← Shift Key with Robinson Meyer
Shift Key with Robinson Meyer
It’s Easiest to Electrify This Type of Truck
01:03:09
Rob and Jesse talk with John Henry Harris, the cofounder and CEO of Harbinger Motors.
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- [00:00]
A
You are listening to Shift Key, a weekly podcast from PPAP News. On this week's show, the potentially secretly easy part of the transportation sector to decarbonize. We are talking to the CEO of an American manufacturing company about their quest to eradicate greenhouse gas emissions from medium duty trucking. Well, you may ask, what is medium duty trucking? Why is it so important? How does the market work? And what can policy do to help or hurt these challenges, especially over the next four years? Can we even make policy progress over the next four? Well, actually, yes, we can. And the rest of the answers, they're all coming up after this. You might know about heatmap for our award winning journalism covering the clean energy transition and you may know about heatmap for this podcast, but do you know that we also have a data platform called heatmap Pro? Heat Map Pro is this special platform full of data and insights on political risk that energy developers can't get anywhere else. In heatmap Pro, we track contested renewable projects all around the country and county level restrictions and ordinances. Then we bring in additional data sources and proprietary polling, all to forecast the risk of local opposition to your project. We generate a political risk score for every county in the country. To learn more about using Heat Map Pro for your community affairs strategy, visit heatmap News Pro. That's heatmap News Pro. Hi, I'm Rob Simayer, the founding executive editor of heatmap News.
- [01:32]
B
And I'm Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
- [01:36]
A
And you are listening to Shift Key Heat Maps weekly podcast about decarbonization and the shift away from fossil fuels. Jesse, what is your favorite thing that comes in a truck? I have an answer for this. I'm curious if you have one favorite.
- [01:50]
B
Thing that comes in a truck. Oh, it's probably be some kind of garbage, some kind of new electronics or something. I just actually just got a new replacement gradient heat pump for my window from the company. I got the new second generation cold weather rated window heat pump that's going to replace one of the first gen models that I worked into the ground over the course of my New Jersey winter and that was delivered on a, on a truck. One of those ones that you know, if you got the little three wheeled forklift that hangs on the back of the truck and then the guy gets to use that to pull the pallet down like I always want to drive one of those. That looks like a lot of fun that way. You were.
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A
I'm going to skip the fact that you just talked about a window heat pump. Clearly something we need to go talk about in the future.
- [02:29]
B
That's right.
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A
Well, I have a favorite thing, though I can't say I've ever used it. In my neighborhood, there's a guy who drives around in a little box truck and sharpens people's knives. I assume he goes to restaurants mostly, but he goes to people's homes too. And you can like hail them down, bring out your knives. What a amazing.
- [02:44]
B
You just run out to the street and you're like, hey, hey, I got my knives. You're running down the street after him with a bunch of knives in your hands.
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A
A bunch of knives in your hands. Exactly.
- [02:51]
B
That's a good mental image.
- [02:53]
A
Yeah, exactly. That's my. I think that's my favorite thing that comes in. Truck. Well, on this week's show we are talking about one of the more important, but I think least attended to segments in the transportation sector and parts of the decarbonization challenge, and that is medium duty trucking. What is medium duty trucking? Well, medium duty trucking is like the whole middle range of trucking. Any vehicle you see outside that's bigger than like one of those Rivian Amazon delivery vans or like a white Ford Transit connect van, if you know those. But smaller than a big, you know, big old 18 wheeler or you know, class 8 semi tractor, tractor trailer, smaller than a Caterpillar construction vehicle. Right. It's that whole kind of middle range of vehicles. And while this may seem like a relatively kind of niche part of the transportation segment, it's actually enormously important to the carbon and air pollution challenge. And it's going to potentially continue to be a tractable challenge to solve as you'll hear over the next four years during the Trump administration. So medium and heavy duty vehicles together comprise only about 5% of all the vehicles on American roads, a very relatively small number of vehicles on the road. And yet that small number of vehicles, small absolute number, produces a really oversized amount of pollution. So medium and heavy duty vehicles together, despite being only 5%, produce 21 to 23% of U.S. greenhouse gas pollution from the transport sector. And so the medium duty sector is actually an enormously important part of the overall decarbonization challenge. And today we're going to talk to someone who's working to solve that part. John Harris is the CEO of Harbinger Motor, a Los Angeles based startup that is producing chassis for medium duty trucks. They are trying to decarbonize the medium duty trucking segment. They're a four year old company, they were started in 2021. They already have trucks rolling off the finish line and getting sent to end consumers. And I think most interestingly, they're doing their final assembly all in the United States. And so this is a company that I think hits a lot of components that listeners of Shift Key might be interested in. They're doing US production, they're working on a kind of weird part, but very important part of the energy industry. And they're dealing with the current policy, environment, not only its uncertainty in terms of the environment, but also in terms of trade.
- [05:25]
B
Rob? Yeah, I'm excited about this segment because as we'll hear, this is one of the most logical sectors to electrify. It makes the most sense from an economics perspective and from a practical perspective. And yet at least in the United States, we're lagging way behind in electrifying medium duty transport. And so it's like, it's really interesting, very nuanced one to break down and excited to get into it with John and with that.
- [05:49]
A
John Harris, welcome to ShiftKey.
- [05:51]
C
Thanks for having me, Rob.
- [05:53]
B
So John, let's start here. Can you just describe what is the medium duty transportation sector? Like what kind of vehicles are we talking about here? Help people picture some that they might be familiar with in their kind of day to day lives, if you can.
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C
So medium duty is kind of a grab bag. It's a lot of stuff that you see everywhere but you probably don't think about that much. It's easier to define it as what it isn't. So medium duty is everything other than passenger cars and long haul trucks. And in that everything you've got delivery trucks, emergency vehicles, work trucks, ambulances, aerial work platforms, school buses, lots and lots of vehicles.
- [06:36]
A
I love the kind of category of medium duty vehicles as like everything else. It's almost like half the cars in like a kid's book, half the vehicles in the kids book and like all the working vehicles, like almost anything. A Richard like 80% in the kids book of. Yeah, yes, exactly. Like if a, if a badge or a pig is driving it in a Richard Scary book, it's probably a medium duty vehicle.
- [07:00]
C
You know, that's a great categorization.
- [07:05]
A
And can you just tell us how the sector works even without electrification? How does a medium duty truck maker sell its cars and make its cars and just like how does that sector work? And then I want to talk about like why that fits into electrification or not.
