This fireside chat recap is from FreightWaves’ Small Fleet & Owner-Operator Summit on Wednesday.
FIRESIDE CHAT TOPIC: New technology in an old truck.
DETAILS: FreightWaves’ Justin Martin sits down with Edison Motors’ Chace Barber to discuss how he’s revolutionizing the logging industry with his prototype 1962 Kenworth electric/diesel hybrid truck.
SPEAKERS: Barber is the co-founder and CEO of Alberta, Canada-based Edison Motors, owner of Solar Energy Logistics, and has more than 745,000 followers on TikTok. Martin is a content creator for Back the Truck Up at FreightWaves.
BIO: Barber is a truck driver with 14 years of experience. He started his own trucking company in Alberta using a 1969 Kenworth truck. Barber and his partner, Eric Little, also run Solar Energy Logistics, a solar equipment manufacturing, production and installation company.
KEY QUOTES FROM BARBER
“New trucks are being designed for mega-carriers. What they like to do is buy a new truck. They keep it for four years and then they get rid of it as soon as the warranty ends. They don’t really plan on having these parts available. The parts on these trucks are designed to work for four or five years, and they are so expensive to maintain that you have to go buy a new one.”
“We’re out to lunch now with these new trucks with small fleets and owner-operators. Besides being designed for mega-carriers, they don’t want the drivers to fix the parts. The new trucks are being designed so technicians can fix it nice and easy at the big dealerships. But that’s not what the small fleets and the owner-operators and the loggers need anymore. They need trucks that are simple, easy to fix. Mega-carriers don’t want their drivers to touch it. Small fleets are like, ‘Absolutely we want our drivers to fix as many things as we can so that that truck keeps going,’ because the competitive advantage of small fleets is that ability to adapt and overcome.”
“There’s no sense to TikTok. Do not try to make sense of it. It’s literally that you can post a video and it goes nowhere. You post another video and it takes off and there’s no rhyme or reason.”
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