Episode 076: How Many Direct Reports Should I Have?

Welcome to the Fleet Success Show.

3, 2, 1.

We are 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. I'm your host, Josh Turley, joined today by Jeff Jenkins in the living flesh and Steve Saltskiver here again in Arizona. Here again in Arizona. We've missed you. Yeah, it's been a little while. We need to convince your wife to let you out of the prison a little bit more.

I would love to have that happen.

Yeah, come on down to the heat. We like it. Uh, today we're recording in front of a live studio audience. I don't have an applause sound. That's what I needed was like a little applause sign. Good job. You guys did it on cue.

Seriously, I feel like I'm like a Cheers or, you know, one of those old sitcoms.

Yep. You guys are the laugh track here.

Perfect. So we asked, we polled the audience a little bit for some subjects that were top of mind and on their mind as they're, you know, going back and managing their fleets. We're trying to ride the storm out. And what are some of the storms they're facing right now? And we've got like 3 or 4 topics. So today is going to be a little bit of a hodgepodge and we're going to hit them all. We just, we feel ambitious, I think.

Done.

So we're gonna talk about it, and I'm gonna ask for some audience participation. If I call on you, don't hesitate. Just, you know, you don't even have to run up to the mic, it'll just catch you. So the first thing that was asked was, how do you get mechanics to use a time clock short of like just forcing them to use the time clock?

Can I tell a story about this?

You can tell a story.

That's what I do.

All right, perfect.

All right, perfect. So I had this mechanic who we had a very strict no overtime policy, um, that we were doing. And so he was just right on 40 hours every single week. And he would, you know, this is all paper, we didn't have to actually do it electronically, but what he was turning in every week on the work done was 100 hours of work, right? So that's what we billed to our internal clients was 100 hours worth of work, but we were paying him for 40 hours worth of work. So I said, Larry, Can you explain to me how it's possible that you do 100 hours worth of work when you only worked 40 hours?

And you're only paying him 40 hours.

We were only paying him 40 hours, but he was billing— he was billing 100 hours.

And this is a trucking company, so there's no like chargeback system or anything like that?

No, no, this is just like— it's just going to one cost center or another, right? It's all internal billing. It's funny money, doesn't really matter anyway.

Trying to understand the semantics here, like what the motivation could have been. Yeah, because I'm not seeing it.

Yeah, no, no, he was almost 70 years old. He looked at me and he goes, Jeff, when you've been doing this as long as I have, you'll figure it out.

All right, I don't know that I'll ever be that smart. Okay, you got me, man. I can't wait to be 70. I'm gonna figure this mystery of life out right there.

That's right.

I'm almost 70.

Have you figured it out yet?

No.

I didn't figure that one out.

All right. Well, you got to keep working then.

I guess.

Just keep working at it. So Steve, do you have suggestions on how you've gotten— have you implemented time clocks before as you've gone through?

We have.

Okay.

Yeah. I was just thinking of the—

there was a heavy sigh there, so I imagine it's painful.

Well, it's always a problem. Okay. There's no panacea for this problem. I was thinking that the first thing that came to my mind when somebody mentioned that is the old nuns in school with the rulers, you know, to get these people to get going on that. But, you know, I think, you know, really just the discipline of it and the constant reminders and maybe a reward system would help. Having your one-on-ones and discussing that with them, you know, making sure that they actually do that. I think nothing is more successful than maybe evaluating people As that would be a parameter. Like, you know, you didn't clock out 18 times. Gotta happen. Here's the, you know, if you can come up with a, the ramification of why this matters, you know, so what's in it for them kind of a thing. I know we talked yesterday about some, some, I guess it's some kind of glitch. I was talking to Joe about this where mechanic doesn't clock out, then the machine spins or something, right? And you get stuck in the program, an RT program. So I think that, you know, letting them be aware that these things can cause problems for everybody else, you know, I don't have—

if they don't use it. Yeah, yeah.

I don't have a real surefire thing because you've got human nature to deal with. But I think the more you can show them the benefit of why they really need to do that, unless you get some kind of jokester, I guess, that says, well, screw them, I'm just going to do what I want to do, you know.

I don't know about jokester, but definitely, you know, like I've seen it where You've got people that are set in their ways. They're like, no, I've been doing this for 30 years, and when you get to this point in my career, you just don't care. I have seen that. And some of it is like, you've got to show them a little bit of why it's important to you, but then you try to figure out, well, why aren't they doing it? What's stopping them from doing it? Could be they're afraid. I hear big brother. Well, I don't need them knowing every step I take and wherever I'm going. And that's kind of your point, educating a little bit.

