What does that stand for? A C T Act. Expo, which is the alternative. Clean Transportation Expo came just down the street here in Anaheim, California. And our friend Seth from Dana, who gave us the whole behind the scenes tour of their EV stuff a while back, invited me to join him down there. And so I said, yeah, that’d be great. ’cause Dana had a huge booth. There was everybody in the industry, all medium duty, everything like excavators, dump trucks. That’s funny that we semi trucks of Dana as being Jeep axles, Ford axles, things like that. But they do all the heavy duty stuff.

Holman (11m 28s):

Yep. So the whole medium duty heavy duty market was there. that wasn. that wasn actually really cool. that wasn like a, a mini sema. And there was a a lot to see. So they invited me out there and gave me a tour of their booth, their technology, a few of their customer vehicles. and then they turned me loose and I, I got an interview from Nicola, we haven’t heard from them what in a while. And I got some other interviews from other interesting companies. and then one in particular, we have to try and get him back on the show, show Bollinger. So I’ll, I’ll explain that. But once we get into the show, we’ll go ahead and play some audio that I got and some interesting interviews. So if you’re curious about, you know, hydrogen and fuel cells and EV and propane and all the things that come with, you know, alternative fuels, especially in the heavy duty market.

Holman (12m 12s):

You’ll probably like this episode if you hate all those things. Listen anyway. You might learn something like I did

Lightning (12m 19s):

All, right? Holman, I got a quick quiz for you. I’m gonna name three things. What do they have in common? 310 horsepower. 6,690 pounds of towing capacity while getting up to 24 miles per gallon. What truck on the road offers? All three? I’m

Holman (12m 34s):

Going with Frontier Lightning.

Lightning (12m 36s):

Woohoo.

Holman (12m 38s):

Am I right? Yes, that’s right. Am I right? Am I right? You’re right. You can head over to Nissan usa.com to Oh I wait, build and price. I have to

Lightning (12m 44s):

Give you a dinging a little late. Thank you. There

Holman (12m 45s):

You go. To, you build a price to the Nissan Frontier for your lifestyle. You can get everything from the king cab or crew cab. You can get the four by two SS model or you can go up to the Pro X, which is also four by two or the four by four Pro four x or even the Long Bed if you’re looking for a little more bed space for your mid-size pickup. And if you need something bigger and hauls more, then you want to check out the Titan and Titan XD with the industry’s best five year, 100,000 mile warranty. Head on down to your local Nissan dealer and test drive one today.

Lightning (13m 16s):

And another quiz for you. Holman, do you prefer hot air intakes or cold air intakes?

Holman (13m 23s):

I’m gonna have to go with cold air intakes, Lightning. Oh,

Lightning (13m 27s):

And do you prefer bigger filters with greater dust capacity or itty bitty filters that clog really quickly?

Holman (13m 35s):

I’m gonna go with restrictive. No, that’s not right. I’m gonna go with big high flowing high desk capacity filters. Lightning.

Lightning (13m 42s):

And do you prefer stock tube sizes that have the same cross-sectional area as stock? So you flow stock air or do you prefer massive super tubes that can flow anything they want because they have a bank’s air mass control module

Holman (13m 56s):

Lighting. I prefer optimized airflow.

Lightning (13m 58s):

Yes. You no. Or

Holman (14m 0s):

Can I get those things?

Lightning (14m 1s):

We are on fire. This is

Holman (14m 3s):

Awful. Something something awful. Go. Come on. What? Where can I get those things? You

Lightning (14m 6s):

Can get ’em at Banks power.com. All you have to do is type in your year, make and model and you’ll get the new air mass control module that allows the Banks engineers to flow anything they want through the intake that would be otherwise impossible to do if you were any other company. Are

Holman (14m 18s):

You also selling micro machines?

Lightning (14m 20s):

No. Okay. Just checking micro machines. Does he

Holman (14m 23s):

Sound exactly like the micro machine sales dude from the commercials back in the eighties?

Lightning (14m 27s):

I don’t want much T. Oh really? I do

Holman (14m 29s):

Changed a hundred percent, huh?

Lightning (14m 31s):

No. So go to Banks power.com, type in your year, make and model to find the best intake for your truck. The Ram air intake. Add another quiz for you. Holman. Do you prefer twin tube shocks or monotube shocks

Holman (14m 44s):

Going with Monotube. Lightning.

Lightning (14m 46s):

All, right? Holman. Do you prefer a stock shock that’ll blow out with just a few hundred miles or something that’s been tested on the Baja 1000

Holman (14m 54s):

Lightning. I’m gonna go with a shock that can GoTo.

Lightning (14m 58s):

Oh snap and Holman. Do you prefer a cheap white shock that’ll last only a few years or one that will outlast your truck.

Holman (15m 4s):

I’m going with Outlast your truck Lightning. Oh

Lightning (15m 7s):

My God.

Holman (15m 9s):

And I’m heading to bill Bilstein us.com. Do you think people hate this bit yet?

Lightning (15m 13s):

Absolutely. It’s awful. I will not do this again,

Holman (15m 15s):

But, but the products aren’t so.

Lightning (15m 16s):

No, the products are amazing.

Holman (15m 17s):

So if you wanna get the the mono tube shock that’s gonna be designed and tuned specifically for your ride, head over to bill Bilstein us.com where you can find some of the best shocks on the market.

Lightning (15m 28s):

And Holman, do you prefer an app that’ll get your co-host home when he’s been lost for days out in the woods? Or one that leaves him stranded for dead? That sucks.

Holman (15m 44s):

Oh, was I supposed to answer that?

Lightning (15m 46s):

I mean, kind

Holman (15m 47s):

Of. Yes please. I lost interest in your swarmy announcer voice. Yeah, All right. Let’s end this bit. I would like for you to come back So. we can make more podcasts. So of course I’m gonna send you over to onX maps.com or onX Offroad dot com. You can download the app on either the Google Play store, the Apple App store. It works across all devices, including your pc. And

Lightning (16m 5s):

What’s cool is that it syncs across all of your devices. You can create your route on your PC and then sync it over to your iOS device and then, and then actually use it on CarPlay or Android Auto. You

Holman (16m 14s):

Can discover Offroad trails, public and private land info. You can save your maps for offline use. You can customize it with markups and you can even use the new Route Builder tool to plan a route and share it with your friends. Point your browser to onX Offroad dot com. Planner out and point your nose of your truck to wherever that takes you.

7 (16m 32s):

The truck show. We’re gonna show you what we know. We’re gonna answer what the truck, cars, truck rides with the truck show. We have the lifted, we have the lowered and everything in between. We’ll talk about trucks that run on Diesel and the ones that run on gasoline. The truck show. The truck show. The truck show. Whoa.

8 (17m 3s):

It’s the truck show with your hosts Lightning and Holman.

Lightning (17m 9s):

Wonder how many listeners we just drove

7 (17m 11s):

Off with that last bit?

Holman (17m 12s):

All

Lightning (17m 13s):

Of them. Damn it. No,

Holman (17m 14s):

The beauty of podcasting is you don’t drive ’em off. They just hit the forward button.

Lightning (17m 17s):

Don’t tell ’em that that’s there. But

Holman (17m 18s):

Of course they stayed because they love our advertisers.

Lightning (17m 22s):

I wonder how many people know that that little 15 second skip ahead button exists.

Holman (17m 27s):

I wanna know why you think nobody is aware of that.

Lightning (17m 30s):

I think some people aren’t tech savvy.

Holman (17m 33s):

It’s an arrow on audio.

Lightning (17m 36s):

Maybe they don’t know. You think

Holman (17m 37s):

They don’t know how to watch YouTube and push the ten second forward button?

Lightning (17m 41s):

Some people may not.

Holman (17m 42s):

Okay. Direct all your emails of Lightning being aloof and crazy to Truck Hill podcast at gmail com.

Lightning (17m 48s):

I have watched a lot. Lot of people sit through commercials on YouTube.

Holman (17m 51s):

No, they like the commercials

Lightning (17m 52s):

Now some are elderly All,

Holman (17m 54s):

Right? Oh No. No. Okay, we’re not getting into your accidental offensiveness. Can we just get into a podcast show that sure doesn’t involve you?

Lightning (18m 1s):

Let’s jump on into the act. Expo.

Holman (18m 3s):

All, right? I’m gonna do this because it’s, it’s it just me. It is like SEMA for medium duty trucks and big trucks and there’s a battery powered excavator. Alright, I’m at the Advanced Clean Transportation Expo in Anaheim, California and there’s all sorts of cool stuff. I was invited by our friends at Dana, so I’m gonna head over to their booth, see if I can find them. and then yeah, we will, we’ll walk around, learn about some Dana stuff and see what other trouble we can get into All. right. So that’s me at the act Expo. I pulled into the parking lot.

Lightning (18m 35s):

It’s obviously not me.

Holman (18m 36s):

No, of course it’s not you. You said

Lightning (18m 38s):

I did weren’t that wasn you. and then you said that wasn you twice. Right?

Holman (18m 40s):

It’s still me, it doesn’t change things. and then I walked around for a little bit and after I got my badge I wandered and found our friends at Dana. Alright, So here I am inside the Anaheim Convention Center at the Advanced Clean. Transportation. Expo is invited by my good friend Seth from Dana who bailed on me. And he left these two fine gentlemen, Jason and Jeremy to, to babysit me for the day as we walk around and look at some of the, the future of, I guess would be medium duty vehicles, medium

Jason (19m 10s):

Duty, heavy duty, I mean anything even down to,

Holman (19m 13s):

So I say babysat me because basically I had the credentials of a Dana employee.

Lightning (19m 18s):

Oh damn. So they

Holman (19m 19s):

Got me in under their booth and then they kind of turned me loose and they’re like, Hey, at the end of the day, can you give us your badge back So? we have other people come in and I’m like, sure.

Lightning (19m 26s):

Did you go immediately into the back of the, the, the secret area of the Dana booth to like see what kind of goodies they had, like m and ms and candy and stuff like that?

Holman (19m 34s):

No, I was working.

Lightning (19m 36s):

You totally did

Jason (19m 38s):

Wife iPhone 50 type pickup. You’ll see some of that here. So

Holman (19m 40s):

All, right? So I’m standing in a convention center. It’s exactly how you would imagine it. Soft carpet. Lots of booths. And I am, I’m in the Dana booth and if you guys go back when I toured some of the Dana facilities, maybe last year we talked about some it, I’m seeing some familiar things here, but lots of orange cables, lots of big motors attached to solid axles, lots of looks like inverters, some drive shafts off of electric motors. It’s there’s, it’s all scaled up. It’s all the big stuff that I, that I got to see before. And today we’re gonna actually see these in vehicles, which I’m pretty excited about.

Lightning (20m 18s):

Was it, what was the feel like at the convention? Was it like sema, was it stuffier? Like Comdex or something? Yeah, it’s

Holman (20m 24s):

Exactly like sema except that wasn the, you know, a lot more OE and, and tier one suppliers. So not as much aftermarket people are more buttoned up a lot more suits and you know, collared shirts and things like that. But very optimistic. In fact, I think they said, gosh, I can’t remember who was, you know, in the tens of thousands on attendees. They’re actually moving it to Vegas next year. I think they’re outgrowing the, the Anaheim Convention Center. And I have several comments of people saying How much, it’s exponentially grown each year and it felt fully fledged. I mean there was, there was a ton of companies there and a lot of cool stuff. So big million dollar booths. Oh yeah. Oh yeah, for sure. Like Cummins booth was enormous.

Holman (21m 4s):

How about Caterpillar? Were they there? I mean I don’t remember every single company that was there, but I did get a chance to jump into different driver’s seats and pretend I was playing with big trucks that I don’t normally get to. So you guys are taking me around today, so if you want to, what, what’s your, your name and then your responsibility at Dana?

Jeremy (21m 24s):

Yeah, so I’m Jeremy Renick. I lead commercial vehicle engineering with Dana. I’ve been there about 12 years. I’m pretty excited for the show to this year and especially today as we unveil some new products. It’s gonna be a good one.

