Episode 016: Should You Electrify Your Fleet

Welcome to the Fleet Success Show, a podcast dedicated to talking about the fundamentals, standards, and best practices that empower today's fleets to achieve fleet success.

Let's get into the show. All right. Welcome back for another episode of the Fleet Success Show. Joining me today, my co-host, Jeff Jenkins.

Wow.

And Steve, right? Like, we just stopped right there. So Steve's out today on vacation, uh, enjoying some wonderful mountain weather. And we've had some good weather down here in Phoenix.

We have. It's been 70s and 80s like last week with a little bit of rain.

July, which is awesome. Uh, of course, you know, we've had a lot of flooding down here too, so I want to be mindful. And, uh, I know we've had a few fatalities and things like that, so be smart when you're out there dealing with weather.

Don't want to have any problems with that, but So did you ever tube down the canal beds when you were younger? When they still—

No, like the log flumes and stuff like that? No.

Oh, no, I wouldn't. I mean, as a safety person conscious now, I would say don't do it. But as a teenager, tons of fun.

Oh, sure. Right. I think there's all houses out there now, but there is.

Yeah.

All right. So today's topic, we're going to talk about something near and dear to our hearts. I know a lot of fleets are dealing with this. They're getting either pressure or they're really curious about how to implement some of this stuff. And it's electrification and sustainability, right? So, you know, like we're making a big push. We are trying to be more environmentally conscious, you know, whatever our motives are. And we're going to talk about that. But we're, you know, we're looking at these other things that are coming out, right? Tesla's really moved the market towards electrification. We saw Ford just recently dropped their electric truck, their electric F-150, which I think is going to be a bestseller.

Like it will be. Oh, yeah.

'Cause Ford F-150s are already the bestseller and now you have an electric truck version. It's, you know, you may as well throw in a diesel in the thing. It's awesome.

It is awesome.

I agree. So we're looking at that. We know there's a lot of fleets that are— this is a hot topic right now, even in trucking electrification. You know, people are really waiting to see what this is going to look like, how much benefit it's really going to provide. So we wanted to take some minutes and talk some of the pros and cons of electrification. What are some of the considerations that maybe people aren't thinking about. What kind of supply chain issues are we running into right now with, you know, specifically like with Tesla and Nikola and some of these other companies that are out there really trying to push the, push the market in trucking and in, you know, into the industry. And then just some of our reasons like, hey, this is— these are some reasons why you should do it, some reasons why you shouldn't do it. And there's some definite reasons why you shouldn't do it. But that's just our opinion.

So yeah, lots of opinions, right?

That's why people listen to the show though, right? And hear our opinions. So pros and cons, like what are some of the things that you get out? You know, if you're going to go and electrify your fleet right off the bat, I think we talk about there's no— there's very little— not no, but there's very little maintenance cost for electric vehicles, right?

And most of it's covered under warranty for whoever you're buying from.

Which means very little downtime, very little cost. Uh, that's, that's a good experience, right? Uh, I know personally, you know, having ridden in some friends— I don't own an electric vehicle, but I have ridden in several, and I will tell you, the performance on electric vehicles is mind-numbing. It's just amazing, isn't it?

It baffles me. The first time I sat in a Tesla and I hit down on that gas and how quick it had to get up and go, and at 40 miles an hour, and you press it down and it still has it.

Yeah, the instantaneous torque is just— it's a feeling like you've never felt before.

It's amazing. I— it shocked the hell out of me.

Yeah, but you know, and applying that in a trucking environment or in a work environment, having that torque at on demand, that's big. It's huge, you know, because a lot of them, if you know anything about internal combustion engines, right, they've got to spin up to reach peak torque. Uh, you know, I know back in my other days, my younger days of doing like racing tuner cars, we're always trying to maximize time in the power band, right? How much time did you get to spend at max torque. And the fact with an electric vehicle that you're always at max torque is just awesome.

Yep.

So benefit there for sure.

Huge pro.