I think it comes back You know, from the management side of these hard conversations we always talk about, you know, yeah, you know, you got to be real about it and you got to talk to them about it. And, you know, I mean, are you the right person to work here if you can't even close out a work order? You know, I mean, simple. This is a simple task, right? And I think it really comes down to enforcement and management and constant reminders. Chief Reminding Officer.

Well, I think, you know, we talk about replacement all the time, right? And one of the biggest factors in replacement is always going to be your maintenance cost. And if you're not tracking that time accurately, because the number one driver of maintenance cost outside of tires is your labor, right? So going through and making sure that that time is accurate is going to let you justify to upper management, like we saw this morning, you got to tell a story with your numbers. If you don't have good numbers, you can't tell the right story, right? It's fictitious. So being able to justify getting newer vehicles, having better equipment in the shop, getting better staffing. All of that comes out of the data they're putting in and clocking in and out of Paperless Shop.

You know, that's a really good point too, because ultimately how competitive you are as an organization is job security for your team.

Yeah.

If you can't justify your labor rates or your labor, or you can't do any analysis because of that, you know, that's not beneficial for them. That's not job security for them.

I'm going to open it up. So somebody asked that question out here in the audience, and what challenges are you seeing specifically? Okay, so we've got some inconsistent behavior, and creating the work orders seems to be maybe more of the challenge than actually just clocking in, clocking off. Okay, so doing the coding. I've heard that before, as you know, shop foremen, shop supervisors say, well, I want you wrenching, I don't want you putting data in, right? You're not a computer person. And I will tell you, like, that is definitely— and it's becoming quickly an outdated mindset because of how rapidly things are changing. And we do have to change with the times. We've got to get to a point that we can feel comfortable putting data into the computer. Sometimes I've seen them where it's like, well, I don't know how to type. They do have devices. I don't know, has anybody done this before? They've gotten like the little Dragon speech recognition for their computers. and the text can just speak into it. Of course, I've heard some text speak, and like even Google, you know, this has problems with me speaking because I mumble sometimes. But, you know, that's something that I've seen with people who struggle typing is just go text-to-speech or speech-to-text— speech-to-text— where they just speak and it transcribes it for them.

Um, we're going to be there eventually anyway.

Well, you can already do that on your phone, right? On your— if you're using a tablet or using your your mobile device, you could speak to it and have it capture that.

Have you ever asked them why they don't do it? What the root cause of that is?

Um, if I had to speak for them, I would say they would say they're too busy or they forget. It's kind of an inconvenience for them when they're trying to do work. Anyhow, that's probably what I would suggest.

You could pay him late one day and say you were too busy and you forgot.

So you joke about that, but one of the best ways I've seen to really implement paperless shop is to tie it to the payroll. And I'm assuming, how many people have done that in the room? A handful of you. You'll see how quickly they comply when it actually hits them where it hurts. Because now they've got skin in the game, right? And it won't stop them necessarily from clocking in and then not doing any work throughout the day, but you could specify and say, nope, you've got to have this many hours of direct labor, or I need to see all these work orders that you put in. I've got to be able to tie that back to your time card, otherwise your time card's fraudulent. Um, and then you can really like, wait, hold on a second, you know, they put a little bit of fear in them. I don't like leading through fear, But sometimes you gotta, if they're not getting the message and you're being positive, then sometimes you got to bring the stick around. You tie it to their payroll and you make it painful in that sense. There's a book by Chip and Dan Heath called Switch, and it's all about the psychology of change. Because a lot of people, this is really what this is, right? It's change management. And he talks about how we all have this kind of like elephant inside of us just is, it's loose, right? It's powerful, but it doesn't know where it wants to go. It's, you know, it runs a little bit scared, and that's kind of that, you know, we call it the amygdala, right? Like it's that fight-or-flight response. And people see change and what they see is a lot of the, a lack of control, a loss of control. And he talks about, you know, like you as the manager, you're kind of the rider sitting on top of this elephant, and you can do things as the manager, as the writer, to help steer that elephant. Things you could do is pave the road, right? The elephant's gonna try to go on places where it's a lot smoother and it's easier to go through. He's not going to want to go tramping through the jungle. So you look at things that, okay, it's too difficult to use, or I forgot to do it, or it was inconvenient. Well, let's knock out some of those inconveniences. Let's go figure out why this is so hard for you to use. I've trained technicians on the old school version of Paperless Shop in 10 minutes. And like, these are guys that barely know how to move the mouse around, right? This is 10, 15 years ago when that was a lot more common. The new Paperless Shop, I think, is even more intuitive, and it's a lot simpler to move around in. But either way, you know, like, there shouldn't be an excuse for "I don't know how to do it," because I can teach you. "It's too inconvenient." Well, then how do we make this— the pain of the inconvenience less than the pain of whatever happens when you don't do it? And that's kind of how you kind of pivot around. It's really about psychology and connecting with that person and what's going on and getting that elephant to go where you want it to go as the rider instead of letting the elephant dictate where it goes and you're just along for the ride. All right, did we beat that one pretty well? Does anybody else have suggestions or anything they've done to implement? Yeah, up front. We actually have that issue and we pay from title block. You pay off time card?