Jason (21m 36s):

Jason Sanders, I do application engineering for commercial vehicles. So I’m take the office space definition, Nick the specs from the customer to the engineers and we work to get the, the right product for the right fit every time.

Holman (21m 47s):

So are you the guy that has to go back to the customer and go, yeah, we can’t do that.

Jason (21m 51s):

We always find a solution.

Jeremy (21m 53s):

It might be a yes and

Holman (21m 54s):

Yeah. Okay. We can, but hang on a second. We’re, we’ll, we’ll figure that out. So here we are. We’re in the Dana booth and I know you guys have some announcements today and some new things that you’re showing. So let’s, let’s check those things out. Yeah,

Jason (22m 5s):

Great. Sounds a good plan. So I guess since you, you kind of teased the announcement, this is the announcement here, right? We’ll just, we’ll go, we’ll go go for the big thing right off the bat and then work our way down from there. This is new for Dana. There is a press conference at three o’clock, but it is a new three speed e transmission designed from the ground up from scratch based on all the components and different acquisitions we’ve made over the last four years. Bringing in different components from inverters, controllers, actuators, clutch mechanisms, everything has come from the acquisitions we’ve made. And this is a, a purpose-built, medium duty e transmission that can go as low as like a class five depending on the application, all the way up through class six and seven.

Jason (22m 46s):

So it is, we’re really excited about it and it’s launching a mid 2024.

Holman (22m 51s):

So why is this significant? I think, you know, to this point when we’ve seen a lot of the heavy duty trucks and even medium duty trucks, it has been a electric drivetrain that’s been adapted to internal combustion and they may have had the electric motor ahead of the existing transmission and now this is basically all electric from the start. Yeah,

Jason (23m 11s):

You’ve moved from like a P two P three configuration to a full electric powertrain. And what the benefit this is providing over like this yard spotter in the corner of the booth over here is that was a single speed motor

Holman (23m 23s):

By the way. A yard spotter is like what they use at the dock to move like containers around and it’s basically four or you know, two axles, four tires, a place for a trailer to go and then just a steering Wheel in a box. It’s like short stubby and it’s all about tor my buddy Sean at the port calls them yard goats. Yeah, they’re freaking awesome. So Dana had a yard goat in their, in their booth that just tells you how big the booth was. It took up like a 10th of the booth, geez.

Jason (23m 51s):

Attached directly to the drive shafts. You were very, not very limited but somewhat limited in what your torque and top speed could be. There’s only so much you can do to shift that curve. This given us the three speeds enables us to kind of extend that curve out in both directions and really hit top speed requirements and top torque requirements and meet the application needs.

Holman (24m 7s):

So this is good for on-road vehicles, not just a yard vehicle because you can get those highway speeds as well as hooking up a heavy load and being able to move it. Now when you talk about an electric transmission, how does it differ from what we’re used to with a tor converter and hydraulics? Or is it like a big, you know, dual clutch or an automatic manual? What makes a EV specific transmission? It’s like maybe

Jason (24m 28s):

One of the benefits and Jeremy jump in if you want to at all, but because it’s all electric and it’s all a motor and we control the, the transmission control unit and the motor, it’s really easy to speed match between gears. So, we shift out speed, match up the motor, ship it back into gear and then away you go. So there is no extra mechanism for that. We just, we speed match and you’re good to go and

Jeremy (24m 48s):

It’s a whole lot better for efficiency losses, right? So with the torque converter, you’re inherently spinning up additional components, having some of those friction losses, this anything you need, you’re spinning it up and nothing more. So, we synchronize a fancy word for saying we match the speed of the motor to the speed that the gears want to see. We have, as Jason alluded to, a lot of the investments we’ve made over the years to bring in things like electric motors, inverters, synchronizers, transmission controls, soup to nuts. We’ve got the capabilities to do it all in-house. Now it doesn’t mean in one single location we’re spread out across the world, but that’s kind of the beauty of it.

Holman (25m 24s):

Yeah. So now basically a customer can come to you and you’re not mixing and matching parts with other tier one suppliers. You guys are able to control the entire sandbox, the, the hardware and software together and give a solution that’s a one-stop shop, which means that your stuff is talking to each other, that you can control the durability. You’re not taking anyone else’s word for the quality of their componentry, you know, all that. Now what is the mechanism for shifting? Is it clutches in there? You said you were able to match it Precisely. And

Jeremy (25m 51s):

We have some electric actuators on the top. So those move shift forks, we have synchronizers inside, so for seamless smooth shifts and it’s again three speeds.

Holman (26m 3s):

So I know people are gonna ask, you know, they’re listening and they’re not necessarily seeing it. It is probably don don’t know, 18 inches around or so, maybe less, maybe 16 inches in diameter ish, thereabouts. And it’s I what, maybe 36 inches long from

Jason (26m 21s):

And end to end? Yeah. And that, that captures, you know, about four or five inches of inverter. and then you got about what, eight to 10 inches of motor and then the remainder of it is gearbox and kind of the yoke attachment for the drive shaft. It,

Holman (26m 33s):

It’s amazing how compact it is. What would the power output class be for something like this?

Jason (26m 38s):

Kilowatts it’s like 350 kilowatt. Okay. Peak power continuous is closer to 2, 2 20 20 a kilowatt I think. and then peak tort, again, Newton meters is 7,900 newton meters and there’s an a variant for this also that goes down to 4,700 newton meters, but then gets you slightly different speed requirements also. So it’s all about, again, matching it to the correct application.

Holman (26m 57s):

So I actually have a calculator for that because when I was working on a potential EV project last year, so I will translate it nice. And I’m not guaranteeing everybody, my math will be precise, it’ll be a ballpark, but I’ll get you close. No,

Jason (27m 10s):

I’ll look up the numbers and verify, but I’m pretty sure those are close to accurate.

Holman (27m 13s):

Don don’t know if my math is right, but 7,900 new meters works out to 5,826 pound feet of torque. So I mean that’s, I don’t know if that’s right or not, but it’s it is, it sounds absurd. It is ridiculous. That sounds like a a a a ship’s engine. Yeah, I mean it’s, it’s right. He said 7,900 new meters. I think that’s what he said. All, right. Well then that’s, I mean, what, 5,000 pound feet of torque wouldn’t you? 5,826. Wouldn’t you want that in your truck? Could you imagine? You would literally just spit out your entire rear end just gone Well, they’d just fly out and your bumper would be sitting on the ground all squatty and stuff.

Holman (27m 55s):

Yeah. Hmm. Anyway, that’s a lot of torque. Yeah,

Jeremy (27m 57s):

And keep in mind too, we have that secondary reduction in the drive axle So, we can match that. So

Holman (28m 2s):

It’s a two speed or axle?

Jeremy (28m 3s):

No, it’s a, it’s a single speed. Okay. But we can Because, We have so many different ratios available in that drive axle. Oh, got it. We can well match the transmission to the drive axle for the right solution for the application. So

Holman (28m 13s):

It’s all about use case. It gives you basically a gearing solution on both ends on the, the drive end as well as the rotating end or the Wheel end so that you can kind of mix and match those. Yeah,

Jeremy (28m 23s):

Precisely.

Jason (28m 24s):

So if you put this in a, a medium duty city delivery truck, it might be a a three and a half final drive ratio. You could put it again that yard spotter application and throw like a 5 5 7 or a six 13 behind it and then bring your top speed down, kick your torque up and again, you’re fitting for that application as best as possible.

Holman (28m 39s):

Cool. All. right? What’s, what’s next in the Dana booth?

Jeremy (28m 42s):

Well, we can hit up the e axle now. We introduced this at ACT in 2021. This is our zero eight family of e axles. It’s that class eight size. We have a couple different variants here. Sean again, some of the motor technology is eerily similar to what you see in the tranmission, but that’s one of the ways we scale and leverage some of the components and systems that we already have in-house. So these are additionally three speed gearbox, integrated e axles for the class eight market. We have a HP 180 motor and HP 300 motor up in the front with the mix and match between the two. We can cover a really wide range of vehicle applications with these as well. So

Holman (29m 21s):

Would this be on the rear drive wheels of a semi-truck, for example? Yeah,

Jeremy (29m 24s):

Exactly.

Holman (29m 25s):

And so you look at a lot of semi-truck that have dual rear axles. Would you put an e axle under both in some applications or?

Jeremy (29m 32s):

Yeah, yeah. And these are targeted kind of to be pretty modular So. we can have a tandem with it kind of in the configuration you see here, or it can be a, a single drive. These have plenty of torque, plenty of capability. It literally can rip a house off its foundation.

Holman (29m 48s):

Yeah, I mean it’s, it’s cool. So you guys aren’t seeing this, but it’s basically if you look at, think about the frame missing and you’re just seeing the rear two axles and there’s sort of floating in space at like a tilted 45 degree angle with the show lights on ’em and they’re painted really nice and it just, it just looks cool. I mean it’s, even, even the vent hose coming off of ’em looks nice on the, on the housing, but you just look at it, you can tell that it’s, it’s for a big truck. But again, I’m, I’m amazed e axle technology is something that you guys are really pioneering all the way up to this class eight size. But even on down to the Dana 60 e axles where the motors offer Jeeps and applications like that, or full-size trucks.

Holman (30m 27s):

And I guess for me, I’m impressed with the scalability of, of that, you know, platform or that design and the motors are incredibly compact and especially if you’re moving the motor to the axle, I would think on a semi-truck where you maybe aren’t worried as much about ground clearance and the things you might be worried about on a Jeep with the, you know, motors on the drive shaft side of the housing sitting there, that opens up a huge amount of room under the hood for thermal management, cooling, batteries, whatever else. It seems like this just completely changes how you would package a, a a a full-sized vehicle.

Jeremy (31m 6s):

Absolutely. It does exactly what I mean. You well, well laid it out. It opens up a whole lot of space claim on the vehicle to do batteries. It, depending on the range that you’re looking for to handle and we’ll kind of hit that on the next step or stop in the booth. And some of the e auxiliaries and stuff you can shove under the hood now that you don’t have a Diesel engine under there. But in the evolution, we’ll say from a direct drive central mount, non geared motor solution into a multi-speed transmission solution or an integrated e axle solution, depending on where a customer or or o e m is in that evolution or where, where they’re really prioritizing their time, their space and their energy. We’ve gotta drive, train solution for them.

Holman (31m 45s):

You just want to go up and touch it and it’s, it just so, so cool how big it is and how burly and you just, it, it’ll be neat to see these on the road. I’m, I’m

Lightning (31m 54s):

Paulman Do you know if I, I’ve listening to these guys talk and they’re talking about medium duty and the massive, massive torque in their e axles and things like that. Are they in the race car scene or in the, the

Holman (32m 8s):

Race car scene? Well,

Lightning (32m 10s):

I know that’s totally different than what we’re we’re talking about here. Okay. But it seems like these axles would like multi-speed electric transmissions would something would dominate racing aside from this conversation. Are they,

Holman (32m 29s):

I’m still trying to understand what, what point you’re making work with me here.

Lightning (32m 32s):

I’m curious if they talked to you, like if are, are these racing now if they said, are we taking

Holman (32m 36s):

These semi-truck transmissions and motors and going racing in cars? I

Lightning (32m 40s):

Just feel like, would it translate to racing? I gotta fix that.

Holman (32m 42s):

Well, I’m sure, I’m sure it’s all scalable. Yeah. But you have to make sure that the, you know, you have the right case size so that you don’t put something in a car that’s gonna crush it. No, no, no. I I mean those axles aren’t gonna fit in a car.

Lightning (32m 52s):

I’m just, that wasn weird. Like I was, I’m listening to them talk about these the transmissions multi-speed. Yeah, electric transmissions. And I haven’t heard about about that in

Holman (33m 1s):

Like, that’s why they were making a big announcement. I was there the day they were announcing their multi-speed transmission for EVs and

Lightning (33m 7s):

What is their competition like. Do you have any idea don?

