EV Transcript

TCI EV: Interview-John Sappington – March 01

@5:43 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

So John, one of the things that we did actually was how Danica started, and I thought it was pretty good was a quick little background on you.

Don’t have to give us your LinkedIn, your whole history, but just like how you got into the industry and how you got to where you are in a short little little kind of conversation.

@6:00 – SappingtonJ

additional explanation sure okay so gosh I can talk a whole hour on that but so I started an industry back in 89 at Rollins I was working at a company called seven photo photocopiers and fax machines and all that company was going through chapter 11 wants and went through a second time I was in a a management role there in sales and so I was using a headhunter to help me find a recruiting agency help me find salespeople we we had a lot of turnover in that industry which was which was common it wasn’t it wasn’t a seven thing but it’s pretty common and then I find it to the second bankruptcy chapter 11 I said hey I think I’m gonna ask you to find me a job is that you know it was tough working there and you know some of my bonuses weren’t being paid because it’s gonna be couldn’t afford a pan and then I went to Rollins which is in this industry that’s how

I got here.

@7:01 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

And what is Rollins?

@7:04 – SappingtonJ

Rollins was the same as like Ryder and Penske, they’re publicly traded, Jim, and they were the big three. It was Rollins, Ryder, Penske, and they’re a huge company.

John Sr., John Rollins Sr. passed away in 1998, I think, and then after he passed away, the company sold the business to Penske.

That’s why Penske got bigger. And that was a big acquisition for Penske to swallow. But I worked there, moved up in the company fairly fast.

I was actually the, not the brag of myself, was actually the 19th person, sales person in the company’s history to make the round table.

The round table, making the round table there is a lot more difficult than making Penske’s winner circle for riders because you’ve got to be the number one sales person one year.

They call that a super award. then you have to do other things too, but you have to be the number one person out of all

all the salespeople. And there’s like 400 salespeople. So I was fortunate to get that a couple of times. And anyways, I got the roundtable recipient, and then they move into a national sales executive role.

So I was one of 10 salespeople in the country selling to big companies. And anyway, so in the industry, my name got known pretty well.

Steve Scully found me. says, Hey, I want to interview you. And basically in the same capacity there is where I’m at TCI.

I ran the sales form. The company was smaller when I got there. And he says, Hey, I need someone to help grow the company.

And so I was there for about 12 or 13 years. And we went from about eight or nine million.

But yeah, when I got there, it’s about a hundred and we got to about 131 million. When I when I left and I left because, you know, I want to equity in the company, but he said, Hey, it’s family business and I’m going to go start my own company.

so that’s what I did. I was going to do it in the solar, the solar space. I wanted to go work for Conergee, which was at the time, throughout Hamburg, Germany.

And they’re the second largest integrator in the world. And so I got working for those guys. then, actually, that started out pretty fast.

Then I found myself within about year being hired by Garland. They’re a big roofing company manufactured out of Cleveland.

around since 1895. And to this date, it’s the most successful company I’ve ever worked for. These guys, I mean, I honestly do.

I think they rival profitability of companies like Google and Apple, mean, as far as return on investment. But they’re wildly profitable company.

And anyway, so I was in the solar space. That’s where they found me, because I did some deals for them, helping facilitate roof sales.

And sometimes things were getting blocked in New Jersey in California where the two hot markets were. So they needed someone to help them get through that.

I don’t want put a rip on if I’m going to put solar on them. to put me riff on and then tear it off and put slower down and put the new you know so anyway so that was that and they hired me to start this company called Garland Energy so I did that for about three more years and we set up this brokery model and then as the Chinese got more more in depth in manufacturing, crystalline panels and inverters and all that stuff the model wasn’t as good for people to use us so at that point it was kind of this good timing I got called back into this industry I went to work for supreme bodies at the time and I ran the western region form and then at that point you know Andrew and Ryan knew me from from the skille days we competed and you know Ryan and Andrew and I we spoke for probably probably I was at there I was there for three three and a half four years and eventually almost the entire time I was there they were trying to bring me over to TCI and I kept saying I’m not I don’t want to go over that you know I’m and we finally put it together and the rest is kind of you guys know the rest is

or a TCI and so fitness capacity ever since and just going out to company.

@11:05 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

Okay so with TCI short and sweet when you got here what was this like what we’re talking about sustainability EV that type of stuff right so that’s what that’s where we want this conversation to kind of go you already touched a little bit about getting your feet into that area prior to TCI so when you came in what were your initial goals or challenges or tasks what we like when it comes to sustainability was that part of your agenda or did you bring that agenda the company assigned it to you did you bring it yeah no they didn’t assign it to me actually brought that thought to Andrew and Ryan as far as because you know we electrified our risk you know the first thing we did we did commerce Fontana and Phoenix and between the three locations where we have close to a megawatt now between the three a little under megawatt and it’s just

@12:00 – SappingtonJ

the buildings it’s a no-brainer to put solar up so I basically said hey we should be doing this save some money and they agreed and then I just went out to the integrators and found one called REP that I really liked and we did all three buildings but that’s where that kind of came to play that had nothing to do with at that point because that goes back now actually came out we put the solar up I want to say it’s probably been up for a good five or six years I think at this point maybe maybe seven years and so we did that like I said nothing to do with the EV vehicles it was just it was just to bring our costs down and and you know quite honestly speaking it wasn’t that we wanted to be you know great citizens of California and the world you know about putting our way it was it was a cost savings deal is why we did it and how quickly did was saving scene like was that like instantaneously to take a couple years to yeah yeah the savings the savings starts right away

Hey, but what you let me answer it this way because people are going to say that doesn’t make any sense, but No, the savings does start right away, right?

Um, but you got this big investment So it’s the return on investment. So by the time you pay off what you what you pay the integrated install that stuff for you The ri for us is on there was under four years.

was it was about it was about by member right I think Three and a half maybe three and two thirds years is when our our break even point was so after that point Then it you know, then it’s all it’s all savings.

mean by so if he paid if he paid a million dollars for a solar system You you but with the depreciation and the ftc credits and all that stuff You’re you’re basically got that back for all those credits plus what you’re saving on electricity In about three and a half three and a half four years is what it was for us That’s pretty quick And what’s the lifespan of the equipment that you got at what point are you looking to have to replace or upgrade?

So inverters are warranted for 15 years and then the that panels themselves are warranted for 25 years. So it’s a long it’s yeah.

And the panels, I mean, they the the degradation of panels, you know, they’re they’re less, you know, they’re like a quarter percent per year.

It’s pretty low. So even after 25 years, I would expect those panels to still be be fine. I don’t think they’re going to be new ones out there.

So much more efficient that it would be worth the cost to replacing those and putting new ones up. I think that, you know, we have a big demand for electricity and we say, hey, you need to get a bigger footprint on the, you know, KW footprint on the roof.

Like, like the house I live in has has five KW on it, right? And yeah, I didn’t put that up.

I bought the house with the panels up here. And it’s got five, five KW on air on the roof.

