Electric Vehicles: Future-Proofing Your Fleet with Harbinger
Join us on Industry Insights as we explore the future of the electric vehicle industry with guest John Harris, CEO of Harbinger Motors. Learn about the commitments major corporations are making to renewable energy and the importance of electric vehicles in the logistics sector. John sheds light on Harbinger's unique approach to building from the ground up, emphasizing affordability and reliability in the medium-duty vehicle segment.
Discover how Harbinger's in-house production of core components allows them to offer electric trucks at prices comparable to diesel models from day one, how their modular battery systems serve diverse range requirements, and what advanced features and real-world savings their trucks provide. Don't miss out on this insightful conversation about innovative solutions and the future of commercial electric vehicles.
About Harbinger
Harbinger was founded with a mission to modernize the medium-duty vehicle industry. Leveraging deep experience in electrification, Harbinger is delivering to the market an EV platform offering best-in-class performance and durability priced for zero cost acquisition premium.
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Josh Gregory: Welcome to Industry Insights. I am your host, Josh Gregory, and today we're diving into the electric vehicle industry.
And honestly, every single major corporation right now, from FedEx to Amazon to UPS, they have all made major commitments to the electric vehicle industry, to renewable energy. In general. So whether you're a contractor that has been in this space, has owned fleets for years, [00:01:00] or you're trying to look and decide if you want to enter the logistics industry, electric needs to be something that you are thinking about, that you understand the costs, the benefits, the challenges, if you really wanna position yourself for success in the future.
And today, my guest is John Harris, the CEO of Harbinger. And this is a company that's taking a little bit of a different tack, a little bit of a different. Look at the electric vehicle industry. Instead of trying to just cram consumer technology into commercial vehicles, they're really working on building these electric vehicles from the ground up to be positioned for the delivery space for really solving those challenges that you see as a contractor and understanding what the real world looks like.
So we're gonna get into all of that today, but for right now, John, welcome to the studio. Thank you for being here, at least virtually. I see you're in a little bit of a different location than I am.
John Harris: to be here, Josh. Yeah. I
am
sitting in Harbinger's, uh, commercial vehicle factory behind me. You could see our battery modular production line where we're making about, [00:02:00] uh, one megawatt hour a day of battery packs today.
Okay.
Josh Gregory: And, and out in California, right? That's right. We're in Orange County, California. Perfect. Well, we'll get a little bit of that background as we're going. Uh, and, and John, if you just wanna start, you know, I gave a, a little bit of a, uh, a background on Harbinger, but if you wanna tell a little bit about who they are and, and what you do there.
John Harris: So, harbinger is, uh, you know, a company Desi, uh, dedicated to building the right product at the right price. When we looked at this segment five years ago now, we thought, why would we electrify anything else before? We've electrified medium duty. This is, this is the place where it makes the most sense, where there's the best fuel savings, there's the biggest improvements to be had in vehicles, but none of that matters unless we electrify vehicles at a price customers can afford.
Um, this segment for a long time has been, I think, really hamstrung by manufacturers who came before us, [00:03:00] offering EVs at double or triple or quadruple the price of diesel trucks. And, you know, there's, there's a spreadsheet argument around, don't worry about it, you're gonna save money in 10 years. We just think that's nonsense.
Um, at Harbinger we're dedicated to building electric vehicles that you can buy for the same price as diesel trucks from day one.
Josh Gregory: Okay. That's a, it's a pretty strong tagline. Hey, one of the things you said right there, though, medium duty, you know, if somebody's never heard that phrase, what are, what are you talking about specifically there?
John Harris: So median duty are vehicles with a gross vehicle weight rating range from 10 to 26,000 pounds. Mm-hmm. These are vehicles that are bigger than pickup trucks and sprinter vans. They're smaller than long haul trucks. At Harbinger, we specifically build in class four through six, so we've narrowed that a little bit farther.
These are vehicles with A-G-V-W-R range of 16 to 26,000 pounds. Um, to [00:04:00] us that's. An interesting sweet spot where the vehicles need to have the durability of a long haul truck. We're building vehicles here with a 20 year life expectancy. They've gotta be a lot cheaper than those long haul trucks. So you, you know, you've got something that's a lot more durable than a sprinter type vehicle, but it's also still small enough that you can use it with a non CDL drive.