Electric will outperform internal combustion pretty much every day of the week. Um, other benefits, you know, for having electric vehicles: no gas tax.

How's that?

There's no gas tax. That is true. I hadn't thought about that. So that's—

you're saving money. Now we can talk about the other side of that on the con, but Yeah, there's— so there's no gas tax, so you're saving all kinds of money when it comes to that. And what I like about electric cars now too is they look slick.

They do. They're designed really well.

When they first came out, you remember when like the Leaf came out or the Volt, and you're like, those are the Prius— those are the early—

the Saturn EV1.

Yes.

Do you remember that? Like how terrible that looked? It looked like a reverse tricycle. Yeah, right. Well, then you had the Prius, and the Prius was known for being the gutless wonder, but it but it wasn't fully electric. It wasn't fully electric, right? And now we're finally into the stage, and I tell you, that's why Tesla's done amazing things for the electric industry, is they really pushed the design mantra. They really like— they took Apple's mode of how they operated on computers and said, we could do the same thing for cars. Yeah, we can make them perform awesome and be, you know, electric, and, you know, they're going to be good for the environment, and they look like a sports car, right? And it feels like a sports car. It does, right? And their performance is right up there with supercars, not even sports cars, right? I mean, you see it all the time. You know, if you ever go to YouTube, just YouTube Tesla versus anything, right? I think the fastest, one of the fastest production cars on the market right now is what? Dodge Demon, right? Yeah, the Hellcat Demon. Yeah, um, it was just amazing. It's a 9-second quarter-mile car off the lot, and Tesla still beats it, right? Right? It might have trouble with that one, but everything else— Hellcats, everything, you see them and it's just, you know, on the drag strip they're always big on that.

Yeah, well, off the line it's quicker, right? Right, the Hellcat may beat it in a 100-meter race or whatever because it catches up to it, but off the line every time. Yeah.

Uh, other pros for electrifying your fleet?

I mean, outside of the tax, I think about not having to ever stop to get gas, right? You can charge it overnight, you just like You're done for the day. Stick in the charging, and you're done. You don't have to worry about it.

So there's a time savings there.

There is.

I mean, just eliminating fuel costs, we know fuel cost is the number one operating cost, right? And for the most part, when you look at your price per pound of pound-foot of torque, it's going to be cheaper to charge that vehicle, assuming the prices stay normal, right? But you don't have the same fluctuation in price with your electric grid as you do with gasoline, right? If there's an oil shortage or OPEC is doing something, it doesn't really affect the price of electricity, at least here in Arizona. Now, this is something I learned recently. I guess Texas, they do have demand pricing, right? So when we had that whole freeze-ish, ish, so tell me more about this 'cause you lived in Texas.

Yes, so basically it's an open market in Texas and it's everybody's pulling off the same grid. It's just different companies selling just off that grid. So you can— what basically what you'll do in Texas is you can change electric companies once a year if you want to.

Okay.

There's a thousand of them out there. It's not like Arizona where you got two and you have to pick whichever one's in your area, right?

But there is no choice.

There's no choice.

Like, it's government-sponsored monopolies, right? And it's really a duopoly.

But yeah, yeah. So Texas, basically you sign an agreement for a year and they'll give you, hey, this is your price per kilowatt hour for this year. And then after your contract expires, it'll go up basically whatever the market's at, but we'll hold it steady if at that year. So a lot of people, what they'll do is they'll sign a year contract and they'll switch companies every year because then you get a better—

because then you get a better deal incentivized.

But if you stay on that, that actually will, will fluctuate based on the cost of whatever the grid is at the time. So I think our cheapest was like $0.06 a kilowatt hour and then off contract, it ended up doubling to $0.12, and it could go up as high as $0.20 just depending on what was going on.

So what happened with, you know, like, I know we had several people who got power, they had power in Texas while everybody else was without power, and they were getting like $14,000 electric bills. Yes. How does that even happen? Because I just can't fathom that here in Arizona, because like it's set by the Arizona Corporation Commission, right? Like they lock in the rate, and that's like APS and SRP, they have to publish ahead of time and get approval by the board, you know, which is a— it's their elected board to raise rates.

