The Heavy Equipment Podcast
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The Heavy Equipment Podcast
HEP-isode 39 | Kenworth C580, the Cool Truck Advantage, and Harbinger's CEO
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It's been a whirlwind couple of weeks for The Heavy Equipment Podcast with back to back trade shows, some all-new heavy haul trucks from Kenworth, the new Acela Dispatcher 4x4, and Harbinger's new gas-electric hybrid box van. We've got all this and more on today's Over The Top HEP-isode!
ConExpo Highlights And A Custom Truck
SPEAKER_02We are back thanks to the uh good people at ITT from a really uh kind of exciting two weeks, man. You were in Las Vegas for Con Expo, then straight to work truck week. We had a lot of stuff going on there. But the thing that I was most impressed by was not the new Kenworth C 80, C580, rather. Was not the new electric drive caterpillar dozer in Battleship Gray. I gotta tell you, that big orange show truck with your name all over it was pretty intense, dude.
SPEAKER_03No, I appreciate that. The uh company's really proud of that thing. We uh it takes a long time to build one of those trucks to do it right, you know.
SPEAKER_02It wasn't a Mac, was it?
SPEAKER_03I don't remember. No, it's a Peterbill 537. Nice. So we bought a new uh cab and chassis last year, and we were worried about taking delivery of it, and then we got it over to Summit Truck Bodies. I mean, those people are amazing to work with. That's our second major custom build with them. And building a custom mechanics truck is like building building like a wrecker. I mean, it's the same kind of thing. You think of every drawer, every angle, every piece, and they go through it with you step by step and make it easy. I mean, those guys are phenomenal. We couldn't believe the uh marketing they put out for us. I mean, we had luggage tags and stuff with our truck on it that they were handing out, which was crazy. So it's uh it's a great company. They build everything in-house, that crane, the drawers, everything, all that is done by them.
Kenworth C580 As A Heavy Haul Tool
SPEAKER_02We got to get some pictures of that up for the show notes because that was just a sick looking truck, and I really like that. I think to me, the big thing that everybody seemed to be talking about coming out of that show was that new C580 that replaced the C500. What did you think of that truck?
SPEAKER_03That's that's a bad sick looking truck. Here's the problem we're having anymore. All these trucks look the same. We got all these jelly bean trucks swelling down the road, and they have a purpose. They have a purpose and a fleet, they have a purpose for economy. The efficiency of those trucks is great, the comfort ride, all that. But if you're looking for a truck that's gonna heavy haul, pick up things, move it, you can order that truck in a bunch of different configurations, and that truck is gonna be our next heavy haul truck. When we get ready to buy one, we're gonna we're gonna end up with a Kenworth C580 because I mean, here's the thing it's got a steel hood on it, you can't hurt it. It's got a huge cooling package on it. Again, can't hurt it. That one at the show has the tri drive on it with the short bunk. We probably still have a short bunk on it, but with a tandem with an airlift axle, again, all that can be gotten from Kenworth. We we have the luxury of being not far from the chili coffee plant dealership down there, so we can get trucks right from the plant. But it's a really good situation. That that's a really good redo of that truck. The interior of the cab is just as comfortable as anything else you'd have on the road.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, they're real proud of that cab. It looks, I mean, like you would feel right at home in that almost like a car. It looks nice. Oh, it's beautiful. I have to challenge the assertion that those arrow, slant nose, hyper-efficient trucks are not desirable. Because if they're not, then what did the hero of the 1987 Sylvester Salone film over the top, Mr. Lincoln Hawk, do all that lifting for, if not a slant nose arrow style Volvo?
SPEAKER_04It's not for the money for the uh the Lincoln 20 to 10 for the long time. It's not for the glory. You ain't gonna bring this. It's for the love of his son. Some besters to load. Over the top rated PG opens this week.
SPEAKER_03Well, that would that yeah, there's a white Volvo, and and and that movie. I mean, that truck surfaced a while ago.
SPEAKER_02People have bought that truck and first real over-the-road automatic, yeah.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and the truck was in service up in into the early 2000s. So here's the thing it's not that people don't want it. Fleets need those trucks. The industry needs those trucks, but they're not heavy haul trucks, they're not built to get in and out of when it's mud, when you got gravel, you got all this stuff. The cab doesn't sit higher to get above the dust and everything else. You needed more air room. They're built for what they are, they're built to move freight. That is a great vehicle for moving freight. It's purpose built for that, but you're not gonna order one with a longer frame, put an airlift axle on it with a larger uh larger height frame, thicker frame, and then beat the crap out of the cab of that thing as it goes down the road. It's just it's just not what it's built for. C580 is purpose built for what it is.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I like also maybe this was the case of the C500, and I just never really looked at them that close. The C580 has a seems like a big air gap. Air gap is not the right word, but it has a big gap between the cab and the frame rails. And I just gotta imagine that as a technician, as someone who has to work on these things and keeps them moving, you gotta love having all that room under there to get to the stuff that you need to work on.
