Episode 128 Fleet Management Challenges that Keep You Up at Night

Hey, welcome back for another episode of the Fleet Success Show. We're your hosts, Josh Turley. I've got joining us today Tony Yankovich. How are you doing?

Great, Josh. Thank you.

And the, as always, charming Steve Salzgiver.

Good to be here.

You freezing up there yet, Steve?

Well, I have a coat on. You can tell.

Yeah, it's a little chilly.

Been raining the last couple of days, which is really unusual this time of year. It should be snowing, but Well, and I've got some money on this.

So where's it been colder this December and January? Has it been colder in Kansas City, Tony, or in Salt Lake?

I'm going to say Kansas City. We had a 2-week spell where we didn't get over freezing. And overnight lows were like -12 with wind chills in the -20 range. But today we're sunny and 65. The beauty of living in Kansas.

He wins. The lowest we got were the, maybe the single digits for a while. Never got below zero. And last couple weeks we've actually, I've been actually golfing the last couple weeks, amazingly, in January.

Yes, plus, yeah, call those bonus days.

Those are bonus days. Well, fun. Well, all that, you know, zero degrees and all that, that sounds like zero fun. So you guys enjoy that. I'm going to be sitting nice and toasty here in Arizona.

I definitely miss Arizona myself.

With that though, I was thinking about it and last night I was just having trouble sleeping. And I know we kind of sat down and came up with the topic of what is it that keeps fleet managers up at night, right? There's challenges. We know it's just a very stressful time to be living as a fleet manager. I mean, just to be in professional work environment anyway, it's just everything's so politicized, everything's all crazy. Seems like every day you turn on the news and something else is going nuts. But as a fleet manager, there are specific challenges that obviously they're dealing with. And how do they handle them? What are some ways that they can kind of rest easy, so to speak? So as you guys are thinking about it, what are just some general things that you think, you used to be fleet managers or fleet managers today, what are some things that are keeping them up at night?

You want to start it off, Tony?

Yeah, you know, one of the things that we always are really concerned about is making sure that the drivers that we have are fully trained in whatever type of vehicle or even piece of equipment that they're operating. We want to make sure that they have the necessary skills, the necessary training, that when they get behind the wheel that they're going to be safe, they're going to take care of themselves, they're going to take care of other people. And of course they're going to take care of the equipment that they're operating.

Yeah.

You know, and that goes along with when I was a fleet manager, probably the biggest thing that kept me up at night was getting indicted, which actually goes along with what you're talking about there. I actually got indicted a couple of times. Fortunately, we had good lawyers at Coca-Cola Republic. But, you know, I mean, when your drivers are out there running around and they're not checking their vehicles, doing DVIRs or things like that, when your maintenance people aren't competent or following through and checking the tires and things happen on the road and cause crashes, there's huge liability. You know, those kind of things keep you up at night.

Yeah. Well, I think almost it's, it's almost like being a parent, right? You know, you have kids that start driving and one of your worst fears is that, you know, your child ends up killing somebody on the road. And, and I think that extends, you know, maybe these aren't your kids, but gosh, they sure act like them sometimes, right? As a fleet manager, you know, your babies are the, you know, the trucks themselves. But you're putting these, you know, company representatives behind the wheel with a big old company logo on it. Uh, yeah, the, the risk there, the liability that stands up from that, um, you know, you could definitely see why it would keep people up at night worried about something that they can't necessarily control. But I think there are things they can do to help mitigate some of that. Um, and so, you know, Tonya, if you've got strategies or suggestions, somebody who's really struggling with that and just worried about their driver. Getting into a wreck or killing somebody, you know, what do they do? How do they get better sleep at night?