And it wasn’t enough. So I added some more added, I added another almost five KW to it. And the new panels, some is more efficient.

I did that in the square footage of the roof in about half the space’s elements take. That’s how much more efficient these panels have gotten.

So down the road, if we expect to replace those things, would have to be something like that. And it would have to make some sense.

And the other thing would have to make some sense is we need that additional power with all the EV vehicles that we’re going to be forced to be putting in our facility.

@15:25 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

that could happen, actually. Got it.

@15:28 – Jameca Lyttle

Okay. Okay. Can I ask a question in two of those EV vehicles, Jim?

@15:31 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

Yeah, I’m still trying to get there here. So just kind of really quickly. So as far as the sustainability goes, the challenges, opportunities, what have been the toughest obstacles to overcome and where do you see are still really great opportunities for TCI to go?

@15:55 – SappingtonJ

Well, so, yeah, two different… Questions there, but the challenge is to the market, if you will, our customers, and just the general public who has to have vehicles, the biggest thing is cost, right?

The cost still isn’t really there, other than where there’s voucher money, where there’s grant money, and they just, they don’t really work without that.

The other thing is range anxiety, so you can’t, you know, like we have, I don’t know, we want to put this in the articles we want to permission to, but I’ll give you example of the sketches, right?

Every sort of sketches, and we do dedicated services for them. We do it with tractors, and we have some yard tractors on site, but also, you know, we’re the road tractors, and their headquarters is in, is in Manhattan Beach, but they’re, the big DCs out in Maryland, make that round trip, they will, they will,

They really want to be a green company. want to use green whenever they can. And we got these green power vehicles and the range of these things are about 130, miles depending on who the driver is.

And they really want to do it. But they say, I don’t know if we can do that because that’s right on the bubble if we can make it over there and back.

don’t want to have to charge out there then come back before we come back. range anxiety is a big one.

Cost is the biggest issue. And as bad as people want to be green, most are not going to be green to the point of cost and money to be green.

Maybe a little bit but not much. So the biggest challenge well let me say the biggest opportunity right now and then I’ll go back to the challenge and jump back and forth here.

But the opportunity is the class four, class five vehicles, those are the smaller ones. They don’t have big batteries, but and so you get the range anxiety with those two But the thing about those vehicles those like the little zucie trucks They’re cheaper and so you can you can cost those out they make some sense It’s if you get the voucher and the lower price of those vehicles You can generally make it make sense compared to the to the diesel engine to the Internal combustible engine whether that be diesel or gas or whatever it is You can make you make that make sense.

@18:30 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

So how do you guys deal with the range anxiety? I mean, it’s it’s obviously as being a big issue What do you do?

Well, how do you host TCI address that?

@18:39 – SappingtonJ

So we we got one going today, right? We signed the lease today and it’s a green power vehicle the customer I says hey, that’s gonna work for me 90% of the time But when I have to go out to LA and then go down Orange County and back out to Chino Hills I don’t I don’t think I can make it and I and we’re looked at the mileage and I said not don’t think you can make it Maybe that’s not the vehicle for you.

I said but that’s the vehicle So we can give you at this point, and that’s going to be your best, your best cost.

And so, so what we did is we looked at, you know, this charging station is going up all over California right now.

There’s more and more every day. And so we looked at that and we said, hey, you got a charging station here.

Where do you have to go? I have go here in LA. else do you go? in Orange County? Well, there’s a charging station here and there’s one here.

And you can probably make that, you can probably make that, uh, that triangle. But if you’re worried about it, your drivers were worried about it, he could probably stop here and get charged for even, even if probably a 20 minute charge would be enough to get you back.

So that’s, and he said, okay, that’s good enough for me. Let’s do it. Because he’s looking at, I’m going save a boatload of money and then diesel.

know, because right now he’s paying, you know, we’re paying over five hours a gallon for diesel and the average price of a kilowatt.

For most business anyway, in California, it’s probably going to be around 16 cents to 20 cents a kilowatt hour.

And so you’re going to save a substantial amount of money. money going to, when you just look at what it takes to power the vehicle, whether it takes electricity to power or diesel, you’re going to save a lot more money and power it by electricity.

So that customer that I’m talking about this morning, and the customer is called Inland Plastics, and I’m sure you can use that name if you want, because I know he wouldn’t care, but it works really well because we’re able to get the voucher money for him.

The HPIP voucher, the voucher against the cost of the vehicle, and then how much are you going to save?

He’s probably going to end up saving $200, a month, running the electrical vehicle, all of a sudden done, and he’s running an electrical vehicle too, and he wants to be green if you can.

@20:48 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

It must be, I want to be green if it doesn’t cost him. So what do you do if you have one of these customer’s clients who gets one of these vehicles and runs out of juice, and they’re sitting up.

there in the middle of the highway, some were calling you on the, like, I know you guys have TCI’s road repairs.

@21:05 – SappingtonJ

You have similar for the electric EV vehicles? Yeah, so the difference there, if you break down on the road with the diesel or internal combustible engine, you just bring some diesel out to them, right?

here go. But if you’re down on battery, we don’t have, and there’s really no one out there right now that I’m aware of that has mobile chargers.

I mean, I guess you could. I mean, I know you can have a battery pack on your truck and then go out there and give some of some juice.

That’s something we’re looking at, you know, that we should probably look at doing. But right now, that vehicle down for charge would probably need to be have a tow to a charging station.

@21:48 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

Would you swap them? Would you bring like an alternate vehicle charged?

@21:53 – SappingtonJ

You might not be able to get it. No, because that would be something that, so we’re answering that question too.

What you And if it breaks down because the vehicle breaks down from some other than you got plenty of juice but it broke down for some of the reason, we would tow it and then we’d have the customer come to our location and pick up another vehicle.

@22:10 – Jameca Lyttle

But if there was the possibility of the customer to make sure that he had this power and everything.

@22:14 – SappingtonJ

Yeah, that’s just being stupid, right?

@22:18 – Jameca Lyttle

really.

@22:19 – SappingtonJ

We don’t cover it. We don’t cover the stupid stuff.

@22:21 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

It’s never stopped anybody before. so let’s jump into these Lone Star babies, right? and let’s kind of, so you guys went and purchased a bunch of these for a whole bevy.

What do they call it?

@22:38 – SappingtonJ

a flock, a flock of Lone Stars or a gaggle.

@22:41 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

Yeah, of Lone Stars. Why? And what was the lead up to the company making decision? I know it’s not a, that came after a process.

You guys were going through other things as well. But kind of, how did that happen? What were the questions?

as one of the driving factors behind TCI saying, we’re going to do this.

@23:04 – SappingtonJ

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And that’s where the opportunity is, and this is really what the article, if we can point people to this, this is probably our best opportunity to get some bang out of the article here.

But so we, you have 40 long-stars on this list, on these questions, but actually it’s over 100. We did 40, 47 plus 59 plus 4.

So that’s, what is that? That’s 110? Is that right? Yeah.

@23:35 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

111.

