Dee Davis (00:09.048)
Welcome to Management Under Construction podcast with Dee Davis and Brad Wyatt. We're here today to talk about EVs, electric vehicles. Brad's a big car guy, so we're gonna let Brad give us his history lesson.
Thank you, Dee. I am a deeply, deeply obsessed car guy. I'm gonna go into a bit of a slideshow presentation here that has some stuff I wanna talk about. So a lot of you will think of EVs as a recent innovation that we've only ever had electric vehicles recently, but this photo shows back in the 1890s, there were electric taxi cabs in New York. At the time, the...
manure from horses was becoming such an issue and the city was growing so rapidly that people were seeking an alternative to that. And one of the technologies that came out of the time was this idea of trying to use an electric vehicle. And you can see here some guys in some uniforms that were professionals that were trained to drive these things that kind of look like tuk tuks that you might see in Asia as far as the design of the vehicle itself. But they were viable. They were used. They were charged on New York's electric grid and
until refined petroleum became available and gasoline powered cars became much faster. These were an idea that people tried. But then we moved back to the 1990s to get to our next electric vehicle. This is a concept car that General Motors produced called the EV1. And it went from a concept car to a trial run vehicle. They leased a couple hundred of them to people around the country.
where they could charge them at their homes to see if people liked them and people loved them. They were shocked by the reception that people had with these cars. The people who really enjoyed them were just devoted and were so upset that they decided not to move forward with the car because GM figured it wasn't a viable machine for most drivers that they produced a movie called Who Killed the Electric Car about General Motors and why they decided not to move forward with this car. At the time, GM was looking at a bunch of different technologies like
Brad Wyant (02:19.032)
Hydrogen and hybrid and other things go ahead D. Were you about to say something?
got a question. There's a long standing conspiracy theory that the reason that electric cars were killed was because the oil companies basically bought out the idea to own it. Is that true?
I don't know for sure. I would have to go back and watch that documentary. But I know that a big part of the documentary and the people I've spoken to at General Motors who were there at the time all say, look, we just didn't think we could sell enough of them. If they ended up selling the idea to an oil company, it was probably because they figured that that would be the best way to monetize what they had done. If they thought they could have monetized it by selling it to people, they would have. They ended up using the technology that they innovated here to create something called the
Chevrolet Volt, which was a first of its kind unique hybrid vehicle that had a gasoline engine and a electric motor that were paired in series instead of parallel, which is the way the Toyota Prius works. Without going into engineering gobbledygook, it just meant that it was all things to all people in terms of a design. It could convert from using electricity to gasoline to regenerative braking to whatever it needed to do to be efficient, but
Nobody liked it. Nobody could understand what it was. The Prius, you just get in and push the pedal and it goes. And was a fine vehicle. With the Volt, GM wanted you to plug the car in so that you could use electric range. People were like, OK, but there's a gas tank. Why do I have electric range? A study they later did of the owners show that this first plug-in hybrid in 2009 was never plugged in. Over 70 % of owners, after they drove off the dealership lot.
Brad Wyant (04:05.55)
never had a charger installed in their home, never charged the car, they just used it like a hybrid. So there was a big miss on GM's part there in terms of understanding how people want to use vehicles, which we'll talk about later when we talk about our experience with charging. that brought us to 2012, three years later with the Model S, which was not just an electric car, it was a software defined vehicle where it had this 11 by 17 touchscreen. It had a 060 time of a
Italian sports car. It was exciting. It was dynamic. It looked futuristic. With that, Tesla made an electric vehicle to mean the future. They meant it to mean this special new thing, not just a more efficient way of getting around. So that's sort of the history of how we've gotten to where we are now. We're seeing proliferation. Now we're seeing greater government subsidization and all kinds of things that we're going to dive into here, a little bit of background.
That's great. Thank you so much. I've had my Prius for, gosh, I don't know. I think she's about 11 years old now. Still running strong. I love my hybrids. I've got a couple of different hybrid vehicles and I'm a big fan. They did very well with the Prius in particular.
I was a fabulous car. mean, they came up with that technology in the 90s when they realized they could do something even more efficient. That was what Toyota's selling point was here when they started selling in the 1960s. I drove my aunt's Prius. It's a fabulous car. It's quiet. It's super efficient. It's cheap to run. There's nothing, there's nothing not to like about it, except if you have a ego complex that you can't get over that you don't want to drive a Prius and that's a ridiculous way to
I've had lots of conversations with people over the years about my Prius, my darn little Prius. But I'll tell you, my Prius will kick the high knee of most vehicles coming up the mountain any day. All right. So what about what's going on with with federal subsidies and competition and stuff now?
Brad Wyant (06:05.038)
That's a very interesting question. The federal government back in the mid aughts, like 2005, six, seven, realized that electric vehicles were going to be an emerging technology and decided to subsidize the innovation companies were trying to bring to the electric vehicle market by granting Department of Energy loans at very, very low interest rates to companies like Tesla and Fisker and a few of the big OEMs to develop electric vehicle technology. Tesla was able to turn that into
incredible success with the Model S. Fisker, one of their biggest competitors, which you haven't heard of because they didn't end up doing anything with that technology.
Thank you, I was wondering about that.
Heinrich Fisker is the man who the car company is named after. designed cars like the Aston Martin that Daniel Craig drove in the James Bond movie. He another very cool sports cars, but he had this idea to start a car company. It just didn't work. He wanted to do a plug-in hybrid and nobody bought it. So once it came to market, once people were going to buy these cars, it wasn't enough for Tesla to have these Department of Energy loans.
They were so expensive that a little bit of subsidization was required to incentivize the public to buy them at a competitive price. And the government saw fit to introduce subsidies because they wanted to clean up the air. They wanted to do something environmentally sustainably. And there were a lot of politics around that, that everyone was rattling their sabers about saving the planet and reducing our emissions. My take on that is the brand new car puts out so few emissions that
Brad Wyant (07:41.29)
subsidizing to the tune of $10,000, $15,000, the way that some states and governments combined can, really isn't in the public interest because a two-stroke gasoline back-mounted leaf blower is doing more damage than somebody's F250 in terms of environmental harm, the emissions. So that's the take. But the subsidies have been working. People are buying more EVs. There's a little bit of a pullback.