Uh, it's a, an unusual niche, and I think that's why it's so far behind the rest of the industry. You've really gotta focus on this niche. If you wanna build the right product for.
Josh Gregory: And I think that's what's really important and, and we'll get into what that means, but I think there's a very different way of solving and addressing a, a niche market like that, that it does differentiate you guys a lot from what I've seen.
But, but tell me a little bit more about that, because, so I've seen a lot of different electric vehicle companies kind of enter the space and, and some of like what you talked about that are very expensive, but what makes Harbinger different from them outside of just [00:05:00] targeting the medium duty space?
John Harris: The big difference between Harbinger and everyone else in the segment is what's going on behind me, harbinger, we make everything in the vehicle.
We buy commodities and we turn them into trucks. So behind me, they're taking cells, uh, battery cells from Panasonic, and they're turning them into modules and then into battery packs, all right here under Harbinger's control. Um, farther back behind that, behind the, the clear wall. You can see about 30 feet behind me.
There's a chassis assembly line where we're bringing in all the raw components and assembling chassis. And then another layer behind that, there's a drivetrain line where we're actually taking raw copper and we're winding electric motors here on shore, and we're building transmissions, and then we're building complete drive units out of that.
So everything's happening in the same place here, but it's all happening from those commodity layers. And so what we, you know what we're buying here at [00:06:00] Harbinger. They're very low priced inputs. We're transforming them into complete electric trucks, and we're doing so without giving away a ton of margin to big tier one suppliers.
And that's allowed us to bring a product to market at a radically different price point than any companies that came before us. Okay.
Josh Gregory: And I'm sure this is part of that price point, but you know, what is that different from others? Like are most people making it in the US or are they making 'em elsewhere?
Harbinger is the only truck company in the world doing them.
John Harris: So there are, um, two truck companies today doing the battery work that you can see behind Harbinger and BYD. And Harbinger is the only company in trucking building complete drivetrain in-house. So this is a, a radically different approach. Um, you know, this is the approach that we learned from Tesla and a lot of my team members have leadership roles there.
So we've, we've run this playbook before. If, if you wanna offer something at the right price, it doesn't start [00:07:00] with buying a bunch of overpriced inputs from other companies. We want all the savings of electrification to go to the operators. If we double the price of the vehicle, the savings of electrification are essentially being like stolen by the supply chain and given to these tier ones who are selling components at really high prices.
And that's, that's just not what we're here to do.
Josh Gregory: Yeah. And I think that's, that sounds very different from a lot of what I've heard from, from others who are manufacturing in, uh, in this industry as a whole. But what does that really mean from a, from a cost perspective? You know, total cost of ownership.
What can buyers expect that's different here?
John Harris: So on the, the TCO front, that one's, you know, pretty low hanging fruit, to be honest. Yeah. An ED will always have lower CPO. It's just a question of how many years you're gonna calculate that over. You know, you can go buy something like an MT 50 and there's a spreadsheet somewhere that will tell you that's gonna have [00:08:00] a lower TCO.
It's gonna take 20 years because the product is so expensive, but over a long enough time period, we can always make the TCO math work. The difference at Harbinger is that the TCO Math, we just don't think that's good enough. We're focused on what is the price upfront. So when you buy a Harbinger Electric chassis.
You can buy one for about the same cost as a diesel chassis, not five years later. Not with a bunch of incentives factored in just blind to line. We sell electric chassis at the same price point that our competitors sell diesel chassis.
Josh Gregory: Okay. Yeah. And that, that alone is, is, you know, pretty crazy. 'cause I, I agree with you.
You know, basically any electric vehicle argument I've heard is if you own this long enough. It's, you know, you're gonna be better off, you're gonna make money. And that's the whole, that's the whole idea of, uh, uh, you know, electric one. It's, there's a whole renewable energy argument [00:09:00] that, that makes sense depending on how you're thinking about the future of energy and consumables.