Yeah.

And I mean, if they have lost time in there, they didn't get paid. Okay. So I mean, it was a very simple fix because now, I mean, you are kind of messing with their money and they're 100%.

I got this vision as you're talking about that elephant of My Greek Wedding, you know, that manager's the head of the shop, but the wife controls the neck, you know. So I'm thinking, okay, well, find someone to control that neck.

Yeah.

All right. So next up, we'll pivot a little bit and then we'll come back to the EVs. How is the event going? So we're in the middle of RTA Connect. You know, it's our annual users conference. And I'll just ask the crowd, how is the event going in your mind? How's it been going? This is day 2. We're almost ready to go home. We've got 2 more hours. How's the event going? Good. Awesome. All right. There we go. That's good. Takeaways. What are some of the favorite parts so far from the crowd? The web interface. Really cool seeing that, playing with that. Did you get to play with it in the computer lab at all? No. No? All right. But just seeing it— go back and do it. New features class. That was awesome. Keynote. The keynotes have been good. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. You didn't have to say that for me. I'll give you a 5-spot later. There were 2 keynotes. He said plural. If he said a keynote, then I might have been like, yeah, it was Mark's, right? Because, you know, but karaoke last night.

Impromptu karaoke.

Impromptu karaoke.

Wasn't even planned.

He didn't tell me about it ahead of time. Just said, hey, we're going to do this. Okay, let me get my earplugs. Um, I thought '80s Night was fun. It was different than anything we've done before. Uh, just, you know, got the high score in Pac-Man, I think.

So I got—

pics or proof, like I need to see this. I don't believe it.

Well, you took me back to the '80s. I don't play games now, but I did play Pac-Man.

Okay. All right. You've got a good argument there. Uh, any other thoughts?

Perfect.

Just speechless.

Great.

The food's been great. All right. I will tell you the food last night was actually really good too. I was impressed. It was. The crab cakes I thought were spot on. So were the spring rolls.

I can't remember who I asked.

I said, how was the food?

Oh man, that fishy thing was gross, but everything else was good.

Like, huh?

The crab cakes?

Yeah, that's what it was, the crab cakes. You come here once and you'll say, okay, yeah, I'm done. But no, but come back because you always get something different. Yeah, keep coming back. You always get something new. I had somebody Well, Eddie was here, right? He was the last one standing. We talked about how many Connects you've been to. I think he's been to 25, 26, and even then, like, he's still learning new stuff. It's partly all for our fault because we're always coming out with new stuff, but it's also like things that have been out there for 10 years. Like, I didn't know that did that. Um, even, you know, like, we just, uh, we brought Nathan Schaefer over. He's been using the software— how long you've been using it? Over at Sandy? 6 years at Sandy, came in, he's like, "Whoa, I didn't know we could do that." You know, and it's like you always learn something new. There's always something. And a lot of that too, I think, depends on where you're at in the journey, right? Like when you're first starting off, there's so much low-hanging fruit that you're just like, "Okay, we got to get this done and get this done," and you're setting that foundation. And then when you come back, even if we've told you it before, you weren't ready to hear the message, right? Because you needed to focus on some of these other things first. And then you're like, yeah, I've got this handled. You go to that next step and you're like, I'm ready for this next thing, and you can start moving higher up the tree. Uh, so I definitely think that's true. So, well, cool. All right, well, let's dive into it. EVs.

God, we always dive into this.

We don't always. It's been like 3 episodes out of 76. Uh, but we were tired of talking about it after NAFSA, GFX. After GFX, because it was the 3rd or 4th trade show we've been to in like 2 months, and at every single trade show they talked about it.

And it didn't— he was serious, it didn't matter which class. I was in a, like, a technician retention class, and it was the same thing. Well, let's talk about EVs.

What? I wanted to learn about culture, right? How do I keep these people here? Nope, nope. It was all about training for EVs. Because that's the other thing is, you know, we're seeing is we don't have any training budget, and we can't— we don't have the ability to train them on how to handle these new Ford Lightnings. How many people got Ford Lightnings? Delivered? Nobody. Nobody. Oh, you guys are just unlucky because I haven't seen them roll out. City of Charlotte got theirs. Um, there's been a couple of them got Lightnings. You know what the first thing they said was? And I think this is the first thing Ford Pro is going to have to do to like an over-the-air update on— they're going to have to limit it. They're going to have to throttle the thing. Really? Yes. That much power is too much, huh? You just put a public works employee behind the steering wheel of a hot rod and you expected this to go well. Like, it's awesome. It's way awesome, right? But as a consumer, it's one thing. You're talking about a fleet vehicle that'll do 0 to 60 in almost 3 seconds.