I think that another reason that the subsidies are an interesting idea is because of the Chinese competition we're experiencing. The current state of the market is that Chinese EVs are so much cheaper than anything that can be purchased anywhere else. The European market is being flooded with these cheap Chinese vehicles because there's not as high of a tariff barrier there like we have here for Chinese vehicles. So the European Union is talking about increasing the tariffs that they have there to guard
the domestic auto manufacturers like Volkswagen and BMW who are being overwhelmed and subsidizing efforts in this country to develop electric vehicles and subsidizing the companies that are building them is a way of competing with those companies, much in the way that Airbus is subsidized by the European Union and Boeing is subsidized by the United States government so that those two companies can continue to compete. And free market economy ideas being what they are, we haven't lived in a free economy
for a long time. I'm a free market economist. I'm a proponent of that idea, but the reality is that you gotta fight fire with fire sometimes too.
Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that has been getting a lot of attention in the EV market is the Rivian. So what's different about that?
Brad Wyant (09:26.55)
The Rivian is a fascinating idea. Rivian was founded by RJ Scarrin, who was a former PhD holding engineer back in 2008. And he wanted to do something different than Tesla was doing. He wanted to go from this sports car, cool futuristic thing to an outdoor oriented vehicle. He wanted to produce a utility vehicle that people would use to get to the outdoors and feel good about driving because they're keeping the outdoors approachable and safe and clean by driving an electric vehicle instead of a...
gas powered one. They released the R1S and R1T, their truck and SUV in 2021 and huge public acclaim. They won the Motor Trend Truck of the Year award. They won the Motor Trend SUV of the Year award and they have had a lot of success in terms of the product. Where they haven't had as much success is the finances. The company opened to the biggest IPO since Alibaba when went public in 2021.
But the stock prices fall significantly from then because they just haven't been able to make the money. Now I've got a fun chart here that shows some interesting data on what's going on with that.
While he's pulling that up, can you tell that he is an MBA student?
Dee Davis (10:45.966)
That is one of my favorite people for having intellectual discussions about a variety of topics and we share a lot of interest in sustainability, anything around business sustainability and construction. So you guys are going to get a lot of different topics listening to this podcast over time. All right, EV credits. Interesting.
Yes, so this this I did this research for an accounting class project when I was comparing Tesla and Rivian. So Tesla went public in 2012. They started selling the Model S in 2013 and because of the. Market that California created with EV credits. Where they required companies to sell a certain number of electric vehicles in the state if they were going to do business there at all and.
Tesla was the only one making electric vehicles at the time. So for General Motors, Chrysler all had to buy EV credits from Tesla in lieu of selling their own electric vehicles, which they didn't offer. The revenue that Tesla generated from EV credits is graphed out here as a portion of their total revenue. So you can see for a long time, the revenue that Tesla was generating was between five and 10 % of their total revenue.
their total auto business revenue. The blue line represents what you factor in for their solar panels and batteries that they started selling to the public later on. But if you just look at them as a car company in the red line, there's a ton of money being made just on these EV credits. And then as Ford, Jim and Chrysler came out with their own electric vehicles later on, the Mach-E for Ford and the Silverado electric vehicle for General Motors, the value of those credits
diminishes greatly in the revenue that Tesla is able to generate from those credits diminishes accordingly because the market just wasn't there for them anymore. So California, who did their own work to prop up Tesla, created this market to help Tesla stay afloat, to stay profitable. And as EVs have emerged, Rivian started producing vehicles in 2021.
Brad Wyant (13:03.63)
all of sudden these EV credits that Tesla was able to make a lot of their money on are no longer available at 2 Rivian as a source of revenue. So they have not had as much financial financial success in large part because of that EV credit market drying up. That has been a huge problem they've been trying to overcome. They didn't have the long runway that Tesla did with the EV credits. So now as we approach the end of Q4 of 2024, it'll be very interesting to see whether Rivian was able to be profitable.
just making their vehicles for the first time or not. The Wall Street Journal did a great piece about how inefficient the manufacturing was, how overbuilt the vehicles were. Tesla had some of those same problems when they were a burgeoning company back in 2012, but they were able to cover those costs with that EV credit thing. And Rivian hasn't been able to do this thing.
Yeah, and that's a common thing with new technology and we'll get into hydrogen vehicles in a little bit. There's government subsidies to encourage new technology, but when that dries up, the technology has to be able to stand on its own to be marketable. Neither of us own an electric vehicle, but we've both used them, rented them, drove them in different circumstances. And we're going to share with you a little bit about our own stories of driving and renting EVs.
I'll start with mine. I do a lot, a lot of business travel. I'm always flying somewhere, renting a car, driving to a customer's facility. And when I was online one day, I noticed that the electric vehicles started coming up to the top of the page as the most economical vehicles to rent. So I thought, what?
The facility that I'm going to, know where I'm going. I know where the airport is. I know how much I'm going to be driving. I've always had range anxiety when it comes to electric vehicles. I rented a Polestar. I got to choose the exact model of vehicle that I was going to rent so I could research in advance because I'd never driven an EV before. I looked it up 300 miles of range. Okay, great. This is going to be a great experience. I'm going to get to drive my first EV.
Dee Davis (15:15.014)
and have this experience so that I can share it with other people. And I went into this whole thing with great expectation. I was pretty excited about it. So it was definitely becoming cheaper to rent them than a gasoline vehicle and rental companies typically don't rent hybrids. It's either gas or electric. Anybody that knows me, I'm not an early adopter. I'm not an early adopter of anything. I wait. But something comes out and I'm like, Ooh, that's exciting. Let's wait and see what happens.
Let's let them work out the bugs. Let somebody else spend the money. My next door neighbor was so excited. He's the first in line pre-ordering every new electric vehicle that comes out on the market. I'm not that person. I'm a wait and see person. So I had waited a long time because this occurred in 2024. In early 2024 is when I rented this finally. So
I also want to say that whether or not something is considered sustainable is a really complicated topic. There's so many aspects of sustainability. So when you're talking about tailpipe emissions or you're talking about carbon footprint, those are this much of the conversation that are very, very tiny piece of the conversation. I lived in California for a very long time.
And California, we've said, early, they're early adopters. They're on board with all the stuff. For me, it's always a question of, this the answer? Is this the sustainability answer? And I'll get into that more later, but sustainability is very complex. So I rented the vehicle. I had done all my research. I was very excited. I actually had my family with me. My husband came with me on this business trip.