Holman (33m 9s):

Don’t know. Hmm. Listen, I’m just a dodo loves trucks and a major tier one supplier for massive amounts of industries all over the world. Said, Hey, do you wanna be our guest and learn about our stuff? I went, yes, you went. Yes. Yeah. Yes. I’ll go there. and then, and then they said, we’re gonna talk to you. And I said, I’m just gonna push a little red button on my phone that says record to the record. and then you tell them what I’m, I’m not even gonna be the middleman here. I’m just gonna let you talk to them direct. So why get in the way All. right. I’m just gonna hit play and let it keep going.

Lightning (33m 39s):

Okay.

Holman (33m 40s):

I’m definitely curious to see what happens with, you know, the transformation in the fleet side, which is a lot about what this show is just because there’s a lot of unknowns. I mean there’s a lot of technology where at the bleeding edge of it, there’s a lot of solutions coming out. A lot of different people have different, you know, directions and it’s gonna be really interesting once these are used in the real world to see how it all filters out. Yeah,

Jeremy (34m 2s):

No, you’re right. And I, I like that you pointed out just the, the burness the durability that’s inherent to it. Dana’s been doing drive axles, especially in the CV market for a long, long time. And there’s no way we want to ever erode that goodwill and, and a following that we have in the market. So, we take no, no shortcuts when it comes to developing these. We want these to be all about uptime. We’re all in this evolution together. So being able to have something that hits the ground running, keeps these trucks on the road and gives the, the fleets, the, the dealers, the end customers, nothing else to worry about. That’s why we’re here. I

Holman (34m 35s):

Guess the other question that I would bring up too is you look at the cost of ownership of a bigger, medium size or heavy duty truck. And especially for those, you know, independent contractors or even, I guess it matters for big companies as well. My guess would be that moving to a a electrified platform, there’s gonna be a lot less maintenance costs because there’s not gonna be as many fluid changes and, and you know, things like that. And if a, a big truck today, you know, a reasonable lifecycle before rebuild is a million miles, what does that look like on the east side?

Jeremy (35m 4s):

Time will tell, but we’re definitely designing it to be as good or better as what they’re used to in the field right now.

Holman (35m 10s):

There’s so many possibilities. There’s so much opportunity that gets opened up by doing this. Yeah.

Jeremy (35m 13s):

Yeah. And I don know Jason, you wanna speak to some of the maintenance side, but

Jason (35m 17s):

I just gonna say yeah, the gearbox may end up being comparable, but you definitely lose your periodic engine oil changes, right. That’s gone out the window. Otherwise the motor and the inverter don’t need maintenance. They’re just you, you hook them up and they run forever.

Holman (35m 29s):

Yeah. I mean you’ll still have coolant because you still have thermal management, you’ll still have brake fluid. Yep. You’ll still have, you know, transmission fluid, things like that. But again, oil change is a pretty big deal. Yeah.

Jason (35m 38s):

Oil changes are gone. Yeah. For the buckets and buckets of oil that the Diesel engines take, those are no longer a factor anymore.

Jeremy (35m 45s):

Yeah. And the, the brake wear, as you mentioned, is much reduced. They

Holman (35m 49s):

Re regen obviously.

Jeremy (35m 50s):

Right. Regen is taking care of a lot of that breaking for you. I think you’re gonna see significant improvement on the dealer side as

Holman (35m 56s):

I’m kind of curious, you know, you, you may not think about break brakes as being a big maintenance item, but no more Jake brakes going down hills. You just go max region, just fill up your batteries no

Lightning (36m 8s):

More.

Holman (36m 10s):

I know it’s kind of sad. Right. But also interesting. It could sound like my wife’s four by you turning in the driveway. Ooh. Sounds like a Jetson’s car is landing. Imagine

Lightning (36m 19s):

Like 40 years from now and you’re down at one of those little towns along the I 70, you know, it’s quiet the Ike and you’re used to just Yeah. All that noise. But now, now all you hear is just tires, just

Holman (36m 31s):

No, they won’t be that quiet. You’ll still hear the motors going. Woo. They sound weird dude. Yeah. Living with one and pulling like I could tell when my wife is coming home versus any other car on the street. Just makes that

Lightning (36m 46s):

Noise. Does she have, is any of that sound artificial?

Holman (36m 49s):

No, it’s regen from the, from the motor. Oh. You know, basically it just under load making motor notices. But

Lightning (36m 55s):

A lot, a lot of the cars, electric cars have artificial exterior sounds so You know what they’re backing up or they’re

Holman (36m 59s):

Being required at some point by federal regulations. I, I don’t think they’re required yet. And yeah, her car doesn’t have that. it just, the sound of the vehicle, which is interesting. Hmm. Now is it still air over hydraulic with regen? Is that, is air still required on something like this? Yeah.

Jeremy (37m 14s):

Yep. So it’s, it’s a, we’ll call it blended braking, but it’s all about providing the maximum amount of recovery without upsetting the vehicle dynamics. And there’s a fine line there for

Jason (37m 25s):

Anyone that hasn’t driven any V yet. Experience regen. When I drive most of our trucks where we haven’t calibrated, it’s very much one pedal driving. I only ever touch the brakes to come to complete stop. It’s, it’s that much region braking. I I I we also ask the guys to calibrate ’em pretty aggressively too. Just ’cause I do enjoy the one pedal driving. Yeah. Once you do it, you love it. There’s, I mean you hate to brake pedal otherwise normally,

Holman (37m 46s):

Well there’s a couple of settings on my wife’s four by eight Grand Cherokee and you know, Jeep’s got the, the regular regen in a high threshold and I really like the high threshold. Yep. And it took her a little while to get used to it. She goes, I don’t know why when I, when I lift off the thing just like slows down. I’m like, that’s your regen, you want that Right. That’s gonna, you know, help you increase your range. And so it took her a little bit of time, but now that she’s used to it, she loves it.

Jason (38m 8s):

Same thing with my wife. She’s got the four by E Wrangler and it, I took her bit. I’m like, here’s the button. It bumps your region up. Get used to it. She’s like, oh, it’s kind of nice actually. Yeah. what you get

Jeremy (38m 16s):

Used to it. It’s, it’s funny too because some customers earlier on would come to us and say we want the maximum as they’re specking out what the drive line’s gonna look like, what the e axle capability is. We want the maximum amount of regen. We say, you know, we hear what you’re saying and one of the ways that we’ve kind of tempered that enthusiasm is to put them in the trucks. Yeah. And say, look, here’s what you’re asking for. Now if your kidneys survive that.

Holman (38m 40s):

Yeah. Right.

Jeremy (38m 41s):

And then we kind of come back from there. So there, there’s a enthusiasm limit. Yeah. and then there’s a reality,

Holman (38m 47s):

The practical application of it is a little bit different than what you might see on paper. Yep. Yeah.

Jeremy (38m 51s):

You can handle that full regen capability about one time before you want to exit the vehicle, throw up and get back in

Jason (38m 57s):

You if you put it in a number, some of our applications, like the motor torque is a 2,600 N meter motor, but then regen is actually capped at 2000 n meters. So it, and it’s even still sometimes they, so it’s a little much

Holman (39m 9s):

So, well you don’t want to break your coefficient attraction either with regen, right. I mean you still have tires that are optimized for the platform, but they still need to stop the vehicle and have, you know that. So it’d be easy to, you know.

Jeremy (39m 21s):

Yeah. And it’s, if you’ve ever experienced snow or ice actual a b s intervention on a regen cycle, it’s a eerie feeling. It is

Holman (39m 29s):

A little bit weird. It is weird.

Jeremy (39m 30s):

Yeah.

Holman (39m 31s):

Unfortunately

Jason (39m 32s):

We’ve got a controls team that’s helping to work with that and work with the, you know, the slip controls providers as well to make sure we’re talking over the can bus and making sure that we’re responding with torque and pulling torque back when they set that certain GS one message to C one

Jeremy (39m 43s):

Message. Never underestimate the power of the software and controls team. So that’s really the bread and butter of what makes all this stuff work together. Without it, you’ve got bits and pieces bolted on together in hopes and prayers. But the software and controls guys,

Holman (39m 56s):

Well I’m a, I’m a big aviation buff and so learning all the history of the flying wings and the B two and the F one 17, it weren’t for a software controls team, those things would never be flying and most modern planes couldn’t do what they were able to do without that. So, you know, taking that down and distilling it to the on-road market is a, you know, just equally as important to making all these, you know, different components, especially in a transitional period where you have, you know, traditional air over hydraulic brakes, but now you’ve introduced regen to it and so there’s newer technology being interspersed with older technology that’s proven and it all has to talk and make sense to each other. Yeah,

Jeremy (40m 31s):

Indeed.

Holman (40m 33s):

All. right. So we’re standing in front of a, a new display that looks like on one end it’s a e axle. It shows controllers in the middle. It’s, it’s like battery management and batteries, cold plates. And on the other end is basically a, a drive unit or I guess a controller inverter. Is that what that is called?

Jason (40m 51s):

Power electronics cradle. Okay. So it’s a combination of pretty much anything needed to run the truck that the engine used to do.

Holman (40m 55s):

Okay. So basically you can design that or adapt it on a existing platform to basically drop in where the engine was. ’cause now in the case of what we’re seeing here, there’s an e axle. So what’s driving the vehicle is now on the axle, not under the hood. That gives you you room for this cradle to drop in that has all the controls.

Jason (41m 12s):

Yeah. And it’s been designed very specifically to sit on the exact same motor mounts that the Diesel engine came out over the gas engine came out of IC engine. So it’s, it’s specifically designed to drop in for that and again, replaces all those auxiliary systems. Hey

Lightning (41m 24s):

Holman, How much of the electronics are they doing in house of Dana? ’cause

Holman (41m 28s):

I everything Oh they are.

Lightning (41m 30s):

’cause because you think of Dana as being more of a hardware company.

Holman (41m 32s):

You know, they made all these purchases and they’ve everything in their booth. They literally, what we’re talking about right here is imagine what it would look like if you had an electric vehicle sitting in front of you and the body frame axles and chassis were all gone and then each of the components was living in space of where they would be on that. That’s what this display was showing. Everything they do from cooling plates to the batteries controller,

Lightning (41m 54s):

They’re, they’re not hiring out with partners. They’re, everything is under one roof at Dana. So they bought their own electrical engineering

Holman (42m 0s):

Team. They even bought their own company to make cables to make electrical cables so they can control the quality of electrical cables.

Lightning (42m 6s):

Wow.

Jason (42m 7s):

Top level on this one’s an inverter. So this, this inverter doesn’t necessarily go with this e axle. Sure. But if that wasn a direct system, it could. But if you’ve got your inverter, you’ve got a high voltage junction box on top of that actually. So that’s our, you know, fuse panel for the whole EV system. Our DC cables coming from the battery feed that, and then we’re sending out different lines to the different systems on the whole truck.

Holman (42m 26s):

And there’s a lot of orange cables on here. We learned at the last time when we were visiting data that you guys bought a cable manufacturer so that you could keep your cables and, and make them to your specs. A lot of the cars are now moving from, you know, 400 volt architecture to 800 volt architecture, which allows more power and charging capability. What is it in the big truck market? And if it takes me on an 800 volt fast charge set up in a, you know, a truck two hours or two and a half hours for a full charge, what does that look like on the, on the heavy duty truck side?

Jason (42m 57s):

So again, it depends on yeah, when you’re doing AC level two charging or DC level three charging size of the battery, but most everyone is doing 800 volt. I think I know of only a handful of the c v OEMs that are doing 400 volt systems. And again, because 800

Holman (43m 10s):

Seems to be the kind of the new place where everybody’s jumping off.

Jason (43m 13s):

The nominal is closer to six 50, honestly. But they’re that higher voltage up to 800 volt classes system. So all of our Dana team four inverter product is good up to just under 800 volts essentially. And our, our next series of product that’s coming out is good to eight 50 and might even be pushing it past that Because We do see the battery storage systems progressing up that, that, that trajectory towards higher voltage. So we’re making sure our components can go along with that at this point in time. But the charging time, I mean, yeah, like if you took a, I had a truck on the charger last week that wasn 120 kilowatt battery hooked it up to our 62 kilowatt charger and that wasn done in two hours.

Holman (43m 49s):

Not, there’s not a lot of downtime. So especially for those fleets that might be closed at night, they could charge overnight and have all the trucks ready in the morning. Easily.