Why?

Elon Musk has poisoned us all.

Yeah, apparently.

That is the beauty of electric.

It's awesome. It's way awesome, right? But they're going to have to throttle that back a little bit. But I think they'll, what they'll want to do, because, you know, like you probably want that in a squad car in your police department. I don't necessarily want that for my parks and rec guy. So what I'm imagining, and I hope this happens, you know, Jim Farley, if you're listening, is to be able as a fleet manager to go and throttle and say, okay, parks and rec, we're going to lower the power by 70, you know, by 25%, 75% or something. Yep. And be able to tune that based on who it's assigned to or what department it's assigned to. So that you can do that. And that's the awesome thing about EVs and over-the-air updates— flick of a switch, you know, you don't have to go in and install a limiter plate or like a throttle body or anything like that. Nope, you just put in, you know, I guess you could do a speed limiter, but you can never change the horsepower and torque output. You can do all that now. You might be able to program it with a MyKey. I don't know if Ford Lightning has that. Mopar, I think they do all that, but They have it on their ICE stuff.

Yeah, they do.

I never got one. I guess they're like, Raptor, whatever, you do whatever you want, man. Not cool.

Prima donnas.

Seriously. So let's talk about some of the things, obviously, with EVs. How many people are facing an EV mandate from local government or from higher-ups? Maybe you're in private and you've got higher-ups that are pushing it. School districts. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I was gonna say your school. So, uh, and what do they push it like on the Thomas buses and the school buses or just your white fleet?

Some of it the school buses, but depending on the programs with the different utility companies, okay, mandate which manufacturer to go with.

Okay. Um, anybody else having mandates that they're facing? I don't have anybody from California in here. I know I've got a couple of you. They just don't want to admit it because they're crying on the inside right now. Like, that's what's happening is we brought up a really painful issue and it's not fun. Um, so we've been hearing a lot about it and yeah, especially California. I think New York just passed one. They did. And we're kind of seeing that state by state. It's a little bit different. Um, I think what really blew my mind is just the other day— was it last week? California passed, you know, the CARB passed, um no, no internal combustion or no diesel. No diesel by 2040. Yeah, no diesel vehicles sold in the state by 2040. How many people are ready for that?

Nobody. The manufacturers aren't, the infrastructure is not. I mean, nothing is, right?

Because you're talking about not just, you know, like your light duty, you know, like your F-350 Super Duties, you're talking about, you know, Class 10 trucks.

And that could be the life cycle of a garbage truck. 18 years from now. Yeah, the life cycle of some bad garbage trucks.

Yeah, we have seen though, we have seen a lot like garbage trucks do fairly well with, um, electric, with electric. I know they're working on hydrogen.

I think school buses actually do well with electric. Yeah, because they've got a short route and they're back half the day, right?

Charge.

They could charge. They've got— they start out picking up kids along the way and come back empty.

So I think that's the— when we talk about EVs, that's always the first thing is there are use cases where it makes a lot of sense and there are use cases where it makes no sense at all. And so to do a blanket wide mandate is tough. I think allowing for variance or, you know, allowing for some flexibility.

That's kind of why they need to do segments. You know, I mean, over-the-road trucking is probably not going to happen by 2040, at least at this point. Unless they do some— they have to do something drastic to make that happen.

But what'll be really fun is you'll see, you know, kind of like you do when you've got, you know, the 3 trailers versus the 2, they'll drop them off or you have to go like— because here in Arizona you can only go 2 doubles. Yeah, you can only run doubles. But if you run a triple, like, I know you can run triples in Utah, they'll have to run another truck up there empty, um, just to grab the extra 2 trailers, you know. So instead of running 2 trucks, you have to run 3.

Well, you're also going to run into the weight issues to where you're going to limit your capacity and how far you can go based on how much weight you're towing. And that's the thing, like, I was talking to, uh, Jeff Crisp from the Crisp Company— he actually already left— and he was talking about concrete. And he went to a show and they were showing EVs for concrete trucks, and he was asking the guy about, hey, you know, what's, what's the radius? How far can I go in a day? And he said, oh, we, you know, you, you can go, you go, what do you say, 200 miles, you know, on one charge. And he goes, yeah, but how much weight is that? And then he goes, well, it's not fully loaded. Okay, so when you have that concrete truck maxed out, fully loaded, keep in mind it's always spinning, right? You've always got some type of movement with that as well. It drops it down to 125 miles off of one charge. You got to think about the economics behind that, because how many concrete trucks that— and they're made to just, right, they're turning and burning, they're going, they're delivering, they're going back and forth. How much business can you actually do off of 125 miles, also considering how much of that idle time is taking away from that charge?