A couple of my kids had just come and visited and they were flying back with us. live in San Diego and I was going to take them home on my way. So there was four of us in the car. The Polestar, by the way, super cool car. It's very attractive looking. You feel like you're driving a space shuttle when you get into this thing. It's super cool. Like you said, you got the tablet, you're pushing buttons. It's a really cool experience. The first jolting thing, which I did not know was braking is different.
Dee Davis (17:32.064)
in an EV or it can be different. In this particular car, and I don't know about all the other EVs, but in this particular car, taking your foot off the brake was the same thing as pushing the gas. So was it like that in the vehicles that you've driven, Brad?
I think you mean taking your foot off the gas was the same thing as pressing the brake.
something like that. was an unusual experience. It wasn't what you expected out of a regular vehicle. And I think I might have read about it because I did realize that there was a way to shut that off, but it took me a minute. had a couple of scary moments in the parking garage, figuring out where the setting was and getting that fixed. So once we had that, it was all good to go. Drove like a dream. I mean, it really was very smooth.
very responsive, it was comfortable. I really liked the vehicle a lot. Everything was going swimmingly, except that I did notice that in the very beginning when I picked up the car, none of them had 100 % charge. The highest percent I found was 83%.
Mm.
Dee Davis (18:43.549)
Highest. Of them were 60, 70 % charge and I'm thinking, well, okay, that's going to affect the range. And although I wasn't particularly concerned about the range at this point in time, I still wanted to make sure that I didn't have to charge it. That was the whole plan was that I was going to be able to do everything I needed to do, go to all the places I needed to go and bring it back without having to charge it. I just did not want to engage in the whole charging thing.
So 83%, I picked that one and I'm like, okay, well, you look at the little thing, it says you have however many miles, 200 and some odd miles. Okay, well, I should still be all right. Well, I wasn't. By the time I had dropped the kids off and dropped my husband off, I had already lost like 20 % charge according to the display, which is all I have to go by. And I thought, no.
Now my range anxiety is really set again, cause I'm thinking I have several days of driving to do not super long distances, but I've got to go back and forth and stop and start. And anytime you turn on the air conditioner and this was in the summer, anytime you go up a hill, your range drops. So my range anxiety was setting in the very first day. I do what I got to do by day two.
I am 100 % convinced. like, there's no way with as fast as the range is dropping that I'm going to be able to get back to the airport. The other thing that they told me when I checked out at the airport was you have to bring it back with at least 20 % charge.
That's how they get you.
Dee Davis (20:25.71)
So unlike a gasoline vehicle, you could bring it back on fumes as long as it's still running. You're good, right? If you have the auto refill option, there's no auto refill option available on an electric vehicle, or at least at that time there wasn't. I had to bring it back with at least 20. So I'm watching my little gauge go like this. You know, go to the left very quickly. I'm thinking, oh no.
I'm gonna have to find a charger. I'm gonna have to figure this out. So I don't wanna go into all the details. I actually have a blog on my website, www.yspeyellowstoneprofessionaleducation.co that has the entire story with all the details and all the facts and figures, but there are chargers out there that are private, but they're sitting out where you can just drive up to them.
And they won't tell you that they're private and that you can't use them until you go through the whole thing. So I was always told charging is easy, public charging is no problem. You find a restaurant you want to dine at, there's a charger out in the parking lot, you pull up to it, you swipe your credit card, you plug it in and you go have dinner and you come out and it's charged. That is exactly the story that I was told.
They were not available. Even in Southern California, I had a heck of a time finding a charger that was publicly available. None of them were in anything that could be remotely described as a convenient location for anything that I was doing. a panic, I called a colleague that lives up in the Bay area. And I said, where do people charge their cars? And she said, Walmarts and Targets, a lot of times they'll have chargers. Is there one near you? And I said, I think there's a Target. So I go to the.
the target parking lot and way over in the back corner of the target parking lot, there's a couple of chargers. So I pull up and I'm trying to figure it out. Well, it's not as easy as swiping your credit card and charging. It should be, but it's not. There's brands of chargers, multiple different companies that are operating these chargers. So each one has its own app, which you have to download. And then you have to set up a username and password.
Dee Davis (22:45.272)
and then you have to load in your credit card.
It's a hassle. imagine Chevron or ExxonMobil or Shell each had their own apps and you had to, no one would shop there.
This is not easy or convenient folks. That's all I can say. Even in a place like Southern California where you would expect these to be on every street corner and you would expect it to be as easy as pulling up, swiping your credit card and going in. Why isn't it by the way? I really would like to know the answer as to why it's not that easy, but it isn't. I'm trying to figure it out and there's a lovely gentleman that's an Uber driver that's charging his car, sitting in the car charging, which we'll talk about shortly.
and I just went over and knocked on his window and I'm like, can you please help me? I can't get this thing to work. And he's, well, if you don't have an account and you have to do, he's explaining to me all the things I have to do. And he helps me get all set up and I'm charging. I do have to tell you that I had no plan for charging the car because that was never the plan. So basically I'm wasting my client's time sitting there charging. which really stresses me out. don't.
like doing that. I'm thinking the whole time I'm saving my clients some money by getting the cheaper rental car. Not when I spent a lot of time trying to find a charger, set up a charger, all the savings were lost and then some. Yeah, was not overall cost beneficial for sure. Certainly not time beneficial for me or my client. And I'm sitting in the car and I'm thinking to myself,
Brad Wyant (24:10.168)
Yeah.
Dee Davis (24:23.15)
I shouldn't be sitting in this car when it's charging. For some reason, that just feels like a bad idea. What I know about electromagnetic fields and motors, I'm thinking, hmm, this seems like possibly not a good idea. And I thought, well, I'm not going to be here that long. It's probably fine. I pull out my phone to start checking email and my phone won't work in the car. Possibly because of the fields is my theory.
Although I think a lot of people do sit in their car and mess around on their phone. So I don't know if it was just a strange day or what. There was absolutely nothing productive for me to do except sit and wait. So I charged about 40 minutes and vowed to never rent another EV again.