Yeah, absolutely, Josh. And I think one of the things that people need to understand in today's world is that these young people that are entering the workforces, they're not like us. You know, when I was 12 years old, I was driving. You know, my dad would take me back down on these back roads and let me have it. I was behind the wheel driving, couldn't get enough of it. Today, these kids don't necessarily want to drive like we did when we were growing up. You know, it's not, it's not necessary with, with all the ridesharing and all the other opportunities that they have for transportation. So a lot of them don't have a lot of experience when they come into the workforce and are start driving, whether they're driving their personal vehicle for business purposes or whether they're driving a company-owned vehicle. So they don't, they just don't have the experience. So I think that, you know, it's very important that they, they have some type of official onboarding that includes driver training. There are some online simulation driving programs now that, that are excellent. They're, they're fantastic. They're so lifelike that you can actually do very formal, very extensive, comprehensive driver training in the simulation, so you don't have to worry about the safety of others or your equipment. So I think that's one of the best things to do. The other thing I think is very important is you know, we work with a lot of colleges and universities and, you know, they're always looking for the vehicles to transport the small groups of students, the small teams and stuff. And, you know, a lot of them are still using 15-passenger vans and that's a whole different animal. So there needs to be specific training on specific types of vehicles as well.

Right.

Well, the other thing too was they didn't have the technology that we have today. You know, or we didn't have technology they have today, I should say. And I think that's a significant worrier I mean, whether it's the technology on the vehicle that people are fiddling with while they're driving or whether it's their own handheld devices that they're trying to fiddle with while they're driving. One of the biggest lawsuits I was involved in was like $25 million for someone using a cell phone and got in an accident. So, I mean, those kind of things really add up. And, the unfortunate thing is if you kill or injure somebody, you're not only getting sued, money is one thing, but killing somebody is a whole other you know, takes you to that next level. You know, so that's really what you have to worry about is training on, you know, how getting people to avoid distracted driving while they're training. I mean, for my— I mean, I'm bad at it myself. You know, I have to actually put my cell phone in my back pocket and sit on it while I'm driving just so I don't have a temptation to do that. You know, and so there's a lot of things you can do. But I think a lot of awareness training is probably the best mitigation of all that. Technology?

Well, and I think fleet operations need to realize it's not a matter of if an accident occurs, it's when an accident occurs. You know, there's— I can't remember the number exactly, but it's like 5.3 million vehicle crashes every year and about 42,000, 43,000 of those involve a fatality. So it's not a matter of, hey, I hope we don't— I hope this doesn't happen to us. It will happen to us. So what can we do to mitigate those risks?

Well, and I think that, that planning ahead of time, I love that you mentioned too, is this idea of, you know, like the simulator, right? And going through, and it doesn't have to be a fancy high-tech simulator. It could just be, you know, like some questions and answers. And when you think and you have that mindset of it's not a matter of if, but when, then you go through those scenarios and say, okay, when this happens and you war game it, right? And you plan it and you test those scenarios, you test your battle plans. Effectively what you call just a scenario simulator. And you try to say, okay, how are we going to handle it when this happens? How do we handle it when this happens? And just one scenario after another, and you come up with your plan and you test it. And did it work? Did it have the effect that you hope it had? You can't control all the variables, but you at least try to identify the big chunks that you're going to get hit by, what you're exposed to. Do you guys, either of you seen that new movie Gran Turismo?

I have not. I know what you're talking about.

I have not seen it. Yeah. So, you know, it's, it's a movie and it's based on the, uh, you know, the real life true story. I guess they took a, um, you know, a race car driver, uh, a sim racer, right. Who was very good at the game Gran Turismo, uh, which itself is a very high quality, high fidelity game. Uh, you know, in the, in like they have all the racing circuits mapped out, the cars are all mapped very, you know, they're very, uh, what's the word? High fidelity. Very accurate. And they took a racer who was very, you know, an expert in that game, put him behind the wheel of a real race car, right? And it was interesting to see how the skills of the simulator translated to the skills on the racetrack and also, you know, how they necessarily didn't. But just the fact that he had spent so many hours simulating the race even qualified him to get behind the wheel of a real race car. And I think, you know, we throw drivers behind the wheel of buses or 15-passenger vans and they haven't spent any time doing any kind of simulated driving or, you know, any kind of evasive driving. You know, maybe they've done some in a smaller vehicle, but they've never done one in this size of a unit, right? And just how differently it handles, how, you know, differently the brakes respond. Just not having any kind of awareness of the different types of driving they have to do with the, you know, with the paradigms they're in.

You know, and I was a professional truck driver. School bus driver and transit bus driver in my life.

Yeah.