Well, obviously you're going to have more assets. Same with over-the-road trucking. If you can only go a 4-hour drive before you need to charge Or they're going to have to find new ways to do charging. Exactly. I mean, the ultimate infrastructure is like a pad on the road, right, where you're charging while you drive.

That's a big public works investment. Is that a federal investment? Is that a statewide investment?

I think it's a federal. I mean, they've got those in Germany already. Siemens developed those several years ago. But we just— it's all that stupid bantering back and forth on infrastructure that's going on in Washington. That's what needs to happen. All the interstate roads need to be enabled so you drive and you charge.

I think it's a nice sentiment though, but you think about it and how good a quality are our roads right now, right? We've got the infrastructure bill that passed, but we've got roads that were built back in the '50s that are already falling apart that need to be replaced just with regular roads. And, you know, now we're looking at—

The other thing too, I think you have to look at is inclement weather states. You know, I mean, do you want to put a charging pad in a road in the Northeast where it's going to be snowed on, sleeted on, right? I mean, those kind of things have to be looked at. California, yeah, maybe, because, you know, they don't get a lot of bad weather.

But no, they just don't get any power.

Yeah, that's an issue. Rolling blackouts.

Well, the fires and all that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, and I think that's the part too that kills me is the It's, it's almost just mind-numbing a little bit where you are mandating one thing on one side, but then we're not holding the utilities accountable for it. Um, you know, I saw an article the other day and it said, hey, you know, I think you posted this. It was like back to back on the same newspaper.

Yeah, I did. You know, it was one day after the other.

One day, you know, that California was eliminating diesel and, man, you know, they were still holding to the 2025 mandate. For, you know, certain adoption of EVs. And then the very next thing was asking Tesla owners not to plug in their cars during the day.

Yeah, it was a Newsweek article too. It wasn't even— it wasn't even some local paper.

No, it was new, like this, you know, nationwide press. And I think that we've talked about that as the infrastructure is woefully inadequate in a lot of parts of the country. Um, I haven't heard so much of that here in Arizona or some of the other states, but California is just— it's got this really bad reputation.

Yeah, user poll in San Francisco and it was between 18% and 25% down. Yeah. The infrastructure to plug in your vehicles.

Just all the time.

Yep. All the time. Yeah. So I mean that there is no nationwide plan, maintenance plan to take care of the infrastructure. I mean, there needs to be, there's, there's a lot of big strategies that need to happen with that. You know, you talked about infrastructure and the roads you need, somebody needs to take that infrastructure and maintain it, you know, do the preventative maintenance, do the, you know, have a, a number you can call to come out and fix it. Yeah, yeah, it's a big issue. You know, they just install them and walk away from them.

Yeah, and you guys that are facing those mandates, here's your problem, right? And because you're going to need to install and get the chargers on your facilities, right? That's the only way it's going to work because you're not going to be able to rely on any other infrastructure that's going to come from the federal government, state government, local government. They don't have the power right now to go out and to just put up charging stations all over, nor do you have the time, right? When your guys are out working and something runs out to sit there and wait for a charge. Even a Supercharge is going to take you 20 minutes. It's going to take you longer than it is to fill up your gas tank. So you have to solve those problems yourself and not rely on the people who are mandating that you actually do it. But you also keep in mind, you put in these chargers in your facilities, how much room do you have? Who were you— you were talking about that?

Yeah, I talked about that last time.

Yeah, how much room do you actually have on your, your yard to be able to put up charging stations? Because most people are already very compressed for where they can park their vehicles. Well, now you said—

because part of that math, right, when you figure out how many charging stations do you need, like if I, if I know that it takes me 20 or 30 minutes to do it, how long will it take this to, you know, basically send out a shift of vehicles? And then, you know, because that's really what you're doing is you're scheduling time at the pump. Um, and then how long does it take to get rollout? How many chargers will I need in order to meet the demand, right? Like if I've got a city and I've got garbage trucks that I've got to get out, I know that I need at least 27 for a particular day. If I've only got 8 chargers, that means I've got to run 3 shifts, right, at least. And what ends up happening then is, okay, well, I could do 20 chargers, right, but I've got to have the space for that. And if I'm running transit buses, I've got to have the space to be able to, to turn around and do a rollout. And if you're putting them, you know, like, that was a huge consideration they realized at this county I was talking to. That they were going to lose something like 10 to 15% of their available parking spaces just because the charging stations took, you know, a 3x6 space. Well, it's not like they suddenly had more acreage. You know, they had to carve out what they already were using and they were already running a pretty full lot. So they figured out, they found out an offsite parking area that they were able to kind of offload some of that to.