But, um, the idea is if you own one of these long enough, you're gonna be fine. But it's very different, I think, to be able to say, yes, that's true, but also. The price on the front end is comparable to what you're paying for a diesel already. Now how, and is that just you saying that's the price compared to a diesel with incentives or is that like the true price compared?
No,
John Harris: that's with no incentives.
Josh Gregory: Okay. Yeah, because then it goes, even once you throw incentives
John Harris: in, it's, it's a whole different ball game. But, you know, we have, we have customers in states with are incentives available, but it's kind of a small list of states. Mm-hmm. Um, you know, if you're in one of those states, it becomes.
Sort of absurd, right? In states with incentives, we're underpricing used trucks. The trucks are, you know, they're not far off for being free. I don't love that, to be honest, because it, it's not very sustainable. [00:10:00] Um, you know, we're benefiting from these incentives that that can't grow that large. So Harbinger was really about pricing the vehicle the right way in a zero incentive world.
Josh Gregory: Okay. Yeah. And, and that's really different is what I would say there. Um, a lot of people when they think about the, the front end cost of electric say that it only makes sense in a state where I get those tax incentives. And to hear that you've priced it without the incentives to make sense regardless.
I think that really opens up, you know, a world where suddenly from a price point, at least. It's available, but I think the next question always is, you know, it's great that I can buy it. It's great that over time this actually ends up being something that's cheaper on a spreadsheet. But does it actually work?
Can I actually use this in the territory that I have? So you know, if I have a hundred mile or a 200 mile territory, can I use one of these vehicles over the course of a day and it still works. So let's talk a little bit about [00:11:00] range first. You know, what are we seeing out of these vehicles? How many miles can they go?
John Harris: So the harbinger vehicles are built, um, with a very modular battery system so we can match the range to what the customer needs. My goal is really to sell the lowest priced vehicle that would meet the customer's needs. And so I don't want to give them 20 or 30 or a hundred percent more range than they need for their daily operation.
So when we look at vehicles in this segment, what we see is that most of the trucks. We'll consume between 0.9 and 1.0 kilowatt hours per mile. So let's just just use 1.0 'cause the math all gets really easy that way. We offer three common battery options depending on the wheel base. Four battery packs, that's 140 kilowatt hours, five battery packs, that's 175 kilowatt hours or six battery packs, and that's 210 kilowatts.
So that [00:12:00] means those vehicles will do a hundred forty, a hundred seventy five and 210 miles of real world range. Um, those battery sizes are usable energy. So another big difference in how we approach this, um, the battery packs are actually almost 10% bigger than that. So the battery pack capacity that we're quoting, that's the capacity that the operators actually get to use.
Hmm, the, you know, additional reserve to make sure we don't hurt the battery. I think everyone understands that you don't really wanna bring a battery down to zero at this point. We know that. And so when we say it's 140 kilowatt hour battery pack, it's really more like 150, but we don't think that the operator should be the one, you know, paying the price for that extra range so that those sets of, of real world ranges.
1 41 75, 2 10. Those are real world ranges that you should see every day.
Josh Gregory: Okay. So it it, that's the range of what you [00:13:00] can expect. There's, you know, it's a pretty high in terms of what I've seen from some others. Can it get any higher? Is there any other way to get above two 10 or is that kind of the top end of, hey, if you've got mileage up in that 200 range or higher, this is probably not the right option for you?
John Harris: So we've also just recently launched our series hybrid platform. Now when we take the battery system and we add a range extender, which is a small gasoline motor that I think is the right choice if you've got a really extreme delivery route, um, I think that's probably unusual for last mile for parcel.
Mm-hmm. I know that's, you know, that's the main audience that, that you guys serve at Route Consultant and, and help people optimize their routes. So, you know, if someone does have a 250 mile parcel route, um. Number one. I'm sorry. That's, that sounds like a, a heck of a job. Mm-hmm. But we can solve that problem if they wanna move to a sustainable option.
But with our hybrid, we can do four to [00:14:00] 500 miles.
Josh Gregory: Okay. Yeah, that's, that's huge because you're right, not everybody's in that range, but there are some that get up there that have at least a, a truck or a route that gets up in that range. And, and I think what I'm seeing, and you know, the world that we're headed towards is, you know, we move towards a place where, you know, you're partnered with FedEx or you're partnered with Amazon and they require.