SPEAKER_03Well, when you stand behind the truck and you look underneath the cab, you can see all the way up to the engine. You can see the exhaust, you can see all the harnesses and everything down through there. That's a lot of all air movement. You gotta move air through that thing to keep it cool. It can't all escape underneath the hot truck. So it's a phenomenal setup. The only thing you could do with that truck maybe make it even it'd be less cool, but it would. I mean, there's variations. They'll sell it with ground exhaust, they'll sell it with um, you know, a single stack version, sell it with a dual stack version.
SPEAKER_02No, you need the dual stack, there's no question. Why would you buy that truck and then not have the dual stack? That thing should come standard straight from the factory with Brahma bullhorns sticking right out of the front of that thing.
SPEAKER_03I mean, it should, yes, because the hood on it's phenomenal. The the width of that truck is great. I mean, it it is again purpose built for what it is.
Acela Dispatcher 4x4 And Bed Practicality
SPEAKER_02Purpose built for what it is. I think that you know, this goes back to one of the real early themes in like season one of the episodes when we talked a lot about getting it's not about getting the bigger truck, the batter truck, all that. It's about getting the right tool for the right job. And I think we're hitting on that topic, even though we didn't mean to, I think we're hitting on that again in in kind of a different way. And getting back into that, I really liked another vehicle that was at the uh the connects, but was the Acela. Am I saying that at A-C-E-L-A?
SPEAKER_03I believe so, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, the Acela dispatcher four by four. That is a little utility bed, two-door Jeep Wrangler-based pickup truck.
SPEAKER_03Well, that was actually they had that there and they had it at Work Truck Week. They it was the same truck, too. They drove the same one, they'd moved it and they cut the back of that cab off, put that plug in there, and and set up those are really cool trucks.
SPEAKER_02What do you think a price tag on one of the I I know you asked because, like, that is such a cool thing. I can't imagine you don't have six of them on order if they're at all reasonable.
SPEAKER_03Well, so our fleet has a bunch of gladiators in it already. I know it. And and we got those during a shortage when we couldn't get pickup trucks, and then we we started getting them. But if I understand it correctly, they're not starting out with a new brand new chassis. They're starting out with a like certified or a certified used, and they're cutting them. You can get a brand new one, but if I understand it correctly, that's that's what the guy told me. And I think you're looking somewhere in that in that 50 range.
SPEAKER_02That's not bad. For something like they got drunk. Yeah, for something like this, I think that's not bad because to me, I think one of the biggest issues with something like the factory Jeep with the crew cab and the short bed, even the bed's not that short, but it's so long, and I don't think it has like enough pickup bed to really replace a half-ton truck. But I think the Cecella has a longer eight-foot standard bed.
SPEAKER_03That's what's nice about it. They put a longer bed on the same wheelbase, right? The problem with the gladiator is that I I put a lot of miles on them, our fleet puts a lot of miles on them. The bed is not the same size as a half-ton bed, but it it's shorter, but it's also not as tall. So think of it like this: there, you're if you have a town who cover on the back of your gladiator, you can't only put certain stuff in there. It's truly a suburban pickup truck, and there's nothing wrong with that, but that that's what it is. And when they put that longer bed on there and set it up for that, I want to know what they're doing with the last the last four feet of that cab. I mean, there's got to be somebody somewhere making a chicken coop out of that or something. Because you don't just cut those off and throw them away, they got doors and everything in there.
SPEAKER_02No, you get the two of them, you put them facing each other, welded together, it's got four doors, it's a chicken sedan.
unknownNothing.
SPEAKER_03They need those of Chick-fil-A. They need those of Chick-fil-A. What when you pull up and the guys running back and forth because they got four drive-thru lines, and I don't know how Chick-fil-A is where some of these guys are at that are listening to this, but Chick-fil-A around here is absolutely insane. You need to be able to kick the gladiator door open, run out of your gladiator phone booth, and go out there and tell us what's going on. I I think that works.
Chick-fil-A Lines Tesla Rant Jurassic Park
SPEAKER_02I like it. You know, hear me out on this. What if you took to those two back halves of the gladiator that they cut off, put a little table in the middle, like in the old Volkswagen Eurovan campers, weld them together and make it a pole behind camper vehicle for these things. Well, that might uh it might be interesting. I gotta tell you what we're on the topic of Chick-fil-A. You know, I always think that Tesla's real problem, and I'll get back to Chick-fil-A. Bear with me. Tesla's problem has always been a product problem because they had their CEO go on TV during the inauguration, do two little Nazi salutes in about five seconds, which I don't know, his autistic ass, you don't even know if he knew what he was doing, and their sales went down 40%. Chick fil A goes on TV every other weekend telling you to get right with Jesus, saying all kinds of horrible stuff about black people, gay people, brown people, women, and they still got a line around the block.
SPEAKER_03They're the biggest hypocritical corporation in the world, and they they employ everybody that they tell people that they need to convert away from. I'll tell you this much if you brind a Tesla, there's a good chance you'll die from it. It's like putting a microwave inside of a microwave. It's not it's not gonna end well, and half of your neighbors are gonna die, and part of the apartment building's coming down. More milk per milk. Exactly. I think that's all really good stuff, man. If Robert Kennedy Jr. had anything to do with it, Tesla would be brined, and then they would be held accountable as an unsustainable, overprocessed food source, which they're totally going after right now. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_02I also like this idea. You've heard that, like, you know, everything tastes like chicken, like, oh, it's a you know, alligator tastes like chicken, iguana tastes like chicken, and then it it's not that it tastes like chicken, it's that those animals are descended from dinosaurs, so they all taste like dinosaur, which raises the question, Michael. If you had an Excela dispatcher 4x4 on Jurassic Park, could you have escaped the giant fight?