Yeah, but you also have the manpower to change those out, right? Keep that in mind. You got to have someone that's moving it in, moving it out and plugging it in. We had a question or a comment in the back.

Yeah, I was going to say, like, for our company, we run buses, like charter buses, and we have 2 EVs, and they're looking at trying to get a charging station installed in our yard, but we're waiting on Xcel, our power company, to come out and do it. So it's also looking at the price of getting those installed because we had to buy the charger from a company, right? So waiting on the utility to be able to have time to come run a new power line to be able to power that charger in our yard.

Yeah.

Now we charge it at one of the— just like Electrified America—

half the time we go, they're broken. So you can't even bet that you're going to get that charge. And so we've had it happen twice now where we've had it run out and we've had to tow it to the manufacturer in our city to go get it recharged.

Did you tow it with a diesel? I'm guessing.

Yes.

That's about the gist of it right there. I think I saw the other day was a Tesla driver with a trailer hooked up to it and a diesel generator. And his license plate said, "You gas." Yes, I saw that too. Yeah, that was pretty funny. I was like, ah. Poor, poor guy. Anyway, um, so how many of you have electric vehicles?

Do you have a fair amount of them? Have you had— have you had conversations with like the fire department next to you and all that?

So our local fire department for us was there last week doing an inspection. They checked out one of the buses. They're like, we've never seen one of these. But they've seen the article about Tesla taking like 30,000 to 40,000 gallons.

Yes.

Put them out.

I mean, really, truly, you should be using foam, not water, right?

So they're, they're not prepared either at this point.

I mean, there's a lot of conversations you need to have if you're going to fill your fleet up with electric vehicles. What about training all your technicians?

You know, they've had some of their techs come down and like show us certain things. Obviously the, hey, don't touch the high voltage wires, but that's not all.

Yeah, that's, that's the first thing they tell you. Exactly.

At least they were kind enough to coat those bright orange, right?

Yeah, well, well, that, that, and you can't even work on them anyway because then it's out of warranty. So you've got to actually have them come work on it, and you got to then deal with the scheduling and making sure they have time. I mean, it's already a headache with Tesla owners, you know, on how quickly they can go ahead and get serviced nowadays. So, and that's going to be the same thing when it comes to maintenance on those EVs. Do you have a comment, John, or a question?

I was going to say, as it relates to charging, because we're going through basically the summit right now of— we've had all the manufacturers of school buses that make them come in. We've put them on hoist and drove them, did all these things. And one of the things that we're learning is, as it relates to charging, is peak hours, right? So, uh, you know, if a school bus goes out and comes back in, it may not necessarily be, uh, efficient to charge it then. Depending on, you know, how the electric company in the peak hours. And then when you talk about, okay, the fast charge, well, the fast— the faster you charge the batteries, the harder it is on them and the less, you know, the less they last. So there's a lot of obstacles, just not only where you put the chargers, how you get the power, but when you actually should be charging.

Yeah, so they're— well, and then not just when, but how many vehicles are charging at the same time. Because, you know, if you're familiar with the charging model, there's your on-peak, off-peak, but then there's also demand charges, right? Which is how thick is the pipe that we've got to run to you. And if you throw all, you know, I think that they did the math and it was like 10 Superchargers is the equivalent to something like 50 Empire State Buildings with the amount of power it draws. It's crazy. And I probably totally butchered that. I'm gonna go find the source and we're gonna correct that. But the, the equivalent though, you do it all at the same time and you're just like, you're sucking that power utility dry, uh, and that will cause a huge issue. And so you've got to have a smart load management system that can say, okay, like, we're— you've got all 10 vehicles plugged in at once, we're not going to charge them all at once, we're going to charge 2 at a time. Well, I guess what you just did, you just cut your charging capacity you know, by 80% just to manage the demand charges. Some of them— there's a company out there our friend Facundo used to work with called Fermata Energy, and their whole thing is about being a vehicle-to-grid. And so what they'll do is they'll charge up a vehicle that's, you know, pretty stationary during the day that you won't necessarily need right away, and they'll actually drain it during the on-peak hours as a as a battery storage system, because that's what they're seeing these as, is it's not just a vehicle, it's now also a portable generator. And so they'll use that to offset energy costs from facilities and all that, and then charge it up at night during the off-peak hours. Of course, then I would say, well, why don't you just buy a battery pack? Because I feel like that would be cheaper than a vehicle. Most likely you probably don't have the chip shortage like you do now for EVs, but It does, right? So now you're wearing out the battery faster. Yeah.

We have another comment.