- [07:21]
C
Yeah. So the answer to that question right off the bat is complicated. And that's part of why there's so little EVs in this segment. So when you see a medium duty vehicle on the road, you're seeing a product that came from at least two manufacturers, if not three. So when you see like a utility truck from your local electric utility, that's probably a medium duty vehicle. And that is going to be a chassis from one company, either Ford or Freightliner. It's going to be a body from a second company, probably Morgan Olson. And then it's going to be a bunch of more complex customer specific upfit from a third company, which is probably ldv. And all of that stuff goes into making that finished product for that customer. And that customer overwhelmingly feels very strongly that that is the right way to do it. The best example I have of of how weird and complicated and like customer specific that gets is UPS and FedEx. Right? You see a lot of FedEx and UPS trucks go by you every day. Those are mostly medium duty. For UPS they're all medium duty. And for FedEx they have some light duty vehicles mixed in. But just looking at the ones that are the same, the step vans for UPS and FedEx, you've got basically the same vehicle doing the same thing at the same time of day with the same cost structure, right? It's not that much cheaper to ship a package with one or the other. And yet those vehicles are completely different. The ups trucks are 4 inches narrower than the FedEx trucks. The whole width of the vehicle is narrower. And UPS will tell you that they will hit less parked cars that way. They'll clip less mirrors, they'll hit less stuff that's like width driven. And FedEx would tell you that's wrong because the narrower vehicle is thus longer to hold the same amount of cargo. And FedEx would tell you that that longer vehicle is going to hit more vehicles more dramatically when they go around corners because it's got longer rear overhang. And so like they're both doing the same thing. And both of them would accept the alternative vehicle width, like over your dead body. Their answer is correct. They are not interested in discussion. And like they're not crazy for thinking that. They have tons of data that says that they are correct. And like maybe they're both correct. But again, that's not really the point. The point is that you're customizing the width of the entire vehicle here. That's a crazy level of customization that you cannot do in any other vehicle segment. And that's intrinsic to how medium duty vehicles operate. Customers have very, very specific expectations.
- [10:14]
B
So Is this a segment that electrification makes, would you say more sense or less sense than light duty vehicles that we might be more familiar with or what's your take there?
- [10:23]
C
I would say electrification and medium duty makes so much sense, I am continuously amazed that we are electrifying anything else when there are still combustion medium duty vehicles left. We've just recently entered the market and so we obviously come with expectations of changing that dramatically. But you know, pre harbinger, the number of medium duty EVs sold is just vanishingly small. CARB and CalStart have some good trackers on electric trucks and the number of electric trucks that have been sold basically in history in the entire United States is tiny. It's sub 10,000 units.
- [11:03]
B
Wow.
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A
Yeah.
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C
So electrification, on the good side you save a lot of money on operating costs and on the bad side, you really need to know what you're going to do with the vehicle to make it a slam dunk. And when we look at medium duty, it fits great into both of those things. A typical medium duty vehicle is operating on a fixed route, it's depot based, it returns to the same location every night, and probably most importantly, it's a single shift vehicle. And so when you think about each of those things, you're sort of hitting on an item that would be a pain point in electrification if that wasn't true.
- [11:45]
B
So single shift, you mean it's just one eight hour work shift rather than a long haul trucker that's going to be going, you know, cross country.
- [11:53]
C
Right. When you run through each of those things, fixed routes means you know how much range you need, which means you can buy the right size battery pack. Those routes tend to be short because they're delivery routes. So the right size battery pack tends to be small. The fact that you're depot based means you're going back to the same place every night and you can charge there. The fact that your single shift usage means that you can charge in that location very slowly. So all of those things when you put them together means that a medium duty vehicle is going to be easier than almost anything else to electrify because you have behind the fence charging in the same place every night using low cost level 2 chargers for a vehicle with short range and thus a relatively small battery pack.
- [12:39]
B
What kind of range is typical for these kinds of delivery vehicles?
- [12:43]
C
US nationwide has an average of about 65 miles in this segment per day.
- [12:49]
B
So 100 mile range or less is totally adequate.
- [12:51]
C
Yeah, and I usually look at it with customers as like, let's Just double that and say you're going to do 60 miles a day. Let's say that you should have 130 miles. That way you can run two days back to back in case someone forgets to plug it in.
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A
We're going to get into US Manufacturing in a little bit. But is this a predominantly North American industry? Are all those different companies, those three different companies, or a handful of companies, are they all located in North America and producing mostly for a North American audience?
- [13:19]
C
Yeah. The way medium duty vehicles work in North America is pretty unique. That very split market structure is very specific to the U.S. those delivery vehicles in particular are built on stripped chassis, which is sort of like a truck that you rip the top off, you just have the chassis under it. That's a product that is only used in a few markets around the world. So the US India and certain markets in Latin America. Outside of the US there's a lot less customization. So if you look at medium duty vehicles in Europe, it would be more common to get the cab chassis and the box all built at the same oem. And then it starts to feel more like long haul trucking, where you just like, this is what they're making and that's what you're buying. This level of bespoke vehicles within medium duty, that is very US specific.
- [14:10]
B
And has that been the principal barrier so far to electrification? Like it makes financial sense, but because every vehicle is sort of low volume and bespoke, it makes it a bit harder to enter this segment and see how you can reach scale.
- [14:22]
C
No, it's an overall segment size issue. Rob, you were talking about total number of vehicles in this segment. So there's about 300 million vehicles registered in the U.S. there are about 20 million medium duty vehicles, but the annual market is even more smaller than that suggests. So there's 11 or 12 million light duty vehicles a year sold in the US and there's about 250,000 medium duty vehicles and 250,000 heavy duty vehicles. But those heavy duty vehicles are not customized to nearly the same extent and they're three to four times more expensive. So that market is much juicier.
- [15:02]
B
Yeah. So the dollar volume is. Yeah, much larger.
- [15:05]
C
Exactly. So if you're a big oem, this market isn't compelling in particular, because if you're a big oem, you're overwhelmingly focused on either light duty vehicles, which basically means pickup trucks, or long haul trucks. So you've got like 80, 90% of your of your company revenue concentrated in one thing that doesn't Have a lot of mix. And you look at medium duty and if you're looking at it from the passenger car segment, you're like, well, this is a complete routing error. Why would I do that? And if you're looking at it from the heavy duty segment, you're thinking, that looks like kind of a pain in the ass because it's really customized. And the vehicles are also way less expensive. So again, why would I do that?