It's a huge pain and the backstory as to why that's such a huge pain in my opinion or one of the reasons it may have become such a huge pain. If you all remember Dieselgate back in 2015 or 16 Volkswagen was found guilty of committing emissions fraud effectively of faking the diesel vehicle performance for emissions requirements and then letting the car
pollute as much as it wanted to when it wasn't being tested. Volkswagen engineers were not only fined billions of dollars, they were also forced to do the Electrify America project, which was the project to build public charging networks throughout the country. And I don't know if you've ever felt this way, but if you have a project as a penalty, you're less interested in doing it. whereas Tesla was able to figure out, well, we'll just
build public charging where people go at the shopping malls and at other places. Here in Denver, they've got one that's on the way to the mountains at the exact point you want to charge between the Denver city center and the ski resorts. just sort of Volkswagen people just sort of built these chargers wherever it's like, yeah, okay. And then they didn't think through the things like, well, I just want to swipe my credit card. I don't want to download an app. So that's my take on that is that the electrify America.
Brad Wyant (26:35.256)
thing being a penalty that somebody had to do as opposed to letting free market competition do its thing, the way that Tesla was able to really hindered that development. But I have a story to tell too about my experience. I'll show a picture of my car that I drove. It wasn't fully electric. It was something called the BMW i3, which was a plug-in hybrid type vehicle.
I rented it on Turo because I was, still a poor student. I'm working on my MBA so I don't have money to go rent from Hertz or Avis or something. I picked up one of these on Turo for like, I think it was a hundred dollars for the whole weekend, which wasn't so bad when I figured I could have gotten a much cheaper, smaller, worse car for a lot more money than one of the real brands. And I loved driving it. It's a BMW. handles like a BMW. It's got a little tiny two cylinder engine that
was a delight. It has a 60 mile battery range and a 60 mile fuel tank range. So as I was driving, I was like, oh, this is fine. I'll just fill it with gas at some point. But I didn't realize it was burning down the battery as I was driving. And the terms of my rental agreement also said that I have to bring it back with a certain amount of charge. Although mine wasn't your 20%, mine was 80 % charge. And I was like, So I've driven like- Oh.
100 miles and all of sudden the battery's like, yeah, 30%. I'm like, oh, God, I'm going to have to go charge this thing, which I didn't plan on either. I'm in town for a wedding. I've got this and that. so anyway, on the Sunday after the wedding, I ended up getting up early as I can get up to get to the airport on time and drop off the car. And I just sat at a gas station across the Bay Bridge waiting for the thing to charge. I was sitting waiting and I got a notification from the car. Hey, I'm not charging.
10 minutes into what I thought was the charging process. I was like, what the hell? So I go out and I got advice and help from somebody at the EV charging station like you did from your Uber driver. So like, no, you got to download the app. It gives you 20 % off. If you swipe your credit card, it charges you more. Great, okay. So I download the app, create the username and stuff like you said, and then it finally started charging, but it was only a level two charger. So it's going very slowly. And there had been a level three charger, which would have been much faster.
Brad Wyant (28:56.366)
couple of blocks down the street, but this point, I'm already into this one. I've already got the username and password set up. I might as well just sit in my book and wait for this thing to go. And it was just such a pain when I was in college in 2012 to 2016 in the Bay area. The only people I saw driving Teslas were the Model S owners who were Silicon Valley executives who could afford a $75,000 third car.
And they got license plates on the back like Gas Who or Past Gas or things like that. They're just like flex kind of things to be like, I don't need gasoline. I don't need to pay shell money. I just charge my car at home. You're sitting at these gas stations. What are you doing? You're in the past. There is this whole like, and the big thing that they loved was putting the HOV lane sticker on the back of their car because that meant they could go in the carpool lane.
without having to be carpooling, still just doing their own thing. for electric vehicles to be given this huge status in California for as long as they were, that was what made early adopters really feel compelled to get with them, I think. And for people who don't own a home, I don't own a home yet, for people who are relying on public charging, for people who can't afford a $75,000 third car, the technology and this infrastructure just
don't make sense yet. So that's just my take.
Absolutely, I completely agree. So you were in the Bay Area when you rented that car. So both of us were in California. Our EV rental experiences were in different parts of California. You were kind of up in the middle, I was down in the south, a place where if there's going to be anywhere that's going to be quick, easy, the best place to try it, I would think California would be that place. And we both had less than ideal experiences at Salem.
Dee Davis (30:54.254)
All right, let's talk about the business of EVs a little bit.
Yeah.
Brad Wyant (31:01.902)
This is where it all comes down to the things we were talking about earlier about profitability and competition. think Tesla has obviously been funded in many ways by the federal government and by this California state government. They've been supported through a lot of means. And for anyone to say that Tesla could have survived as a public company without those support tools is ludicrous to me. But GM and Chrysler were both bailed out in 2009. It's not as if we live in a free market really. So
to make the argument that they should be penalized or that they received unfair support as the strange arguments make as well. Tesla has finally achieved profitability. My dad bought a Model 3 back in 2020 and the new one, the 2024 Model 3 is both way better and cheaper. That is market economics working the way they should. And I think that's only going to continue as EV technology continues to proliferate. The thing that's making Tesla and Rivian
competitive in my opinion has more to do with the software defined nature of the vehicle as opposed to simply the easy technology at this point. Tesla Rivian none of these companies are developing the batteries that are the main advantage of the car. The battery companies like Panasonic and other companies are doing that and when it comes to the product experience the. Zonal system architecture want to make sure I got that term right that.
Rivian and Tesla have innovated is so different than the domain based architecture that Ford, GM Chrysler, all the other traditional OEMs use that it's faster. It uses eight miles fewer wiring per vehicle. No matter if it's an electric vehicle or internal combustion vehicle, it uses 140 fewer silicon chips than a conventional domain based vehicle. So.
That's where those companies are really making the leaps and bounces in the software technology and the way we experience the vehicle and what the product eventually means to the end consumer. So that's where I see the future of the business competition going. The battery technology, other companies are doing so much better at that. mean, Lucid, another car company that's electric, that's US based in terms of technology, but is being funded by the Saudi Arabian oil funds.
Brad Wyant (33:24.77)
They've got a new technology with the motor where they've been able to condense it from about the size of two basketballs to the size of my head. And they can make more power and use less energy than Tesla did. They've got a car that'll do five miles per kilowatt hour. And that's a threshold no one ever thought we'd reach this decade in terms of the efficiency. So the competition is strong. think that instead of looking at the Chinese subsidies as, well, let's just let them have it, we need to
try to bolster the technologies that we're developing in this country to compete with that, as opposed to just terrifying them and being protectionists. That would be my take on the way that American car companies can be incentivized and be supported to compete. Because if we don't, we're going to end up buying Chinese cars. And I don't think any of us want the whole of the American automotive industry to go the way the Dover. I think that'd be a very different American economy we'd be living in.