The overall picture from 30,000 feet, where does the power come from? Does anybody decide how that— No. Well, so if you're California, it's solar and wind, right? Yeah, that's pretty much their bet.

Which is why you have rolling blackouts right now.

The killing all the bats because of the power lines in the hills. Which button do you push? You know, like, that's honestly— that's what we call intersectionality for a reason, right? Is it's like, well, we care about the environment, but we also know that there's environmental damage for those things. We know there's environmental— it's like the lesser of two evils on that side of things.

I think I just looked at the EIA site the other day. 40% still comes from coal.

Yep.

And I think somewhere around 20% from fossil fuels. And then you got wind and nuclear and solar and hydro.

My honest opinion is not very popular right now, but my honest opinion is we got to bring back nuclear. It's cleaner, it's more efficient, it runs, it's reliable. It's just, you know, that's honestly what's killing California is they're shutting down all the nuclear plants. Europe, right? You have the Ukrainian war that suddenly started up. They can't get oil, and they were right in the middle of shutting down and decommissioning all their nuclear plants. You know how quick they put that on hold? Why? Well, it's because it was working. And, you know, the reason they started shutting it down was because of Fukushima. You know, you take away some of those accidents and it's fairly darn safe compared to the overall long-term effect of what you're seeing from coal-fired and wood-fired plants. It's definitely way more reliable than wind and solar.

Go ahead.

The new types are new types of vision— fission versus fusion. Yeah, they're trying to— they're doing a lot of R&D with fusion as well. They're coming out with micro reactors, which I think is amazing. You know, so you talk about needing electricity at a, like, at a fire or something like that, and people say, "Fire next to a nuclear plant, that's a terrible idea." Yes, I agree, but the idea is that you can get nuclear power remote because these things, you know, they basically could take up the front row of this room, and that's how small you could have a, like, a portable nuclear reactor off-grid, which is Pretty fascinating, you think about that. I don't know where you're going to get your plutonium, but you know, it's, uh, right, go to Walmart or, you know, rob some terrorists, I guess. And then they might shoot you down in the parking lot and your kid mentor is going to have to go drive his DeLorean 90 miles an hour around the parking lot, try to run away from him.

This is 1955, not 1985. I know you could probably go and get plutonium at any 7-Eleven on the corner. I just can't do it right now.

2015 was— that was our year, man. We missed it. Um, well, and then you talk about the EV. So this is why it's like this perfect storm of EV. You have the EV mandate, you have the total inability to charge EVs, because even if you could get the charging infrastructure in, it's not necessarily like the power company can't get you the power in some of these locations that are mandating it. And then you can't even get the EVs if you wanted to, and you're already trying to replace vehicles. You just want a vehicle, it doesn't matter if it's EV or ICE. You're just like give me anything, you can't get budget for replacement vehicles. And so I don't know, like, there's a perfect storm brewing, and at some point one of these three forces is gonna have to give, um, and it probably is going to have to be two. And I'll tell you which one it's going to be, is it's going to be the EV mandate. Yes, at some point, like, somebody is going to wake up and say, okay, we can't do this by 2025, there's some other stuff that has to happen. But I'm saying that as a logical person, and I know that doesn't happen right now.

I was just talking to Amanda at this conference, and she's from Indiana University. She said her daughter worked at the, uh, the local utility there, and they were laying off about 600 people because they're going to shut down one of the plants. And then the policymakers came back to him and said, no way, you got to keep that going because of electric vehicles. Well, they'd already laid off like 500 people, they got 60 left, now they can't hire anybody. So I mean, there's not any real foresight strategy planning ahead. People have got to get together, you know, and all these different levels of government and with consumers and manufacturers and say, we got a— we need a nationwide strategy here. You can't just throw out a mandate with no, no strategy.

Well, but that's typically though what we've seen is, you know, state by state, uh, you get different agendas and different— you know, that's why we have the, the system we do, the system of government we do, is that there's a lot more localized control, right? right? And you know, there's a saying is that as so goes California, so goes the nation. And I think Californians say that because the Texans would tell you what nation, right? Like everything's just Texas and that's it. Um, and they would counter what happens in California. But yeah, but why, why do you think it's all just a push to EV? Why not any alternative fuels like hydrogen, propane, CNG? Biodiesels even.

I think Cummins is really working hard on the hydrogen, and there's other—

yeah, here locally we have Nikola, which they're really pushing hydrogen. Of course, I mean, they push their vehicles downhill too, but, uh, that's, that's besides the point.

I would say follow the money.

I wasn't gonna say it, but cynically, yes.