You to have electric vehicles for let's say 80, 90% of your fleet and mm-hmm. Is there an option? So it's good to hear that if you are having to move into that range, that you guys are already building options so that you know if you have one of those territories and if you are required to move into a renewable energy type of option, that, that there is something here because Yeah, I think it's not gonna be too long.
I think we're headed quickly towards the point where. You're going to have only a small percentage of your fleet even allowed to be gas, much less diesel. Um, so I, I think that's, that's where we're headed. So I, it is good to see the spectrum there. I think with that though, is the question of, you [00:15:00] know, is it something where I can get a hundred, 150 miles on a charge, or do I have to start and stop in the middle of the day to charge, you have to charge overnight.
So what are, what are those options? What does that look like for your fleet?
John Harris: So we really don't expect anyone to charge during the day. Anything that's gonna disrupt your operation, that's gonna change the way that you want to do business other than of course saving money. Uh, you know, that's really not what we're, we're looking for.
So, you know, if we look at a typical route, and then most of our parcel customers are doing 60, 70 miles a day, um, you know, with with ground-type routes, uh, we have seen routes up in 120 rain. A big part of it is just what kind of margin do you want in your ring? You know, if you're, if your goal is I want to do my whole route and I want to have another 20 or 30 miles just in case there's a, you know, a road closure, we've got some extra packages, um, you know, that kind of gives you [00:16:00] one answer.
Uh, I think for, for that answer. Our smaller vehicle is fine. You know, if you're in a hundred mile route, you've got 140 mile range, you've got plenty. Um, now I also think there's a, an interesting case to be made for the people with the, the shorter routes to say, I'd actually like to not charge, not only during the day, but I don't wanna charge at night.
I wanna charge every other day. So if you've got a 60, 70, even 80 mile route, I think our 175 mile vehicle is interesting because now we can go out, do the 70 mile route, come back. Maybe we don't have a charger tonight. Maybe the driver gets to plug it in. We can do a whole other route, come back in and we've still still got 20 or 30 miles of extra range.
So as we're thinking about vehicles and range, how you want to allocate chargers is a big piece of that. Um, and I think that's something that, that people have been overlooking. But if you've got a, you know, dedicated charger and it's a one-to-one, you know, [00:17:00] allocation. We can really cover 90-95 of parcel use cases without even touching the hybrid.
Josh Gregory: Okay. And I guess, tell me a little bit more about the chargers. Is this something you charge it, you know, at a station? Do you have to go to a specific place to be able to charge? What are those actually looking like today?
John Harris: So we're fully standards compliant on the charging side. We work with, um, two really common types of chargers.
So J 1772. Those are your, you know, pretty ubiquitous L two AC charger. Mm-hmm. We offer two options for the onboard chargers for that 12 kilowatts and 20 kilowatts. Uh, you're gonna find these chargers installed in a lot of depots today within the parcel industry. You're also gonna find them at parking garages, at grocery stores.
These are the chargers that you kind of find everywhere. Um, they're slow chargers and you can [00:18:00] charge with that 20 kilowatts an hour. And remember we said it's one kilowatt hour or one kilowatt hour per mile. So that means we're basically charging at a rate of 20 miles per hour. Mm-hmm. So, you know, if we come back, we plug into, uh, uh, 19.2 kilowatt charger at 6:00 PM If we did a hundred miles that day, it's only gonna take five hours to completely recharge that vehicle.
Most vehicles in last mile are sitting overnight for 10 to 12 hours. Mm-hmm. And that means we can get away with even smaller chargers, we can get away with 10 kilowatt, 12 kilowatt chargers and still be a hundred percent topped off overnight. Now we also support fast chargers and we support fast charging at a one hour fast charge.
So that means if you've got access to a fast charger, and more and more we're seeing these really big fast chargers available publicly. Through the bigger charging networks, especially Electrify America has a lot of 350 kilowatt fast chargers now. [00:19:00] So with these bigger chargers, you plug in the vehicle and you're gonna be charged from 10% to 90% in one hour.