That's really interesting. The technological advances are really incredible and making huge leaps and bounds in efficiency is a big deal for all kinds of reasons. And we can take that technology and we can transfer it to other fields, right? We can transfer it to energy storage. There's all different kinds of.
ways that we can take those advances and use them in other market sectors. So it's really good to hear that they're making those kind of advances. I have several health and safety considerations about EVs. I mentioned fields earlier. This is a much debated topic right now. There's no doubt that there is elevated fields when you're sitting in an electric vehicle. It's been measured over and over.
anybody can go out and purchase the test instruments and measure, go do a test drive and measure it for yourself. When you compare that to the fields for the wifi in your house, the microwave when it's running, things like that, there's actually a government organization out there for determining what's safe. Anyone who's not
Dee Davis (35:41.548)
Watching, I'm using air quotes or the bunny ears, government deciding what's safe for us. There's all kinds of different levels of safe, right? There is a level of safe exposure, like incidental exposure. Then there's a level of safe, prolonged exposure. The problem that I think we have is that it's not just the field that you're exposed to when you're sitting in your car, driving the car, when the car is running and you're driving it around.
It's the compilation of EM fields that we're exposed to in total. And this is just one more EM field. The wifi in your house that almost every building has now, the EMFs are enormous. I mean, just the electrical wiring in the wall, the cell phone tower that's a mile away from your house or your office down the way produces EMFs. And the stronger signals get.
We've gone from 2G to 3G to 4G. We're now at 5G with cell phone signals. Those fields keep getting stronger and stronger and it interrupts the way the cells in your body work. So is the problem the field from the EV? Yes and no. Is there an elevated field? Yes, there is. Is that the whole problem? No, there's a bigger problem and different people have different levels of sensitivity to these fields. So in general.
I have a concern about that. And there are a lot of people who experience headaches after being in an EB car. Did you experience that at all? Did you notice you, do you have any headaches or nausea, anything like
that? No, I'll tell a funny story about that. So I, you know, I'm a different generation. I've grown up with one of these in my pocket since I was 11 years old, I guess. the Model 3, we've never driven my dad's car that all that long. So we haven't exposed ourselves to it for a huge period of time. However, the 1977 Porsche 911 that I spent the pandemic restoring has a heating system that runs off of the engine. And it sucks in air from
Brad Wyant (37:52.238)
where the engine lives. So when I turn on those heaters, it's a little oily, it smells a little oily. And I recently drove it about three hours up into the mountains to visit somebody and then three hours back that same day. And I had a headache from those fumes. I'll tell you. Certain headache trade-offs being made. Maybe the technology in between there is better than both of those.
Mm-hmm
Dee Davis (38:13.208)
Yeah, yeah. Different source of contamination for you to give you a headache. I was on a tour bus one time. We're up in one of the national parks and we took a tour bus and it was Denali. That's what it was. And we had to sit in the back of the bus and I got diesel fumed and I was sick as a dog. I did want to share a concern and this is something I've never really heard anybody talk about before.
A friend of mine, she is an early adopter. She loves her Tesla. It's a beautiful model S and she just loves that car. And everything was going along swimmingly until it was winter time and she was going home. It was after dark in her black car and she had to drive through this mountainous area. There's no street lights and she got rear ended.
And what happened is her car completely shut down.
Completely shut down, shut down. Just nothing, no power at all. So it's winter time. It's snowing. And the trunk is in the front of the Teslas, it's a frunk or whatever they call it. So it's electrically actuated though, to open it. It's not a manual. You have to push a button and it's electric. All of her emergency gear.
is in her frunk. She had emergency lights. She had a blanket. She was prepared.
Brad Wyant (39:49.88)
She's smart. She's ready for what's going to come.
Thought she was prepared, but she had no idea that her Tesla would completely shut down in the event of an accident. So it's cold, it's dark. The person that hit her was fine and left. So she's out there by herself. She can't turn on her flashers, nothing. Finally, she's able to flag somebody down and they called it in and a police officer came and they got a tow truck and all that.
And she was mad. She was mad. She ended up calling Tesla and saying, what, what the, Hey, are you kidding me? How can this happen? And they said, that's exactly what's supposed to happen. That's what's planned to happen in the event of an accident for safety reasons.
And she's thinking safety reasons. Are you kidding me? It put me in danger. It alleviated some danger potentially, but it created other danger. So this is just something that I have never heard any EV proponent talk about. I don't think that most people know this. We're going to talk about Tesla fatality rates here in a second. Nobody talks about
this aspect of it and what that means from a safety standpoint. So I'm just saying this out loud to say that that's their intention. And I'm not picking on Tesla specifically. I think this is true for probably any EV. They're not telling people. They're not warning them. No one warned her, Hey, don't put your emergency stuff in your frunk because you won't be able to get to it in the event of an emergency. They should be telling people things like this. People should know.
Brad Wyant (41:42.982)
Well, I think it comes down to resiliency. mean, if you look at the way that certain vehicles were built versus the way we're building vehicles now, and this is the car guy, I going way back, way back, but, you know, for a long time, it was considered that an owner was going to be a caretaker of vehicle in a way that they would preserve it and last a long time. And vehicles were built to last for as long as you wanted to own them, not as disposable as our mobile phones, which is the way that we're looking at these EVs because
The moment those batteries in that electric vehicle reach their end of life, you're throwing away the car. mean, you're recycling it. Hopefully you're doing the things that you do to prevent groundwater disturbance and you're getting the lithium ion out of the car and disposing of it safely. But the car is jumped. The cost at that point to renew the car to keep it on the road is astronomical and it's better to buy a new one. We've been...
viewing cars as disposable economically speaking and design wise for a long time. But back in the seventies, eighties, nineties, all German cars, especially came with a handbook about, at 50,000 miles, you need to adjust this and here's how you do it. It gave you a step-by-step procedure on how to do everything. I've still got the manual for my car that explains exactly how to do it along these two things. To view these vehicles as these disposable things and can we afford to be buying new cars every 10 years? I certainly don't want to have to buy a car every 10 years.