SPEAKER_03I'll tell you this much. If you had a gas power to sell a 4x4 Jeep and you were in uh Jurassic Park 1 through 18, however many they have. Too many. The go back to the first one. Newman is stuck on the rock trying to pull himself down. He wouldn't have got stuck, first of all. He'd have drove down and drove over that winged tar flaying creature from hell that killed him. And you know what would have happened? All these other movies would have been get would have gotten more complex and more enjoyable to watch because some other corporation would have been vying for the better beast using that DNA data.
SPEAKER_02So it would have been like a Coke versus Pepsi scenario, like, yeah, there Tyrannosaurus is okay, but this one has racing stripes.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, but if that would be, you know, if the Pepsi can tried to eat you and the Coca-Cola bottle tried to just cut you up. I mean, it's the same thing. It what's that movie where the things everything kills somebody? You know, some guy hits a rock with the mower and it kills the guy.
SPEAKER_02Oh, the final destination?
SPEAKER_03So it'd be like final destination, but for people that like soft drinks.
unknownAll right.
SPEAKER_03Well, the Fago guys are are sitting there already. They're trying to figure out how that that giant one and a half liter uh lid that spins off the Fago bottle is gonna turn around and knock you in the head.
SPEAKER_02I I think that's coming in uh Final Destination 16. I think that's they're gonna finally make it happen.
SPEAKER_03Maybe they'll shoot that mask off the scream guy and they'll just merge the two movies together. I like it. Like Freddie and Jason.
SPEAKER_02But this is a serious thing, though. So, you know, they the whole thing with Jurassic Park, right? Was that we're way off topic. The whole thing with Jurassic Park was that all the vehicles, all those explorers and everything were computer controlled, which 30 years later we still haven't figured out. We'll talk about that another time.
SPEAKER_03Well, they ran on a track, it was different.
SPEAKER_02Fair enough. But like if they had just had a carbureted Jeep, and this kind of goes back to that C580. If they had just had a carburetor Jeep that anybody could work on that didn't require Newman to have spent more than 17 million lines of code getting that wrong, I think they could have gotten away.
SPEAKER_03Well, I think that if you were able today, I'm gonna put it like this let's say that Stellannis Corporation they've done, they've come close with the new charger. The new charger is 206 inches long, bumper to bumper. Okay. The biggest car that uh Chrysler Corporation ever built was this 1976 Newport two-door, had an eight-foot-long trunk and a seven-foot-long hood. It was two doors. I think this build shit that people can work on with carburetors, manual transmissions, actual mechanical parking brakes. People will pay more for them because they want them, and they want this crap. Have a truck with a stick in it for drivers that can drive it that has mechanical linkage, mechanical linkage in the dash to turn the AC up or down, the heat on or off, and all those things that we used to have. I think people would pay more for a truck that was more simplistic. They'd pay more for a car, a more a Jeep, whatever the fuck it is. Put a damn carburetor on it and let us fiddle around with it.
SPEAKER_02I'm with you. I'm with you. But do you think it's a question of paying more? Because I think a lot of this comes down it's not gonna be any less. No, it's not gonna be less. That's fair. But I think a lot of this comes down to like a right to repair issue, and this is another topic that I, you know, I don't know.
SPEAKER_03Well, right to repair got taken away from us just by the complexity of the stuff that we buy. That's it.
SPEAKER_02Like, even if John Deere tomorrow said, here's all our source code, here's how all this stuff works, go fix it yourself. There's no way you could do it.
SPEAKER_03You can well, some of it you can, but a lot of it you cannot. That's what I'm saying. Go back to a simplistic vehicle. Look at the Jeep Grand Wagone era before Jeep was purchased, it was AMC. Those were very simplistic inline six-cylinder vehicles. Some of them had V8s in them, carbureted, automatic transmission, very easy to work on. If it hadn't been for the fact that they stamped like three million of those side panels up, they wouldn't even leak.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's true. I think also the the first gen, I can't remember if it's an SJ or you know, all those digits always kind of screw me up, but um that first generation Cherokee. Oh, you got the XY to YJ, the CJ. Yeah, well, no, that I know which one the TJ is, I know what the YJ is. I think this is the XJ, the OG Cherokee. The one that had the Renault Forklift transmission. You get one of those with that four-liter inline six and that little three-speed transmission, that thing will run forever. Well, it was a problem, they ran forever. That is the problem, especially if you're a manufacturer that lives and dies on a 36-month lease cycle, which again, when those came out in the mid late 80s, that was kind of a niche thing, and those things were kind of designed to last.
SPEAKER_03I think people expensive in their time too. They were real pricey, those were pricey vehicles in their time, so you were paying for something that was meant to be. I mean, look at it. Like we talked about this before in another episode. The the Eagle Premier was another one, but they put some forklift transmission in it that mixed fluids and it died all the time. But that was an expensive car.