Jason (43m 57s):

Easily. Yeah. I mean you said your wife’s got the Cherokee four by eight. Yeah, my wife charges her per wrangler overnight on level one 10. We do the

Holman (44m 4s):

Same thing. So we’ve got a a, I guess it’s a 40 watt charger and so it’s unfortunately it’s only what the, I think on the Jeep it’s only seven kilowatt charger on it, so it’s only, you can’t take advantage of everything. It’s two hours kind of. No ma this is me trying to do math on the fly between watts amps and all that stuff. Yeah, I’m, I’m still, I’m still learning. I was never, you know, yeah. I was never into a math thingy calculations ever. So learning about EVs, remember that time when you were in class, you’re like, where am I ever gonna use this math? And I’m like, oh crap, it’s now, I was today years old when I figured out I would need math.

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We’re sorry. The number you have dialed is not in service at this time.

Holman (44m 50s):

That’s what’s going through your head. Yeah, something like that. What I meant to say, I, I don’t remember if I said what or whatever. Anyway, I, I have a a, I believe it’s a 40 amp charger at home. No, no, no. 40 watts. No, no. And the, the charger on the Grand Cherokee and the Wrangler four by eight is only seven kilowatts.

Jason (45m 12s):

Try

Holman (45m 13s):

Again amps whatever it is. So it, you can’t use that full potential of your amps. So no matter whether you’re plugged in or not, it’s gonna take two hours. That was the point I was trying to make s not a mathematician. Try again, still You done laughing at me. Woo. Oh, it’s like talking to you. I wanna I want you to explain to me how fast the 800 volt system will charge on a 62 amp charger. We do that in, in it’s char her, her, her setup is like, our off peak hours are 9:00 PM So at nine 30 I always get my text notification, your Grand Cherokee is charging, right?

Holman (45m 55s):

Yep, yep,

Jason (45m 55s):

Yep. Same thing. Although I’m, I’m cheap. I just use the one 10 takes 10 hours to charge. But that’s okay. But

Holman (46m 1s):

It’s funny because now my wife, if she’s running around, she might forget to plug it in by the way, I was right. Four by eight has an onboard 7.4 kilowatt charger. Boom. So I was right, I was getting it. I do have my, my charger at home is in amps and her car’s onboard chargers in kilowatts. So it’s not 40 watts. Just feeling vindicated right now.

Jason (46m 24s):

So then we can even, other components in that cradle are DC D c inverters, auxiliary system pumps, AC system pump in there, cooling system pump for the motor inverter. Like I said, everything else that the engine would normally be running, we find a way to package into this power electronics cradle. So it’s an easy drop in and like from a kind of manufacturing process, we, we build this thing so that when you drop it in, you unfold the cool lines, you unfold the high voltage lines to come up, and I think it’s ready to go.

Holman (46m 50s):

That’s amazing. What would a typical conversion take if somebody drove a truck into a shop that was certified to do a conversion, how long before they could drive it out? It would be on the road if you had everything, all the parts there, somebody knew what they were doing and that wasn, you know, all your stuff was ready to go. Couple days,

Jason (47m 8s):

Probably a couple days. I think that’s what they’re doing right now. At one of our facilities. They’re, I mean, they’re bringing in, you know, kinda a rolling chassis and bolting all of this stuff into it. And our buildup process is about two days to drop everything, hook it up, and that’s, you’re talking, running all the cables, all the lines, all the wires. That’s, that’s about a two day venture. You know, this part, it’s

Holman (47m 24s):

Still pretty amazing.

Jason (47m 25s):

Yeah. When you think about it. Yeah. Building an EV from scratch. Yeah.

Holman (47m 28s):

Now you guys, we, we saw some of the cooling plates back when we visited Dana in the past. And that technology came from, I, I, I can’t remember now, but that wasn a, a legacy product that it actually worked really well in the cooling plates.

Jason (47m 41s):

Yeah. Long, long. The thermal systems group, I think. Yeah, that, that was one of the older acquisitions Dana’s made. But yeah, it’s highly leveraged across light vehicle and commercial vehicle. Actually, I think this one actually was from the Lightning. Someone told me, So, we have product on the Lightning. We have product on the volt back in the day when the volt was still a thing. So Dana, Dana, our power technologies group has been supporting EV for well over 20 plus years at this point.

Holman (48m 5s):

Well, I guess that’s something important to, to mention too, right? Is, you know, Dana is known for, you know, a lot of things probably in the truck market primarily drive trains and axles and gears and, but you’re not new to the electrification market. This is something that you guys have been highly involved in as a tier one for some time now. And I think there’s just more focus on it now than there maybe was in the past, really

Jason (48m 27s):

Ramping it up, especially for the commercial vehicle market, making sure they’ve got all the products they need to electrify anything from class three all the way through class eight. It’s been a lot of fun.

Holman (48m 37s):

Alright, we’re where to next? We know class

Jeremy (48m 40s):

Four or five, we’ll call it an integrated e axle, uses our Tmm four LD motor. It’s a great drop-in solution for box trucks. City delivery kind of meets that existing architecture, but retrofit into an EV market.

Holman (48m 57s):

For those of you who may not be familiar, it’s kinda like a Ford nine inch where there’s a third member that would drop out. But in, in, in place of the third member that would drop out is actually a whole integrated motor assembly that just bolts right to the front side of that axle and basically comes out and then the motor sits at a 90 degree angle to the input on the axle. So it’s parallel with the axle itself. It’s got a, I guess a controller box on top and super, you know, efficient on packaging. It

Jeremy (49m 24s):

Is, yeah, it’s all helical gearing single speed. So there’s no shift solenoids, no shift actuation, nothing like that. It does have an integrated park lock mechanism that was a Dana in-house design. Some of our talented engineers put that together. Works really, really well. what you see on top of the axle that ends up being chassis mounted, the inverter, and then you’ve got the high voltage cabling runs down to the, to the motor and makes it all happen.

Holman (49m 49s):

I guess one of the unintended consequences of moving to EV trucks, especially with single speed, is we all know that there’s a, a job shortage in certain sectors and finding truck drivers is one of those things. So I’m guessing this is actually gonna make it easier to find people to drive because they don’t have to learn how to shift a transmission and things like that. It’s, it just bigger, but you know, from a driving standpoint, there’s not a lot of extra things you have to do. If you can drive a car, I would imagine you’d be able to drive an EV box truck. Very

Jeremy (50m 15s):

Much so. Yeah and, and it’s again, getting into the software and controls piece, that’s really where the rubber hits the road, no pun intended, but making it drivable, making the experience positive for, for drivers, being able to get outta whatever they came to work in, hop into this truck and drive off like nothing’s different. That’s the, that’s the intention.

Jason (50m 35s):

One of the things I’ve been more proud of is our controls team that does do that. We’ve done a lot of benchmarking on commercial vehicles size trucks and light vehicle size trucks and really understanding how they drive and making sure we can make these bigger trucks, to your point, making ’em accessible to everyone to be able to drive. And you hop into, get some of these bigger box trucks, you’ll see in the floors we go for a walk and they really drive quite well. I mean we’ve got acceleration management techniques and just, it, it’s easy to drive a 20,000 round truck. You know, anyone can hop in and do it. I wouldn’t be afraid to have my grandma get in dry one

Holman (51m 6s):

All. right. So we’re leaving the Dana booth now and we’re walking over to, looks like international and I see a semi chassis. I see a lot of orange cable. So this looks, oh, this looks pretty familiar. It looks just like what we were talking about on the Dana stand, except it is on a class eight frame. Are those your, your e axles that I see? Those

Jason (51m 30s):

Are e axles. That is that zero eight platform we were just talking about. So there’s two of ’em in here tandem set up. This is using the smaller HP 180 motor that Jeremy was mentioning. So each of these units is good for 28,000 n meters of output, total output torque to the Wheel and from each unit.

Holman (51m 47s):

So this is neat to see it off of the stand, obviously in your booth it’s naked because it’s not in an application. And here we are in the international booth and just what I was asking earlier about can you have two e axles working together on a, you know, dual axles class eight truck and, and here it is and to see it’s kind of cool. This has all the arrow skirts on it and stuff, but there’s no, there’s no body. It just looks like a giant semi skateboard.

Jason (52m 13s):

Yeah, it’s pretty cool to see like it able to see all the different technology in components out there and full view.

Holman (52m 20s):

So the, the giveaway is sort of the rear view. It still has the airbags from the side. It would kind of look the same, but you can see, I guess that’s the, the gear splitter, the two speeded rear axle. Yep.

Jason (52m 30s):

That is the three speed gear box booking right out the back end. Okay. Yep.

Holman (52m 33s):

So that would be kind of a little bit of the giveaway and maybe snee kind of seeing some of the orange wires making through

Jason (52m 39s):

As you see the phase cables coming outta the motor and then winding back up towards the inverters. Yeah. and then you’ve got our transmission control unit right here on top as well. That’s easy to spot.

Holman (52m 47s):

So it’s, it’s funny to see the, the, you know, you’re at a show when the entire frame is gloss black and beautiful and the hitch is a massive piece of billet aluminum.

Jason (52m 58s):

Yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s not standard for sure without,

Jeremy (53m 1s):

Without a drop of grease in sight.

Holman (53m 2s):

Yeah, right. Yeah, there’s no, there’s no grease. It is pretty though. It’s funny ’cause it has a, like a wear pad on top so you don’t gouge the, the billet, but it’s, it’s so cool. All. right. So I’m gonna walk around the side of it. So, we are at the back now, now we’re looking at a side, and again, this has kinda the, the arrow skirt on it in the back. It’s got the, I would assume the batteries on this would be a midship.

Jason (53m 27s):

Yeah. So side chassis mounted side, external to frame rails. I’m not sure what the exact capacity on this is. It’s comparable to some batteries we’ve used in the past as well. I think it’s around 320 ish kilowatt hours is a total capacity to put in this truck. Maybe you can look that up later and figure it out. But it’s, it’s a, it’s a sizable battery pack between the whole chassis. So

Holman (53m 46s):

What would a truck outfitted like this be used for?

Jason (53m 52s):

Regional hall is mostly the likely application. I mean yeah, that’s where you’ve seen all the, all the long haul stuff. You just can’t put a battery in the darn truck. Yeah.

Holman (53m 59s):

To me it’s like the long haul stuff really fuel cells is kind of probably where it’s at because of how discharge range and all those things. But a truck like this might be the, the tractor trailer that delivers to your local grocery store for a distribution center or something like

Jason (54m 12s):

That. Exactly. Local distribution type stuff. Exactly.

Holman (54m 15s):

So I think this is where ev makes sense too in the truck market is that inner city where there’s a lot of traffic, a lot of stop and go, you know, things like that. I think it probably, you know, it’s probably the sweet spot of the marketplace is is taking off, you know, some of those general combustion engines there and replacing ’em with, with ev in, in that particular use case.

Jason (54m 36s):

A hundred percent agree. And that’s one of the things we do with our application process also is looking at, okay, what’s the first question? What’s your duty cycle? What are you actually gonna run this saying? How are you gonna reuse it? Okay, well single speed might make more sense for you actually based on the fact that you never get above 40 miles an hour and you only do 60 miles a day. But again, for the more slightly regional application, multi-speed kind of extend that torque and speed kind of points again. Makes sense. So, we always try to make sure, like I said earlier, we’re picking the right product for the right application

Holman (55m 5s):

So the motor doesn’t care where it’s getting its electricity from. So in this case there’s batteries and you know, all the components that go with it. Now would you be able to plug in your motors to a fuel cell vehicle and would, do they have the duty cycle and would they be appropriate for a truck? So if somebody said, Hey, well we’re doing a fuel cell, don don’t know if you guys are working on them or not, but obviously the drivetrain downstream from the electric source, is this still, you know, you’re able to grow into those other technologies? Yeah,

Jeremy (55m 33s):

Absolutely. We’re, we’ve designed our systems to be, we will say fuel source or power source agnostic. So we’re happy to feed the motors essentially from any source and it kind of makes it well-suited as Jason indicated, there’s as nice as it would be, there’s no one style or one solution that fits all markets. So because of that we’ve gotta be ultra sensitive and ultra flexible to whatever’s upstream of our solution. But yeah, it works with the, regardless of power source

Jason (56m 0s):

And I, I’d say that’s not just a statement we have put this into a fuel cell truck. So it is, it is real. It’s not just yeah, we’re power agnostic. Yeah. We actually are power agnostic. We don’t care. You feed us the juice we’ll make it go.