- [15:49]
A
So you have upfitters, you have chassis makers. How does Harbinger fit in?
- [15:52]
C
So Harbinger is a chassis maker. We build the vehicle part of the vehicle. So you have a ladder, frame, truck chassis. You've got the axles, you've got the motor, the battery, you've got all of the classic like bits of a car that you will find in a children's book other than the seats, the windows, the doors. So we're making this flat thing that a lot of people probably look at and they'd say, like, I could build cool stuff on that. And we get a lot of people coming in that are like, I'm going to build this weird custom thing because I've got this, you've got this platform I can build it on. So we build that and we build everything inside of it. We don't do any upfitting, so we don't build the box at all. But the magic of what we do is because we only build vehicles in medium duty, we can spend 100% of our effort on that, 100% of our bandwidth building medium duty specific technology. So within the chassis, we build the motor, we build the transmission, we build the axles, we build the battery, we build all the software, we build the low voltage distribution, high voltage distribution. But because we only build medium duty items, when we build the electric motor, we build a medium duty specific electric motor, which you might initially say, like what it, what does that mean? But the way that we actually wind the motor, which is something we do in house here in California, our copper winding pattern is uniquely designed for vehicles that have a particularly broad range of operating speeds. So if you think about passenger cars and long haul trucks, the design of those vehicles is to focus on delivering really good fuel economy when you're actually using the vehicle, which is usually at higher speeds. And so if you think about a chart of vehicle speed versus energy consumption, you can get what's called an efficiency map. And you have an island of efficiency where within this big chart, this certain area is where the vehicle is most efficient. So in medium duty vehicles, you want that Chart to look very different because the vehicle spends a lot of time in neighborhood speed. It spends its time with very widely varying payloads because the vehicle goes out full, it comes back empty. So all of that means that the way we wind our motors yields a larger island of efficiency because the vehicle is used in a wider variety of ways, which if you're not focused on medium duty vehicles, you wouldn't care about that or even take the time to think about it.
- [18:22]
A
That's so interesting and I think gets it some of the specificity of this sector. What are other ways that the Harbinger platform is kind of specially designed for medium duty? I was noticing that your batteries are modular and designed to work at high voltage. Can you talk a little bit about that?
- [18:39]
C
Yeah, the modularity really ties back to the fixed routes and the fact that operators in this segment, they tend to do something very specific and they know everything there is to know about that very specific thing. So when you buy a passenger car, when you buy an ev, you get like the big battery or the small battery. Typically, maybe you don't even get that, you just get the battery that it comes with. For medium duty operators, they typically know, hey, we're going to use these vehicles on these routes and these other vehicles are going to put on these longer routes and they sort of have a more detailed understanding of their own use cases. And that means that we want to be able to customize the battery pack for them a lot. So they can say we want a vehicle with 90 miles of range or 120 miles of range or 150 miles of range, because the closer we match how they're going to use that vehicle, the cheaper the vehicle costs, which means the faster they get to deliver a big operating cost savings by switching to an ev. And so we make unusually small battery packs as far as EVs go. Each of our battery packs is only 35 kilowatt hours and we typically will put four on the vehicle, but for some people we put five, for some people we put six.
- [19:52]
B
Then the whole, like, the whole economics of this, right, is, is a little bit more upfront cost to save a lot on fuel and maintenance, right?
- [20:00]
C
So the, the, the classic pitch in electric trucking is, you know, your Diesel truck is $100,000 and your electric truck is, don't worry about it, you're going to save a ton of money in 10 years more, right? And usually that, you know, don't worry about it number is like 300 or $400,000. And it's crazy because Then why buy the electric truck to begin with? We sell electric trucks at the same price as diesel trucks.
- [20:29]
A
What is that price for the complete vehicles?
- [20:33]
C
And again, there's massive amounts of customization here. But 120 to $150,000, that's including the.
- [20:41]
B
Outfitting or that's just including the outfit?
- [20:43]
C
Yes. No, that's including the outfit. And the outfit varies a lot as well. I would say. Most upfits that we work with are about $40,000. But if you're a high volume buyer, you could probably get as low as 30. And if you're looking at a utility truck or a snap on truck, you know, something that's really like heavily upfit, you could easily spend 100,000 on the.
- [21:04]
B
Outfit and then cost me the same to buy it. How much am I going to save on fueling and maintenance? In a typical location in the US.
- [21:11]
C
You'Re going to save about $12,000 a year.
- [21:15]
B
That sounds good. I like that. How does that compare to the typical annual fuel use of a vehicle? Is that like a 30% savings? 50% savings? What's the kind of typical volume we're talking about?
- [21:25]
C
It's about 50%. So if you look at kind of national average fuel prices and national average electricity prices with a medium duty vehicle, you're probably spending about $24,000 a year on fuel maintenance, all of your operating costs for the most part. The rest of your operating costs don't change. Right. Insurance, permits, tires, like all of that stuff, you are still going to buy and you're going to buy it at about the same rate.
- [21:56]
B
Is there a major maintenance advantage here too? I mean that's always been one of the selling points for EVs. Like I've 37,000 miles into my car and we've done nothing but rotate the tires, you know. So is it similar kind of advantage there? Because I imagine like beyond the cost of repair, like downtime, having your vehicles in the shop is also a major indirect cost for fleet managers because you have to have redundancy in your fleet to cover that.
- [22:20]
C
So there's a big cost savings opportunity in the maintenance. We think that that doesn't translate into as much savings as you see in many segments. Partly that's because we're being conservative. We believe customers will save about 25% on maintenance. Most of our competitors would tell you it's 50 or 60%. The reason that we don't think it's that high is because commercial vehicles are really over maintained. Probably fix something in a Corolla when the vehicle will not get you there safely, like you, you probably change the oil every 15,000 miles, hopefully, if you remember. Yeah, but like you're not doing much beyond that. For a typical consumer in a commercial vehicle, like you said, the downtime is really expensive. And if you get in some kind of accident and it turns out that there was a maintenance issue, you end up with a lot of liability. So commercial vehicles, a huge amount of.
- [23:17]
B
The maintenance, they do preventative maintenance and.
- [23:19]
C
It'S just inspecting things. It's like, let's check the brakes every month, let's measure the pad thickness, let's check that none of the lines are chafing, let's check the brake lines for corrosion. So there's, there's a bunch of stuff you're not going to do anymore. There's no engine oil to change, there's no spark plugs to be replaced. And we think that obvious stuff you don't do that's very engine specific is about 25% of the maintenance and everything else people aren't just going to keep doing even if they don't need to, because they're doing it very preventatively.