@23:36 – SappingtonJ

Yeah. 111. Yeah. 111. So we did 111 of them. And the reason why we did them is because in California, they got this rule of 23.05 and the swear program and their penalized and warehouses, know, DC centers that are 100,000 square feet or Last year is for their, you know, thousands or 10,000.

Now, these fees can be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. In fact, they can be up even over million in some cases.

So, these loan stars, it’s a Kalmar product and we’re a Kalmar dealer. being a dealer those, and we got the vouchers formed too at $120,000 plus 10% more if and putting these out to the customer, it makes more economic sense than anything I’ve ever seen in the 35 years I’ve been doing this.

You could either pay, you could pay at least a vehicle from TCI or someone else, or if you want, you could pay the fee.

But, you know, most people don’t like paying fees, they’d rather get, you know, get some equipment. And instead of paying a fee and getting nothing for, at least if you get a vehicle when you pay when you when you lease a truck from from TCI and these penalties are annual penalties that don’t go away.

So if you don’t do anything in 2024, you’re going to pay a fee. And then in 2025, you’re going to pay another fee and depending on the size of your warehouse, you might pay a bigger fee in 2025 than you did in 2024 and you might pay a bigger fee.

Even if you don’t have a, you know, if you already have a warehouse that’s over, you know, the next size where you’re at the highest point on the calculator, I mean, you’ve got to see the calculator.

If your business grows, right, the economy grows, your business grows, get more trucks ingressing and ingressing out of your facility, every time that’s a point each way.

So as your business grows, you’re going to have higher penalties too. So at some point, you’re going to either pay the fee or you’re going to do something about it to mitigate the fees.

And the best way to mitigate the fees. is to go electric, and the best electric way to do that is through yard tractors.

You get the biggest amount of points back on yard tractors in the vehicle out there. So it’s the fastest, easiest, and if you’re lucky enough to find a company has vouchers, you’re going to pay a lot less than someone who doesn’t have vouchers.

But that was the reason why we jumped in and took a big portion of Lone Star’s capacity on getting these chucked up.

And as far as we know, we’re the only dealer out here that sell the Lone Star product to have vouchers.

@26:44 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

So what do the companies make the similar products to Lone Star?

@26:48 – SappingtonJ

So the biggest one is Orange EV. make theirs, AutoCar has one. I don’t think that their production on them, or is that big though?

I think it’s pretty small. I know that tyco is coming out with one and capacity probably have one as well too.

not familiar with I have not seen any of those out there. The only ones I’ve seen out is the Lone Star and the Orange EV.

@27:15 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

So you guys, how long ago was this where these Lone Stars on TCI’s radar? at what point in time did you guys start realizing I know the co-calma relationship has been in place for a while.

Obviously they’re connected but how far in advance prior to making the jump the leap into the purchases did you guys have to work on this and were there problems, challenges, the things that you ran up against that made this a difficult move or was it smooth as silk?

@27:48 – SappingtonJ

Yeah so that’s good question. We saw what was happening in California number one and you know TCI was born and raised in California in 1978.

is our birth date. We’re not our birth year, I should say. And we’re not going anywhere. So we saw this, you know, this is coming down.

And we wanted to buy, we wanted to buy loan stars. I’m sorry, we wanted to buy electric yard tractors, I’ll say, because at this point loan star wasn’t on our radar.

And Kalmar is the biggest yard tractor manufacturer in America. By far, they have by far the lion’s share, they get over 60, 65% of the market share here in America with their traditional diesel.

they’re working on their EV, right? And so we have a lot of customers who are being forced by the state to go electric.

And so what was happening is they were coming to us to supply them because we have a great, we have multi-year relationship with our customers.

They like our service, but we couldn’t support them because we didn’t have a product because Kalmar didn’t have a product.

And then we wanted to pivot and say, let us go somewhere else and buy these electric yard tractors. It’s just electric.

And they said, oh, no, you can’t do that because you’re going to avoid your dealer agreement. Your dealer agreement, you can’t go get another competitor.

@29:12 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

You got to sell our product.

@29:14 – SappingtonJ

And then we said, well, wait a minute, you don’t have a product for us to sell. And meanwhile, we’re losing customers.

some of customers went to our competition to get electric vehicles. Now they got these loan stars. And then the loan star relationship is interesting how it’s intertwined.

loan star is the name of the yard tractor, but the loan star is also the dealer name or the freight liner dealer name, our principal, where we buy our freight liners from.

And it just so happens that they call this the loan star on the vehicle. And this is just another part of that whole dealership network, if you will, they’re really large.

This is a total offshoot. And these guys manufacture them there in Texar, Canada, Texas. So we went down there.

Look at them, we flew down, took a look at them, we liked them. But again, Kalmar wouldn’t let us buy them because you’re going to avoid your dealer agreement.

then we kept coming back, say, hey, we’re losing customers, we’re losing, because they keep, you know, give an example.

Usen is one of them. Usen, we lease over 30 diesel yard tractors to that company. They service, you know, Target department stores.

And they went out and they kept saying, hey, if you don’t give us anything, we’re going to go. So we have to get some electric vehicles.

And so they did, and they didn’t do them for us because we couldn’t do them. we finally said, hey, and then Kalmar came back and said, okay, you guys can go ahead and do whatever you need to do because our product is really slow to market and go ahead and do it.

But we expect you to come back and buy the Kalmar product once we have our product ready for you.

And we say, okay, up. No problem. And then they have more setbacks at Kalmar and then Kalmar eventually bought out the intellectual property of the Lone Star.

And that’s how this is now a Kalmar product. And that happens. I can’t exactly when that was, but I want to say it’s probably about six months ago, I’m going to say.

When that happened, mid-year last year.

@31:09 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

So, Kelmar originally had what was called the T2E Electric.

@31:13 – SappingtonJ

Now they’re selling the TX, the TX the Lone Star. That’s it.

@31:17 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

So, they’ve swapped. So, they basically said their product that they were working on was just not up to par with Lone Star.

They just figured why keep staying in our heads against the wall trying to get something.

@31:28 – SappingtonJ

Where else would it go get them? Yeah, that’s what it is. So, they bought their intellectual property. They have some whatever issues, they have some prototypes that T2E, they have some prototypes out there.

But yeah, long and short of the story is that it wasn’t up to what they wanted it to be.

They say, we’re going to go buy this company Lone Star by their product and then make it our product.

But they are continuing to work on the Kelmar side too. They say they’re not sure what they’re going to

But they’re probably going to continue to do some R&D on their product, T2E, take that to market, or they’re going to maybe perfect this long-star, but they’re probably going to do some changes to the long-star, or they’ll come out with their own, and at such time they’ll probably discontinue the long-star, or they’ll just modify the long-star, and that’ll be their product.

@32:21 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

Are you guys in the kind of behind the doors of conversations with Kalmar and those types of companies knowing what they’re planning and what’s coming down the pike, do they keep you abreast of stuff so you can plan ahead?

@32:35 – SappingtonJ

Yeah, they do, they’re fairly communicative when it comes to that, you know, in timing and all that, you know, but it’s kind of like Tesla, right?