Holman (56m 10s):

That’s awesome. I think it just, just the, the scalability to have the right product for whatever the customer wants to power however they want to use it. To me it’s fascinating just I guess the, that duty cycle I guess between fills, I mean you’re really going hours and hours of running with huge torque loads and, and you know, lots of weight and kind of all, all the things that, you know, and don don’t wanna say bad for the drive train, but all the things that tax the drivetrain. So to be able to match that and still have the, the electric motors be able to do that for these long stretches is pretty cool. I

Jason (56m 40s):

Mean it’s, it’s the nerdy math part of the process, but I, I do really enjoy still getting to do the math and figure out what the best fit for the application is.

Holman (56m 48s):

It’s funny, we have a lot of engineers who listen to the podcast. We’ve got a lot of science guys and a lot of like truck nerdy people and we’ll have guests, especially companies like you come on that have a really complicated product and you’re talking about Newton meters and you know this and that and they’ll, is that too much? I’m like, our people love it every time we have something super technically in depth, they just eat it up. So, so just you know, keep Yeah, don’t, don’t, don’t dumb it down for me. Keep it a high level, I’ll shrugged but my listeners will get it. Awesome. Nice.

Jeremy (57m 17s):

That’s fun. We love it.

Jason (57m 17s):

And we do everything from full bearing durability analysis, looking at start ability, gradability top speed requirements, actually going through and running C f D on the lube flow within the gearbox itself. Sure. To make sure that if we mount these things at a forward like motor forward or motor rear condition, we’re still getting the right lubrication flow throughout the entire gearbox to make sure bearing seals are all getting the lubrication and the coolant effect that they need from that, that lube. So it, it’s not just a fitted here, we try to make sure that we’re designing it so that we can cover all these applications from A to Z and then pick the right one for the right time.

Holman (57m 50s):

And, and that’s a, I guess that’s a pretty, you know, huge point too is, is you know how fluid flow is when you’re, you’re using something for a long term. You have the, you know, the problem solving of, you know, cavitation obviously getting air whipping up into foam where now your viscosity’s not there, it’s not lubing, it’s not cooling. So those are all things that you guys have to think of because like you said, the motor may be mounted in a bunch of different ways and they have to be, you know, capable in any mounting direction.

Jason (58m 18s):

Yeah, absolutely. don don’t know if any of your previous visits to our, our test lab center, if you’ve gotten to see some of the axles, we actually cut giant windows on the side so you can actually watch the loop flow and verify the C F D results. So we’ll do the C f D up front and then actually monitor and make sure Yep. It’s spinning the way it should, it’s not foaming up the way it shouldn’t. Yeah. So it’s all that goes into our designer view process

Holman (58m 39s):

B two B, that’s a lot of stuff.

Jeremy (58m 40s):

We even have a really cool spin stand that not only lets you run it Flad, but we run it side to side up down kind of a simulate Yeah. Conditions that you wouldn’t even want to get a vehicle into but get into lateral G-force acceleration, up down grades, Because We, wanna look at all the use case scenarios.

Holman (58m 58s):

That’s why I’m not a, you know, electric drive train engineer ’cause I wouldn’t even think about half that stuff.

Jeremy (59m 4s):

Well if we don’t think about it, our customers find it and that’s the wrong time to find it. Yeah,

Holman (59m 7s):

Good, good point. Yeah. So one of the questions I have is off highway vehicles So, we’re looking at the on-road vehicles, on highway vehicles right now, but what is different for some of the off highway stuff? I I obviously there’s all sorts of things. There’s the, the, you know, from the port, whether it just the tractor that moves boxes around to a, a loader to I, don dunno, there’s a gazillion different things. Are there differences in your setup for off highway stuff versus on highway?

Jason (59m 34s):

A little bit. Yeah. Again, it kind of goes back to duty cycle and then packaging off highway and CV bridge, this weird world of, we call heavy vehicles sometimes. So you’ve got terminal tractors as low as 40 tons all the way up to 110 tons. And as they go up in scale, they kind of tend to move into our quote unquote off highway group. And that’s where we are looking at again, you know, higher g VWs, higher direct torque loads through the gearbox. So it does transition to more of a off highway mentality and did some of the design work in the applications and due cycles, lower speed, higher weight, et cetera, et cetera. So we’ve also got here in the booth what we call our E S P five oh two, which is a two speed transmission design specifically for these higher off highway applications.

Holman (1h 0m 14s):

Again, probably the, to your point, the biggest trade off is probably gonna be top end speed and higher weights.

Jason (1h 0m 20s):

Absolutely. So that, that 5 0 2 is really ca that like, I think like just call it 30 ish, 35 miles an hour, that’s as fast as you’re ever gonna get it to go no matter what gear you put in the differential on the rear end. So, but again, off highway stuff, they don’t care about top speed. They care about just building, pulling down power. Yeah.

Holman (1h 0m 36s):

They’re, they’re moving giant boxes or containers from point A to point B in the terminal and they want to do three at a time instead of one at a time. Yeah. Even if one gets picked up at a time. Right. They wanna be efficient to get things off the dock and, and to where the staging areas for the on highway trucks to come pick ’em up. Yeah,

Jason (1h 0m 52s):

Like the giant reach stackers you see in the ports and the really, really big fork trucks and the terminal tractors. And we’re, we’re in cv we’re looking more at the, the smaller 40 ton terminal tractor. They’re looking at the big 80 and 1 10 20 ton terminal tractors. So, but we all, we all, again, we’re all different business units under the same one. Data umbrella, So, we all talk nice, plain nice. And make sure that we’re using the right product again for the right application.

Holman (1h 1m 13s):

Same team. Same team. That’s

Jason (1h 1m 14s):

Right. All ins and@dana.com

Holman (1h 1m 17s):

All. right. So we’re walking through the show and we just came up on a giant yellow school bus. So this one is made by Lion and this is, this is a Dana customer. So what is the setup on this particular chassis?

Jeremy (1h 1m 29s):

Yeah, so this, this particular vehicle and a lot of the line vehicles are direct drive. So they’re integrating existing type of architecture with an electrified drive line. So a direct drive motor, no transmission, no gearing drive shaft, traditional drive axle. So a really good clean integration, quick to get it into market does a really good job.

Holman (1h 1m 49s):

So this is something that probably has lower development costs for the end user, like a school district because it’s an existing platform that they’ve been able to electrify for those who wanna go down that road, but maybe don’t want all the costs associated with a clean sheet design. Yeah,

Jeremy (1h 2m 2s):

Indeed. and then school bus is a great duty cycle for this because it’s morning and afternoon. There’s plenty of time in between to charge, there’s plenty of time after school to charge. In fact, a lot of school districts and infrastructures like that are trying to look at these vehicles not only as point to point Transportation, but actually as like a microgrid capability. So depending on How much battery capacity they put in the trucks, they may have quite a bit extra to do other things.

Holman (1h 2m 27s):

So this has, what is it, a 220 horse? Something like that? Two 50, yeah. So this is a, a 250 kilowatt 335 horsepower, which sounds pretty good. 1800 pound feet of torque. Yep. How does that compare to a typical internal combustion drivetrain? Is that pretty much, you know, match power-wise

Jeremy (1h 2m 45s):

Except for the fact that the power comes on immediately? Sure. As you’d expect. It’s, it’s pretty similar to what they’d have with the Diesel truck.

Holman (1h 2m 51s):

Awesome.

Lightning (1h 2m 53s):

So Holman, as we’re listening to that last part of the interview there, as you’re walking around the show, I’m poking around on dana.com and I find out that they make a seven speed dual clutch transmission designed for high performance cars with a central engine and a transaxle. They’ve teamed up with freaking McLaren. So you’re talking about a mid engine car? It says Central engine right here? Yeah, mid. Okay. Midg engine car. Midg engine. Yes. So they’re already making race car parts. Yeah, it’s Dana. Yeah. No, I didn’t know they’re, they’re not new to the world. Can I be honest why I was asking that question, don. Don’t know. Does it make it better? I mean, we’re exploring different avenues for race car parts for Pikes Peak.

Lightning (1h 3m 34s):

Oh, okay. So I’m particularly curious. Got it. Yeah. Yeah. Hit play.

Holman (1h 3m 40s):

Okay, so I’m walking around and I see the Nikola booth and who do I see our old friend Dan Pass from, from Nissan. But your badge says Nikola. Now what is this?

Dan Passe (1h 3m 51s):

Well, I gotta be honest with you, Sean, I, I love this place. It is an amazing, inspiring organization. And as soon as I interviewed with the man you’re about to talk to next, and as soon as I went and rode in the trucks and saw the facility, I knew I had to be there. And I tell you, because this is a real game changing organization, changing the world of Diesel trucks. All.

Holman (1h 4m 14s):

Right. So who do we have here? The man who’s about eight feet taller than you and I both That’s right.

Michael Lohscheller (1h 4m 19s):

Well, my name is Michael Los. I’m the c e o of Nikolai. I’m only six foot eight. Right. So only,

Holman (1h 4m 25s):

Let’s be honest, right? I meant, I meant 80. Wait, whoa, whoa,

Lightning (1h 4m 27s):

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. He is six foot eight. You cannot miss him. You’re like, Hey, where’s the CO at? Oh, he’s the guy in the corner that’s standing four feet above everybody else. Yeah. I worked with a guy who was six four and six six. Yeah. And they were, they would tower over me. Yeah. Six six was really tall. Six eight is, I’m holding, I’m sorry if the audio’s bad, but I had to

Holman (1h 4m 46s):

Hell extend

Lightning (1h 4m 47s):

My arm all the way up to reach him so that he could do this interview. No, I, I’m super gracious of him

Holman (1h 4m 52s):

To, to jump in and, and I thought that wasn kind of a,

Lightning (1h 4m 55s):

A cool little get from the show. So they’ve got a legit c e o for the first time. It just moving right along. So

Holman (1h 5m 3s):

Last time we were at Nikola, we went down to the Arizona facility, we had a different c e o that wasn a different set of circumstances. The company has matured and evolved since then. And you guys are now starting the sales of the tray in both hydrogen and battery power, which is the big trucks. Tell us a little bit about where Nikola is today and, and since you’ve come on board, where have you taken it? What’s the direction, what’s the future for Nikola?

Michael Lohscheller (1h 5m 26s):

Sure. Very happy to do so. So first of all, last year in April we launched our battery electric truck in our state-of-the-art factory in Coolidge So. we have a real battery electric truck in the market now. We produced 258 trucks last year. Now we sold trucks to the dealers and to end customers. So Nicola has a real truck, real technology, real factory, real people.

Lightning (1h 5m 47s):

And by the way, that is absolutely true. I pass a the Quinn Caterpillar dealership Yep. Off the 6 0 5 freeway and they must have 20 of them. Yep. They went big on Nikola.

Holman (1h 5m 59s):

Yeah, they’re, we’re starting to see ’em driving around the SoCal area. And of course Phoenix is where they’re based. So we’re starting to actually see them out in the wild. So it’s pretty, it’s pretty exciting considering that we had one little tiny speck of that history there. We were a part of Ish ish. Still weird,

Lightning (1h 6m 20s):

Super weird.

Michael Lohscheller (1h 6m 22s):

Absolutely. 2023 is all about the launch of the fuel cell truck, time to market. We are the first in the market. Fuel cell truck has a range of 500 miles. It fuels within 20 minutes and comes with a lot of energy and talk. So it’s an amazing piece of technology. So this is really very important for us during the year 2023. But on top of that, we also provide the energy infrastructure, meaning we will produce green hydrogen in Arizona. We were distributed to California and then dispense it in up to 60 stations here in California. We made a big announcement today with Volterra, a partner, they will build up up to 50 stations. Wow. So back to your question, what we try to do is like real things, real trucks, real technology, real factory, real people.