I don't want to, you I'm happy to buy a new phone every 10 years because yeah, the technology will be that much better. I'm going to be doing okay enough in life to spend a thousand dollars every 10 years, but cars are getting more expensive. I just don't see that as a way I want to experience that kind of a product in my life, which is why I hope somebody will keep making gasoline for my old car and I'll be able to keep for a long time. onto the death tally rates. That's a kind of word, I Tesla vehicles have always been
very, very safe from a crash safety standpoint. The Insurance Institute of Highway Safety, the IIHS, the agency that's in charge of rating crash safety in the United States has always rated Tesla vehicles as top safety pick, safety pick plus whatever. They're very well rated for crash performance. But despite that, the fatal crash rate of Tesla vehicles is the highest of all car brands in America. And this report,
Brad Wyant (44:04.056)
from 2018 to 2022 concludes that the reason doesn't have to do with the crash safety. It has to do with the driver behavior. The models on this list likely reflect a combination of driver behavior and driving conditions leading to increased crashes and fatalities, the report quotes. So what this means reading between those lines is that people are using the self-driving features of electric vehicles that Tesla makes.
beyond the limits that they should. They're not paying attention. There are videos you can find on YouTube of people getting in the backseat of their car while they're on the road with it to prove how cool their Tesla self-driving features are. When it comes to self-driving, when it comes to safety, why are we solving for that end of the equation to try to make the car drive itself until we get to like minority report levels of step in the car and every car is driving itself? Why not just spend a little bit more money on
driver education. Why not find people more often for doing things like not wearing a seatbelt or speeding or doing things that are unsafe on the roads? I just don't get how that's the way things are going. mean, do you learn to drive when cars were a lot harder to drive than they are now? Have you seen it just you can, you know, the texting and driving has become more possible because cars are easier to drive. Where do you land on?
You know, that's an interesting question. See, Brad, this is where you and I are the opposite. I don't like to drive. I don't think it'll be safe enough in my lifetime, but I'm really excited about the prospect of getting in a car and just saying, take me to this, take me to Target or whatever, and then chilling or doing something more productive than driving. I'm always looking for a way to be more productive. It's part of my personality.
There's no way I would do it. There's no way I would try it at this point. There's just too much data to the contrary. But in Arizona right now, you can take a driverless taxi. You can take a driverless Uber in the state of Arizona right now. And I know a few people who've done it. I would be too scared, I think, at this point. I just know too much about, like you're saying, the fatality rates and all the crazy stories. I think it's a lovely idea.
Dee Davis (46:17.888)
I also want to be beamed from place to place because I don't even want to take the time to drive there. Beam me up Scotty, I'm all for it. I also don't think I'm going to see that in my lifetime, but I don't even want to take the time to get from one place to the other. I have a bunch of friends and family members who are car people. They love to drive. It's like, let's hop in the car and drive five states. It's like, wow, that's not my idea of a good time, but you love to drive. My friend Paul loves to drive. My sister loves to drive.
It's like road trip. have a friend who him and his wife went to the Grand Canyon for the weekend from San Diego. So the love of driving I think is lost to some of this stuff. My first car didn't have power steering. That's how old I am. Of course, my car is older than I was, but you know, it didn't even have power steering. It burned oil and I had to carry water and.
and it used leaded gas. Okay, so that's how old I am. So it was a very different time. I love push starts. I just love not having to carry a traditional key and push starts aren't new technology either. We have a 1956, 57 Jaguar that has a push start. But I do wanna talk about the feasibility of these EVs really at this point in time.
I have vast concerns about the feasibility long-term, especially in a state like California. I'm very familiar with California's electrical grid. I've a lot of work building energy plants in California. And so I have an intricate knowledge of what the grid looks like, how it functions, and the idea of decarbonization and electrification in the state of California is alarming to me, knowing what I know.
The whole purpose of the state of California looking to do these things is to decarbonize, reduce carbon footprint and reduce CO2 emissions in the atmosphere and do their part. And one way to do that is electrification. And part of electrification is making everything electric, taking things that were fossil fuel driven before and making them electric driven now.
Dee Davis (48:41.238)
And cars is part of that. They're doing it with lots and lots of other things in California, which makes it even scarier. Big, huge industrial plants. This is what I do. I construct and maintain manufacturing plants. And the state is requiring that things that were normally fuel driven of some kind, any kind of carbon based fuel like gasoline, diesel, or natural gas now be electric.
So these are massive pieces of equipment that have huge electrical draws and they're far more expensive to purchase. They're far more expensive to run and maintain. there's all of that is pulling on the grid and being added to the grid every day as well as the push for electric vehicles. And the last time I checked California was 2030.
for fully the adoption.
where you're going to get brand new electric vehicle anymore. They'll still let gas stations exist, but you will not be able to buy a new internal combustion vehicle.
Right. So my prediction for what's going to happen is everybody's just going to go to another state. Arizona is going to be selling a lot of gas or hybrid vehicles. Starting in 2030 is going to be the year. If you're listening from Arizona, you should prepare for this. You're going to be selling a lot of cars and it's going to be really interesting to see what happens. I'm sure the state of California will penalize people. They're already doing it. If you buy a vehicle in another state and you bring it to California, you register it here, you pay a big fat penalty.
Dee Davis (50:19.91)
and New York is doing the same thing. I believe Oregon and Washington have, have made some kind of declaration. There's a number of states that are doing this and there's other states that are talking about it. I think states that are taking a little bit more reasonable approach to it are saying, Hey, we're encouraging you to do this. We're maybe giving you some incentives to do this, to buy an EV. and we're, we're having a goal of.
a percentage and not outright banning. don't think outright banning is going to go very well. The people that are in office right now are probably not going to be in office in 2030. So we'll see if it really happens. But in general, there are a lot of EVs. There's lots and lots of hybrids in California and in Washington and Colorado where we live.
A lot of EVs, I see Teslas everywhere and I'm starting to see lots of other electric vehicles, especially now that they're coming up with electric trucks. There's issues in colder climates with electric vehicles that we haven't even addressed. Charging and cold temperatures and things like that, it can be a problem. But the grid is really my biggest concern. Different states are going to have different grids. Slower adopting states might not really experience these kinds of issues.
but I'm particularly worried for California.
What you're talking about in terms of the grid is this, my favorite graphic of all time, the duck curve, the way that there's so much solar power generation in California that during the day, the system load goes down a ton because you're compensating for it with all the solar energy. But it goes down. And just as people come home from work and turn on their TV and use the microwave and the oven, you get this huge spike. And then you're talking about the dirtiest plants.