And I went through months worth of training on the road, in simulators, you know, on test tracks with cones. I mean, they did everything they could really to prepare you before you got actually out on the road, you know. I don't know, a lot of that is happening quite like it used to. There's a lot of online stuff. I'm not sure the online is well adapted really to the real life scenarios. So I think that's something that they could really put a combination, you know, to get back and maybe run on a real road sometimes, you know. But, and I understand time restraints and things like that. But the irony of all this, when you talk about crashes, if you go in and you dig into the data for the Federal Motor Carrier, you'll find that ever since they put CDLs in, they've never lowered accident rates.

Interesting.

Yeah, that data has never gotten lower, which is really an irony of itself because that was the whole point of the CDL.

I think we almost have another podcast episode just on the efficacy of government regulation sometimes.

Yeah, exactly.

So Steve, are you saying my kids' experience with Mario Kart doesn't necessarily make them a world-class driver?

Well, definitely my experience with Mario Kart doesn't.

It works perfect. Have you ever tried drift boosting in your little Nissan? That works.

That's great.

I don't know what you're talking about. Well, especially if I get a little green shell behind me, you know, then I really get moving.

Well, I know I lost Mario Kart when we had our retreat down there in Arizona, so don't depend on me to use that.

Well, so, you know, fleet managers having trouble keeping up at night with this particular topic. It really is pushing on the operation side of the house, getting more driver training so that you have less exposure from that side. Right. And even if you're over fleet and not over the drivers, it's still your organization. You know, we like to call it, you know, you're still on the same ship. And if somebody else punches a hole in the ship, the whole ship is going down. It doesn't matter what department you're in. Right. So, you know, it does become your responsibility to, to push on that, to advocate for that and make sure that people are completing that training so that you're, you know, you can sleep better at night, honestly. And honestly, everybody else goes home at the end of the day too, that you're sharing the road with.

The other thing too, we didn't talk about is credentials. Make sure they have the proper credentials, medical cards, driver's licenses. You know, you validate the training that they've had. And training is not a one-time event, you know, it goes on maybe annually, biannually. Yeah. So you have to have it, you know, frequently just to keep up with things that are going on.

So you can go recertify, you know, and keep refreshed.

Yeah.

The other thing too—

oh, sorry. The other thing too is you got to have orientation on the equipment. You can't just throw someone in a new piece of equipment and expect them to be familiar with it and drive it. That's one thing that we used to do as fleet managers is we'd have the vendors come in or the OEMs, and they would walk around with us and they would familiarize, you know, the drivers or potential drivers with the cab, the controls, you know, all those kinds of things so that they knew how to operate that vehicle or at least had an idea before they jumped in it.

And it's interesting to see how that translates sometimes. Right. And I've even noticed this just doing a rental car. I don't know if you've ever gotten in the wheel behind the wheel like one of the new Chevy Suburbans. For the life of me, I could not figure out how to put that thing in park, right? And you figure 80% of the driving experience should be, you know, pretty, uh, it should translate from one vehicle to another, but then you get in something like that. Um, and you can imagine for any kind of like heavy equipment, off-road equipment, just how those little things, you know, something like this case, it's a Suburban and putting it in park was impossible. I couldn't figure it out. And then I finally was like, oh, you push a button.

Right.

That happened to me with an X5, Josh. Exactly. I couldn't figure out how to put it in park.

Okay, how do I get this into drive? How do I put it back in park? Oh crap, now what do I do? Don't get out, whatever you do. Put on the brake. Where's the brake pedal?

Right. I remember my first rental car where it was a push-button start and I, you know, I didn't have a vehicle like that. So I sat in the car for 10 minutes trying to figure it out, looking for the owner's manual. Finally had to get up and go ask someone, how do I start this thing?

Well, can you imagine everybody getting in behind the wheel of a Tesla with one pedal driving? You know, like, whoa, hold on. How do I stop this thing? How do I stop faster? You just let off the gas.

Right.

Well, you know, and to piggyback on what Steve was saying earlier, I mean, we went as far to formalize those, that vendor training. So they, we would require them to provide X number of hours of actual operation training on that new piece of equipment. And even though, you know, backhoe's not a great example, but even though, you know, an operator's been operating this type of backhoe for the, you know, the last 5 years, the new model's going to have new technology, it's going to have new features. So it's really important to refresh their training when a new You know, whether it be a new vehicle, new piece of equipment comes into your fleet.