We sent Tesla $400,000 back in 2017 to put our name on 20 trucks, 20 tractors to get our name, you know, so when they come

out, we can get them. But I mean, we’re talking, what is that, seven years ago now? And they’ve produced them for free to lay, Pepsi free to lay.

That’s only company that has them right now and they’re going to hopefully come out and make us some trucks here maybe later this year or 2025, we’ll probably see some of these Teslas finally.

But the same thing with these, the T2E and all that, you know, they kept telling us, hey, we’re going to have something to you three months.

Hey, three more months, you know, next year or early next year, we’ll have to you. And then they kept putting this off and they finally said, ah, we’re not going to be able to make this happen.

Go ahead and go buy your loan stars and we’ll figure something out. But I mean, we’re Jim, we’re like hitting these guys hard.

I mean, really, really hard because we’re we’re those on our customer basis.

@33:51 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

So this is an industry, I think, like, it’s like most companies are missing deadlines, struggling or as you have you found other

companies in this kind of sustainable world of vehicles that have been better at this?

@34:05 – SappingtonJ

Yeah, I mean, yeah, obviously Orange EV has been at it longer than anybody on the yard tractor side. You know, I know that AutoCar, I can’t speak to AutoCar specifically and capacity and tyco and all that with the struggles they’ve had, but I can tell you that you know, they still are way below everybody else in the market, you know, as far as putting EVs out there, I don’t know any company who has an AutoCar capacity or tight or different.

don’t know any company that has anything other than an Orange EV or a Lone Star, then those loyalty brands.

I don’t know anybody has anything else yet. I’ve heard AutoCars got some out there.

@34:45 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

I don’t know where they’re at, but then there’s not very many of them. Got it. My last question on the Lone Stars, then we can move into California and stuff.

Just in general, you kind of touched on this before, but The terminal tractors are obviously the best way for a warehouse or a company or anybody in general, a business to get into the EV world because of the distance that they go, right?

They don’t have to go across state, across country or whatever, it’s very limited. You can have your charges there, right there, know, you could be able to keep these things going pretty much 24-7 around the clock as much as possible.

So, I assume this is why you guys have been all in on those, yes, because they’re easier to push right now?

@35:32 – SappingtonJ

Yeah, there’s no range anxiety, right? just for the reasons you just said, you know, you don’t have to worry about that.

So that, know, cost and that are the two biggest things. So you get rid of one of the biggest objections right there, right?

of the biggest concerns you’ve removed, the other objection people give you our cost. But now, since we got these vouchers, know, you can, you can, even without the whole wear penalty, these still make sense.

They still make economic sense to go this way, even if you didn’t have a penalty to pay because it’s so expensive.

@36:08 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

Okay, so that’s a good, you bring up where that’s a good opportunity to kind of shift here a little bit and just kind of talk about California and kind of what you know, these challenges and opportunities that California is putting in front of you, you know, face planting you with as, as you’re trying to navigate the world of.

So, you know, the sustainability world bringing these clients up to speed, helping them, helping TCI and stuff, talking a little bit about California in general, the regulations and the emissions issues and reefers and just general don’t go too far because we’ll touch on some of these, but just an overview about you and TCI kind of had to face California.

@36:51 – SappingtonJ

Yeah, so, so we’re, you know, like I said earlier, we’re not leaving California, right? Like some companies are saying it’s just getting too, too difficult to be in California.

Not just for the vehicle side, but just doing business in California. So the challenges are is that the state’s mandating, they’re mandating a lot of changes in California, whether it be, know, probably the most common thing people are looking at is the advanced clean fleet rule, which, you know, people call it ACF.

And so what’s happening is there’s mandates that your fleet has to be a certain percentage has to be ZEV by a certain date.

the first ones being hit are the small trucks, yard tractors. So if you people have a fleet of 100 yard tractors, generally speaking, their yards and all that, certainly in the smaller trucks, know, if you have, let’s just say you have 10 yard tractors, by the end of 2025, 10% of those have to be ZEV, have to be.

And on the smaller trucks, if you have 10 small trucks, like the ZEV. to type, 10% of those have to be ZEV by the end of 2025.

So you have to start, you have to start moving over. And then the bigger trucks, you know, larger trucks, those are, you know, there’s 10% of those in 2026.

And then, you know, moves into the tractors, you know, pulled the trailers and those started in like 2027. And every year it goes up, it goes from 10% to 20%.

And eventually it all, I think on the yard tractors and on the yard tractors and on the smaller, like the class four or five, 100% have to be there by 2035.

So there’s this migration from here to there. And then on the sleeper tractors, those are the slowest to be hit.

But I think in 2030, you got to have 10% of those have to be ZEV as well. then by 20, I get the dates here.

20, 39 or 20, 40, those all have to be 100% ZEV in California too.

@39:06 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

So how does California put restrictions like that or mandates when it’s you guys as the companies have no say over it, right?

It’s the manufacturers have to be able to churn out product that can provide the service that buy a particular year.

What happens if they don’t make it? What happens if they’re like Tesla and they can’t get their vehicles governing time?

@39:31 – SappingtonJ

Yeah, California do a lot of things to penalize you. One is they can keep you from registering your vehicles.

know, you won’t be able to run anything. If you don’t, if you don’t, if you don’t comply and say, come shut your fleet down, you know, they got that power to do that.

You say, hey, you’re going to operate in California. You’re going to operate our way and you’re going to, you’re going to be clean and you’re going to be at least 10% clean and by this day and then by this year you’re going to be 20% clean and you know, it’s going to keep is going to keep rolling.

Now they, you know, they’re they’re they’re they’re pretty difficult on this. And they’re pretty staunch on it too, but where I’ve seen them back down a little bit is give you example in 2020-25 model year right now over in 2024, but the way manufacturers do it is if I go get a new truck today, it’s going to be at 2025, even though I’m in 2024, right?

So the trucks they have at 2025 date on their registration, those trucks can’t have a reefer body on it with a diesel reefer, can’t do that, can’t do it.

So what you have to do is you’ve got to build your truck, you know, you can build your diesel truck and put your reefer body on there, but as far as the actual reefer unit has to be electric.

You can’t put a diesel unit on that thing. You can do a, you can power it by diesel if you put a engine driven unit, runs off the engine of the truck.

But you’re not getting credit for that, but you can run it that way. What you have to do, you have to get an electric reefer unit on that truck.

So where California is kind of back down, say, okay, so the two main manufacturers out there are Thermal King and Carrier.

two companies control 95% to 98% of the industry. And if I go to Thermal King and say, I want to get one of these electric reefers, I go and get it yet.

So how am I supposed to do this if I can’t even go buy the stuff, right? Or if it’s a specialized equipment too, there’s some things there that they’ll back down up.

Hey, we can’t make you do this stuff if it’s not available for you. So what they’ve done is they’ve allowed us to push the trucks forward for a year, the ones that we have.

Hey, we’ll let these things run a little longer. But getting a new vehicle in here, though, you can’t, you can’t do it.