Brad Wyant (52:14.958)
that generate power known to existence having to ramp ramping plants that burn coal, that burn natural gas, that burn fossil fuels. So until we can implement enough lithium ion batteries to even out this curve, until we can find other ways to not have this problem, we're still going to see these crazy demands on the grid that are untenable.
Yeah. And lithium ion batteries is a whole nother podcast, I think. There's lots there. And I have all kinds of environmental concerns there for anything that's using batteries, whether it be an EV or it be battery storage or something else. There's all kinds of safety concerns there. There's all kinds of environmental concerns there. The other feasibility point is the waiting. There are fast chargers, tier three charger. They are faster.
And those are great, but those are the ones that are in the most demand. actually had a conversation with the Uber driver that helped me that day charging the car about the chargers, all the different chargers availability. He says he has to charge twice a day. I asked him, said, well, you know, why aren't you at one of those really fast chargers? He said, good luck getting to one. He said they're around, but people are waiting. They're always in use because those are the ones that people want. And.
By the way, in case you didn't know this, when you go to a public charging station of any kind, you're paying a premium. You pay per kilowatt, just like you pay for energy per kilowatt at home, but you might pay maybe eight, nine cents per kilowatt hour to 26 cents per kilowatt hour, depending on the time of day. If you go to a public EV charging station, they're going to make a profit on, they're paying.
So you might be paying 30 or 40 cents per kilowatt hour for your charging. So you're paying a premium to charge and then the fast charging ones charge even more. They cost more per kilowatt.
Brad Wyant (54:16.302)
It's the service that's required for that, the amperage. mean, think about a gas station with an 800 amp service. We're both in the construction business. What's it gonna cost that gas station order to do that? Of course he's gonna charge more for it. I mean, gas is called the smoking tire. This guy built this collector car storage place in the West side of LA. And he had to figure out, well, I'm gonna have this many people who are gonna wanna charge their EVs here. And then he's talking about
I am.
Brad Wyant (54:44.622)
tearing up the street and involved with the city and doing all these things to increase the capacity that he's going to be able to offer for charging. That's where the rubber is going to meet the road to use an apt metaphor of all this EV charging stuff. When we come to upgrading our grid to be able to handle these kinds of loads, it's going to be no small task.
Yeah, and very expensive. The lead time for electrical equipment, breakers and switches, anything electrical has tripled in the last few years. The cost has gone through the roof. It's come back down some, but the demand for chips, the demand for electrical services just keeps growing.
because of all this electrification and because of all these decarbonization efforts and additional EB stuff that people having to bring more service to their homes, to their businesses, to support all this infrastructure, it's massive. And the market appetite is waning a bit. Conventional wisdom out there says that people that are going to adopt have already done it for the most part. There's some with introduction of new
types of vehicles, new trucks and new SUVs and things like that. There's going to keep some interest, but you know, there's a couple of rental companies. Not going to say any names that went big into the EV market. They were like, we're going to convert 20, 30 up to 50 % of our fleet into EVs. And I'll tell you what, those things sit on the lot. Nobody will rent them. And it's because of the experiences that you and I had, if you're just going to drive 50 miles and come right back. Fine.
But if there's any chance that you're gonna have to charge and you do not already have the setup of the apps and the locations and the whole thing, it's a pain in the neck. And when you're on vacation or you're on a business trip or whatever, the last thing you wanna be doing is sitting in a parking lot waiting for a charge to happen. Now, I do know people that have absolutely planned vacations.
Dee Davis (56:51.234)
with their electric vehicles have traveled all the way across the country with their electric vehicles. It took them much, much longer than it would take, you know, had they driven a hybrid. Not that it can't be done. It's just that you have to be willing to make that sacrifice. So I think the market appetite is waning for sure. I definitely know that the rental companies can't offload these things fast enough because when I go to rent a car, sometimes that's all that's available. And if you want a
gasoline vehicle you have to wait. We've already hit on a lot of the sustainability aspects. There's lots of mining involved with any kind of battery technology. There's rare metals that have to be mined, which is a really big deal. Maybe it's not a problem for us where we are, because maybe they're not mining it here, but they're mining it somewhere. And a mining operation is a very carbon heavy operation.
They're not using electric vehicles for that, I can tell you. And then if you're driving a gasoline vehicle, then we have oil extraction, right? So how do we weigh that from a sustainability standpoint?
It's very hard. think that the life cycle cost analysis that has to be done to make that sustainability argument is not being done in a rigorous enough form. And this is where I'm so glad I'm going to business school. There's a very interesting new accounting evolution on the table for public companies to report in a very rigorous way on their business activities and the impact from a sustainability standpoint of those activities. And I think that as we enter into this
new era of thinking more deeply about how our activities impact the planet more widely. We're going to get more rigorous about how we account for things like that. How we account for the actual environmental cost of the fuel that you're bringing into tank versus the actual environmental cost of the lithium that ended up in those batteries. I did a cost study analysis for a project for a moderate driver of 20,000 miles a year. You don't see the economic
Brad Wyant (59:02.094)
payoff, the dollars and cents of it payoff until eight years of the ownership for most cars. used a RAV4 versus a RAV4 hybrid versus like a Tesla Model Y. And that was with all the federal subsidies. Now, if you drive more miles and you're still a bit of charge at home, if you're somebody who drives 45,000 miles, I the math was like, it was only four or even three years. It was a huge difference in the terms of the usage. I don't know hardly anybody that drives that miles a year. So. Yeah.
the patent and we're not doing the rigorous stuff yet to be able to say for sure this is the point.
So what are we left with? Gasoline vehicles have their issues, certainly. EVs have their issues. Is no EVs the answer? I don't think so. Is all EVs the answer? I don't think so. We need more solutions to the question. Hydrogen is an up and coming market. I took a class on it earlier in the year.
Just to find out what's happening, what's going on in the marketplace, when are we going to start seeing cars? When are we going to start seeing some competition here that maybe, maybe makes more sense? It's hard to say at this point if it makes more sense, but we think maybe it makes more sense or can be part of the solution. I don't think any one thing is all of the solution. The working on scaling right now is really what the issue is. Things like ships and
big rigs and like large engines, like really, really big engines. They figured it out. They figured out the technology. They've got it to a point where it's becoming economically feasible. But scaling that down to the personal vehicle level is still in progress. There are a couple of manufacturers out there right now who have released some hydrogen vehicles.