Yeah. Well, and I really like too, from the refresher training standpoint is one of the things that training does is it exposes you to scenarios you might not see every day. So as you're training on new equipment, if you're training in a, you know, like you throw something at the driver, there's something that crosses the road or there's a new situation that they haven't been exposed to just in their day-to-day driving. That's the piece that you have to refresh, right? It's, it's not the stuff they're seeing every day. And maybe sometimes it is because you want to validate that they're handling that situation correctly. But it is to kind of expose them again to things that, oh yeah, I forgot that that can happen and I wasn't even thinking about it, you know?

Right.

So other things that we think could keep a fleet manager up at night, you know, I know some of the things we talk a lot about from a data standpoint, you know, because as an FMIS provider, as just the accuracy of the data in the system. As we're trying to do analytics and things like that and benchmarking, we're noticing there's a significant issue with data collection. And I can imagine as a fleet manager that, you know, how reliable are my numbers? Council's calling me into a meeting tomorrow and I don't have confidence in my data. What are some of the things that would drive down that confidence that you had worried about in your career? Have you seen in your careers? That's actually— Yeah, go ahead, Steve.

Oh, sorry. That's actually one of the things that I noticed right away in my career, and I actually became what some people call a data expert because of those very issues. I could not stand to go before a legislature or a CEO anywhere and have bogus numbers, you know? And a lot of that stuff comes in through the work orders. You know, there's no consistency in your operation. You don't have an operational plan. You don't have anything documented. You're using codes that aren't standard codes. And then like in the industry, like the VRMS codes and the SAE codes, things like that. You know, but that's really where you got to focus on doing a lot of training to get your people to put things in consistently. You know, and the more you can automate that, like a lot of the things that we've done, you know, with Paperless Shop, things like that really helps because the more you take out human intervention or human typing, the better off you're gonna be on trying to get more accurate data.

Exactly. And I think one of the things that, that we always look for is, you know, we look at technician productivity obviously, and their labor time, you know, is, is it, based on SRTs or standard repair times, or is it based on actual time? And it's really important that they do that in a consistent manner in the way that, you know, the shop wants them to operate and track that information. So many times the, the technicians, they're either putting in a time that's so much less than what it should be required because they think they will, they will come out looking like a better technician if we're, you know, if we're beating flat rate time, we're beating SRTs. So they want to, you know, do this job and, and report in 2 hours even though it may have taken them 3 hours. But then on the other side of the coin, you know, if someone's measuring how many hours the technicians are just simply at work, you know, then all of a sudden the technician, because they're not real busy, they're gonna start, uh, what we call banging hours on a work order just simply to fill up their timesheet. So it's really important that they're, they're putting accurate time on the, on the, uh, work order.

Well, and then that has a, a compounding effect, right? Because now they're beating the estimates in some areas and then others they're, you know, maybe they're, uh, they're fictitiously reporting jobs that didn't actually get done to fill out the time card. If they don't do that, now all of a sudden their, you know, their hours paid versus hours worked is completely, you know, out of whack. And so now I'm questioning the productivity of that tech, right? Or do I really need this tech?

Right.

And that's the piece I think is even more painful or hurtful from a fleet manager standpoint is now you can't accurately project staffing needs because you can't get good DDE data.

Right.

And I've seen that, right, where I remember we were talking to a couple of clients in California. And they set their labor rates based on what other government fleets are setting their labor rates at, but they're not looking at the labor rates of actually what everybody else is charging, you know, private fleets and all that stuff. And so they end up with like, you know, this massive echo chamber of crap data because they just aren't validating what that actually should be costing them from a staffing standpoint.

Well, exactly. And I always come back to, we really need to educate the people, you know, whether we're educating, you know, finance and budget because of what our fully burdened labor rate really is versus, you know, being trying just necessarily trying to be competitive in the marketplace. In the same way with the technicians, you know, we want them to understand why we want to track actual time worked in most cases. And it's not because we're going to use that as a hammer against them, you know.