Michael Lohscheller (1h 7m 9s):

And we wanna be humble, but where we can be confident, like for the fuel cell truck and our technology, we wanna be confident and say we are the first in the market.

Holman (1h 7m 18s):

I think for you guys, fuel cell is huge because for last mile delivery trucks, we’ve talked about it, electric makes a lot of sense. But over the road for interstate travel, because of the way of the batteries and the way, you know, energy has to be stored, hydrogen fuel cell is really the right choice to be the next step going away from Diesel. So to have a hydrogen fuel cell truck that is ready to to, to take on those 80,000 pound loads interstate is, is huge in the industry right now.

Michael Lohscheller (1h 7m 46s):

That’s consistent with what customers are telling us because who am I, I just wanna make sure that our customers are happy and they give me exactly the feedback. Like in ports, the electric truck is actually very interesting. Everybody goes the same route every day. But if you need more, more range, then the fuel sail truck is probably the better choice. And that’s why it is fantastic that we have in a few weeks both trucks into the, in the market and we feel very good about that.

Holman (1h 8m 12s):

So what’s the future of Nikola moving forward? Is it a two truck strategy? Are you gonna have different models? Obviously the consumer division is, is gone now and the focus is on the medium and heavy duty segments. Where do you go from here?

Michael Lohscheller (1h 8m 25s):

Yeah, our focus is clearly on the fuel cell truck because that truck has more potential in combination with the energy business. Because what we try to do is we try to disrupt the truck business plus the energy business. And of course that’s a lot. At the same time we have to do it because customers need both. If you just have a truck at no hydrogen, that is not sufficient. And I think we are uniquely positioned to do both and we also try to do both. Whereas many other competitors just say, look, a truck is sufficient. It’s not. Yeah, we have to do both. Well

Holman (1h 8m 56s):

That’s sort of like how Tesla entered the battery electric vehicle market By doing their own charging stations, you’re essentially doing the same thing but with hydrogen fueling stations. And what that does is it, it accelerates the infrastructure for your customer and hopefully pushes the industry in that direction. Right.

Michael Lohscheller (1h 9m 12s):

That is absolutely correct. And of course we, we have many, many benefits because with the inflation reduction act in the US also, there’s a lot of attention, also a lot of public support. Well, the time is right for hydrogen, the time is right for our truck. And yeah, we, we, we are excited.

Holman (1h 9m 27s):

Well congratulations on the battery electric vehicle. Congrats on the soon to be released Hydrogen electric vehicle. And we look forward to having Nikola on the show in the future and we maybe go a little more in depth into the technology at some point.

Michael Lohscheller (1h 9m 41s):

Excellent. Thanks for having us. Thank you. Thank

Holman (1h 9m 42s):

You. Alright, well thanks for getting us the interview with the c e o you. What’s your new position? Global. Is that you’re the global PR guy? Is that

Dan Passe (1h 9m 51s):

Global Head of marketing and

Holman (1h 9m 53s):

Communications. Wow. That’s, that’s pretty impressive. I I just wanna say that you’re doing right by the media because you had a frosty cold Dr. Pepper. Ready for me. Number

Dan Passe (1h 10m 1s):

One rule of comms is know your audience. I know you my friend. Thank

Holman (1h 10m 5s):

You. We, there’s different kind of brown water we need to go consume soon. Looking

Dan Passe (1h 10m 8s):

Forward to that.

Holman (1h 10m 10s):

No joke. He had ice cold Dr. Pepper, he didn’t even know I was gonna be there. Saw me from across the booth and held up one finger, disappeared and came back with a frosty cold Dr. Pepper. And that wasn in the palm of his hand as if he was displaying it to me. And he goes, do you wanna sit in the truck? I went, yeah. Where did he get it? Did he go to the, the the, the stand? No, that wasn, he had Dr. Pepper on hand in his booth. In the booth. Oh. So he went in the back where the refrigerator is and made sure that I was Well, so he knew you were coming? No, he didn’t know I was coming that wasn either. He’s a Dr. Pepper fan. Yeah. He just knows that Dr. Pepper’s preferred eight to one by media.

Holman (1h 10m 50s):

Eight to one. Where did you get that stat? I made it up right now. I have figured you did. It’s actually 15 to one in this podcast room. The new c e o seems like they’re executing on Trevor Milton’s part of it. Like that wasn Trevor Milton’s vision of having hydrogen, having a station and a vehicle having soft and hard parts, having the infrastructure with, you know, selling it with the vehicle. You can get your fill ups here and there. so Yeah, they’re attacking it from multiple sides, which is kind of what was, you know, I love that. I don’t think, listen,

Lightning (1h 11m 20s):

The story really is amazing. Put someone’s gonna make this a documentary out of it. Right. Like, because Trevor Milton, he, he raised a ton of money Yeah. Defrauded a lot of people. All the stuff that he’s accused of,

Holman (1h 11m 29s):

Allegedly, allegedly

Lightning (1h 11m 30s):

Don

Holman (1h 11m 31s):

Don’t remember. Whatever I, don don’t

Lightning (1h 11m 32s):

Wanna get in the middle of it. So maybe he did bad stuff, don don’t know. Let’s just say that.

Holman (1h 11m 36s):

But he still was a visionary.

Lightning (1h 11m 37s):

But he was a visionary. That’s the thing. Yeah. Or at least, well at least we think he was because maybe he got the ideas from other people

Holman (1h 11m 43s):

And then, but not in this industry. He did revolutionize the, the mindset and what he started is to market now. So. Well

Lightning (1h 11m 51s):

That’s my point is that even if it’s not

Holman (1h 11m 53s):

That wasn all vapor was the lady, the medical device thing, who, who made nothing? Sarah,

Lightning (1h 11m 57s):

Somethings she

Holman (1h 11m 58s):

Whatever. She didn’t make anything Right. The,

Lightning (1h 11m 59s):

The blood measuring things that was gonna in every CCB ss Right. But

Holman (1h 12m 2s):

Was there ever a product that came out of it that I don’t believe

Lightning (1h 12m 4s):

So. No. This is a product.

Holman (1h 12m 7s):

I, I mean he at least laid the groundwork. I’m

Lightning (1h 12m 9s):

Not, that’s what

Holman (1h 12m 9s):

I’m, I’m not defending him. He’s a, according to the things that have been said, he’s not the world’s best human. And I’m not defending that. I just find it interesting that a company ous its founder and c e o and is able to still keep in with the vision and build something tangible out of it.

Lightning (1h 12m 29s):

I I am agreeing with you, I think that so many people had written Nikola Off for Dead. Yeah. And yet the vision was so strong that people, the investors and others new c e o comes to town and just they are making it a reality. Like legitimately it’s cool.

Holman (1h 12m 46s):

Yeah. Well, and, and again, I I think it’s, it’s legitimately a real business that has real backing, that’s making tangible products and that’s not where that wasn headed. I don’t know how else to say that. What

Lightning (1h 12m 60s):

Else you got?

Holman (1h 13m 2s):

Okay, I, I stumbled across the Toyota booth and then who’s here and it’s my old friend Josh Burns, who used to be like me at another magazine doing Offroad journalism and then he got sucked into PR and then he started climbing the corporate ladder. And it’s like, dude, what are you doing here at the act Expo? I mean, you’re probably asking me the same thing. What am I doing here? Yeah. But

Josh Burns (1h 13m 22s):

I, I think I’m on the first or second rung, but I appreciate that Sean. Yeah.

Holman (1h 13m 26s):

So Toyota, obviously you guys have a long history with fuel cells, but this is more of a medium duty heavy duty show. So where does Toyota fit in all of this?

Josh Burns (1h 13m 35s):

Yeah, great question. So I, I mean really we have 30 years in hydrogen research and I think a lot of that is coming to fruition here. Obviously we’ve had the light duty marai on sale since 2015 in California. ’cause the infrastructure’s in place. But on the heavy duty front, you know, we really went into this exploration back in 2017 of can we apply this technology because it’s scalable? Can we make this application work for class eight trucks? You know, and that’s really where this went.

Holman (1h 14m 6s):

That’s amazingly ambitious from the standpoint of making, if not the first, one of the first hydrogen fuel cell cars available on, on the market. Right. and then jumping into Class eight, I mean, that’s a huge leap. Yeah.

Josh Burns (1h 14m 17s):

And a very different world, right? Sure. So I, I mean, 2017 really began that effort. Shortly thereafter, we partnered with Paccar Kenworth brand and worked on a a T six 80 that used the fuel cell chassis that later developed into a proof of concept that we did at the port of Los Angeles with Shell, the Port and Kenworth. We actually had 10 trucks that were in operation and drayage routes working for a little over a year. I mean, COVID was kind of in the midst of that. So there’s a little bit of challenge there. But yeah, that wasn, that wasn a real world proof of concept actually serving four real world customers. and then we come to today, and this is really an announcement we made with Paccar, that both Kenworth and Peterbilt will be offering commercialized version of their trucks with our fuel cell powertrain.

Josh Burns (1h 15m 10s):

So

Holman (1h 15m 10s):

That’s awesome. That’s huge. So I mean, you’re basically partnering with another tier one, you know, manufacturer to Yeah.

Josh Burns (1h 15m 16s):

In in this, in this app, in this, in this application specifically, we really are more of a tier one supplier. Yeah, right. It’s a little bit of a different role for us in that regard. But exciting news, you know, exciting news for the fuel cell team that have been working on this for so long. You know, this is, I would’ve that journey,

Holman (1h 15m 32s):

And I was gonna say, I would imagine that the, the duty cycle and the learnings that come out of heavy duty would directly translate into knowledge base for the car side of the business too, right? I mean, there’s, there’s value there because there’s such a different use case that is probably going to improve durability, dependability, even more than the data that the company might have with passenger cars and light duty.

Josh Burns (1h 15m 51s):

Well it’s interesting. I I think in some ways what we did in light duty actually worked moving into heavy duty. The, the scalability of the technology, I think is what has a lot of great applications for the future. Whether it’s energy storage, whether it’s stationary storage, obviously light and heavy duty transport. But I think it’s kind of one of the overall Toyota approaches right now of offering a portfolio of options. I mean, in some regards, you know, it might sound like there’s one option and one option only of the future. But I mean, I think there’s gonna be mult multiple options, right? And electrification is coming, you know, we, we know that. And, and

Holman (1h 16m 27s):

How do we embrace it? I mean if you look at the today’s lineup, right? You’ve got your traditional gas vehicle, you’ve got your Hedberg electric vehicle. By the way, the new Prius is really awesome looking. Yeah. It’s,

Josh Burns (1h 16m 36s):

It’s, it’s stunner surprisingly, I would

Holman (1h 16m 39s):

Actually consider that as my, as my daily just to get around. I, I really like the way that car came out. It came

Josh Burns (1h 16m 44s):

Out really good looking.

Holman (1h 16m 45s):

Yeah, of course you got the, the Mariah from a hydrogen standpoint and Toyota’s made an announcement saying, listen, we’re not just gonna abandon ice, we’re looking at hybrids and, and ICE is still gonna be part of our future going forward. And I, I honestly think there’s a other, there’s a couple companies, GM with their small blocks and a couple other companies that said, we’re not abandoning ice. I think for certain people the use case for ICE still exists. And it’s great to see Toyota not only forging forward with the advanced technologies like fuel cell, but still realizing that there has to be some practicality in, in how we transition and that there’s a place for, you know, more traditional powertrains. Yeah,

Josh Burns (1h 17m 18s):

Absolutely. I mean we, we have a battery electric vehicle on both the Toyota and Lexus brands that are in the market right now. But as infrastructure’s built and as the future is built out, you know, not everyone has the same needs. Not everyone has the same access. So I think it’s providing options and you know, maybe it’s, it’s zero carbon options, but it might be carbon reducing options, you know, that they transition into that future. But you know, the idea is to not leave anyone behind and offer options that are both affordable and practical for their daily use.