SPEAKER_02We had one, we had the yeah.
SPEAKER_03There you go. There you go.
SPEAKER_02She got into this Maytag repair man deal.
SPEAKER_03Well, here's the thing about the Maytag guy that is the same thing with all industries. Go back to what we were talking about earlier with fleet trucks versus off-road and and semi-on-road and then full on-road heavy haul. Those are two different worlds. The one is a throwaway truck, and the other one is one that you're that is meant to be rebuilt and worked on. That's what it is. You can work on a Volvo, and I'm not saying you can't. It's not meant to go up and down the road and then have some guy purposely you know putting it through the abuse that the other one is built for. A C580 will take a bunch of abuse. The Volvo is not going to take that same chuck hole, pothole, windy, twisty roads under heavy load that the other one's gonna do.
SPEAKER_02I think it's just safe to say that they're not a vocational truck, right? Like it's a different that's what that's what I'm saying.
SPEAKER_03But but then at the same time, turn around and look at it like this. One is built to be supported by the dealership group and it and built to be worked on, and the other one is kind of like, well, drive the guys drive it till it has a problem, and then swing in somewhere and we'll fix it. Never thought of it like that.
Why Cool Trucks Get Better Service
SPEAKER_02And I think that's an interesting point. I think that's something that you know, and that's what I like about doing this show with you, right? It's like I cover all this stuff from a journalistic point of view. I get all the press releases, I see all the stuff that comes out from the manufacturers, but that's a pretty good distance removed from the way that people are actually using these things. And I think that's what makes this show interesting, you know. To people who are in the industry who are driving this stuff, they get kind of like, here's kind of where the manufacturer is coming from, and here's what it looks like in real life, right?
SPEAKER_03Well, that's exactly it. If you're going down the road and you got a cool truck and you pull into the shop, like a like a Kennethworth C580, and we have cool trucks, and you and you pull into a shop and you got to work something, you don't know what's going on, but you're like, I'm gonna need some help with this. Something's not right.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it's making a weird noise, it's not exactly okay.
SPEAKER_03You pull with an everyday Volvo, it might be blue, red, purple, whatever. The guy's sitting there going, Oh my god, what are we gonna do with this thing? All right, well, we're gonna get him in line. When you pull in with a cool truck, they're like, Whoa, did you see what just pulled in? What's this guy? What do you think this guy needs? And I'm telling you, what happens because we've had this happen. They go out, they want to look at the truck, they want to see what's going on, then you get the thing in the bay. The guy turns the radio on, he wants to have an actual conversation with you. He doesn't just shuffle you over to the waiting room, you know, and then breaking the ice by Martha Wash comes on, and the next thing you know, they're in there trying to figure out how they're gonna get this thing fixed and get you back on the road in an hour. And that's what is cool about driving cool stuff.
SPEAKER_01I'm tired of breaking the ice by Martha Wash. We're gonna play that right here. Oh my god.
SPEAKER_03That's perfect for you. Tim Tim's over there shaking his head, he don't even know what the hell that's like. He's grinding right now. He's like, I got an insert song. I don't know what it's in.
SPEAKER_02I gotta tell you, this is a concept that is blowing my mind, but like I know you're right. I know it's true.
SPEAKER_03It's because we've had it happen. When you drive full stuff, you end up part of the part of the dealings going on within the store.
SPEAKER_02But wait, wait a minute. Think about this from a fleet perspective. Think about this from a fleet management perspective, which I know you do. If you have cooler stuff, you get better service. 100% that's the bananas. 100% at what point do you think that somebody in the marketing department, it's gonna be somebody like it, Peter Bill or Mac or something, is gonna sit there and go, huh? Our truck is cool. If you buy a cool truck, all the mechanics will come out and look at it and figure out what's wrong with it. And if you have this ridiculous one out of 150 generic daycab thing that nobody cares about, nobody's gonna come out and care about it. You're just another number, you're a cog in the machine.
SPEAKER_03Well, let me let me put it like this we have a 2016 Western Star gliders, the last of the gliders that you could get. It's a manual with a stick in the floor. It's got a Series 60 Detroits putting out some stupid horsepower to the ground, and it was making a weird hiccup sound one day. We drove it over, and I'm gonna plug these guys because they have a phenomenal service department. They're in the middle of a great passing through area between Ohio and PA. Uh TSI Western Star. We pull it in, they're like, Whoa, look at this thing. It's a glider. We're like, Yeah, you know, it's got a little bit of a hiccup, blah, blah, blah. Technician's never seen a truck before in his life. Another guy walks over, goes, Hey, I remember when you guys got this thing, you know, years ago. And and and so we. We're all talking. We're all standing there. And it's sitting in their bay idling. And it makes this little bit of a hiccup in the title. And he goes, Oh, I just heard that. Let me take a look at it. They called us at 11 o'clock that night, told us that they had to top into the motor off. They had to put a cam in it, an injector in it. It broke a valve spring and they were working on it. And he said, So when can we get it picked up? He goes, We already put in the parts order for it. Tomorrow night at midnight, you can get the thing. It'll be done sitting outside running. We said, that's great. We'll come in the following morning and grab it. And we grabbed it and we were on the road. That we two days.