Yeah.

So I just don't understand how that could even happen.

But off your contract and boom, demand price done.

That's amazing. So, and I think California, like, they have— I don't know what kind of system they have out there, but a shitty one. We do know that they shut down a lot, right? Like, they have a lot of rolling blackouts and, you know, they encourage you to turn off your electric like appliances and things of that nature, your AC, especially during the summer when it's hot. It's not really a problem in the winter, right? We know that. And here in Arizona, we see that, you know, if you're not on balanced, what do we call that, the equalizer?

The equalizer, yeah.

Right, the equalizer plans where, you know, you spread out your cost over the year. You'll see that right in the summer, all of a sudden you've got a $700 bill and in the winter it's a $50 bill, right? But you kind of know that it's hot in Arizona in the summer. If you didn't know that, it's definitely hot, and so the air conditioning is usually run a lot more. So all that being said, right, you don't have as much of a random fluctuation in fuel price, right? Because you'll see that, you know, like fuel cost is $3 a gallon, then the next week it's $3.15, then the next week it's $2.93, you know, or you're in California and it's $4.50, you know, and all of a sudden there's a pipeline shortage and now it's $5, $6, whatever. You just don't see that usually in the electric grid.

Right.

So you do have more control of your cost, and it's usually cheaper, you know, paying 6 cents per kilowatt hour. You'd have to have a lot of kilowatt hours to equal that same, you know, $3.30 per gallon of gasoline. You know, I think about the energy output, like what's the equivalent of that? Gas— electric is going to be cheaper than gas. It will be just straight up. So that's definitely a pro. Cons. What are the cons for electrification?

You want to go straight to infrastructure or do you want to put some other things up first?

Ah, whatever. This is a good conver— it's going to come around anyways, right? So we just talked about rolling blackouts.

Yes.

Definitely a con, right? We had, I think in the last year, I haven't done the research on this, but I'm pretty sure we've only had one major gas shortage. Right, when the Colonial Pipeline got hacked.

Yes.

There might have been a couple other localized ones, but that was the major one that rolled across. How many rolling brownouts and rolling blackouts have we had in that same time frame?

Well, I mean, California tells everyone now to quit using electricity, so it goes like—

I feel like it goes without saying. You just know if you live in California, this is a part of being there.

Well, not only, not only just because of the heat and the rolling blackouts, but when PG&E had all those lines that set fires, that totally took out their grid as well. So now it wasn't just because of the heat, it was because their overall grid and their infrastructure of their electric, their electric utility company, which is pretty much the whole state, it, it went down, right? So you've got no electricity, you can't charge just based on that.

I know in New York, I remember reading an article, they basically were asking their residents to shut down all their things, you know, like all their air conditioning units, and there was some public backlash because you could see Times Square lit up bright and pretty. Yes. Right. We're going to ask all the residents to sacrifice, but our tourists, they're still going to see New York at its best. Right. So, you know, you definitely have some issues there. And it is— it's just an issue with the grid not being able to keep up with the demand.

Right.

That's why we have demand pricing here in Arizona, is that the grid can't handle necessarily— they don't have a lot of excess capacity. Right. Because they're running a for-profit business. They're trying to make sure it's efficient. They're not going to build a ton of excess grid capacity when they don't need it yet. Right. But they'll charge you for what they have to make sure that they can still use.

Right.

And supply demand economics at work. Right.

I mean, also on infrastructure, you got to think about the charging stations and the availability of charging. There's been several times where I've looked at little charging stations that had, you know, 6 and you had cars just backed up waiting to put their car up to the Superchargers to get them done. No different from a gas station, right? You pull in, you have to wait to get gas at certain places, but it takes 20 minutes for a Supercharge, whereas it's 5 minutes to fill up your tank.

Right. So just the time to get charged versus the time to get, you know, to fill up your tank.

Yes.