Holman (1h 17m 48s):

I mean, I think Toyota’s probably, at least on the light duty side, one of the most varied manufacturers when it comes to product lineup, you literally have everything from battery all the way through hydrogen. So there is something for everybody, and I think you guys are proving that it’s really gonna be a tapestry of technologies and not just one that’s going to do everything. And, and it’s, it’s really interesting to see you guys scale up the fuel cell into the, the big trucks because that was something that I wasn’t expecting just, just wandering around that wasn like, oh, Toyota on a pack car. What, what, okay. Look like cool looking Kenworth, what’s the story here? Yeah,

Josh Burns (1h 18m 17s):

It’s awesome. I, and you’re right. I mean, I think part of it too is our global footprint. We have the perspective of You know what the challenges exist outside of just North America, you know, outside of, of Europe and Asia. So you’re, you’re absolutely right. And, and again, it, it’s, it’s a great moment I think for the field cell development and you know, I think there’s a lot of other applications that we’ll still explore stationary and other opportunity. But this is, this is really cool to get this one off the ground.

Holman (1h 18m 47s):

Well, awesome to see you here, obviously, and the product, but dude, it’s, it’s great to see your success of being a lowly dirty journalist like myself and, and now wearing a almost a suit. The as of Expo, there’s no tie.

Josh Burns (1h 19m 0s):

There’s no tie. Good.

Holman (1h 19m 2s):

I I wouldn’t be able to do a tie either. it just too constricted All right brother, good to see you.

Josh Burns (1h 19m 6s):

Thanks for having me.

Lightning (1h 19m 7s):

So Holman, he’s a, he was a journalist and works for Toyota now and then there’s

Holman (1h 19m 12s):

You and there’s me who works for nobody now, which is weird. Yeah. I, I walked around and, and I came across Bollinger and that wasn interesting because they had their B four, which is the electric commercial lineup, but their B one that we originally talked to Robert about was in their booth. Come to find out I missed him by like six hours. He’s coming in after I was there. And apparently now that they’ve got the commercial stuff up and running, they’re gonna start putting some engineering resources toward the B one again. So I wanna get him back on the show and talk about that. But basically here’s just my, my goodbye to the show. Alright, lighting. There it is. That’s me from the show floor here at the Act Expo in Anaheim, California.

Holman (1h 19m 55s):

It’s been really awesome seeing all sorts of advanced technologies, whether it’s a EV or hydrogen fuel cell, propane, natural gas, all sorts of interesting stuff. You’ve got Kenworth and Cummins and you’ve got Peter Build and Toyota and our friends at Nikola Zeus, the company that makes us really awesome, fully independent, medium duty trucks that kinda look like a mix between a military vehicle and a medium duty, a chassis cab. Bollinger. Just, just so much to see here. I am. I’m glad I had a chance to go. So a special thanks to our friends over at Dana for, for inviting me. But I wish you were here. I I really, I really do. Except it would’ve probably been a four hour show if you were here.

Holman (1h 20m 36s):

So I’m gonna wrap it up and see you back in the studio next time. You should come with me. You or, or not.

Lightning (1h 20m 44s):

Yeah, I was gonna say, you lied right there. You wouldn’t want me to travel with

Holman (1h 20m 48s):

You. That’s not true. Why are you looking at me like that?

Lightning (1h 20m 53s):

You love doing your little independent man on the street interviews stuff

Holman (1h 20m 57s):

That is man at man on the street. Yeah, I think

Lightning (1h 20m 59s):

It’s man on street, man at the convention. You love going rogue and doing your own thing. As do i I enjoy it. But I think we’re pretty good together as much as you hate it.

Holman (1h 21m 9s):

I’m sorry,

Lightning (1h 21m 11s):

Were you saying something? I, you knew

Holman (1h 21m 13s):

You weren’t paying attention. I thought you were just carrying on or something. So I don know. Second. You’re

Lightning (1h 21m 17s):

The dick.

Holman (1h 21m 18s):

What?

Lightning (1h 21m 19s):

You’re a

Holman (1h 21m 19s):

Dick. I’m sorry. Were you saying something again?

Lightning (1h 21m 21s):

Nope.

Holman (1h 21m 22s):

Okay, good.

Lightning (1h 21m 24s):

I at home It’s email time.

7 (1h 21m 27s):

You email? Yeah, I email Do it. We email. That’s right. Everybody email type it up. You email proofread. I email send it. We email, click it. Email

Lightning (1h 21m 47s):

All. right? Who’s going first with Coleman

7 (1h 21m 49s):

For you? All, right.

Lightning (1h 21m 50s):

Here we go. Subject line is another one from Doug Bassett. Hey again, you two second time emailer. Long time. Listen. Eric, I’m missing, eh, I’ve been meaning to ask this. What’s up with the new Toyota Sequoias? They have a solid rear axle. The previous model was independent. Help me understand or not whatever. Asking for a friend. Stay cool, Doug.

Holman (1h 22m 13s):

Okay. Asking

Lightning (1h 22m 14s):

For a friend. Oh,

Holman (1h 22m 16s):

Well I, it shares a platform with a new tundra. It is a platform made of the Land Cruiser, which is also the Lexus, all of which have solid rear axles. That doesn’t fully explain it because even Expeditions and Suburbans, which have chassis mates have I r S now. I think just the complexity, I think they wanted to have something with a little bit more towing, durability. And this generation Sequoia has a lot more towing capacity than the previous one. So I think it’s about cost and I think without i r s they could get more towing out of it and charge more with more profit.

Lightning (1h 22m 53s):

Makes sense. I mean,

Holman (1h 22m 54s):

Yeah. Yeah. Why design something if you don’t have to, you know, and they, and Toyota’s kind of known or going after being the off roadie brand and so they have the t r d, you know, pro Sequoia. Well I r s at least in the OE world doesn’t really do great off-roading. Well, right. You

Lightning (1h 23m 15s):

Need a solid rear axle.

Holman (1h 23m 17s):

I think most enthusiasts prefer that. Yeah. Yeah.

Lightning (1h 23m 20s):

Okay, what’d you got?

Holman (1h 23m 22s):

I got this really interesting one here from Iva and Enrique from Iica Offroad. This is Enrique from Iica Overland. We have a YouTube channel about over landing here in Spain, but we try to travel as much as possible all around Europe and beyond. We discovered your podcast and listening to the Overland Journal podcast that Holdman was on and I’m totally addicted to the show. I listened to all the recent episodes and started from episode one now to about halfway. Yeah. Crazy. But I have a lot of time since I’m in the process of building a camper for my Ford Ranger, which at the same time is becoming a business. So your interviews with entrepreneurs are a huge motivation for me. By the way, my wife has published some articles at Overland Journal and Expedition portal and we’ll be attending the big over landing event here in Germany this summer.

Holman (1h 24m 7s):

I think Overland Journal will be present there as well. It would be great to do any type of collaboration or just get in touch somehow. We’ll be producing some videos for our YouTube channel. We’d love to do any kind of collab with you guys. And just a few more things already. Give you five stars on Apple and we’ll send you a Titan picture. But we only have Navarros here. Which brings me to something you guys asked for on your show. If people, oh well

Lightning (1h 24m 24s):

I, we’ll take a, we’ll take a Navarro photo. Yeah,

Holman (1h 24m 26s):

He sent a of stickers. Yeah. There’s some great Navarro photos. He says, if people out the US a love American cars like the Bronco and the answer is yes. We live everything big and nonsensical that we can’t afford or maintain. The same way you guys over there dream with Hilux and other small vehicles. And last thing I promise, please don’t stop checking those parameters. Best, Enrique Pacheco master

15 (1h 24m 44s):

Monitor key engine

Holman (1h 24m 46s):

Parameters. So if you wanna send him stickers, there’s his address right there.

Lightning (1h 24m 50s):

Madrid, Spain. I’ll do that. And did you know that we’re the number one truck enthusiast podcast in Spain? Are we? Yes we are. Or

Holman (1h 24m 56s):

Are you just saying that saying

Lightning (1h 24m 57s):

It All

Holman (1h 24m 58s):

Right. I’ve

Lightning (1h 24m 58s):

Actually doesn’t, doesn’t make it true, but I

Holman (1h 24m 60s):

Believe it. Okay. I’ve, I’ve actually been to Madrid. Beautiful, beautiful city.

Lightning (1h 25m 5s):

I have not and would love to go received Truck show podcast stickers. Subject line from Phillip faus. Hey guys, thank you very much for sending out the vinyl. It’s on the rear window of my 90 pickup mini truck. Since here in SoCal, we’re always stuck in traffic. I put it on the back window where it would be seen the most. And being from SoCal, when was the last time you saw the other sticker on my back window of the Toyota Talk? Talk about a throwback the other truck show podcast sticker. I figured I’d put it in the same spot on my other truck. Keep speaking the truck gospel. I will keep attending Truck Church. Take care. And five stars.

Holman (1h 25m 42s):

Congratulations. You have earned five stars. It’s really cool. I got this one from Evan Jones as Monday morning Whiskey bourbon talk.

Lightning (1h 25m 50s):

Sup Evan. Lightweight

Holman (1h 25m 51s):

And hole man. I really appreciate the start of episode 18 with a quick whiskey talk. And as I write this while sitting on the throne and listening to episode 19, we’re trying some local Long Beach whiskey now as Lightning is a bourbon whiskey newbie and Holman is a pro, this will give us normal guys a great idea of the taste smells and the shaky of each drink. I can already see myself buying more bottles if this continues. And I hope it does add one more star to the rating as my favorite podcast. Just got better. Six stars. Keep up the great work fellas. And a OG Emmy. Yeah buddy from Jeep Jones.

16 (1h 26m 25s):

Yeah buddy.

Lightning (1h 26m 27s):

So I need to go back to the last email that I read and he was talking about the other sticker on his truck. He was talking about the Bad Boy Club.

Holman (1h 26m 35s):

Oh yeah, there you go. On

Lightning (1h 26m 36s):

His Toyota. that

Holman (1h 26m 37s):

Wasn a big truck, big SoCal thing back in the day.

Lightning (1h 26m 39s):

Bad Boy club. Man, those stickers were lame even back then. Geez

Holman (1h 26m 44s):

Louise. Okay. But

Lightning (1h 26m 45s):

I appreciate you calling it out. I, I like looking at it and

Holman (1h 26m 49s):

Mocking it. You mean you like re remember the days where you would cause mockery? That’s,

Lightning (1h 26m 53s):

We were wearing Jimmy Shorts and like Maui and Sons and all that stuff and we were wearing

Holman (1h 26m 58s):

Bugle Boys and Jams were ugly. Razorblades

Lightning (1h 27m 1s):

Fluorescent this and fluorescent that. Woo.

Holman (1h 27m 3s):

Coming back

Lightning (1h 27m 5s):

We were a mess. No, it’s not coming back. It came back for a minute. Now it’s gone.

Holman (1h 27m 9s):

Nah, it’s not gone. Yeah, it’s wait till summer dude here in hb. Just wait till summer all knee on again. I’m not

Lightning (1h 27m 16s):

Okay with that. So this subject line stickers from Evan Hoover, I can’t believe, but I got my stickers. I put one of them on my O two Peterbilt 3 87 and one on my 96 Silverado. I’m loving the show since you guys took ownership. So great. Keep those parameters mounted and yeah Buddy Mount

15 (1h 27m 35s):

Monitor, key engine parameters. Yeah buddy

Holman (1h 27m 40s):

Got this one from Matt Herbs and the title is Nikola. Hey guys, wanted to share my recent work trip that brought me to a vendor here in Michigan that’s working with Nikola to install chargers for their trucks. During my visit, they offered to show me around the facility and parked out backward to Nikola Trays. I was able to climb in and check them out. They were nice. The cab was a bit strange being a half sleeper. I’ve included a couple pictures also. Thank you Lightning for the stickers. I received them earlier this week. I appreciate all the hard work you both put in the show. I truly feel I’m getting my freeze worth. Yeah, you are pal. Can’t wait for your online store open so I can give back more by buying some merch, Matt. And yeah, so the interesting thing is the Nikola trays are cab overs. And when I got in one at the Expo, there’s literally a ladder when you open the door and in front of the front, Wheel is a ladder to get in.