Right.

But what we want to do is be able to track that information. So it's really educating the people that are, that are tracking the data, inputting the information, is, is a real key component.

Always start with why, right? You got to tell them the why behind why you're tracking that data and why you need that data. Yeah, you mentioned that a shop would call just a couple other shops, uh, to get their labor rate, but it wasn't really the right labor rate, or at least it wasn't accurate. You end up flattening the M&R curve, and so your, your optimal replacement cycle extends out, uh, even though it's not really what it's costing you, you know, um, because yeah, you're talking to other shops versus talking to your finance department. You know, your finance department knows how much a labor hour cost. Um, and I like using a fully burdened labor rate there too, but, um, if they're not capturing the hours correctly, then it doesn't really matter. The data is going to be garbage anyways. Exactly. So what do you do, you know? I mean, other than getting good, good times in there, right? You know, obviously you want to implement some technology, do some shift tracking, making sure that you're tracking and accounting for those hours. Uh, Tony, you mentioned, you know, explain why that's so important to the technicians so that they are more, um, judicious isn't the right word, but you know, that they adhere to those policies and, and more bought into that, right? Um, what do you do about, you know, other things like parts just not getting reported on the work orders?

You know, that, that's a real big issue, especially in the smaller fleet shops. So if you're in a large fleet shop and you have 8, 10, 20 technicians, generally you're going to have a full-time parts clerk. And more often than not, those parts are going to come over the counter to the technician. So inventory accountability, inventory management is much easier to do when you have a full-time person managing, managing your parts operation. But in those shops where you, you might have 2 mechanics and maybe it's a satellite location and you have a parts room but you don't have a parts clerk, so the mechanics are picking their own parts, and, or it's a second shift and the parts clerk only works the first shift, and there's a log sheet and, you know, you pick the part, you sign the log sheet, and you write down the part number. But if a technician's in a hurry, you've got a police officer sitting at your door, you know, you need to fix a headlight or some other top light, you know, you grab the part, you go, you install it, you get the guy back out on the road, then you go on to your other thing. And oftentimes technicians forget to put those parts back on the work order. So I think it's really important as part of that, the whole review process when you're closing a work order, that someone's looking at the task completed and then making sure that the associated parts are posted and recorded appropriately.

Yeah. Well, and again, it goes back to, you know, hopefully explaining why, right? Why is that so important? And I think we've all had that where you needed a part and it wasn't on the shelf, but the system said there was one, so it didn't reorder one. And that's the kind of thing we're trying to avoid, right? Is a stockout situation where now that vehicle's got to be downed because we were waiting on a part that didn't need to be ordered. Like we could have ordered that 3 weeks ago and it, you know, like that's the kind of downtime impact of not putting your parts correctly on a work order has. Right?

Right. And think about it. If, you know, if for some reason, you know, somebody comes and does a physical audit of your parts room and this continues to happen, you know, it's not that there's theft or shrinkage, it's just that these parts are not there because someone didn't record them. But, you know, that's going to be a hard message to, to relay.

Exactly. And how do you prove it?

Right.

Because that's the assumption is that it is theft or shrinkage. Correct. Of course, I mean, what's people— what are you going to do with a, like, a headlight, right? You know, maybe people are selling it on the side, I suppose. But putting a little, like, a double-check, quality check into your processes is very key, right? Putting some controls around the inventory. You mentioned, like, having a parts room or a parts counter where somebody's responsible for that, and it goes on to a work order if it walks out the door, right? I mean, that's just part of the process. So those are things, you know, if that's what's keeping you up at night, those are good strategies.

Yeah. And even for those operations where the mechanics picking their own parts, you know, if you're using technology to help you and you a barcode scanner. You know, a technician should be able to use a barcode scanner and scan that part before he walks out of the parts room, right?