They’re still not letting you, even though it’s not available, you can’t go get a 25 model year truck and put a diesel reefer year on that thing.

But you can do it. Yeah, you can’t do it. Yeah. So that’s why there was a mad rush last at the end of last year to go out there and build out a bunch of 2024 models and get these reefers.

These reefers had to be produced in 2023. You can’t even get a reefer, a diesel reefer produced in 24, couldn’t go on a 24 truck.

It had to be a 2023 reefer on a 2024 model to work. So yeah, there’s lot of mandates out there.

When it gets to something like that, the work with you as far as what you have and let you move it forward, but they won’t let you build trucks like that.

And the other thing California has done to you, is they’ve been really tough on manufacturers. So TCI, we traditionally will buy 400 to 500 freight liner trucks, whether they’ve

the trucks or tractors, but that’s, you know, we’re big freight on our customer and up until this year, it didn’t matter.

know, we’ll take 400 more trucks or whatever. But this year, California won’t let the manufacturers sell into California if they’re diesel, only a small percentage.

So to give you an example of us, we, out of those 400 trucks, only 20 of them could go to California.

That’s it. can’t, we can’t, we got, we need 30. Okay. Sorry, I can’t do it. You know, I get 20.

They’re, they’re forcing every, they’re forcing everyone to go electric.

@43:38 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

Interesting. So how do you guys keep up to date with all of the ongoing evolving regulations in California? Is that something you guys have, you know, you know, leadership group in charge, keeping in touch with things, sending out memos, having meetings, like, who do you keep in touch with?

How does that work?

@43:57 – SappingtonJ

So you guys are constantly ahead of the game. So, So how that works is it’s been predominantly myself, and it’s, you know, it’s getting to be a bigger deal here in California, right?

So it’s been, Andrew’s got into it to a certain degree, but it’s been mostly me on keeping up all this stuff.

And how I keep up with it is, you know, I’m talking to manufacturers, I’m talking to people like CalSTART, you know, the AQMD and, you know, keeping those relationships going, the ones that put out the, you know, the grants and the vouchers and all that, staying in touch with them, a lot of reading, and just trying to keep up with everything.

know, it’s just like at our sales meeting, you know, Daimler, which owns Freightliner, which is the largest commercial vehicle manufacturer in the world, we haven’t come out to our sales meeting and they give us a talk, so you learn things that way too, and I think they have, they have like five people in compliance in that company, and I have one of their experts come out and talk to us, hey, here’s all the new things, and what they’ll

say like this things changed probably 10 times in the last year, know, it’s like they got this now they’ve changed this and changed that.

So it’s a really it’s a it’s a it’s a it’s like a living breathing organism, you know, that keeps changing.

And so that’s how I’ve kept up with it. But what we’re doing at TCI is we’re on the very tail end right now of hiring a compliance manager, someone this is all they’re going to do is compliance.

And we got a really good candidate. We’ve been interviewing a lot of people. And we’re going to probably make an offer and bring this this person on here.

Certainly sometime before the in the march, we’ll have this person on board.

@45:38 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

So will this person be in charge of TCI compliance as well as like helping clients and customers attain compliance or is it really just internally focused?

@45:49 – SappingtonJ

No, it’ll be both. It’ll be it’ll be everything. It’ll be yeah helping helping making sure that we stay in compliance, making sure we’re hitting our mandates because you got to plan things out.

I can’t just say, Hey, let’s go buy some trucks for today because because I got to be in compliance tomorrow.

So we’re doing that, we’re working on pricing and with the manufacturers and all that type of thing and we’re trying to get vouchers.

person is gonna be responsible to go find more grants because California’s not the only state. There’s a lot of what they call the CARP states.

There’s a lot of states that have adopted California. Not to, I mean, they’ve adopted being a CARP state but they’re not mandating things like we’re talking about here.

Yeah, anyway, I know they will, but they’re gonna be somewhere down the road. And so this person is gonna be in charge of making sure we stay in compliance.

This person is gonna be helping our customers, making sure they stay in compliance because that’s what we do. serve the customer, we need to be their experts and their source where they go to.

Like kind of how we go to Daimler and NASA and for their expertise, our customers come to us and say, what do we need to do here?

they’re reading the stuff too, but they’re bouncing things back off of us, making sure that they understand. and stand the rules right.

But this person will help with that. And this person will also help with the sales team in general. Like, hey, I got a customer that has some questions, or can you get on a call with this, or go to a meeting with me?

@47:13 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

This person will be doing all that, So what about where? So obviously, they’ll be involved with that as well.

Does where evolve? Or is it really just locked in with that rule 2305? It’s just, that’s it.

@47:26 – SappingtonJ

It is what it is. Yeah, it is what it is. At this point, until they change it. And the only thing that’s changing going forward, and it’s not really changing, it’s just the matrix there.

If you have a 250,000 square foot building or bigger, you’re at the highest penalty range anyway, the highest formula, if you will.

And then if you’re 200,000 square feet or 150, someone lower than that. But as the years progress, everybody’s going to get that same number.

And it stops at 100,000 square feet. So… Um, if you’re, if you’re a hundred thousand square foot billing today, you have a little bit smaller formula score to, to, to penalize, but then actually that, that, that score goes, that formula goes up and then the next, I think, I think everybody’s at the max at 2026, no matter if you’re a hundred thousand square feet or you’re million square foot billing, all, they’re all, they’re only a couple of years away.

So why do you think there seems to be such a lack of awareness about where even for those who need it and who are going to suffer?

Well, I think that, um, I mean, it’s amazing. A lot of people don’t have, they don’t have sustainable compliance people working in their company.

Um, you’re finding that, if you talk to the big companies like Walmart and Target and, you know, Amazon, you know, they, they have, they have a whole team of compliance people and they’re, they, they understand all this stuff.

Uh, if you, if you go below, like it’s here below them, I’m going to say a lot of them to and

to some magical way. They’re not going to be caught. They’re not going to be penalized. And, you know, we’ll get to this when we get to it.

They got to, you know, they got higher priorities in their mind. And they’re just not up to speed with it.

And it’s almost like they got their heads buried in the sand. And then when you, it’s a very easy sale.

Once you get in front of them, and you explain that the numbers and the penalties and all that, it’s a pretty easy sale.

It’s just a lot of people don’t want to, they almost want to like, if I don’t think about it, doesn’t exist, is what it is.

you know, Jimmy, saw the article we sent you last week from LA Times. that thing, I think that thing spells it out pretty clearly on why, you know, why we’re at the state where we’re at.

I think that was a great article. So, so we, you know, we’re trying to make people, making all our customers aware, but we’re trying to make all, you know, we got a lot of companies out there that aren’t our customers.

We’re trying to make them aware as well, too.

@49:58 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

Got it. So last thing I think in this kind of area, maybe one more thing, talk a little bit about the voucher program, how that works, how it came about, and how do you get them, and ultimately, know, why it’s so good for the program and good for TCI.