Right. And if you're on a road trip, like, that probably makes a little bit more of a difference. If you're out on the road, you know, if you're, let's say, your city fleet and your police vehicles are kind of running around, You know, if it doesn't last all day and you can't charge it overnight, then that could cause a problem. You definitely don't want to see your squad car in the middle of a high pursuit and you run out of gasoline, a.k.a., you know, you run out of charge and it just pulls over to the side of the road. So you don't want to see that. There is more infrastructure coming, right? There's a lot more charging stations than there were 5 years ago. Yes.

And there's going to be more in 5 years than there are today.

Um, but it is still just not as common.

Well, and it's, and it's passenger-focused, right? If you want to talk about the semis that would need the infrastructure for charging, there's nothing there. There's nothing there. Not only there's nothing there, but if you know anything about trucking and you go to a truck stop to fuel as a, as a truck driver, one, you, you never find an open pump. You just don't ever pull in. Usually you're waiting and there's guys filling up 150 gallons worth of fuel And so you're waiting for an hour sometimes to fuel. And so what's that gonna do now if you have to charge, right? There's not enough parking spots, first of all. Now you're on fumes. What are you gonna do? You're just gonna break down the side of the road because you can't get a charge anywhere. I mean, there's just, it's for local type work, it's probably okay, local or regional. But when you talk about using those trucks for over the road, yeah, it just, I, I don't see it anytime soon at all. Right.

There's definitely a lot of work that has to happen.

Yes.

I think another piece of the infrastructure puzzle that a lot of people don't think about when they start pushing electrification, there's a huge investment you have to make in your own facility.

Yes.

To be a charging station, right? To be a charging facility. You can go out and get ChargePoint chargers. You can get Tesla Superchargers. I mean, there are options out there to do it, but you, you know, there's construction permits you're going to need to go out and get. Something to keep in mind. And this isn't a reason not to do it, right? This is just if you're going to do it, here's some things you need to be thinking about. And hopefully this isn't— I'm not the first person to ever say this either, so hopefully you've heard about this before, but you do need to go out and get construction permits to run power to those parking stalls, most likely, especially rated at the spot you need it at. You need to make sure that, you know, that you're able to separate the cost of you know, that grid, right? Because the one thing that you'll really upset somebody with real quick— yeah, your fuel budget might go to zero because you don't need any fuel anymore, but you know who's going to be paying for that? It's going to be your facilities. And if you're not the same department, all of a sudden the facilities budget's like, whoa, who's using all my power, right? You can't just walk up and plug into the side of their— side of the building. It doesn't work that way. So you do need to make sure that you're able to separate those and budget that accordingly and that it comes out of the facilities budget, but that you're also capturing how much electricity each vehicle is consuming, just like you would with fuel and a fuel island, right? Like, we're really, you know, we focus on that a lot. How much does each vehicle cost? And fuel is a huge cost of that. It doesn't just go away with electric. It just changes where it's coming from. Right. And so making sure that you're treating it the same way you would a fuel island or a fuel depot that's on site.

I got another con.

Shoot.

And it's not an actual con yet, but it will be a con down the road because you're getting away from paying the government their fees on fuel taxes.

Oh, it's coming, right? Right.

So user fee, mileage usage fee, they've tested it in several cities with the increased availability and just mark it on electric vehicles. Just wait. I mean, and maybe it's a, maybe it's a pro as well, because guess what? They're not just going to say if you have an electric vehicle you have a user tax. They're going to do it across the board. So you could be paying a fuel tax and a user tax if you're still buying gas. But when it comes to electric, I mean, that's— you think you're getting a savings now because you're not paying that tax. The government's going to get their money at some point, and they're going to tax you per mile that you drive.

Now, the fair thing would be Okay, we're going to eliminate the fuel tax. We're going to do a mileage-based tax.

Yes.

But this is the government. We know that won't happen.

Right. They'll never enact a tax and then take it away.