I think one of the things I think of— there's a book called, um, Change. It's from, uh, oh gosh, Chip and Dan Heath. They wrote a bunch of books, but one of them, you know, this idea is like, how do you get people to change? How do you get people to, you know, come along with the way you want to go and do things, right? And if you have people that are struggling with something like checking out parts when they walk out the parts room, Um, the concept is, is that, you know, there's like, there's this rider and then there's an elephant and then there's the road. And sometimes, you know, like if you think of your technicians as the elephant and you're the rider, you're trying to steer this massive thing and it's hard for you to move it. It's going to go the way that the road goes. It's easier for it to go down a paved road than it is to go cutting through the jungle. So if you can do things like that, yeah, we want you to use a barcode scanner. But if I make that really difficult for them, they're not going to go that way. They're going to follow the road instead of cutting through the jungle. So pave the road, right? And that's part of change management is make it really easy and simple to follow the process. Put it so that, you know, the barcode scanner is right there by the door. Uh, make it so that it's very easy for them to find the work order they're on, you know, to go clock in, find their stuff, scan the part, and that it's a very natural part of their process and not something that's cumbersome or, um, you know, non-intuitive.

Some great points.

Yeah. Some other things. I mean, we talk about, you know, obviously cost management, volatility of fuel prices. You know, seems like every day, you know, we've got a massive conflict going over in the Middle East right now. Who knows what that's going to do to fuel prices here in a few months? If it escalates, it'll definitely have an impact on the oil supply out there, right? What do you do as a fleet manager dealing with some of these things, supply chain disruptions? You know, heaven forbid we have another chip shortage, right? It seems that that's finally settling down a little bit and it doesn't look like we're going to have another labor strike. So gosh, we're just checking all kinds of things off the bingo cards. But what do you do? You know, like these are the kinds of things that are keeping me up at night. How do you handle that?

Well, you know, the fuel prices is an interesting thing. You know, I just read a report earlier this week that the US Department of Energy has projected that fuel prices will be down over the next 2 years. Interesting. Inventory, increased production, increased refinery capacity. But now, like you mentioned, now we have some issues in the Middle East. We have— that's going to put another spike in oil prices. So, you know, even though these long-term expert projections are saying, hey, you know, fuel prices should level out, they should be actually reduced a little bit from the last couple of years. We have a conflict in the Middle East that escalates. We're going to be right back in, you know, $5 a gallon gasoline again, like we were in 2022.

Yeah. Well, and that's interesting because like that one was, you know, a lot of that was blamed on the crisis in Ukraine and that seems to have settled now. Right. And it feels like the world just has to adapt sometimes. But anytime, right, right. You just don't know what's coming next. Right. It just anything we can do to keep the prices high. I'm going to put my tinfoil hat on, right?

Right.

Yeah. And supply still is not keeping up with demand. I, you know, like we know that from both a consumer standpoint and from a fleet standpoint. You know, I know Ford is still canceling orders. I think Toyota is fulfilling theirs. Like several of the, you know, the imports are doing their part, but a lot of the domestic manufacturers are still not keeping up with demand. So that's still a problem. So you have to plan ahead for that. The kind of the last thing we think is really keeping fleet managers up at night is these sustainability mandates, right? We know, you know, like California's is in effect now, but it's, you know, that's just going to get tighter and tighter. Coming up with solutions to problems that don't appear to have solutions, you know, how do you do this when you're stuck between three rocks and three hard places all at once?

Great point, because we recently worked with a school district where the state where the school district resides mandated that all school districts will move to all-electric buses or zero-emission buses. And I think it was by 2030. And there's no way. The one district that we were working with, they had realized that the first— they had a 10-year plan where the contractor was going to provide X number of EV buses every year to transition the fleet. They met the first-year demand, they met the second-year demand, and guess what? Now they can't even meet 20% of the third-year demand. And they're already projecting zero electric buses available for this client from that vendor in the fourth year. So, you know, it's one thing to have a plan. It's one thing to have a mandate, but executing those plans is becoming more difficult.

So if you're a fleet manager and you have a mandate you can't meet, I mean, what do you do? Do you just throw up your hands and walk away? Do you just hope that somebody doesn't fire you for it? You know, I can imagine one day they're going to start fining people for not meeting the mandate, but when you can't meet the mandate, Right.