- [23:50]
A
Medium duty vehicles, delivery vehicles, as you were saying, they're very over maintained. They also work for a long time. You see vehicles on the road that are in great condition but are clearly 15, 20 years old. How does producing an EV chassis that has to compete with such a long lived asset work? There just aren't that many 20 year old EVs on the road. So how do you make sure your asset's going to work until the 2000-40s?
- [24:15]
C
So I think holistically you've got to decide that right from day one. It's a how long is good enough because it ends up rolling down to a lot of small detailed changes that if you didn't start with that, end up being really painful. You said 20 years and that is the right number. These vehicles are expected to have a 20 year service life. Most operators will be in one of two camps. Either they'll use the vehicle the whole 20 years and then it's like until it gets scrapped or fleets will use it for 10 years and then they expect it to have some residual value and they sell it to someone else who uses it for 10 plus years. So our service life for our vehicle designs is 20 years, 450,000 miles. And in every place of the vehicle that shows up in different detailed changes. So in the battery system, for example, we cool our batteries a lot more than you would in A passenger car, we look for a much smaller delta table between the hottest cell in the vehicle and the coldest cell in the vehicle. In a passenger car, your maximum temperature difference is probably 8 to 10 degrees Celsius. And for us, it's less than 2 degrees Celsius. Because the hottest cells age the fastest. When those cells are worn out, the whole pack is kind of worn out. So we end up with a lot of cooling. We cool the cells more aggressively. We have a different architecture. We use a multi zone heat pumping to try to make it less expensive to cool them that aggressively. But like the whole thermal management approach that we take is more aggressive than you would with a shorter life vehicle in the battery structure. Again, very different approach. If you look at most EVs, they're at the end of life, which today basically just means Model S's. For a long time, people assume that all those Model S's would need lots of battery replacements. It turned out that that's really not true. Model S's are sitting out there with like 10, 12 years of battery life.
- [26:15]
B
300,000 miles range, things like that.
- [26:17]
C
Yeah, the ones that are having replacements are not because of the actual cells. It's because the battery packs are corroding through and having a water ingress issue. You have to make sure the cells last as long as possible, but you also have to make something that is a waterproof box that stays waterproof under the vehicle in New Jersey for 20 years. So our whole battery enclosure design is different. We use gigacasting to make massive monolithic aluminum enclosures because they're more corrosion safe in the motor. We use different insulation materials on the wire because over that 20 year period, the insulation materials, if they're different, they'll sort of attack each other with different coefficients of thermal expansion. So there's, there's all these like really small technical choices that individually don't seem like that much. But to hit that life on the whole vehicle, you just have to make that a key requirement in how you design the vehicle from day one and stick to it.
- [27:17]
B
So I'm curious, just how do you learn all this stuff? Right? I mean, this is not an established sector where you know exactly how to make a medium EV or pioneering kind of new space. But you're talking about a lot of pretty subtle design decisions. How do you figure out what you need to do here and kind of what, where's, what experience is your firm drawing on people coming out of different sectors or you're just sort of starting with a blank sheet of paper and being like, well, this is what makes sense for this segment.
- [27:41]
C
You have to learn by failing at it. And the EV space has no shortage of failures to learn from. We're not the first to market. We're not a fast follower. People have been doing this for a long time, and our team here has been doing it for a long time. And it's given us lots of opportunities to learn how these failures appear, especially because most of these failures, they won't show up for five to 10 years. So my co founder, Phil, our CTO, he's been designing battery systems and powertrain systems for 25 years, going way back to Coda, doing battery systems there. He was at Quantumscape before, like, that was an exciting thing. So you have to do this and fail at it repeatedly and learn what all those failures are. Because if you, if you build a company and have to find the failures within the company, it takes so long to get to those failures, you're probably already screwed. So you really need to go in knowing where the potholes are.
- [28:41]
B
Where is Harbinger in its journey right now as a startup and into the market?
- [28:47]
C
So we are shipping products to customers, which is the exciting part. Harbinger is a little over four years old, and we spent almost four years testing and validating multiple generations of our product to make sure we were getting it right. That's unusual in trucking. Typically when people build a new truck, they build like two prototypes and they only change it 1% from the last truck they built. So they don't validate much. No one's really built a new truck company in a long time. So we took an approach that's it's more informed by the passenger car environment. So we build fairly large numbers of test vehicles and we test them more rigorously at much greater expense than people typically do in trucking. So last year, for example, we sent three of our trucks to New Zealand in summer to the south island, where they have a winter proving ground built up on a glacier. And that's like every passenger car company does this. This is the only proving ground in the world that that has this capability. And if you go there in June, you will see all the vehicles from big OEMs two years before release because they're all doing this rigorous testing so they can develop ABS and ESC and advanced control functions. No one's ever brought a big truck there before. Like, just no one's ever bothered.
- [30:10]
B
We have to talk about EREVS for a minute because I noticed that the Thor Industries platform that you're offering to them for building out Electric Recreation Vehicles, RVs. It comes as a plug in hybrid or an extended range EV where you have an electric generator on board to extend the range. Which obviously for an RV is going to make a lot more sense than a short range delivery vehicle. I've written for Heat Map and others about how I see the EREV market as a perfect solution for the very heavy large vehicles in the light duty segment, you know, full size SUVs, pickup trucks, et cetera. I'm kind of shocked that we haven't seen more of them in the market, but they seem like they're coming. They're a couple years out in the next sort of 20, 27, 2028 model year kind of releases. But curious. Tell me a little bit more about kind of that design and maybe explain how it works well for an RV kind of setting or maybe other applications that you have in mind in the delivery and medium 2D segment.
- [31:00]
C
You know, for an RV you need a lot of range, right? You need like 400 plus miles for a product that people are excited about. We can build a 400 mile range electric truck, but it's going to be a big battery, staggeringly expensive, right? And it's. All the payload is going to be the battery. It's not a very compelling vehicle.
- [31:19]
B
This is the problem with all the big, big pickup trucks, the F150 Lightning or the GMC Sierra or whatever. Like they have these enormous battery packs and so they cost $85,000 and up, right? It's just extremely expensive to build a pack that big.