Okay. And so I think that's more of a like, oops, I forgot to plug it in scenario. Yeah. Um, you know, it tends to be a little more expensive if you're using those fast chargers. Um, but if you know. Show up in the morning, truck wasn't plugged in. I think it, it makes it pretty practical to sort of go out on a route and then maybe stop when you're gonna have lunch charged for half an hour and get the vehicle basically topped off.
But it just, it provides a nice, um, kind of recovery option.
Josh Gregory: That makes a lot of sense, and especially seeing those appear more and more, it means that you're not as worried about if I forgot or if it didn't properly charge overnight, I've got some of those options to get a quick charge in the middle of the day or at the beginning of the day even.
Exactly. Are you finding anyone has challenges, you know, if they have 10, 15 vehicles to get them all charged at a, at a depot, or is that something [00:20:00] where you have enough chargers, you build it in and you, you just kind of structure it based on. The size vehicles you have and the the location you have. I'm, I'm more worried about, like, I, one of the things I hear often is a concern about grid and the energy at a certain building if they can handle multiple vehicles.
John Harris: I, so far we haven't really seen that being an issue. I think, you know, where that starts to get complicated is if you've got like a hundred EVs in one place or 200 EVs in one place, uh, you know, with most buildings you can support kind of. 30, 40, 50 vehicles. Okay. If, if we're looking at, you know, 200, it's very doable.
It just requires a little bit more planning on that building side. Yep. Um, you know, one of the best ways to address that though is with charging, um, management software or CMS, we're seeing more and more operators deploying software to manage all the chargers, [00:21:00] and that allows you to charge more vehicles.
With the same amount of energy because you're not allowing all the chargers to run at full speed. Uh, that's something that we do here at Harbinger for our employee charging. Mm-hmm. We've got, um, I think about 25 chargers now all on one electrical panel. So it's triple the amount of power that that panel will theoretically support.
But we use charging management software from flip turn, so as the employees plug in more cars. The software is looking at what are all the cars that are plugging in, and it's just balancing all that charging now, so there's still only so much energy we can get through that system. But you know, if you've got 2020 kilowatt chargers and you've got a 10 hour window, that's 20 kilowatts, that's 20 chargers, that's 400 kilowatt hours times 10 hours.
So that's 4,000 kilowatt hours of energy. That's the amount of energy we could pull through that Bank [00:22:00] of Chargers overnight. Mm-hmm. We know that that at one kilowatt hour per mile, that's 4,000 miles of driving and that's what we can do every night. So that, you know, to me that sounds more like a hundred trucks.
150 trucks. Yeah. Even though there's only 20 chargers right there. So we can use charging software like that to put in more chargers without having to pay serious infrastructure costs. We're helping balance that across larger numbers of vehicles.
Josh Gregory: Okay. Yeah, that's really interesting. I think that's, uh, you know, anytime we're talking to infrastructure, it's like, okay, this is gonna be take forever and be expensive.
But the software side of things of actually balancing it in real time makes a lot of sense. So, you know, we don't have to go into all of that right now, but I think that's. From a peace of mind perspective about scale. I think that does a lot about making, you know, it's like, obviously as you approach 50 and 60 trucks at a building, you can start to think about infrastructure, but knowing exactly there's something in place that can balance it out for a much longer time.
It gives [00:23:00] you the bandwidth to say, okay, hey, we're, we're headed towards that breaking point, but we got some time. Um, okay, that, that, that's much better. So that's good to hear. There's
John Harris: some breaking point, but I think it's important that people understand that it's not necessarily 50 trucks, it can be two or three or 400 trucks.
And Yeah, if you've got 400 EVs, the amount of money you are saving every month at that point is, is staggeringly large. So that's a great problem to have.
Josh Gregory: Yeah, I agree with that. Okay, so, so one of the things too that we always hear on the electric side is that they, they can't perform in cold weather. So talk to me a little bit about that.
You know, why do we hear that? But also is that the case for you guys vehicles as well?
John Harris: So you hear that for a good reason. Um, vehicles that have been built before Harbinger in this segment have performed terribly in cold weather. Uh, you know, it wasn't unusual with, with early electric trucks to see 30, 40% loss of range.