Holman (1h 28m 27s):

And it’s not easy, it’s a hike. But once you’re up there, talk about a commanding view of the road and the interiors on ’em are are fantastic. It’s actually really high quality. Feels really good. And I was actually really impressed. So here’s some photos he sent us of the Nikolas. Oh yeah. Being

Lightning (1h 28m 43s):

Those are the ones I’ve seen. Yep. Sitting at the cat dealership. Yep. It’s weird don, don’t get the, forgive me, but I don’t understand the, the cat dealership buying the Nikola big rigs. I don’t, are they

Holman (1h 28m 55s):

Servicing them there? Is it independent dealership? No,

Lightning (1h 28m 57s):

They’re, it’s Quinn. They’re all over the the west.

Holman (1h 28m 59s):

Okay, so they, they’re probably just a dealer for Nikola. They’re probably picked up. There’s lots. Yeah. Think of it as your local whatever the Motorsport del Lamo Motorsports, they sell Hondas and cows and Yamahas. Same thing at the semi dealers.

Lightning (1h 29m 10s):

Okay. Hey Lightning and whole butt. So

Holman (1h 29m 14s):

No that, that’s not what that says. That’s not what that says. You can’t you, you can’t change what the the listener says in their email. Yeah,

Lightning (1h 29m 25s):

It’s a Lightning holster.

Holman (1h 29m 26s):

Thank you All. right.

Lightning (1h 29m 28s):

So apparently I must have helped him out with it. Oh yeah I did. Okay, this will make sense at a second here. So, hey guys, I just installed my pedal monster and went for a test drive but I have a little bit of a problem. I pulled over to the side of the road and switched over to sport mode and then set it moderately at about four bars up. When I pressed the pedal to pull away from the curb, I think my truck did a wheelie. I got a sharp pain in my neck from the immediate onslaught of power and thrust my head into the headrest. This sudden acceleration also jogged my brain, displacing it somewhere else in my skull. Not sure if it is returned to its normal resting position. As of this writing, you’re gonna be hearing from my chiropractor, he’ll be sending you the adjustment bill to you for the payment.

Lightning (1h 30m 12s):

I highly recommend that you offer him the item seen in the photo attached as part of your overall pedal monster kit. He’s referring to a remove before flight key chain that we offer on the website. So nobody told me this thing would be this good and react that immediately. I will follow up with a video posted to my Facebook page to highlight this oversight on your part. On a serious note. Holy crap man. My truck has never responded like that before. What a difference. And I was just trying it out. Can’t wait to tie it all up and go for a real cruise. Thank you. And that’s Michael Harding at Champion. He’s a director of Champion Cooling Systems. Apparently I didn’t know that when I gave him a deal on a pedal monster.

Holman (1h 30m 49s):

Very nice. We should have him come on to talk about radiators. They make a bunch of aluminum radiators. Alright, I got this last one from Travis Bowles says, howdy, Lightning. Holman. I figured that wasn about time. I send a thanks to Lightning for hooking me up with a discount on the Derringer ID dash pedal monster. Oh, we got a two four ball here. A three fer. Hmm Derringer ID dash Pedal Monster for my 2022 Ram. 1500 EcoDiesel Laramie four by four. I’ve put 27,000 miles on the truck since adding the bank gear. And I have to say I’m very happy with it. All the pedal lag is gone. I love the ability to turn the wick up on the truck with the click of a button. It’s no 3 92 or T R X. But personally I think the EcoDiesel Laramie is the best jack of all trades. Lifetime average so far. 27.4 miles per gallon.

Holman (1h 31m 30s):

Tows my bass boat. Well super comfortable. Looks great. Kicking sound system with the Harman Cardin. I’ve made several trips from Michigan to Tennessee, Alabama hauling a bass boat in Michigan to Oregon now loaded down. And the truck has been amazing, especially with the Derringer. I did throw one check engine light climbing a mountain in Wyoming, but was able to stop, read all the stats at the time of the code and clear the code. Realizing that low voltage in my Covid era battery was screwing with the sensors. The peace of mind I have with ID dash is second to none. So thank you. Thanks for the discount. After driving my truck, my best friend and my dad went and bought EcoDiesel Laramies in different colors and both bought all the Banks gear too. Love the show. Keep the great work. Keep mounting those parameters. Mounter

15 (1h 32m 9s):

Monitor key engine parameters.

Holman (1h 32m 12s):

Five stars. Five Stars

17 (1h 32m 13s):

Review Five Stars

Holman (1h 32m 17s):

And Finnegan. Yeah buddy. Yeah buddy, thanks. And that’s Travis rn. and then he says, mine’s the silver truck. Dad’s is the black one. Of course he had to have a bigger truck and it shows his dad’s truck next to him all lifted and jacked up. So appreciate that Travis. And we appreciate all you guys who have written into Truck Show podcast@gmail.com.

Lightning (1h 32m 38s):

Send us an email, won’t you? We’ll read it on the air.

7 (1h 32m 43s):

The truck show. The truck show. The truck show. Whoa.

Holman (1h 32m 50s):

You can find that guy across the table probably from me on Instagram Lightning at LBC Lightning. Find me at Sean p Holman. Or if you’re looking for both of us at Truck Show Podcast. And of course you can always find us with your phone. The one that you’re listening to this thing on probably right now. Just head to Instagram, hit the call button or you can dial 6 5 7 2 0 5 61 0 5 or the five star hotline. We want to hear from you guys. We need some more messages. We’d like to hear our reader’s lovely voices You

Lightning (1h 33m 19s):

Know what we didn’t get that many calls on. I’m kind of disappointed as

Holman (1h 33m 22s):

Brown. Code Brown. Yeah, yeah.

Lightning (1h 33m 23s):

Code Brown. What happened with you guys? Why didn’t you send, you’ve got a call 6 5 7 2 0 5 61 0 5 and leave us your code Brown message.

Holman (1h 33m 31s):

That’s when you they don’t have to. No, not when you’re going Code Brown. Listen, Trevor Nero wrote us one that was called the Hotdog Story. Wait a minute. Wait look, it’s four paragraphs long. I’m not reading it. Do they know

Lightning (1h 33m 43s):

What Code Brown is?

Holman (1h 33m 44s):

Yes, they do. They do. Okay, don don’t know why you assume everybody doesn’t know Truck vernacular. Anyway, I, I am holding the, the hot dog story ’cause I don’t know if I wanna read the whole thing really. But if you’ve got a story 6 5 7 2 0 5 61 0 5, I

Lightning (1h 34m 0s):

Want to hear a code Brown story. Just barely made it to the restroom in time. Why? I, I love hearing about that. Agony, the sweats and like the gurgling stomach and all that stuff. There’s

Holman (1h 34m 10s):

A reason I, there’s a lock on the door and I didn’t put a bathroom in here. It’d be a mess. One day. Code

Lightning (1h 34m 15s):

Brown. And before we get into our sponsor mentions here, I want to ask you guys sincerely, can you please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts? It really helps us to get found and to be honest with you, we enjoy reading them. A lot of you guys are funny, creative writers, and if you’re not, drop us a message. Anyway, leave it as a review, apple Podcast app, or if you, if you on Spotify, then just give us the five stars. don, don’t think I’ll let you leave a review there, but drop in an Apple freaking podcast. We’re doing the show for you for free. The least you can do is leave us a review. Thanks.

Holman (1h 34m 52s):

No. The least they could do is go out to their local Nissan dealership and support Nissan for supporting the show by buying, buying a 2023 Nissan Frontier Titan or Titan xt. So if you guys are in the market for a pickup truck and you wanna support The Truck, Show Podcast, there’s no better way than going out and spending tens of thousands of dollars on a brand new truck and telling them that Lightning and Holman sent you. So Nissan usa.com to build in price or your local Nissan dealer.

Lightning (1h 35m 14s):

So maybe you don’t have tens of thousands of dollars, maybe you have don don’t know, five, 600 bucks. Go to Banks power.com to find your Ram air intake. Or just slide into my dms and I’ll Hooker brother up at lbc Lightning on the gram.

Holman (1h 35m 29s):

And I know there are those of you out there who need better shocks. You get into it, your wife’s mad. You got a bouncy truck, you’re leaking oil everywhere. It doesn’t control your load, doesn’t control your trailer, and it just bottoms out and fuels awful Offroad. Well then you gotta head over to bill Bilstein us.com where you can get a shock from the originator of the Monotube. Bilstein was the company that invented Monotube Shocks. And when the road runs out, Bilstein Shocks will keep you going. They’ve got ride height adjustable shocks. They’ve got external bypass shocks, they’ve got Reservoir Shocks, they’ve got direct fit shocks. They’ll make your daily commute more enjoyable, whether it’s on the dirt or on the road. And guess what? There’s no ride penalty and you have better control of your trailer. No better place to go for upgraded suspension than bill Bilstein us.com.

Holman (1h 36m 9s):

And while we’re on the subject of money for less than a tank of gas, you can get yourself the best Offroad Map app built for Adventure Onyx. Offroad is the app we trust. You can discover new trails, you can figure out who owns the land you’re on. You can save maps for offline use. If you don’t have a cell connection, you can customize it. You can use their brand new Route Builder tool. You can use it with CarPlay and Android Auto and You. know what the best part is. If you make a change on one of your devices, it automatically updates your account on all of your devices, whether they’re Android, iOS, pc, or your Mac. You can subscribe and learn more about it. Onyx Offroad dot com All. right? Well, now that we have thanked all of the sponsors, I’m looking forward to this weekend, which is gonna give us an opportunity to see them all in person since you and I will both be heading out to Overland Expo in Flagstaff, Arizona.

Holman (1h 36m 57s):

But of course, by the time you hear this, we’re driving back and we have already given out all the stickers, taken all the photos, and Lightning has seen how the other half, well, the rich half live while camping. Yeah,

Lightning (1h 37m 9s):

Yeah. I was hanging out with that with the one listener. He had that beautiful van, no truck car. He had a a, a tent, a rooftop tent.

Holman (1h 37m 18s):

No shift

Lightning (1h 37m 18s):

Pod. She had a sh pod. He was chilling in the shift pod. We were drinking beer whiskey. And

Holman (1h 37m 23s):

That wasn, that wasn chilled by Solar

Lightning (1h 37m 24s):

Chiller? No, no, no. He had a Dometic fridge. He

Holman (1h 37m 27s):

Was wearing a tan shirt with pockets.

Lightning (1h 37m 28s):

No, he had a, a wide brimm hat. No, neither. He had a Flad on,

Holman (1h 37m 32s):

Giant machete on his hip

Lightning (1h 37m 33s):

And No, no machete hiking boots. No, none of that. No. He had a really cool

Holman (1h 37m 36s):

App on his phone. He

Lightning (1h 37m 37s):

Had a leatherman that he was showing me like that wasn like a kind of a Swiss Army knife thing. and then, yeah, that wasn just amazing.

Holman (1h 37m 42s):

And he had extra gas cans. He,

Lightning (1h 37m 44s):

He didn’t have any extra gas cans

Holman (1h 37m 46s):

That wasn water. Yeah, water shower hanging off of his truck.

Lightning (1h 37m 49s):

No, he had a, he had that little tent thing that you can shower and

Holman (1h 37m 51s):

All that stuff. and then the whole kitchen

Lightning (1h 37m 52s):

Setup. No, he didn’t add any of, and then a bat wing on him. He had none of that stuff. That stuff. He was staying at the local Hilton.

Holman (1h 37m 57s):

Oh, you, you, you might have been at a different show than, than I was.

Lightning (1h 38m 1s):

This was the home remodeling show in Phoenix, right?

Holman (1h 38m 4s):

No, this would be the remodeled truck and outdoor show in Flagstaff. Oh,

Lightning (1h 38m 9s):

I may have Driven to the wrong spot. The Truck. Show Podcast is a production of Truck famous l L c. This podcast was created by Sean Holman and Jay Tillis with production elements by DJ Omar Khan. If you like what you’ve heard, please open your Apple Podcast or Spotify app and give us a five star rating. And if you’re a fan, there’s no better way to show your support than by patronizing our sponsors. Some vehicles may have been harmed during the making of this podcast.