Right. No, that fuel tax is here to stay. They'll just do on top of the fuel tax, most likely. All right. So now this was interesting because it's fairly timely, right? But being in trucking, the big news I know a few years ago was when Tesla rolled out their semi-truck, right? And we have all the drama with Nikola and their CEO and everything, you know, with trying to get the Nikola Tesla truck, whatever you want to call that thing.

Yeah, the hydrogen. The hydrogen, yep, right.

Um, we've not seen either of those on the road. No, right. But they've been promised for several years. Uh, in fact, there was a whole lot of controversy with Nikola is that, you know, they promised something, had a rolling prototype, but then faked the the demonstration.

Yeah, yeah, had it rolling downhill, right?

Just, oh look, it rolls and it moves and, you know, things of that nature. Uh, so Tesla, obviously they've been having some issues with supply chain like a lot of auto manufacturers, but specifically for them it seems like it's more around the batteries, right? Getting the lithium batteries and getting them into the test, the semis. But they started— when do they say that they're going to first be available?

So they're originally going to be available in '19. And then they pushed it to '20, and then they pushed it to '21, and then I think it was yesterday they just said they're pushing it to '22.

So we're just going to keep waiting.

We're just going to keep waiting. And there was a lot of pre-orders that went in, um, with companies that were going to get them. I mean, Walmart did pre-orders. I think, uh, J.B. Hunt did pre-orders. You know, just a lot of major retailers. They said, hey, we're going to pre-order some of these. And you know, it's expensive. When they first came out, they said it was going to be $250,000. Which is a lot.

But well, for comparison's sake, what is it for a normal tractor?

It depends on the brand and everything else. You're probably talking on the low end $120,000. You're talking on the high end $150,000, $180,000, just depending on what you're getting. Okay, uh, $210,000, $250,000 would be very high end. It would be very— it would be extremely high. type. I mean, for comparison. But you know, Tesla said, okay, but everything's covered under warranty. So basically you don't have any maintenance you're going to have to provide on that yourself.

So any first-year stuff, you— their first 5-year stuff, it's all covered.

Yeah, I mean, that, that can add up to a lot. A typical truck, you're going to have a warranty for 3 years, um, anywhere from 350,000 to 500,000 miles. Um, a good— a driver that's really booking it runs 100,000 to 120,000 miles a year. So it's kind of comparison is equal on warranty, but there's a lot of stuff that's not covered on warranty when it comes to a a regular semi-truck that actually Tesla said that they were going to cover. So the price includes that, which I think makes it a little bit more palatable to people. But you've got to think about infrastructure again, right?

It's not there, right? Might be there locally, but not at the truck level, right? All right, so we've obviously— we've got a lot of opinions about pros, cons, why to do it, why not to do it. And we're not saying, you know, don't go out and electrify your fleet, right? Because I think electric cars are awesome. I think there's a market there. We talked about the power potential of them. They're safer in a lot of regards just from the fact that— you ever driven a Model 3 with one pedal? It's the weirdest feeling in the world. But because of the regenerative braking, as soon as you let your foot off the gas, it's immediately braking, right? And then it just resumes. It goes back down to zero. As far as the speed goes. So just because of the drivability, like, they just end up being a little bit more safer as well versus engine braking or coasting because it's all about fuel efficiency.

Yeah, and they've got all that avoidance, collision avoidance on it. I mean, they just come standard. There's cameras everywhere, right? So yeah, I mean, it is a lot safer in my opinion.

And I haven't tried out the autonomous mode yet, but I hear that's pretty awesome as well.

I tried it for a little bit. It's pretty cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's one of those things you have to have a little trust to do.

Right, right, right. Well, you kind of take it and you build trust with your vehicle.

Yeah. And all of a sudden you're talking to it like, uh, come on girl, don't hit that.

Yeah. What was the, uh, what was the old one with the Burt Reynolds? No, not Burt Reynolds. You know what I'm talking about. Oh, Eleanor Hasselhoff. Hasselhoff. Oh, Nighthawk. Yeah, there you go.

I thought you were talking about, um, Gone in 60 Seconds, Nicolas Cage.