@50:17 – SappingtonJ

Okay. Well, the EVs are so expensive that manufacturers really can’t sell them because you can’t make the sense out of them, they’re just too expensive.

And so California wants them, and they say, okay, we’re going to help with that, right? We’re going to help what they want to do.

They want to make the cost of electric cost neutral with diesel. So it’s a no-brainer for the customer to do that.

So that’s how they put these vouchers out there. And these vouchers, they’re trying to make them cost neutral with diesel.

With diesel, there’s no-brainer. There’s only so much money out there, though. not like an endless amount of money out there.

So how the program works is they say, okay, we have You know, $50 million. So I think I think the off-road ones was like it was $70 million of available funds out there for vouchers.

And what you have to do, you know, the pretty rigorous application process, you got to go through and you apply for them.

And then they basically get as long as you qualify They give them to you on a first come first services.

Okay, we’re, hey, we’re done with the $70 million. There’s no more. Sorry, you guys got away for the next block of money to start.

And then, and then if you’re lucky enough to have them, you have a competitive advantage on the, you know, your competition out there because You know, quite honestly, you can’t really move these without the voucher.

So you kind of, you tend to become the only game in town, if you will. As you look at RIs out there, unless you don’t care about the cost, which is, you know, a few and far between companies doing that.

So that’s why the vouchers, that was the whole purpose of the vouchers. That’s how they work and there’s money coming through and then these penalties and all that that we’re talking about, these were penalties that come through to AQMD, that money gets pushed back in to help fund more vouchers, right?

That money comes in and so that’s one of the ways they fund these voucher programs.

@52:22 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

So at some point the cost of these vehicles will start coming down and I assume that’s kind of, they’re just going to wait it out until that eventually happens.

@52:31 – SappingtonJ

That’s the thought, yeah, better is going to get better, range is going to get better, cost is going to come down.

You know, I don’t think it’s ever going to come down to the point where diesel is but they think it’s going to come down to the point where if you look at the cost of electricity and then the cost, higher cost of vehicle, they eventually is going to get down to the point where it should be neutral.

But I think that’s a ways out, my opinion, for whatever that’s worth. I think we’re we’re always away from that without vouchers.

I can’t you know, and you get and there’s vouchers for everything There’s there’s right now. can get a voucher For like the class 8 product for Nikla, there’s there’s a bunch of things you could stack on there and the voucher can be I Think it’s like it’s two hundred and 50,000 $60,000 voucher right because this is this unit though costs four hundred and seventy five thousand dollars So and the thing is that they still make you pay your sales tax off the Price of the vehicle before the voucher so you pay in sales tax and here in California You’re paying anywhere from eight percent, know seven three quarter percent to you know ten and a quarter percent So you’re looking at a four hundred and seventy five thousand dollar vehicle I mean you’re you’re talking you’re almost you’re depending where you’re at you’re over 60 grand distance sales tax So you add that and then the other thing these things have to there’s a thing called federal excise tax on anything That’s over over thirty three

2,000 GBW there’s a federal excise tax of 12% so you put another 12% on that 475 You got another 60 grand right there, you know, so so you think your vehicle cost 475 Oh, no, that’s it was closer to 600 grand and then you get 280 80 grand off on a voucher You’re still you’re still paying well over 300 grand for truck, you know where I can go buy that same diesel truck for 100 and 150 160 grand and I don’t have to worry about the range All right, that’s even if you get the voucher that’s what I’m saying So we’re long ways away.

the only place that really the vouchers work on the smaller trucks on the class four or five trucks or these yard tractors they don’t work anywhere else As far as the cost basis goes I did a whole rating To Peter Christensen, he’s the he’s the director of the HVIP program and I sent him all the rating I say here here’s a diesel here’s what we pay for it.

Here’s an electric truck. This is what we could pay for it And here’s how these things right out even with the value

I give to them as these vouchers aren’t big enough, you know these vouchers They’re okay for the class 4 5 what they need to do is give us bigger vouchers to make it work for these these tractors They got to be a higher number or the manufacturer’s got to bring the price down and they’re in a lot of these manufacturers The same even at 400 75 grand.

We’ll lose the money on them cuz you know They they’re shoving all the R&D in there and they say hey, we’re just you know, so it’s it’s a tough.

@55:21 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

It’s a tough deal All right, Mika do you want to close this thing out with the our last little section here Nope, Jim.

@55:30 – Jameca Lyttle

I want you to go ahead and finish because you have a little phone So I’m guessing you’re doing how you’re writing this out.

@55:35 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

I don’t know what I’m doing here I’m just kind of all right.

@55:37 – SappingtonJ

Am I am I answering these questions too long, wouldn’t it It will close it out.

@55:42 – Jameca Lyttle

I do have to unfortunately jump at like one so Jim it for whatever reason You want to just I would definitely encourage you guys to wrap it up around one 15 because Jim You’re gonna have a lot of stuff to cover here.

@55:53 – SappingtonJ

That’s how I said a lot of stuff here That’s how it works right? mean We need to throw Here though that that is unique to us is we got to talk about the Southern California Edison charge ready program that we’re doing We’re doing that and commerce and we’re doing it in Fontana Jim and then you can close it up go So yeah, so we’re doing we’re doing in commerce and in Fontana and what this is is that Edison’s helping us with the infrastructure of putting in Charging stations and we’re going to have a series of fast chargers and in commerce and in Fontana We’re all set and done and that’s all going to be done By mid-summer to late summer that’ll all be installed and ready to go at both those facilities So we’ll have a series of fast chargers We’ll have some level two charges there too, but we already have level two charges in both those facilities But we’ll have more of them, but we’re gonna have these big fast chargers in there as well and these fast chargers will charge Infinitely faster than these little level two chargers So so that’s that’s the infrastructure.

So it’s So, again, it’s called SoCal. Yeah, SoCal is in charge ready program.

@57:05 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

And how many companies are part of that, is that they opened up to anybody or?

@57:10 – SappingtonJ

They’re open to anybody. What has to happen is they have to come out and survey your site to see if they have enough electricity to throw into your site.

So they’re not going to go put a bunch of charges in and they don’t have enough electricity there for you.

Like we have a location of Merced and that’s up in the PG&E territory. Actually, that’s a public, not a public company there.

We’re, anyway, they don’t have enough, they don’t have enough infrastructure up there to get the power to our building.

So they’re going to to build it out up there to get the power there. But anyway, the charge ready program, Edison comes out to your facility and it’s basically first in, it gets the, gets the power to you.

So if I say, Hey, this is what I’m doing and they come in and they give us the power to, that we’re going to need to charge all these trucks.

And then my next door neighbor says, you know, you’re down the road, Hey, won’t do the same thing. They say, Hey, we’re on enough power there for you.

So, you know, sorry, until we get more power. Power out here, you know, we can’t support you. So you want to be first to the game.

That’s why we’ve been working on this for the last over, actually we’ve on this for the last year and a half.

And it should be finally done here this late, mid to late summer. This should all be done, both locations.

@58:15 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

Well, that’s exciting. OK, so all of this stuff needs training, needs work for us, needs people specialized in all of this.