SPEAKER_02It was down 48 hours for a top end, essentially a top end rebuild.
SPEAKER_03And the guy was like, Man, that truck is so clean. They had everything wrapped in plastic. The truck came back without a bunch of fingerprints and grease all over it. It is a different experience when you drive cool stuff.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. I mean, it's funny that you say that, right? Because we've both had the experience driving the Nissan GTRs. You pull that thing into the dealership, they don't put you in line with the ultimates. They don't put you in line with the verses.
SPEAKER_03No, maybe bring it around back or some crazy stuff because they don't want anybody to touch it. And then they just bring the then the GTR tech comes out and he's like, What's the problem? And you're like, I don't know, but it's doing something odd. When I hit 140 mile an hour, the pasture window comes down and I think we're taking off.
SPEAKER_02Oh, it's bad. You know, it's real bad. Uh there's probably not a ton of people listening to this that really understand the history and know who you are. But when the guy says, Hang on, I got a specialist, I can call and stuff comes in weird, he dials a number and your pocket starts buzzing. That's a problem.
SPEAKER_03Yes. Yes. Yes, it is.
Harbinger Interview Starts And ADAS Focus
SPEAKER_02Like, that is not why I'm here, dude. All right. All right. Well, that's all great stuff. I think we've really tapped into something here. We need to go back to this idea of having a cool truck really gets you that great customer service. I think that's a novel idea that you heard here first on the heavy equipment podcast. But someone who has a cool truck that we saw last week at Work Truck Week, they unveiled this. This was the Harbinger FC series. This is a new, again, electric drive, but it's got a gas engine, a gas generator. So you don't have to constantly worry about plugging in, but it's got all the power, all the torque, all the efficiency. This is John Harris from Harbinger, and he was willing to sit down with us and talk to us for a couple minutes about this great new truck he's got. John, thank you so much for being on the show. Nice to be here, John. John, we're coming off of Work Truck Week that was happening last week, and you had a bunch of big announcements there. I think most notable was the battery electric and uh, I guess e-rev or plug-in hybrid version of the new HC Series cab. And I want to talk about that a lot in just a minute, but the big news seemed to be that you guys are getting in on AI with like self-driving and autonomous. And I'm curious about that. And I don't mean to challenge you here or put you on the spot, but you know, companies like Tesla, companies like GM, they seem to be struggling with the AI and the autonomous driving. With what you guys are doing in the technology package that you guys have, it seems like you're very confident that this will be able to provide real value to customers. Can you talk about that a little bit and talk me through kind of what you foresee happening here with your products in regards to the AI acquisition?
SPEAKER_00I think the the key is that I really wouldn't say we're we're doing things in self-driving at all. What we're doing is bringing in features in ADOS in advanced driver assistance. But when we talk about autonomy, there's obviously a broad spectrum from level one, which is basically like you have a backup camera to level five, which is you know a Zook's vehicle with no steering width. There are untold billions being thrown into level four and level five. And that I think makes a lot of sense because once you have L4, it completely changes the concept of the vehicle, right? I'm gonna take a nap on the way to work. I'm I'm you've completely taken the human out of the loop, and that's exciting, and that that costs billions of dollars. It will continue to cost billions of dollars, and we will absolutely not contest that's fit because we're here to solve problems that other people are not solving. And there's no way you can make the case that people are not solving the L4L planet's problem. What we're focused on is really level two. Um, level two is advanced driver assistance, um, and level two is around features that that we all take for granted now in our personal cars. Um, automatic emergency braking, collision avoidance, lane keeping, smart cruise, I mean cruise where you're gonna do um, you know, follow the vehicle in front of you at a set distance. These are features that feel pretty basic, I think, in 2026. And these are features that are completely absent from the commercial vehicle market, in particular in the in the passenger car world. I think these features are tough because we now take them for granted. And it's difficult to price those features. You know, if I say what is automatic emergency braking worth to you, most people are gonna say, Well, nothing. I'm a great driver. I'm obviously not gonna drive in some of them. But you know, how many times have you had AEB turn on when you're you're getting a text message, maybe pulling up to a stoplight? The situation with a fleet is very different because a big fleet can tell you, based on all the data that they've accumulated, that they're gonna get in, you know, six fender vendors every million miles and two side swipes and one major collision, and they can go through and say it's X dollars per accident, it's X accidents per mile. And that means the feature is worth X dollars per mile. And for me, that's why advanced driver assistance is so interesting in the commercial vehicle context, because we can translate that feature into dollars per mile very linearly. And you know, what we're doing in electrification, what we're doing with hybrid, at the end of the day, this is exciting for our commercial customers because it saves them money. And this is just another thing that will very quantifiably save them money.
SPEAKER_02John, that is an absolutely fantastic answer. I'm not in the business of just fluffing people up and talking about that stuff, but to hear somebody really take into consideration what kind of headaches, what are the worries, what are the concerns of fleet operators, whether they're small fleets or big fleets, I think is very refreshing in a space that is built up on hype and built up on, you know, pie in the sky dreams of like one day nobody's gonna be driving anything. And it's like, well, but today we are, right?