Oh, Eleanor. That's right. That's Yeah, yeah. When you start talking to her, that's when you know you've got some trust with your car.

Right. Giving her a name.

And we're going to talk about autonomous vehicles. That'll be a whole nother segment, especially with its impact on trucking.

But yes, Jeff has opinions.

So speaking of opinions, right, we talk about the pros and cons of going electric, some of the infrastructure challenges, considerations to make. And again, we're not making an opinion that you should or should not do it. Because I think there's a lot of benefits. There's just a lot of things you need to think about. If there's, if there's a reason to do it or a reason not to do it, like, what would you say?

So don't do it just because you're virtual signaling. And then that's like, that's what like a lot of things that irritate me in today's environment is I think people just do it just because it's popular and it's a good PR move. And that's not the right reason. Like, I've sat in executive meetings where you talk about the cost of ownership and what the vehicles cost. And a lot of this was back when CNG was popular and coming out, and everybody was getting on this, this environmental kick, which that's not a bad thing. But if you're doing it just because you want to look good and you want to get a certain certification, it's really not the right reason behind it. Do it because you care about the environment. Do it because, yes, it's going to save me money based on not having to pay for fuel, or, you know, CNG is cheaper than fuel, or whatever the reasons end up being. Just do it for the right reasons.

Be genuine about it.

Yeah, absolutely.

Right, you know, like, don't do it and say, well, we're doing it for this, but then you don't do it for the whole fleet. Or, you know, I'm totally on board with that. Don't do it just to signal that, hey, we care about the environment. You have 3 trucks out of your 300 that are environmentally friendly.

And that's the funny thing is like they would go and they would buy just like, I mean, it's less than 5, you got a fleet of 2,000 trucks, but you buy 5, right, that use alternative fuel, and then you go and you get this like SmartWay certification to show all your— 'cause your customers care about it.

Right.

But it's nothing. I mean, it's a spit in a bucket.

It's like, hey, we hired a woman on our board, but that's it. We don't have anybody else in the whole company. Right, yeah.

Honestly. It's the same thing. You're just trying to make yourself look good, and that's it.

Yeah. Nobody likes it. Like, it's just disingenuine, right? You either care about it or you don't care about it.

Right.

And if you want to do it and you think it's going to save you a ton of money, then be honest with that. Like, I'm totally on board with you going electric to save money.

Yes.

Right. And if you don't care about the environment and this is just about your pocketbook, okay. Right. Like, but don't tell me it's about the environment when you do other things that are anti-environment, right? Or don't tell me it's about, you know, how much this matters to you, that you're a green company But then you only do like fraction 1% that you need to do just to get the PR that you're looking for.

Itty bitty living space.

Right. You know, I would also say make sure that, you know, if you are thinking about the environmental impact and you're saying this is what you want to do, recognize where, like, what's the true environmental impact, right? Don't just look at it as a fuel cost because that's absolutely one of the best benefits to electric vehicles that you're eliminating greenhouse gas emissions through the burning of fuel, right? You're eliminating dependency on oil and combustible fossil fuels, right? Totally on board with that. If you want to do it with solar panels and windmills and things of that to really make it sustainable, now you can talk about eliminating the dependency on a non-renewable resource.

Yes.

Love it.

Perfect.

Yep. But just recognize there's a lot more that goes into the manufacturing of an electric vehicle that does emit a lot of greenhouse gases or does cause a huge environmental impact, like the mining of lithium for the batteries, right?

Huge. I don't think anybody realizes how much carbon that puts out in the environment. A ton. Like, more than, more than you save with the vehicle, I think, in a lot of cases.