Dee Davis (01:00:59.182)
Hyundai and Toyota each have one and BMW has a concept car. So I was pretty excited to see that there was at least a couple out there and now I have to go try and find some of these. I'm really curious what they're like inside. I have more research to do there. I'm looking up the pros and cons. And by the way, these cars currently are only available in California based on the research that I did.
They're, like a test market. They have zero tailpipe emissions. They take five minutes to refuel, which the impatient part of me absolutely loves. Range is similar to an EV, maybe even a little better in some cases, 380 to 400 miles for range. Now, when we say range, what I learned with EVs is they have a published range and I'm using the air bunnies again.
They have a published range, but what they don't really tell you is that's not the range. If the range is 300 miles, you can't count the first 10 % because the vehicle will actually shut down when it hits 10%. And it doesn't fully charge the last 10%. The maximum charge is 90%. So it doesn't really have a 300 mile range. So you have to whack 20 % off of that right off the top before you've done anything, which just
I think that's false advertising and I think somebody should do something about that. But anyway, that's another topic. Is this range really 380 to 400? I don't know. That's what they're publishing. There's a $4,500 incentive in California. Plus, I love this part. And this is again with the government incentives to get this technology going. Manufacturers, i.e. through government incentives, I'm sure, are covering refueling
Yeah.
Dee Davis (01:02:51.062)
or three to six years depending if it's a purchase or a lease.
How do you like them apples, right? It kind of makes me want to go get one. Refuel for three to six years. Here's the problem. Very limited refueling locations are available and it's mostly like up in the Bay area, LA in the Bay area. So nowhere near anywhere I would be more than likely, but if you're in LA or the Bay area, check it out.
I would absolutely love to hear from people if they can find any of these vehicles. Have they driven any of these vehicles? What's the refueling like? How big is the fuel cell? It sounds like you change it out just like, you know, quick, whoop, whoop, five minute refueling. Are you refueling almost like you're putting gas in or are you swapping something out? I'm not really sure.
I've done a little bit of research on this. You're right. It's very sparse. The number of stations that provide hydrogen fuel. Not only is that the problem, the refueling rate of those stations is very low. The tanks that store hydrogen have to be built in very specific way because the hydrogen gas molecule is so small that they just trickle out over time. what ends up happening, a journalist did a road trip in a
hydrogen vehicle, he was planning to go from, I think it was Northern California to Southern California and back. And it was Southern to Northern and back. And it took him a day and a half longer than he thought it was going to because he just arrived at a station out of hydrogen, ready to fill it up. And there was just no hydrogen. And a bunch of other people were like, yeah, we're finding hotels. We don't know what we're doing either. And he was like, well, this sucks. And that was a couple of years ago, I read that article, but.
Brad Wyant (01:04:41.454)
I know that there are issues with the temperature of the hydrogen and trying to connect the nozzle to the car because it'll just freeze and then the safety mechanisms will shut it off because hydrogen gas is very explosive. So nothing's perfect yet. Competition. depends. It's the only answer we can give. I think allowing these different technologies to continue to compete and allowing there to be economic incentive to make something that everyone wants to buy the way Tesla did.
way to go.
Brad Wyant (01:05:11.958)
is going to drive the continued innovation that's going to push these technologies forward more than the government subsidies will, but they will founder without those government subsidies too. So it's about a balance and about trying to figure out what the way is to do from an international standpoint.
Yeah, I'm excited about the possibility. There's safety concerns there because like you said, hydrogen's explosive. So what if you get rear-ended in a hydrogen vehicle? I don't know, get in a car accident, get T-boned. I don't Is it a partial answer? I don't know. I'm just excited to have some other options. If we could ever figure out how to make banana peels work, that would be great as a fuel source. Marty McFly and Doc, if we could get that going.
future.
Dee Davis (01:05:53.07)
That would be fantastic and hopefully have zero emissions. So who is an EV4? And I'm going to give you my opinion and Brad, I would like you to voice yours. My opinion, if your round trip commute is 150 miles or less per day, I'm saying 150 miles with a presumed
published mileage of 300, whacking 20 % off of that and then giving yourself a little bit of grace because if you might have to go up a hill or turn on the air conditioning, I'm saying if your round trip commute is 150 miles or less and you have the ability to charge at home and not have to pay the premiums and sit and wait and whatever, or I should say maybe and or,
If it's a second or third vehicle, you mentioned earlier an auxiliary vehicle, there's his and hers vehicles and this is our third vehicle. And I'm just going to say it. It's sort of like having a golf cart for running around town. If it's that kind of vehicle where you're going to be just doing some local running around, you have the ability to charge at home. I think that's a perfect vehicle for you. Your commute is short. can charge at home or it's an auxiliary vehicle personally.
Could I do that? I absolutely could supplement my hybrid fleet with an EV for that purpose, but I don't really need a third vehicle and I'm not going to incur that kind of expense just to say I drive an EV at this point in time.
I completely agree. I would only add on to that customer profile you're building a few elements that I did a project on this in school. It has to be somebody who abhors the idea of paying somebody to fix their car, who just does not want to bring it in to be repaired, to have the oil change. Somebody who really does not like that process. Somebody who is not going to road trip, they're going to fly wherever they're going to travel. So that's a certain income bracket or certain behavioral pattern.
Dee Davis (01:07:43.63)
Good point.
Brad Wyant (01:07:52.748)
It has to be someone who's going to own a car for long enough for the inflated cost to make any sense. Who really wants to keep that car for eight plus years.
I ironically also think it's for somebody who wants a very fast car. No matter what EV you're buying, when you floor that pedal, you get it right in the back of the chair and you go. mean, even the cheapest EVs are a very exciting driving experience. So that would be the only thing I would add to that customer profile.
The maintenance is a really good point. No combustion engine. So you don't have the maintenance and the tuneups and the spark plugs and the things that go with the combustion engine. That's a really good point. Yes, they are fun to drive. I will 100 % agree with that. I enjoyed the driving experience. I just didn't enjoy the fueling experience, which is something that you would have to do pretty often. We'll keep an eye out.
for advances in this technology, advances in hydrogen technology and banana peel technology and whatever else comes next.
That'll be the only thing that'll drag me out of my 1977 car, that's for sure.
Dee Davis (01:09:10.401)
Well, thank you all so much for joining us today and we'll see you next time.
at managementunderconstruction.com.