SPEAKER_00And I think about the installing thing is you can't translate it into value.
HC Series Cab Built For Fleet Needs
SPEAKER_02Exactly. Exactly right. And I think that kind of mentality really comes out also in the new HC series cab that you unveiled last week at Work Trick Week. This is, for those of you who haven't seen it, it's kind of like, you know, not to mention any uh potential competitors out there, but it's kind of like the uh, you know, the Hino or the Itsuzu trucks that you've been seeing on the road for the last 25, 30 years. It's a little bit lower entry for a little bit easier ingress and egress. It seems to be a little more modern look to it. But I think what's really interesting about it is it tends to meet, or at least it seems like it meets the fleets where they are, where if you're worried about fuel savings, you're worried about fuel economy, you've got that internal combustion hybrid variant that's going to give you that fuel economy. It's gonna allow you to go into quiet zones and into emission-free zones if you're an international customer. But you've also got for the fleets that are ready, for the fleets that have infrastructure built out, that 500 mile maximum EV range on, you know, the battery version. So, can you talk a little bit about what makes that such a unique product? And and if you're okay with this question, why nobody else has seemed to be able to come up with something that works like this? Because your product definitely does work.
SPEAKER_00Well, we're we're trying to meet a bunch of customer pain points at the same time here. Um, you know, we we started the company initially building chassis, which were flowing into delivery trucks and RVs. And we wanted to start with that product because it's a product that really no one else has. It's a very small market, it's very niche. And so we didn't have to come into the market and fight against dozens of people. There's there's really only two people that make chassis like we make in the US, it's Ford and Franklin. Now that we've taken that initial entry point, we've insured the product, we've built capacity, we've got units and fuel. We wanted to take that and say, okay, how do we meet the needs of the rest of the market? And that's really where the HC Series cab comes in. So we're bringing together a really high quality, really modern, driver-friendly cab with Arbinger's existing, completely clean slate design, electric and hybrid chassis. I think both of those are things that are interesting, but putting them together is where we have the real game changer. No one has really designed a new medium-duty chassis in North America in the last 40 years. I think the most recent product introductions in this segment that were something like truly new versus the standard, you know, we change the bumper sort of refresh. Um, was in the mid-80s. It would be the Ford F5X, which was really a new product then, and the Isuzu uh N VR series had major design changes in that period. That's a long time ago. Now that's like a Honda Accord for 1986 is not gonna do well in 2026. So with the new chassis, we're gonna have to do that. Right. I mean, just just think about that. Like we didn't have airbags at that point, we didn't have cassette players in a lot of cars.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, certainly no anti-lock brakes and emergency stopping and backup warning sensors, none of that.
SPEAKER_00Correct. So we brought into the chassis you know modern ADS with ESC, with TSC, with Hillhold, fully you know modern safety features into a market that has nothing. We did that with our strip chassis first, like I said, because it's a more niche market and we wanted to pick the right entry point. But now that that product is in the market and it works, with the strip chassis, we can only address about five percent of the median duty market. So the CAD chassis product, the HC Series CAD, we're addressing a 20x larger market now. So for us, that's obviously really exciting because we had customers coming to us for years, you know. A lot of I would say Fortune 50 aims with big fleet, and they'll sort of come in the door and say, like, we saw your script chassis, we saw the FedEx truck, we don't have any of those trucks. We'll take 10 as a cat chassis, and it's we have been getting that for a long time, and we have been marching towards this product because we've seen the pull. Um, we just don't want to do too many things at once because we know that that's it's not a recipe for making good products.
Modular Batteries And Range Extender Logic
SPEAKER_02Man, John, I can't believe that we have not gotten you on the show earlier because I love all these answers. They're way too smart, I think, for the average, you know, CEO hype man that's trying to market stuff. And this is what I think kind of sets apart what you guys are doing from what some of the other players in this space are doing and trying to revolutionize the entire market. So I I love that. I want to ask you about this battery deal that you have with Airstream, but I I I'd like to lead in a little more gently there and talk about how your kind of in-house batteries have kind of built that flexibility into the HC series truck that I think is gonna give you that edge. And then what does that mean for Airstream? And not only Airstream, but I mean, you know, really any RV buyer, RV brand that's looking for something more sustainable, more off-grid, like this chassis.
