What’s Your EV Resiliency Plan?

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Transcript

Elena: Nick would love for you to talk about your background. Talk about your experience in automotive and of course what you are doing today at Enchanted Rock.

Nick: Yeah, absolutely right appreciate the time so I will take you to the journey of my life. I grew up with my father working on vehicles in our garage and told myself I’ve never been an automotive business and little behold I ended up getting scooped up by a company called TVC brands which is owned by Michelin, which is kind of what everyone knows and I helped them build out their commercial business for North America as well as Canada. So everything from the commercial fleet businesses, how they do adoptions, the automotive repair sites, there’s little over 3400 retail brick and mortar locations that I oversaw between franchise and corporate own and so just really understanding the heartburns and you know, what fleet managers kind of go through and fell in love with the partnerships and the people in that business.

Elena: So for our conversation today, just to keep a little bit of a more narrow focus, we’re going to be focusing on fleet owners and fleet managers, people who are making the move to electrifying their fleet. And so really where Nick where you come into the conversation is really what happens when the power is out. And how is your EV fleet going to stay on the road? Right? Hopefully, it’s not happening to you too much. But those scenarios do happen. So Nick, I’ll kind of let you take it from there. What are some of the points that you and your team evaluate when you’re looking at helping a fleet owner go electric?

Nick: The first one is finding the vehicles so looking through EV vehicles, whether they’re through the smaller startup companies that are out there, they have really good innovations going out to the larger OEMs that are out there. What they’re availability is what their true metrics are. So hey, load and get it really hold my weight, you know, if I’m going out heavy and coming out late or vice versa, we become that liaison to kind of walk them through what we’re seeing in the market, what our customers are saying and kind of help people guide through that. And the second one obviously, is chargers you need to charge and so that comes in a couple of different layers. Okay, well how big is your battery packs? You know, how long do you need to charge him? What type of data do you need to get out of that? There’s a lot of companies out there that are focused specifically on the telematics, they’re focused on you know, the secret sauce, if you want to call it what makes them different, but the reality is, is the fleet managers need to understand how did they get their vehicles on the road? To do their day to day jobs, generate the revenue for the business they need to and make sure that drivers are doing what they need to and so we really help out through that and have partnerships in place for EV chargers and kind of identified that. The last one is the is the myth if you’d like to call it which is infrastructure. You know what’s available today. You know, just because you have it in your depo or you own the property or maybe you have a long term lease or you don’t have a long term lease. It’s understanding how is your path to adoption and what does that look like? And not everyone is created equal? Not every fleet is created equal. Not every hub is created equal. So working with strategic partners for us is really key to understand if there’s EV hubs available for commercial fleets so that they can offset it if there’s rest stops that are putting in Evie infrastructure to guide those people into that adoption. And then the last one for us really kind of goes into all three of those metrics is how do you keep your chargers on? How do you keep your fleet on the road? You know, when there’s a brownout? I still remember last year when I was given a speech in Governor Newsom in California said they’ll charge your EVs there was two major corporations that they didn’t charge their EVs and ended up getting rental vehicles to upset that because they didn’t know whether or not those vehicles are going to come out that happens. It’s going to happen. We tend to look at these natural disasters as the cause for resiliency. Oh, that’s how I powers gonna go but can’t stop the Joe Schmo that runs into a power line and knocks have electricity or a brownout, or a great a couple months ago was a tornado in Texas, which, you know, you know, we’re used to hurricanes, but not so much. You know, other things out here. So those what ifs are becoming more and more common, and those really do affect commercial fleets. If you’re trying to adopt that’s where resiliency is just a must. It’s not even an option really.

Elena: Nick has thought of all of the different concerns you may have had as a fleet owner trying to go electric so yeah, Nick, I feel there is just this conversation is starting to definitely gain momentum. And correct me if I’m wrong. I think we’re still at the beginning of writing this electrification chapter, don’t you think?

Nick: Yeah. 100% I think we’re at a tipping point where the technology has caught up where we have to put some muscle and some time into to get where it needs to go and it’s an exciting time you pull back the curtain, it’s definitely messy back there. Yeah. We’re in the next step, which is really kind of implementing and rolling out, which is exciting to see.

Elena: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, I would love love, love to continue the conversation with you Nick and your work at Enchanted Rock we need to know what you’re working on. Right? Because I think as an ecosystem, we all need to break down the silos and understand what everyone’s working on. So we’d love for you to connect with the listeners, Nick, what’s the best way for people to reach out to you and learn more about what you’re working on?

Nick: Absolutely. You can obviously go on our website you can check us out there. My name is on the bathroom wall. You can reach out to me directly through the website there if there’s any questions, any concerns, obviously through social media, you have us on LinkedIn and everywhere else there. So I do appreciate everybody listening to this one is a passion of mine to make sure that we really educate everybody out there and help anybody we can.

Elena: Yeah, absolutely. Well, Nick is the person to go to highly recommend. Nick, thank you so much for your time. Again. it’s been a pleasure. I learned a lot about fleet electrification from you and hopefully you don’t get any more gray hairs, I don’t want to get any gray hairs talking about it’s Nick, thank you so much for your time.

Nick: All right, thank you, appreciate you.