And the reason for that is that in the cold weather, you're taking a lot of that battery energy and you're basically running [00:24:00] a space heater with it, which just sucks up a ton of power. And that's, you know, every kilowatt hour you put into that space heater. That's one mile left. The truck's gonna go. Mm.
At Harbinger, we knew that that just, that wasn't an acceptable situation. So we approached the entire thermal system on the vehicle differently. So when you're driving a Harbinger truck and you kick on the heater, what the vehicle is doing is it's actually taking the waste heat being generated by the electric motor and it's pumping into the cabin to heat the cabin for you.
And that, you know, that should sound familiar 'cause that's how all of your combustion vehicles work, right? The heat is free. So, you know, it seems obvious. But to do that we had to build a whole new thermal architecture using a multi-zone heat pump. So same thermal system that a lot of people are moving to in their houses because drives a lot of cost savings with our heat pump.
You know, we're running cooling system through that [00:25:00] electric motor. We're just tanking all that waste heat and now we're running it into the cabin. So, you know, I won't say that heat is completely free. Yeah. But we're getting about three times more heat for each unit of energy than people without heat pump systems.
So what we've seen when we've got vehicles on the road, um, in New York and New Jersey in the winter, and we had vehicles through the winter, uh, last year, uh, in the snow, we're seeing a, a range impact of maybe 10%. So it's, it's not zero, but it's, it's more than possible to, to absorb that. Um, you know, with that size impact, we see a pretty symmetric impact, whether you're an extreme hot or extreme cold.
Mm-hmm. If you are running the AC all day, it may be another 10%. So it is sort of a 10% buffer on both sides. L
Josh Gregory: Yeah. And that makes sense. Like, like you said, that's a, a reasonable. It's not a detrimental [00:26:00] business destroying amount of range detriment. Oh, absolutely. So, you know, we're talking about all these systems.
What does the maintenance look like to actually repair one of these I'd, I'd imagine, you know, the average mechanic can't just repair this if you just take it into the shop. Is that the case or what, what can you expect outta the, the actual repair side of these vehicles?
John Harris: So that's, that's another thing where we, we didn't want to sign our customers up for unnecessary pain points.
So harming your vehicles are very serviceable by any skilled technicians that you can take a diesel truck to. So if we look at most of the systems on the vehicle, thermal system, AC brakes, steering, and suspension axles, you're gonna be s able to service all of these with your regular mechanics. If we look at the few pieces that have actually changed, if we look at the battery.
If we look at the electric drive unit, what we've done is made those systems extremely easy to swap [00:27:00] in and out so that your same mechanic can pull the system and swap in a new one. So let's say you've got, you know, an issue with the battery. Let's say you hit a cinder block on the road, right? And I, I'm sure you're, um, you know, listeners in, in New Jersey and, and Philadelphia that you know that that happens.
A lot more often than it should. I say that as someone who, who lived in Philly for about five years and have dodged a lot of cinder blocks. Mm-hmm. Um, the idea here is your mechanic can pull the battery pack out, swap it with a replacement and get you back on the road immediately without having to get a specialty mechanic that's trained, open that battery system up to deal with the high voltage risks.
So our battery systems can technically be swapped in about 10 minutes.
Josh Gregory: Okay. Wow. Yeah, that's, yeah. Sometimes faster than my batteries if I'm doing it myself. So that's, that's crazy.
John Harris: Same thing on the drive. Um, we can replace the entire drivetrain system, our vehicle in about one hour. [00:28:00]
Josh Gregory: Wow. Okay. So that's, you know, that would be one of my biggest concerns if I'm, you know, driving one of these is that, hey, it's great that I bought it and it's nice on the front end, but that, you know, as soon as something breaks, no one can fix it until I take it, you know, back to you guys directly.
So, hearing that. That's not gonna be a huge issue. And if anything it's, it's simpler than a lot of others, you know, and the things that we talk about always with electric, there's, there's, you know, none of the fluids that you often have to deal with. So there's all already a lot of the repairs that you're typically dealing with, with a gas or a diesel vehicle that are out of the equation.