Well, and there's the results with EVs versus the alternatives, right? I mean, they, they just don't have the same results and the same output as you do with electric right now. So they're going to push for that. If someone actually comes up with a better way, you know, and you can get more productivity out of biofuels or hydrogen or something like that, then I'm sure that they'll make that shift. Yeah, but they haven't proven it, and that's the problem.

Well, and I think when you think about the infrastructure, right, there's not an infrastructure for hydrogen. Like, you've got to build that. But there is an infrastructure for electricity. And I think that's probably why it's become the de facto leader, is because there's already an existing pipe that we can use. I think they just didn't realize that a lot of this pipe was insufficient. Or if they did, and that's why I think I'm just disappointed is nobody is saying this on that side of government. In fact, the two gentlemen that we listened to at GFX wouldn't call it out, but they danced around it as hard as they could. To like really mark out the spot on the floor, like, look, this is where the problem is, but we're employees, so we're not going to say it. And the utilities won't say anything against the government because the last agency was GM, and they said something against the government of California, and they got locked out. I don't know if you guys knew that in California, like, they got— they lost their state contract because they spoke out against, like, this doesn't make any sense. And they're pushing EV like crazy, so it's not like they have a different agenda. They just were calling— they were saying the emperor doesn't have any clothes, and they had the audacity to say something about it. But I do think that's why EV won out over hydrogen. And it's not that hydrogen's dead yet or propane's dead yet, but we've been talking about propane and CNG since the '90s. You know, I remember when that was a huge push on the consumer side to get propane installed on everybody's vehicles. You know, here in Arizona, I don't know if you guys remember that. I remember like all the Chevy trucks all of a sudden had propane tanks on the backsides, and you could switch between dual fuel and you had to prove that you were using propane at least 50% of the time to use the carpool lane. Uh, like, I remember that was a big— that was the '90s, you know. I think I was probably 10 when that came around.

I think you just need to use common sense. I don't think it's a panacea. It's not ubiquitous to use electric everywhere. I think that's the problem we have. They just think it can be everywhere, and it's just not a solution for everywhere. But there is a high amount of applications that you can use electric vehicles. You know, I mean, I always say universities, campus environments, golf courses, obviously, you know, I mean, I think, you know, Coke DSD delivery, I think it's a good, you know, for direct store delivery. I think that's a good application. I think they just need to identify the perfect applications and start targeting those applications. Don't tell a diesel truck driver that goes through 16 states One state on your route doesn't allow— yeah, that's just— it makes no sense.

Doesn't allow the sale of diesel fuel. You know, you're gonna have to route around them.

They're gonna— they're gonna be caught where they're not even gonna have vehicles delivered to them because that diesel truck won't go in there. This would be stupid. You know, they're really shooting their foot if you think about it.

Yeah, I mean, they already had— when California did their CARB compliance, they already had a whole bunch of companies that left. And don't actually operate anymore in California based on those regulations. So you'll, you'll probably see the same thing if this continues to go forward. And if we're being totally honest, people aren't going to stop buying non-EV vehicles. They're just going to get one from out of state and bring it to California, right?

Well, until California wises up to that and says, well, now you can't register any diesels, right? Like, it's, it's this step you can, and you can see it chipping away where it goes from, well, they can't buy any new ones to now you won't be able to register any ones that were manufactured in the last 10 years or older than 10 years, you know, so that we at least have newer cleaning burning diesels. Um, and it is, it's, you know, it's just part of that process.

It's, yeah, absolutely.

Cascading effect.

Cool bus for 3 times, 3 times the price. As a diesel school bus.

Well, that's a cost for you guys, right? They don't care about that. And I think that's the common sense, you know, that's why Steve's talking about like we got to work together on this and figure out there's pragmatic approaches to this whole thing. Because, you know, like I'm with Mark, like there's definitely a reason to go EV in a lot of cases, but we need to be pragmatic about it. There's a great way to say, yeah, we need to start mandating some of this because We just talked about doing time clocks with mechanics, and it's that same psychology that keeps people from adopting EV, right? Well, status quo is working fine until it's not. And, you know, sometimes if you want to make a change, you know, you do it through legislation. So I don't necessarily knock that process, but man, we just, we got to have a much more pragmatic approach to how that legislation gets enacted and how it gets, you know, established so that way, you know, we're not making mandates that we can't even support. Um, just the hypocrisy between the utility companies not saying, oh yeah, we can definitely support this, and then what are these guys supposed to do? You know, these are counties, like county governments. This isn't like, you know, just some trucking company out there. County governments themselves can't meet their own mandate. You know, like at some point the something's going to break. So other questions? Any— you could tell we're obviously— we've talked a lot about this topic. We've had a lot of thoughts on it. Other thoughts, other questions? All right. Well, that is going to do it for us live from Connect. We will see you next time.

Later.

Yep.

Look forward to it.

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