- [31:31]
C
I mean, and that's true on a pickup. Think about how that works on a long haul truck. If you want 500 miles of range on a class A truck, the battery that delivers you that range is going to cost more and weigh more than the whole diesel truck. And I'm not exaggerating on either of those numbers. So a hybrid offers that, that great blend where we can build an electric vehicle with 100 to 150 miles of range and we've got that hybrid to push you out to that 500 miles of range and then that ends up working really well when you have these volatile use cases in an rv. If you own an rv, you're probably going to get in it and drive for like 10 hours and go three or 400 miles and then you're going to drive zero to 50 miles a day for two weeks, right?
- [32:19]
B
Once you get there and you're going to be at a place with a 220 volt plug in, you know, hookup for your RV at the RV park so you can recharge when you get there.
- [32:27]
C
Exactly. You plug in and you know, RV parks are great. People oftentimes are like, oh, charging infrastructure for RVs, it seems like it'll be terrible, but no, you just plug in. It's all there.
- [32:38]
B
Yeah, they all already have hookups.
- [32:39]
C
So for commercial customers, I think the volatility there is the compelling part for the hybrid for what we're doing right now with delivery trucks. Customers for us are excited about the hybrid because it gives them security for range anxiety and it also helps them if their chargers aren't ready. Because you can just run the hybrid while you're parked and charge the vehicle.
- [33:00]
A
Right.
- [33:01]
C
So if you don't have enough chargers, that can help you go from needing to charge the vehicle every day to every three or four days. You can electrify a larger portion of your fleet on a smaller number of chargers. As we move into our next product, which will be a cab chassis, I think the hybrid will end up being very popular. It'll probably be close to 100% of our product mix for that product. Because with box trucks and most cab chassis applications, your range is a lot more volatile. You're not running fixed delivery routes, you're more likely to be running multiple shifts, you're more likely to be addressing ad hoc delivery runs.
- [33:38]
B
Yeah. What's an example of a business or.
- [33:40]
C
Use case like that oversized delivery? So if you order a piece of furniture or television, it's going to show up at your house in a small box truck, probably a 20 foot box truck, and that truck is going to basically go to the warehouse, it's going to put stuff in it for like four customer orders. And then they're going to drive to those customer houses and they're going to be done for the day. And they might do 50 miles and they might do 300 miles because it's a smaller number of delivery items and it's just like, who ordered this stuff today? It's really hard to predict how far apart are they? Yeah, exactly.
- [34:16]
B
That's really interesting.
- [34:17]
C
And if you try to do that on an electric use case, you're going to end up back at a battery that's much larger than you need that you're then only going to use 10% of the time. It ends up becoming more like a pascar use case, which honestly is not that great for electrification. When you buy an EV for your own use, you're probably buying an EV with a 350 mile range, you're probably driving at 20 miles a day.
- [34:42]
A
What is it like building a final assembly plan, a US Factory at this moment?
- [34:50]
C
I would say lots of people talk about how excited they are about US manufacturing, but that's very different than putting their money where their mouth is. Building a final assembly line like we have our team here is really good that they made it feel not that hard. The challenge is the whole supply chain. If we look at what we build here in house at Harbinger, we have a final assembly line where we bolt parts together and make chassis. We also have two subcomponent assembly lines where we take copper and make motors and where we take cells and make batteries. And all three of those lines work pretty well. We're pumping out chassis and they roll out the door and we sell them to people, which is great. But it's all the stuff that goes into those that's the most challenging. There's a lot of trade policy at certain hours of the day, on certain days of the week, depending on when we check, that is theoretically supposed to encourage US Manufacturing, but it's really not because of the volatility. It costs us an enormous amount to build the supply chain to feed these lines. And when we have volatile trade policy, our reaction and everyone else's reaction is to just pause. It's not to spend more money on US Manufacturing because we were already doing that. We were spending a lot on US Manufacturing as part of our core approach to manufacturing. The latest trade policy has caused us to spend less money on US Manufacturing, not more. Because we're unclear on what is the demand environment going to be. What is the policy going to be next week? Like we were getting ready to make major investments to take certain manufacturing tasks in our supply chain out of China and move them to Mexico, for example. Now we're not. We were getting ready to invest in certain kinds of automation to do things in house, and now we're waiting. So the volatility is dramatically shrinking investment in US Manufacturing, including ours.
- [36:58]
A
And can you just explain why did you make that decision to pause and how does trade policy affect that decision?
- [37:05]
C
When we had 25% tariffs on China, if we take content out of China and move it to Mexico, we break even if that we might still end up underwater. And that's because there's better automation in China. There's much higher labor productivity and this one is always shocking to people. There's lower logistics costs when we move stuff from Shenzhen to our factory. In many cases it Costs us less than moving shipments from Monterrey because there's a huge pipeline of material.
- [37:36]
A
Can I just ask, what process were you looking at moving from China to, to Mexico? If you don't mind sharing a lot.
- [37:42]
C
Of our heavier metal forming processes around stamping and casting. And so now, you know, if there's a 25% tariff on China and a 25% tariff on Mexico, we're not going to move anything to Mexico. It's going to cost us significantly more money. So the relative value of those tariffs is really important. No one has any idea what the relative value is going to be. Most people couldn't even tell you what the relative value is today because it changes every five minutes and people at CBP aren't sure which tweet they should implement. So we're just not going to make investments in that environment, in moving that part of the supply chain. And then when we look at making investments in the U.S. you know, we have to look at allocation of total dollars. Now we're spending more dollars on tariffs. So we have, which is a tax, right, that we pay to the US Government. Some people disagree, but that's what happens. Our money goes to the government. Like now we're spending those dollars on taxes instead of spending those dollars on hiring people, investing in, you know, our own suppliers in the US buying more capex. We have to make allocation decisions on those dollars. And when taxes go up by a lot, which is what the tariffs are, we have less dollars to make investments into things that will instead yield job creation. So all of this is a balancing act.
- [39:15]
A
If there was one policy, it could be a decarbonization policy, it could be an economic policy that could happen tomorrow that would be best for your business. What would it be? I guess there's a fictional world here where like Congress says all medium duty trucks have to be electric. I assume that would be amazing for your business. But like what's the likely policy that could happen tomorrow? Is it the Fed cuts? Is it, you know, some of these EPA regulations stay on the books. What is it?
- [39:43]
C
I mean, it would just be to stop changing the policies we have. The policies we have are fine. We don't need new tax credits or new incentives. We could even get by with less of certain of those things. We just need the same policies for more than five minutes.
- [39:59]
B
This is the thing you consistently hear from business. It's just give us some rules and let us do our jobs.
- [40:06]
A
Right, Right.