But to hear that the things that I would expect to be more complicated and more expensive are pretty simple and quick, is also, you know, pretty comforting to, to know that that's an option.
John Harris: Absolutely. We want. Our customers to be able to take their vehicles to the view, to the mechanics they already know and like Yeah.
And have comfort that those mechanics can change. The brake system, can do a safety inspection for them, you know, that, that they don't need some exotic
Josh Gregory: skillset. Okay. [00:29:00] Okay. So, so talk to me a little bit more now about, you know, what it's like actually on the driver end. You know, are these comfortable vehicles to drive, or, you know, how do they compare to the typical vehicle, uh, experience for a driver?
John Harris: So this is an area where I think the, the benefits have really been undersold because, you know, people are really focused naturally with EVs on the fuel savings. Okay. But when we look at medium duty trucks specifically, the opportunity to improve the driver experience is just massive because the vehicles that our customers have today, you know, overwhelmingly they were designed in the seventies and the eighties.
So there's, there's just a lot of room for improvement. Um, when we look at, at the Harger trucks. Three areas where, um, we've, I think made a really big difference. We've moved to a much more comfortable suspension system. So in the front end, instead of using the typical leaf spring and solid steer axle front end, we've moved to an independent double wishbone suspension.
[00:30:00] Same thing that you would find on a really high end sedan, uh, or a Formula one cart today. So these are vehicles that ride and maneuver really precisely. Uh, you know, when you hit a pothole, it's not, doesn't feel like the whole truck is being dragged into it. Yeah. Um, we've moved to a much faster and higher assist steering system.
So we use what's called EPAs steering, electronic powerly Power assisted steering. Uh, and that means we've eliminated that hydraulic system in the steering. So there's another maintenance item that's gone, but it also means that we've got much lower. Steering input. So you know, it's not, if you've driven some of the older trucks in this segment, especially the bigger diesels, it, it can be a workout to drive those trucks for eight, 10 hours a day.
Yeah. When you drive a Harmer truck, it's like driving an F-150 or an Explorer. Okay. Easy to drive, easy to steer, and then we've taken that same opportunity to make the vehicle turn in a [00:31:00] much smaller space. When we think about performance, we think about what's getting our drivers through their route as fast as possible.
And that's not actually going faster. It's being able to do a u-turn on a residential street. It's being able to avoid putting the vehicle into reverse and, and all the accidents that come into reverse. So when you turn a Harbinger vehicle, our turning circle is dramatically smaller than anything else in the segment, but it's also dramatically smaller than the turning circle you get.
Sprinter van in a transit in a bright drop. So we can do a full U-turn in about 40 feet, which means most residential roads, they miss a stop and u-turn come back. We don't have to go and go around the block and, and sort of deal with all this time loss. Uh, that's the sort of thing that we think. It's not really electrification, right?
The vehicle doesn't turn sharper because it's electric. The vehicle turns in a smaller [00:32:00] circle because we cared about the driver experience and designed it that way.
Josh Gregory: Yeah, that's, you know, you mentioned it, but that, that is so important for actually getting a route to be more efficient. It, it, it does happen.
You miss a stop, but beyond just saving time, you're, you're eliminating the need to potentially have to back up. And that's where most accidents occur in this, you know, last mile space. So. Being able to just turn around like a normal vehicle as opposed to, you know, having to make a 16 point turn to get back to Oh,
John Harris: absolutely.
Josh Gregory: Yeah. It's crazy in, in, in terms of what it saves in time and safety for that operation.
John Harris: One of our customers just told us last week that they've seen 60% of their accidents happen in reverse, even though the vehicle's in reverse for less
than 1% of the miles.
Josh Gregory: Yep. It's just the way it goes. And you're doing everything you can, you, everything you teach, every safety thing you put in the vehicles to try to prevent it, but that's just where the accidents happen.
So whatever you can [00:33:00] do to eliminate it, it goes a long way. And one more in reverse. We
John Harris: still wanna make safety better there as well, so we offer a full, uh. Bird's eye view camera system on the vehicle. Mm-hmm. And of course, every vehicle comes with a, a backup camera, which also is has our dynamic, uh, trajectory showing, you know, where the vehicle's gonna be as you move the steering wheel.