The more you get embedded in this world, the more you have to have the right staff to handle it.

Obviously, this is new technology. It’s all kind of a new whole world. You’ve got current people working there now.

Like, what’s the plan? How do you transition to make sure that your workforce is up to speed? Is it internal?

Are you bringing new people from outside training?

@58:54 – SappingtonJ

How does that work? That’s a great question. I’m glad you asked that one. So what we’re doing is we’re sending

here are current staff technicians to the OEMs to be trained up on this stuff, all the high voltage systems and all that, how you power it down, and how you work on this stuff safely, how you remove parts and all that type of stuff, you diagnose.

We sent quite a number of service people to the OEMs to get trained up on this. So yeah, it’s one thing to go and sell these things or lease these vehicles, it’s another thing you have to support them too.

And so we can do our warranty work on these things as well, except as a warranty center, being a dealer, know, we can do, you know, we even help out where we didn’t even sell the vehicles, somebody else did into our into this area, and we actually go out there and take care of them as well too, but you can’t help them, you gotta have a good support team service.

@59:56 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

Just out of curiosity, if you were talking to Young folk or folk that we’re looking to get into this industry on the tech side.

Would you basically say? Go and learn the eV world like that’s Don’t know get get what you need to with diesel and those things?

But boy you come in like does I assume that the asking price is higher for these people the talent level or whatever?

@1:00:22 – SappingtonJ

There yeah, there is there are schools out there that train people on all the eV side You know how to work with high voltage and all that you know well obviously low voltage stuff too But but the high voltage that’s pretty every really careful and understand There’s there’s lot of nuances with that and and I would yeah if you’re looking to get into the mechanical world is your trade You could probably you could probably do fine if you don’t know a darn thing about diesel and you just know everything EV because everything’s moving that way there’s a lot fewer eV technicians and there are diesel technicians out there and there’s eV schools out there

You know, electrical school is out there to go through to learn how work on these, how to be a specialist.

@1:01:06 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

So because TCI is very upfront about this movement into the EV world and sustainability in general, TCI is pushing the whole green movement wants to be at the front of that.

You’ve got EVs coming in, you guys are embracing that and being like, it’s going to happen. We might as well be at the front of that.

You’ve got staff right now who are probably quaken in their boots, right? These guys have been doing this, gals have been doing this for a long time that have been that know everything about diesel that can, you know, rebuild, build, fix, do whatever it is.

And they’re looking at this potentially as just destabilizing their livelihood. How are you guys having internal, you know, pep talks, are you doing things to help keep the staff motivated?

Like, well, how does that work? Because maybe I’m wrong. Maybe everybody’s Talk about it and there’s no no concerns internally.

@1:02:03 – SappingtonJ

Yeah, that’s it’s a great The way you put that because I think how you put that is is how the customers are looking at the wear program like hey I if I don’t think about it’s not gonna happen and I think a lot of I think a lot Even out there even if you’re not in our industry and you’re just you know, you’re just talking about hey So I buy an electric car or not, you know, I just stay with gas or should I should I try to do a Tesla?

You know, Roadster or something or whatever. I think a lot of a lot of people are in Denial that this is gonna become the norm here before before you blink.

It’s gonna become the norm, right? and I think a lot of people are now we don’t you know Edison doesn’t have the or California to have the infrastructure There’s not enough juice out there.

already tell us now from four to nine don’t even don’t even charge your car You know cuz we’re we’re having that power even even power people’s cars out there and so there’s a lot of denial out there I don’t think the technicians are really worried about it.

There are some technicians though that really want to learn about this Product and there’s some embracing it’s it’s almost like it’s almost like really by the same percentage of technicians Looking at this like customers right you got some customers out there companies out there that are really embracing the stuff But it’s a small percentage and the rest people are now you know, we’re gonna stick with with the norm and you know This stuff is bunch of you know pine the sky I think a lot of technicians by the same percentage there too or kind of like well, you know This is not gonna be that big of a deal And uh, I think that there’s lot of challenges before you know We’re gonna be this much EV stuff in this space because you know, in in California, you know, Southern California You know sce can’t support it as it is They don’t have the capacity electricity out there And they and a lot of the a lot of the people will fight back and they’ll say or not fight back with the argue back And they’ll say you know what happens when there’s not enough power out there, right?

know what happens, right? We we we turn on these cold burning plants these these these these Energy producing plants that are you know, all kinds of pollution in the air to

For this electricity and you know that these guys are you know a bunch of hypocrites You know and and that’s what they kind of argue the whole thing, but but there’s a lot to be done There’s a lot being done.

There’s companies out there putting charge like to talk early in the call put more and more charging stations out there So you know like the range anxiety is gonna be thing in the past and like you know And there’s gonna be so many amount there you don’t to sit there and wait to you know 30 minutes for for somebody take their car Off it or their truck off, but then you can go now you charge and you actually just burned up an hour and a half of your time You know trying to charge your your truck back up So there’s more and more of those happening and and they’re getting those chargers are getting faster So you know what used to take maybe 30 minutes to charge your car You could probably charge your car now and maybe maybe 15 minutes because the charger is getting more robust So I don’t know if I answer that question fully, I think there’s just there’s just a lot of denial there I think about how fast this stuff can really move because they think like whether it’s

PG&E or SCE or SDG&E, know, the three major utilities here in California, they can’t keep up with what this is going to produce, the demand this is going to produce on the grid.

@1:05:13 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

Yeah, it’s interesting because I know I’ve seen photos of some tech training, first I think for the Lone Star that maybe Sylvia has passed around, maybe you did Crystal of like some of the team at one of the locations getting hands-on with the vehicle and stuff like that.

So I, to me, that’s a real selling point. If TCI is offering, know, they bring people in and they offer this type of training in order to help people that may not have it yet get up to speed ahead of time.

It’s a, it’s a, it’s a very cool, you know, if I was looking for a job, I’d want that.

I’d want a company that was looking out for my best interest as well as the company’s best interest, right?

The more the, the, your people know about this stuff, the better it’s going to be in general. So you think, I think,

I think, unless you feel otherwise, feel like we’ve covered Lone Star, we’ve covered California, we’ve covered kind of the main points.

I know we have in the question, alternative compliance funding, is that anything worth talking about? Because I’m not really, I don’t know a lot about it, is that something that is worth spending a couple of minutes on?

@1:06:20 – SappingtonJ

And you said more funding to afford the ACF, the alternative compliance funding? Oh, no, ACF is the Vance Clean and Fleet Rule, that’s a rule out there, that’s not funny, that’s basically the mandates that are telling you, class of vehicle, we have that many and there has to be compliant, this percentage has to be a ZEV, a zero emission vehicle, by 2025.

So that’s what you’ve already covered that pretty clearly? I covered that part, yeah. And if it helps write the article, I can send you, I can send you, there’s a spreadsheet on that, it shows you where everything’s got to be compliant.

and by what percentage, by what date, by what, you know, I can give you that to that helps.