- [40:07]
C
I guess my point is the policies don't need to be that great. They just need to be policies. We just have to have laws in the United States and we'll be fine. Because within EVs, like EVs win out over time. In any kind of stable environment, people shift to EVs because they're more pleasant. Like drivers prefer them, companies prefer them. They want to save money on operations. So it's not like we need crazy stuff to get to EVs. You just have to stick with the policy and keep it the same way. I know you won't. Your listeners won't get this because this is a podcast, but I'm going to show you one graph. It's going to make your head explode. So look at.
- [40:51]
A
We're going to stick this in the show notes everyone, so you can see it.
- [40:54]
C
This is commercial vehicle adoption. Commercial EV adoption in the us, China and the eu. This line that you can't tell the difference of that and the axis, that's the us.
- [41:07]
B
There's a flat line basically stalling at the bottom of this chart while China and the EU take off at a nice heavy, heavy, heavy clip.
- [41:16]
C
Like, we know that China's going to adopt new technology faster. That is the state of the world in 2025. But man, the EU is leaving us behind on new technology. That seems really sad. So this is like, this is how much of an opportunity There is for EVs to move onto the streets in the US if we could just pick a policy and stick with it for a minute.
- [41:40]
A
When customers come to you and they adopt EVs, they adopt your chassis. Why are they doing it? Are they saying, we're doing this for a policy reason, we're doing this because of tailpipe standards? Or are they saying they're doing it for cost? What's their thinking?
- [41:53]
C
Cost savings, overwhelmingly. And these businesses are facing rising costs everywhere else. Labor cost growth is really massive in blue collar professions right now. UPS drivers are paid something like $150,000 a year. Yeah. They need to find places to save money. And if you look at all the costs involved in a delivery business, number one is the driver's pay. And that's just going to be what it is. Number two is fuel. Number three is everything else. This is at the very top of the stack of controllable costs. And these businesses are trying to shrink costs because they know they're in an increasingly competitive environment. They're competing for customers, so they have to offer their service or their good at sort of the price they offer it for today. And they're competing for labor, so they have to keep offering More pay to make it a compelling place to work. They don't have more money to spend on any of that. So they need to find places to save money and basically reallocate those dollars from fuel to more driver pay or better products.
- [43:08]
A
If everything goes right, how quickly do you think the medium duty sector could transition to predominantly electric vehicles and what policy would help that, if any? Maybe you don't need, maybe you just want policy to stick where they are. How soon could it happen?
- [43:22]
C
It's going to take 20 years because the vehicles have a 20 year life. The vehicles are too valuable to replace early and I think the market is going to be supply constrained for a long, long time. Right now there aren't a lot of electric trucks available right now. I think the market is still demand constrained, but as the policies stabilize, hopefully we're going to move very quickly into being supply constrained because the truck market as a whole is supply constrained. So this isn't unique to EVs. Like over the last few years, if you wanted to buy a diesel truck, in many cases you are looking at a 6 to 12 month lead time. So supply has been very tight in truck manufacturing for the last six or seven years. There's very little capacity to make electric trucks in North America. And so I would say absent incredibly supportive federal policy, there won't be enough production capacity in the US to meet the market need on anything shorter than a 20 year horizon.
- [44:31]
B
How many vehicles can you currently produce per year and what's your sort of ramping plan to serve the new vehicle market?
- [44:38]
C
At the Moment we're producing 2,000 a year, so we can basically double that every six months. If you look at big passenger car companies, especially the US Big three, you know they're dealing with a new crisis every day, right? The trade policy, the labor costs, competition from people like Tesla, their house being on fire is just their normal state of being at this point. They don't have time to sell vehicles into small segments like this. If you're Ford selling 5 million vehicles a year, it's just not worth your time to sell into this market of 2 or 300,000 vehicles at all. And so they're not electrifying and they're sunsetting legacy combustion products.
- [45:26]
B
How much of this is driven by tailpipe regulations and emission standards from California or the federal government or others?
- [45:33]
C
I would say that contributes to it, but it's not the major driver. The broader economic cycle I think is a bigger driver and the sort of cost of bureaucracy. As you get to ever larger companies, the Cost to build new products goes up. So if you want to introduce a new product today at a Ford or a GM or even Tesla, it's a $10 billion cost for a new platform. Tesla is not like small company anymore. And even when Tesla was a small company, the Model s was a $6 billion effort. The Model 3 was at least double that. As they get bigger, those costs go up, and so it becomes less and less compelling for them to build new platforms for smaller segments.
- [46:20]
A
In your view, in this sector, is what eventually drives adoption to 100% going to be climate policies? And is that what's driving adoption in the EU and China, or is it going to be just inexorable cost declines that eventually make it uneconomic to run anything else but EVs? But those cost declines are going to take a long time to play out.
- [46:44]
C
It's cost declines. They're coming fairly quickly, but it's, it's more of a tipping point. We're, we're just getting to the point now where you can do what we're doing, where you can sell an EV at the same price as a combustion vehicle. But as soon as you really get through that tipping point, you see a massive acceleration. Because this isn't about climate policy, it's about cost of doing business. Like if you and I both run a laundry service in the same city, right, and we each have 10 trucks and we pick up uniforms from hotels and businesses and we launder them and bring them back and you switch to EVs and I don't, you're going to bankrupt me. Because your cost of doing business is going to be way lower than mine. So you're either going to cut your rates and drive me out of business, or you're not going to cut your rates and you're going to be way more profitable and you're probably then going to offer better service and hire all my drivers and you're going to actually show up on time, buy them out. Yeah, right. If you electrify and I don't, you're going to win the market. That's the piece that's driving electrification. There's policy levers that can kickstart it. Like in China, policy is being applied much more effectively, much more consistently, and the result is that 25% of new vehicles in China are electric. It might pass 50% this year. That happened in Northern Europe as well. But those policies only need to be applied for a few years and then they can be withdrawn. Because once the market hits critical mass, it's Just off and running.
- [48:21]
B
So let's talk about the role of the tax credits then in that context, the 45W commercial clean vehicle tax credit that might get chopped out of the tax code by the Republican budget bill. What role has that played in your company so far? And is that the kind of thing that you think is needed to get to that tipping point or are we already past that tipping point?