And, you know, the part about fleet sustainability, you know, the piece that's right out in front of you is the vehicle, right? You know, can we get the electric vehicle? Will it meet the mission that we're trying to fulfill? In many cases, yeah, we can probably get one. We're not going to get it, you know, next month. Maybe it's going to be 6 months, 12 months down the road we can get it. But where's the infrastructure? You know, and not only can we get the charger installed, but do we have the electric load capacity in that facility or in that electric service coming into that facility or complex to support that? And most of the time the answer is no. Yeah.

And that's completely out of your control, right? Right. There's not like, you're not sourcing that from a different part of the country or anything like that. You literally can't do anything, you know, other than maybe go solar. But even then solar can't keep up. You can't generate enough power out of a solar array unless the thing is, you know, 3 or 4 times the size of your property. And that's another issue we're seeing. Is it's not even just the infrastructure. It's they don't have the space on site to park these chargers because now they're going to lose parking space. They, you know, they don't have the, the capacity. They don't have— you know, you mentioned the school buses. You've got to have room to turn around, you know, and, and you can't just throw a whole bunch of chargers in there because it changes the entire flow of doing driver rollouts and, you know, like your operation, right?

Um, well, and, you know, NFPA, uh, the National Fire Protection Agency, has a recommendation that anytime an electric bus or electric vehicle of any type is involved in a crash and there is potential damage to the battery, you have to quarantine that vehicle. And by quarantining that vehicle, it has to be at least a minimum of 50 feet away from anything because these apparently will spontaneously combust at any given time because of the, the thermal runaway within that battery. So people don't have space to do that. On their current lots.

And one of my favorite presentations has been the ones from, you know, there's a city in Cali— county out in California, and they've talked about this at length. We actually get— we should get them on the podcast. They'd be awesome to listen to. Um, but that, like, if I'm a fleet manager, that's probably the number one thing keeping me awake right now. You know, if I— especially if I'm in a state that's doing EV mandates, you know, New York, I think Michigan's going through this, California definitely is going through it. Um, you know, but And just, you know, one of the things we talk about, as goes California, it seems that the nation's not very far behind them because it will be, you know, Illinois will be behind that. And then it's just a patchwork. New Mexico usually follows them and then eventually Colorado and some of the others. But everybody has to kind of keep up with that, unfortunately. And so it might not happen to you today, but I'd be worried about it coming down, you know, at some point in the future. And it just, it changes with the political wind, it seems like, which is sad because EVs are amazing. You just have to have a more pragmatic approach to it instead of it being all politicized the way it is. So exactly.

And what I always tell the fleet managers that I speak with is get out in front of this. You know, if, if your CEO, your board, your city council hasn't mandated it yet, develop your own plan, take some initiative, whether it's a pilot program, just get out in front of it so when they come looking, you can say, hey, we're already invested in this. We're already moving forward in it. We're testing this. So, you know, oftentimes if you will have, be able to at least direct that initiative more than just respond to it.

Steer it a little bit. Exactly. I think being a part of the conversation up front, helping if they are thinking about a mandate or, you know, thinking about making a switch like this. If you've already gone through this, then you already have the data to help arm the argument of a more sustainable trajectory for a sustainability plan versus one that's near suicidal from a financial standpoint, or it may not even be feasible because of things like infrastructure lagging behind the demand. So, well, guys, that was a lot of stuff. And I think I had talked about this. I was at one of our NAFA events and I was like, man, I don't know that I'd want to be a fleet manager right now. But somebody got up, he's like, it's a great time to be a fleet manager. I'm like, it's exciting. That's for sure. But dear goodness, there's a lot of stuff, you know, up your anxiety meds, I guess, if you're going to stay in fleet for a little while longer. But it's, you know, there's a lot of stuff coming at you and we, we hear you and there's strategies to deal with each one of these things and you're not alone in the fight. So if you're struggling with that, you know, don't feel, don't feel bad about it. You know, don't hesitate to reach out to us. You can email us podcast@rtfleet.com. All of us get those emails, so we're happy to respond to you and give you any advice you need. But otherwise, you know, thanks Steve, thanks Tony for being on the call with me today. I always love learning from you guys. You guys have such good insights and experience. And you know, honestly, that's what our listeners listen for. They don't listen for me. I'm just here to ask the questions. I just appreciate you guys offering all the feedback and advice to all of our listeners who are dealing with all this stuff every day. So with that, until next time.