And sometimes that's what I've been reading, is that there's actually a bigger carbon footprint for the manufacturer of a battery cell than the battery cell saves by eliminating fossil fuel, right? So that's one thing, right? Do your research on it. And again, if you're virtue signaling, then you probably don't care about the, the environmental impact of mining lithium. But it's something to look at and make sure that, hey, this is— if you're not going to go electric and you're trying to fend off some of the, you know, some of the press, that's one of the reasons why you could say, look, we know there's a bigger impact here. And until we get a sustainable lithium ion manufacturing process supply chain. You know, it's like we talk about organic. You know how long— this is totally off topic, but it's what we do. I know it is. For a farm that wants to become organic certified, they have to actually like purify their fields, and they have to grow it out for like 5 years without using, um, you know, pesticides and chemical agents and things like that. And then only after that point can they say that they're now organic.

Oh, right.

But they have to— there's a breeding process that they have to go through.

Yeah, interesting.

Um, and now I don't remember where I was going with the story. So, but it's the same thing as they recognize that, hey, you can't just slap a label on it and say, hey, we're organic. You actually got to become organic, and you got to do a lot of work because it means something to you. Um, but there's tons of times you go to the store and you read the label, it's organic. Well, it's no different than the thing right next to it. It was grown in the same crops, you know. So just make sure as you're doing this that you're not doing it Oh, we're doing it for the environment, except that you're also really hurting the environment this way. The second part about the environmental impact is how are you producing your electricity? You know, like we just shut down a whole coal burning plant up in northern Arizona, probably about 6 months ago. But that was operational, right? Are you, are you relying on gas-powered power plants and coal-powered power plants, or are you using nuclear or hydro? Right? I will tell you is that the cleanest burning fuel, it's nuclear. Yes. Right? Now, people don't like nuclear because it's dangerous and what do you do with the nuclear waste? But I will tell you that emits far fewer— that has much lower environmental impact than any other power thing. I've got a whole other thing on nuclear power. People don't want to get started on that. I know Bill Gates is big in that corner too. But, you know, but that— the only byproduct from that is you've got nuclear waste and steam. Mm-hmm. Right? And it's— It takes a long time to generate the nuclear waste, right?

Yeah.

But a lot of people don't think about that. Well, where am I even getting my electricity from? Well, that's a coal-burning power plant that's providing me this electricity. You know, and hydroelectric, also fairly renewable. Wind is renewable, but not necessarily. There's a lot that goes into manufacturing windmills. Again, like, you just don't think about the downstream thing. It's this virtue signaling of, well, I buy this because it's, you know, it's wind-powered or it's solar panel You know, it's awesome. But where did it come from? Yeah, right. Like, there is so many downstream effects that we're not thinking about, and we don't talk about it because it makes us somewhat uncomfortable to realize and recognize that there's some dissonance here, like some cognitive dissonance between what we're saying with our virtue signaling and what we're actually doing and the impact we're having on the environment downstream. You know, something to consider. I'm not saying it's all bad.

You're just dropping a heavy bomb on some people right now. I know.

I feel bad about it too. We're gonna have another episode about speaking the kind truth. I'm just doing a little bit of that right now. So if you're curious where we stand on electrification sustainability, we are all for it. I love it. Do it for the right reasons. Make sure you go in with eyes wide open, that you're looking at all the things that you need to make sure are in place for you to have a good electric program. It's not for everybody, and do it for the right reasons, you know, be genuine about it. Don't do it and and say it's about environment when you're not really thinking about the real impact of it and you're only doing it like a little bit and not planning on doing more, right? You get 1 or 2 vehicles out of your 100-vehicle fleet.

And then you call yourself a sustainable fleet.

A green fleet. Yeah. You know, that's not it. You know, you're doing it wrong. So any other last thoughts?

Not any that won't get me in trouble, so I'll keep my mouth shut.

Perfect. Well, that'll do it for us today. Thanks again for listening to the Fleet Success Show. Tag us on social media @fleetsuccess. And again, always share it with your friends who you think would benefit from it. And we will see you next week.

Hasta la vista, baby. Thanks for joining us on this episode of the Fleet Success Show. If you liked our show, we'd appreciate your 5-star review. Be sure to subscribe anywhere you listen to podcasts and come hang out with us anywhere on social media @fleetsuccess. See you next time.