SPEAKER_00I think that the most important piece to understand about our batteries is that the batteries, along with the broader high voltage system, it's a completely modular system of building blocks that you can really put together to meet whatever your needs are. And that's I think people assume a lot of things are done that way. I've read these articles where people are saying, hey, obviously, we should all use a standardized battery format, and then we could change them and everyone can share. Like that intuitively makes sense. We all want it to work that way, in particular, engineers who really, really want it to work that way. The thing is, none of the current vehicles are built that way. You know, when you buy a Model 3 in standard range versus long range, it's not like three Legos versus four. It's like a Lego and a banana. They are not common battery packs at all, they're completely different, they use different parts, they even use different chemistry cells, right? One of them is using Panasonic NCMA cells, one of them is using cattle, um cattle LFP cells. There's no commonality there, and so you have different parts to be maintained in inventory, you have different items you have to send forward to the service locations. You it's just there's no Lego concept there. With the Arbiter chassis, we came into the market and said, well, some people need to go 50 miles, some people need to go 100 miles, some people need to go 300 miles. If we build all these different systems, we'll just drown. We just can't scale manufacturing with a whole bunch of bespoke systems. We're gonna come in and say, you can have whatever battery you want with all these that's black, and we're only gonna make them black, but you can have as many as you want. So on a harbinger vehicle, the batteries are very small, at 35 kilowatt hours. That only gets you 30 to 40 miles, but we normally will put four, four, five, or six. And because we only make one battery, it is the same battery in every position. The dealers only need one part number inside, they don't need you know, a battery position A, a battery position B, and a battery position C. They don't need the short, medium, and long-range batteries, they just need one battery. That's it. And we change the number that you want. So we look at going from you know the relatively smaller trucks that we built for FedEx to the bigger trucks we built for people like Bingo, to the RB, to the HC Series Cab. We change the number of battery packs in each of those vehicles because the idea is we want to give the customer exactly what they need, no more and no less. Because we can't build the product at the right price if we're selling everyone, you know, something this big and they only want something this big. With the range extender, we extend that farther. We say, okay, you want, you know, you're gonna go a hundred miles most days, but some days you might go 300 miles. And the historic approach that people would take, they say, well, then you you better have 300 miles of battery. And that kind of sucks because it means the vehicle is way heavier and way more expensive than it needs to be, for something you're only gonna do if 10 or 20 percent of the time. We've seen this in the passenger EV market, unfortunately, where now you can buy an EV in the US, it was less than 300 miles of range, and you get in it and drive 20 miles to work every day. And so they're all more expensive than they need to be, they're all heavier than they need to be. With uh well, we I usually call it a series hybrid, but you know, EREV, reps, kind of all of these are describing the same product. What we're saying is here's enough battery pack to do the thing you're gonna do 90% of the time. Here's a range extender that's gonna cover that more volatile use case. And we can put those two things together because of that modular architecture that we've gone with from day one.
Airstream Deal Off Grid Power Benefits
SPEAKER_02With this deal in the airstream space, right? Like most airstreams, certainly most modern airstreams, are travel trailers, they're pulled behind another vehicle. So the battery in them is really replacing a generator or a gen set uh to operate the charger.
SPEAKER_00Um replacing, or in many cases, a company.
SPEAKER_02That's what I was gonna ask. Well, that's what I was gonna ask. Was was can you, if you're off grid in the airstream with your Harbinger battery, can you fire up that gas generator or or natural or propane generator and power up the batteries? Is exactly what I was gonna ask.
SPEAKER_00You can. I think you know, when we look at uh the battery approach in the RB space, the typical approach is a generator or short power at a relatively small battery because this is a niche market, and so then the batteries are are painfully expensive. What we've done with Airstream is we've taken the battery pack we use in the chassis, we've taken an automotive grade, automotive volume product, and we brought it into this market, and so we've we've unlocked a much larger capacity battery pack than you would typically find in the travel trailer segment. It's not the largest trip battery pack that you can get, but we brought the battery in at a price point that makes sense for customers, which I would say is not really true of the very large batteries that you can get in the travel trailer segment before hardware. And so that battery is now so much larger that I think for the most part, customers are going to use this without a generator because it's big enough that you can get days and days of runtime off-rid, in particular, accompanied by solar panels, which Airstream has offered across most of the lineup um for a long time now. I think they've they've really been on top of their game on this for years.
SPEAKER_02You fully anticipated my question about the solar panel. So I think we're we're right on it. You know, um, I want to recognize we're coming to the end of our time commitment. I know you're a busy guy. I really appreciate you coming on the show and talking to us about this. And then last question on a similar line a lot of medium, certainly not all, but a lot of medium duty type customers are landscape guys, they are people that are doing light construction, contracting work, that kind of thing. And there are now coming onto the market some like what they call a mini excavators, micro excavators, some sort of lawn tractors, things like that that are electric. And I think that because of a lot of push from the municipal level, like here where I am in Oak Park, which is a suburb of Chicago, you can't have gas-powered or two-stroke powered lawn equipment and lawn care and things like that. Has there been any push for trailers or cabs like this, where in between jobs, guys can plug in their lawnmowers, plug in their yard tools and their 18 volts in the same way that a RV could use this battery to power the microwave and the refrigerator and the HVAC and all the laptops and everything could be used to power up those vehicles and those tools between job site to job site, or am I just like way out of left field?
Power Export For Tools And Job Sites
SPEAKER_00That was a key piece of functionality that we brought to the table with Thor Industries for their hybrid RV. On most RVs, you have a battery pack to support DDs, their industries, and stuff. With Thor Industries, we're providing power export directly from the high voltage battery to run the entire RV. There's no secondary battery pack, there's no secondary generator because we get to use the range extender for that. So that's a functionality that we've actually been supporting for a while. But alongside the announcement um last week for the HC Series CAB, we announced that as a new option for our truck customers as well. Um that's called the Harbinger Power System. And that is an onboard AC inverter that supports both 110 and 220 volt split phase. Um, and we can export up to 15 kilowatts of power for that. But 15 kilowatts is a lot of power. That's a lot of juice. More power than your house specifically drawing. So that's enough power for you to run a large welder, concrete mixers, troweling equipment. Uh, we can certainly charge up the cordless stuff, but we can also run very large job site equipment for that as well.