Mm-hmm. So just being able to see what's going around, going on around the truck at all times, it can make such a difference.
Josh Gregory: Yeah, it's huge. So you touched on a couple of examples there, but are there any other just kinda larger examples of what a fleet or a customer has seen as they've made a transition to Harbinger?
John Harris: I think one of the, the most exciting data points that we've seen is the real world fuel savings. Mm-hmm. You know, we obviously, people focus a lot on that for EVs, but there's a lot of, I think, a lot of arm waving, a lot of, like, what am I really gonna say? Um, if there, there's a lot of, of questionable data points that people are throwing out there around maintenance as well.
You know, [00:34:00] you're gonna save 90% on maintenance. Like, I don't really think that's accurate, but. On the fuel savings, what we saw in a pilot we ran this summer was a 72% fuel savings.
Josh Gregory: That is a meaningful amount of savings for what is often one of the top, you know, two or three expenses for one of these businesses.
So that is, uh, significant to say the least, especially when you're not having to pay the price of five vehicles on the front end just to get one. If you're paying like a, a true comparable rate to get that vehicle in the first place and then you're saving 72% on fuel, that's pretty, uh, remarkable to say the least.
I'd say.
John Harris: Yeah, we think that at the, at the bottom line that looks like. $8,000-$12,000 a year in savings. It depends on what state you're in, but even if you're in a state with, you know, really high electric prices and, and low gas or diesel prices, we're still talking [00:35:00] $8,000-$9,000 a year, which is, it's, I think, gonna have a huge impact on our customers to have that much more margin. So, talk to me a little bit more about, you know, what's the future for Harbinger, what, you know, what are the things that we can expect from you guys over the next few years?
Over the next few years? One of the things that you'll see is a lot more modern safety features. We're starting to roll in, I think more and more exciting features, the Brin driver of the sort of modern safety that they should be expecting in these vehicles.
So I'll have some more detailed announcements on that, um, early next year. Mm-hmm. But one of the things that we built into the truck is an over the air update system. And so that means that we can keep giving our customers more features year over year after they've taken the wave.
Josh Gregory: Yeah, that's, that's great.
I mean, it, it, instead of having to buy a new truck every two years, you just wait for the new feature, uh, download and, and get out on the road. [00:36:00]
John Harris: Yeah, we're gonna see that in predictive maintenance in telematics. There's a lot of stuff that we've built here initially for the companies use for our test vehicles, and as we see those things mature, we're bringing those now out to our customers.
And it just, it allows us to, I think, be a lot more customer responsive by having that ability to develop new functionality and, and share functionality that we developed for our own use with our customers even months or years after they bought the gates.
Josh Gregory: Yeah. Yeah. That's huge. And because obviously with technology like this.
There's going to be new developments. You guys are all constantly gonna be looking for the next thing, and so being able to share that with your customers as you find it, just gives you the feeling of comfort and support that I'm not just buying a vehicle, but I'm partnering with a company that's, that's trying to, to kind of pave the way forward in this space.
Absolutely. Okay, John. So, so that was great. That's, that's kind of really what I wanted to hit and dive [00:37:00] into when it comes to this industry and the things to understand. But I do have one more question that I ask for everybody who comes on this podcast. So, um, if you have a favorite book or movie that you have read or watched recently, what would it be?
You can answer both, but you gotta answer at least one.
John Harris: Uh, I just finished watching the latest season of Diplomat Okay. On Netflix.
Uh. That'll take more than, than the last few seconds to explain, so you'll just have to go watch it to find out. Okay.
Josh Gregory: Perfect. Well, well, John, I really appreciate you being on here and really cutting through the noise for, for what I think a lot of people experience and have questions on when it comes to EVs.
Uh, appreciate your time. I'm looking forward to seeing you guys in Harbinger at the expo where hopefully everybody will get a chance to, to see you guys in person, see those vehicles, and, uh, get a taste of what you guys have put together here. So again, thank you for being here. For answering all of our questions.[00:38:00]
No problem. Great to be here, Josh. All Right see you guys