- [48:41]
C
If that's revoked, I think that that's helpful because it's helped us get to the tipping point faster. I think that that credit is really important for this year. It's still really helpful for next year. It's probably irrelevant in four years. So I would say keep the credit, but to qualify for it should get progressively harder. Like there should be a lot of domestic content rules and there should be affordability rules because when you have credits that are too generous, that are too large, they have a reverse effect. They disincentivize innovation and cost cutting. And that's what we've seen with some of the bigger subsidies. In trucking there have been these huge hundred thousand dollar plus subsidies and the result is that the bigger OEMs have rolled out these, these electric class A trucks that are $500,000. And when you roll it in new technology, it should get cheaper every year. It's how technology works because we get better at it every year. We learn more about how to make it, how to manufacture it, how to roll it out. We haven't seen that in trucks. Electric trucks have gotten more expensive in the last five years because there's no market force pushing them to make them cheaper. So these incentives should shrink over time. Despite improvements in battery costs, they're not getting cheaper. So a good incentive program should have decreasing payouts over a period of time and it should have increasing qualification requirements.
- [50:08]
A
We're going to have to leave it there. This was great. John, thank you so much for joining us. No problem.
- [50:12]
C
It's great to be on the show.
- [50:18]
A
Jesse. I love that conversation with John. I feel like we really. It's such a distinctive market segment. So many of the stories that you hear in energy are like the same. Renewables, power generation are the same. That was not the set of same stories we hear.
- [50:33]
B
And no, I learned a lot.
- [50:35]
A
Yeah, exactly.
- [50:37]
B
Lot of things we don't think about much in our day to day lives. Right. That all these niche fleet managers and everywhere else are dealing with on a day to day basis. And they seem like they've been very thoughtful about trying to develop platforms that can solve those pinch points and Pain points.
- [50:49]
A
Do you know what I recently did, Jesse? This weekend I took my first EV road trip.
- [50:54]
B
Oh yeah? Where'd you go?
- [50:55]
A
I drove from the Jersey Shore down to Washington D.C. and then to. To the Eastern Shore of Maryland for a wedding. And then I drove back to Central New Jersey. I got a sense of what it's like to EV road trip for the first time.
- [51:07]
B
Yeah, what, what kind of vehicle were you in?
- [51:09]
A
Ioniq 5. Okay. And then we really only stopped at Electrify America.
- [51:15]
B
One of my graduate students just road tripped from coast to coast in his.
- [51:19]
A
Wow.
- [51:20]
B
His Chevy Equinox EV and had no issues at all. They said that the Tesla network, which they predominantly used, was completely adequate and they managed to get it all the way to Montana in just, I think three days. And then they stuck around there for a while and then continued on to the Pacific Northwest. It's a different era now.
- [51:38]
A
I'd be curious about two things. I mean, the first is, this is not an original comment, but you realize how crucial it is that Tesla continue to open up its network because we would be just waiting for one of four Electrify America fast chargers looking across the Wawa parking lot at a bank at the 12 totally unused Tesla superchargers. That's like, man, we could be increasing their capacity factor right now, but like we literally are not allowed onto the network yet. But the second thing is just how, you know, in an era where Elon has been such a complicated political actor, I was like, wow, you know, that, that proprietary experience, they did in fact make it better. It's a shame about the full self driving that isn't self driving at all, and many other failures of the cars, but man, they really nailed the proprietary experience.
- [52:25]
B
They nailed the charging experience, that's for sure.
- [52:26]
A
Yeah, exactly, exactly. I, I would want to know from future EV road trippers, what is the number you put in your head as, okay, you have to charge? Is it 50? You know, is it 30? Is it. What is that number where you're like, I have to go get to the next. You know, I'm not going to let myself get below this number on a road trip out of rage anxiety, because I think this is my first time. So it was a hundred. But I'm willing to believe that as I kept going and oh, wow, that's way too, it's way too high. I know it's way too high, but I'm willing.
- [52:55]
B
That's way, way, way too generous.
- [52:56]
A
I know.
- [52:56]
B
Yeah, we, we've rolled into quite a few. Maybe not on purpose. This is the pre Tesla era where like you go to the one Electrify America station and like two of the four bays are broken and well, that's the thing the way, you know, and so you drive on to the next one. We've ended up at a couple like on, you know, three mile range. We also did notice that, you know, just like a gasoline vehicle, at least in our Mustang Mach E, you can go to zero and it doesn't immediately stop. There is a bit of a reserve there, but we tested that to its limit a couple times. But yeah, for me it's like 30 to 50 miles and then you're looking for the next Charger because they tend to be about that far apart, at least in the Northeast.
- [53:37]
A
You know, every week here on Shift Key, as you are well aware, Jesse and I do a little segment we call up Shift downshift where we take one item of climate news from the week. And if it's making us feel more upbeat about the energy transition, it's an upshift. If it's making us feel more downbeat about the energy transition, you better believe it's a downshift. There's been lots and lots of downshifts lately. Jesse, I heard you might be changing it up for us. What do you have?
- [54:01]
B
Well, I've got an upshift for us this week after a long string of downshifts. And that is coming out of a report from the International Energy Agency on the outlook for global oil consumption in 2024. And what they show is a substantial deceleration in the growth of global oil demand. In fact, in 2024, growth in demand for oil for road transportation, picking up on the theme of our most recent episode here, has been completely eliminated. So no increase in demand for oil use, for gasoline, diesel, road transportation, and that's across all segments. The only drivers globally, right? The only drivers of growth in global oil demand in 2024 came out of the aviation and shipping sectors. I imagine that's mostly aviation and chemical feedstocks. So producing plastics, chemicals and other non fuel products. And this is substantial decline. It's about a 1 million per day. It's just shy of actually 0.8 million barrels per day increase in global demand. But that's down from about 1.8 million barrels of growth in 2023. So we dropped about a million barrels per day. And that trend has been sustained since 2021 when we had a big surge post pandemic in increased road transportation consumption. That post pandemic surge is now over. And at least in the rich world, the developed countries, the US and Europe and elsewhere, demand for road transportation and oil overall is still well below 2019 levels. Despite that several years of kind of rebounding demand after the pandemic. So if this trend continues and we shave off, say another million barrels per day of growth in 2025, that would actually push global oil demand negative for the year. So we would actually see a decline in global consumption or at least a plateau in total consumption of oil writ large. And if this trend again continues for multiple years, what that would do is basically push us into structural decline in global oil demand. So this is, you know, one of those tipping points, right. To keep a close eye on. All the world's major economies at this point are basically contributing to this trend, particularly the decline in demand in road transportation. You know, the US that's largely improvements in fuel economy and a bit of EVs. But Europe and China, it's largely electrification which is driving that trend. And that is going to become a decreasing source of consumption globally, it looks like. And so the question basically is how long will it take for declining consumption in road transportation to offset any continued growth in aviation and petrochemical feedstocks? And that might be coming very soon.