SPEAKER_02That's fantastic. I missed that press release. I'm gonna ask you if you've got uh somebody that can follow up this little conversation with that, because I would, I mean, I got 45 minutes of material just on that because I think that's super impressive, but I know we can't do that today. Uh, once again, John Harris, co-founder, CEO of Harbinger. John, uh, as we close out here, you're obviously a smart guy. You've obviously got an engineering mindset, you understand how fleets and commercial trucks operate. You know, as a bystander, as an enthusiast, as a kid who got into this because I like smashing Tonka trucks together. If I was a smart person, is there a question that you had wished I had asked that Harbinger has a really great answer for?
Hybrid Versus EV Mix Forecast
SPEAKER_00Well, that's uh let's see, it's a hard one for the last one minute. Um you only got 30 seconds, too. It gets worse and worse. I would I would say an interesting question is where do we see the the hybrid versus EV mix going in the industry? And the answer to that is is on the on the strip chassis and the HD series cab very different. On the HD series cab, they are gonna be popular with. With landscapers, with movers, with people that do a lot of different things and have a level use case day every day. I expect the HD series to have the role deliver the majority of them as hybrids because of that. With the um bare chassis primarily going into delivery trucks. I expect that we will continue to deliver the vast majority of those as electric only because electric meets almost entire needs of the use case. So I see a big divergence in that across the state.
EREV Trucks Edison Tease And Autocar Next
SPEAKER_02That's very cool. Alright, thank you so much, John. Uh as soon as this airs, I will be sure to send you a quick email on that. Thank you very much for this. And hopefully, I'll get to see you again at ACT Expo in Las Vegas, and I'll uh give you a high five as I walk past you. Sounds right. All right, once again, John Harris. That guy is pretty cool, man. I like that truck, I like that concept. I don't understand.
SPEAKER_03It's a very cool vehicle.
SPEAKER_02I don't understand why we don't have whether they're medium duty, heavy duty, even just light duty stuff, like a like a RAM or a Jeep, why we don't have more stuff that is electric drive but gas powered? Because I mean that's the way locomotives have done it, that's the way it ships do it. That that just seems like the right way to do this.
SPEAKER_03I will say that at uh Con Expo. Who are the guys north of the border that have the truck that's uh gas and diesel?
SPEAKER_02We're getting them in. That's Edison.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, well, Edison couldn't bring any to Con Expo because of an EPA issue crossing the border. We definitely need to talk to them about that because that's total BS. Everything else is there in some crazy state and then in of of completion or non-completion or compliance or non-compliance, and then these guys can't even come in and show off their stuff. And they had a huge sign there that said that at the show, yeah, which was great. On the next episode, too, we're gonna cover AutoCar because that is a private group that bought that brand and rebirthed it from the ashes of Volvo Hell, all right. Because Volvo does their own thing, that they have a great thing, but autocar was getting slumped off to the side because they didn't have a place for it.
SPEAKER_02It's not what they do, and it's not only not what they do, it's not what they know. And instead of bringing them into the fold, like they did with Mac, I think, and kind of say, like, what are we doing here? What is it that makes you who you are, and how can we improve on that and build on that and make it better? A lot of people don't know this, but you know, Lotus Cars, those little British sports cars. Volvo Group bought that company several years ago, about eight, nine years ago. And they were very hands-off. They said, Look, we can manufacture stuff if you need an upright, if you need brake calipers, you need a gas motor, we'll build that stuff. We can build billions of them. And you guys do what you do, that composite, that lightweight chassis stuff, you guys do you, and we're here, we're here to bankroll it. With autocar, and I think honestly, they learned that lesson at auto car because with autocar, it really seemed like their whole move was like, here's what we're building, and then do something to it to make it look like an auto car so we can sell it to autocar fans. And that wasn't the right way. And I think you're right. I think we need to do a whole show on autocar because we do really doing some great stuff.
SPEAKER_03And I'm I'm not gonna go down the rabbit hole of everything that they do because he's looking at me through the glass, acting like he's slitting his throat.
SPEAKER_02But he's gotta go to dinner, man. We're doing all this stuff after work. This is an unpaid internship, exactly.
SPEAKER_03So, you know, and if we drop that big giant ball of oil out the window, we could solve the world's energy crisis.
Wrap Up Banter And ITT Outro
SPEAKER_02But the listen, if those oil ships in Hormuz right now had that rubber bladder that Cosmo Kramer and Steam ahead, steam ahead and let the bulls fly. Let the expletive fly. All right, ITT's gonna take us out. All right.
SPEAKER_04The fastest trains in the world are France's TGVs. TGV stands for Tre Grand Vitesse, which is French for very great speed. The TGVs have set a world record going 238 miles an hour. There are 10 ITT shocks between each pair of cars to steady and smooth out the ride. And cone shocks by ITT help keep the trains safely on the tracks. That's important because when you're going to trade grand vitesse, you want trade grand security.