- [56:26]
A
That's good news. I mean, I feel like very good news. We don't know what happens next. Like, what could happen next is like plastics sop up all that extra demand. Right. Like from oil production. But like, it's still, wow, this has been so often made. But it does feel like when you hear news like that, that we're looking at a world where peak oil is on the demand side and not on the supply side as we thought it would be.
- [56:51]
B
Exactly.
- [56:52]
A
Right.
- [56:52]
B
Yeah. It's remarkable. Yeah. That we're not running out of oil, we're running out of demand for oil because of demand destruction from electrification and efficiency improvements. That's what an energy transition looks like.
- [57:02]
A
Right.
- [57:02]
B
In fact, as a share of global energy consumption, oil's share is now down below 30% for the first time ever. That it peaked 50 years ago at almost half, at 46% of global consumption. So, you know, this is one of those things where again, like total consumption has to fall before we think of it really as a transition, not just addition of new sources. But oil is not the number one fuel anymore. It's declining. And we're starting to see electrification on a sustained basis destroy demand for oil in the motor vehicle sector.
- [57:32]
A
If you think about all the language we use to talk about energy or so much of the language we use to talk about energy is actually based around this idea of fixed oil supply. Right. What made wind and solar attractive at the beginning of their technological life was that they were renewable, and that's what we call them because oil and coal and natural gas were non renewable. And the assumption was that we were going to run out. And instead the renewability of renewables is not what has ultimately given them a decisive advantage in the energy industry. It's the manufacturability of renewables and their operating costs. Right.
- [58:04]
B
Yeah. And the fact that they're immune to the kind of global price shocks that you see in the oil and gas markets, including when a new shooting war erupts in the Middle east at, you know, random Thursdays. Yeah. So, you know, you don't see the price of wind farms skyrocket after these kinds of events. And of course, oil and gas are on a kind of global roller coaster in terms of price up and down. Rob, how about you? What do you got this week?
- [58:27]
A
I have a downshift. I have a big downshift.
- [58:30]
B
Well, we got to balance out here.
- [58:31]
A
I can't hide it, Jesse. I have a downshift. So one thing that my old colleague Derek Thompson talks about is how the Trump administration is distinctive because lots of things happen, but then lots of things unhappen. And that means it can be very difficult, very hard to keep a bead on what the current policy is. So I want to just update people on where policy stands they may not be following. I'm going to read now from a story by my colleague Jail Holtzman. Back on Trump's first day in office, Trump issued two executive orders threatening the wind energy industry. One halted solar and wind approval for 60 days, and another told all federal agencies to, quote, not issue new or renewed approvals, rights of ways, permits, leases, or loans for all wind projects until the completion of a new government review for the entire wind industry. Since then, as he map was among the first reported, I think as we were the first to report, the solar pause was lifted and the Bureau of Land Management has now approved a bunch of solar projects. And the Department of Energy has actually approved an offshore wind project as well. But for land based wind projects, onshore wind projects, there does still seem to be some kind of pause in effect. So specifically, the Fish and Wildlife Service, which has to approve projects that could affect endangered birds, and the US Army Corps of Engineers, which has to approve projects that could have a nexus with the federal wetlands or federal waters, seem to have basically stopped processing all wind project permit applications. Those pauses have not been lifted during the Trump administration. And we know this because of filings submitted to a federal court case last week alleging that at least three projects in New York state have been paused, as well as three wind projects in Arizona, all of which kind of cumulatively add up to billions of dollars of potential capital investments. And so the Trump administration, right, they have this incredibly fickle policy impetus and they announce things and the announcements get a ton of attention, but then the announcements slowly get lifted. And that's happened on solar. The federal government is permitting solar projects again, but it's still seemingly not permitted permitting wind, or some agencies still aren't permitting wind. And I just want to highlight this as a downshift because the industry feels like it's in a better place maybe than it was three months ago. And yet the government's still using these procedural roadblocks and still using its ability to approve these individual projects to block wind projects as a policy matter. And that's obviously really quite bad for the energy transition and it's bad for the US Emissions trajectory and it's bad for the industry.
- [61:10]
B
I have a hard time understanding how that's legal. Not that that has stopped the administration from issuing many a ultimately legal executive order. But the part of the reason we know about this is because lawsuits have been filed to try to overturn this decision. I mean, it just seems like the definition of arbitrary and capricious, which is the thing you're not allowed to do in administrative law, right? I mean, they have a statutory obligation to process permits and requests. You can reject those on substantive grounds. But simply sitting on them for any indeterminate amount of time, and not returning people's phone calls, that seems to be, you know, arbitrary, capricious, and not in keeping with their statutory obligations. So I hope that these lawsuits are the impetus for, you know, kicking them back into gear. I also wonder how much of this is just lack of staffing in the DOGE era. Maybe it's not a top down directive, it's just staffers being worried about doing anything that might get them on the wrong side of DOGE and the, you know, political appointees by approving a wind farm that the President turns out doesn't like. So they have purposely, as they've talked about, you know, created a sort of a climate of fear amongst civil servant employees. And that could also be one of the reasons why we're not seeing any movement in these agencies. It's just unclear exactly what the, what the justification is.
- [62:16]
A
Here.
- [62:16]
B
And so we don't really know why this is happening, but clearly not good for the industry, like you said. And one of those things I hope that we can see some progress on soon.
- [62:23]
A
Jesse, I couldn't put it any better myself, as you said, you know, we know about all of this because of filings and lawsuits that were provided to my colleague. But even if the lawsuit is ultimately resolved positively, it still adds all this cost development.
- [62:37]
B
Yeah, time delay, cost, risk.
- [62:39]
A
Yeah. I mean, it's funny because, like, what does the Trump administration talk about? They talk about how they want to reduce the cost of American investments. Right. They want to make it easier to invest in the United States. And then what do they do in practice?
- [62:49]
B
But only certain types of investments.
- [62:50]
A
Exactly.
- [62:51]
B
Yeah. Exactly.
- [62:52]
A
Well, thank you so much for listening. As always, Shift Key is a production of heatmap News. Our editors are Gillian Goodman and Nico Lauricella. Multimedia editing and audio engineering is by Jacob Lambert and by Nick Woodbury. Our music is by Adam Kramolow. See you next week.