@1:07:05 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

Yeah, that’s, we’ll take whatever you’ve got. If you’ve got some facts and stuff, it might even throw a couple charts in there or things like that.

Outside of all of this, outside of the yard tractors and, you know, all the green initiatives that TCI has been, you know, in.

Anything in the horizon you guys are working on behind closed doors that, you know, are exciting additional new things that are going to help keep the TCI in the forefront of the green movement.

@1:07:33 – SappingtonJ

Yeah, I think that what we’re going to, you know, we’re going to be one of the first adopters or maybe I shouldn’t say adopters, but users of the Tesla product is, I think, number five or six in line.

So that’s one. We’re going to be one of the first ones to get Tesla tractors that we’re looking at.

The other thing interesting about Tesla too, Jim, they’re wanting us to put a 750 kw charger in before they’ll sell to us, which is a massive charger.

I mean, it’s just huge. I The biggest charge I’ve ever seen so far is the 350. So 750 is massive, and I don’t know if we’re going to have enough juice to power something like that.

But those are things that are, you know, things that concern me a little bit. But we’re going to keep building out.

We’re going to stay in front of the mandates California’s putting out to the best of our ability. And it’s really not to, I think what it is, it’s not that we’re trying to out think California.

We’re just trying to keep up with California better than our competitors do, and better than to help our companies.

Because they’re changing things, and they get such aggressive goals out there. If we can just keep up with that, think we’re going to be probably in the top 1% of what’s going on in California, just to keep up with California.

So that’s really what we’re trying to stay compliant. We’re trying to figure out ways to enhance the ROI for our customers, try to find these grants, find these incentives out there.

That’s one of the roles that this compliance manager is going to be to go out there and keep an eye out for all this stuff, you know.

And even though we’re talking everything in California here, you know, TCIs, coast-to-coast company now, I get calls from people in Georgia, customers in Georgia, Texas, Chicago, or Collins and we want to do, like we just did a deal with Kelloggs, right?

And Kelloggs, we did it here in California, but they said, we want to do something in Texas. said, well, there’s no really no incentive there right now for that.

There are some incentives, but they don’t really quite work for, there’s too many rules around it that may make it work.

TJX, a huge retailer that we do a ton of business with as well, we put an electric vehicle in Texas for them because they just want to be green, but they’re asking for incentives there too.

So, this compliance manager is going to be not only focused on California, that’s going to be predominant, but also be looking at other parts of the country too, because there are other incentives out there, you just got to go find them, but usually there’s not a lot of money in them.

You’ve got to find them and you’ve got to apply for them quickly for someone else’s.

@1:10:03 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

So I suspect that in a weird way, expansion for this kind of program for you guys is going to be dictated by where those are, right?

by knowing where these vouchers show up or discounts, opportunities is where TCI can go and say, aha, okay, let’s go try to get our foot in the door over here.

@1:10:27 – SappingtonJ

Right, yeah. Yeah, because a lot of companies would do that, mean, like I said, it’s rare, but sometimes companies will pay the full pop without any incentive, right?

But most won’t do that, and so if we can keep our ear to the ground and figure out where things are at before the people can figure it out, we’re going to be that much stronger because a lot of people can’t get their hands on these trucks as quick as we can either.

@1:10:51 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

So, with all of this, I mean, you’ve been at this now for a while and it’ll continue, obviously, for a long while.

Is there one thing? that you kind of look at and say it’s the most important learning piece of learning that you’ve had in the process of giving TCI to the point that they are right now in this whole process.

@1:11:14 – SappingtonJ

Well, I think the most important thing is that I’ve learned, and I don’t really know if I’ve learned it, but it just maybe cemented it, is that the ROI has to make sense, and for the RO to make sense, you got to go find tools to make it make sense.

until you have that, your success in this space is going to be pretty minimal, I think. So I don’t know if I say I learned that.

I feel like you’ve got this big state out there mandating all the stuff, you’ve got like, you’re hanging on for dear life, hold on to the coattails, try to keep up with all the stuff they’re mandating on you.

And, um, But, you know, I think one thing that’s helped us too is we’re a leader, you know, Jim, won the G75 award, I think, the last three years, and we did that for certain things we’re doing, because we’re not just all electrical.

did LECS, did all that CNG gas, you know, and that’s not zero emission, but it’s pretty darn close to zero emission.

And so the county dictated that we had to have those to be the recipient of winning that RFP, so we did like 50 units there, and we’ve always been looking at ways to do it.

We got some CNGs we put in last year at a company up in Central California. But yeah, I think that’s, you know, I think we’re doing more than most companies out there, because, you know, one time he says, you know, it costs a lot of money to be the trailblazer.

You know, to be the pioneer, and maybe we should kind of drag our feet a little bit too and see maybe we’re better off that way from a cost standpoint.

us it’s cost us money because we want to have the we want to have the product on hand so we got we got level three chargers we have we have these loans that are sitting there that’s those things are expensive and we got to pay the floor and charges on those things you know and cost the money and cost the money these days are are you know not like it was a couple years ago I mean we’re at 7% cost the money these days right so that’s a lot of money sitting there but we feel that we’re better to go to the market that way because we have things you know available right now like flowers is as a if I sign the paperwork I’ll see you kind of get a truck I’ll I’ll get it to you next week you know most most our competitors would say well we’ll get you a truck you know three four or five months down the road here got it so and interesting enough you mentioned you kind of touched on it these other these other sustainability things you guys have been doing I know three locations are currently solar are you planning on rolling that out into any other locations that you own I know you can’t do it on the ones that the locations you lease

Yeah, and the locations we own, like, you know, we bought the one in Merced, so we’ll do solar there for sure.

We’ll probably do some solar. We’re looking at buying a property up in Stockton, so anything we buy in California, any building we buy in California is going to have solar on it, right?

right now that’s the case. That’s just Fontana and Commerce. Fremont, we don’t, because actually, well, that’s not, I don’t want confuse it, but we’re not even if we own Fremont, but we’re not there.

And, but any location we buy in California, going to put solar on it. And then we’re also looking at, we’re looking at other states right now, too.

If it makes sense, it has to be a good R.I. for us to do it, though. So we’re looking at, it’s funny, yeah, because I’ve been, I’ve been working on that here recently, too, with the other states.

@1:14:45 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

Interesting. And what about, whatever happened, we haven’t pretty much talked about the green power vehicles, the EV star cabs and stuff.

Are those still, are those being used, are those in test for you guys?

@1:14:55 – SappingtonJ

What’s the role with them in the, in the program? Yeah. So that’s, I think, yeah, think part of help is get the G.

So. Five is we have four of those in our in our service fleet. We may service trucks out of these green power vehicles Yeah, we have those ones.

So we have four of those in our fleet we We we got two more today that are being delivered today to Fontana But those ones won’t be service vehicles ones going to be that one I mentioned earlier in the plastics and The other one is going to go into our rental fleet We’re going to use it as a rental we use it for demos and all that type of stuff But that’s the class four vehicle and and we have voucher money against that so it makes makes a lot of sense to do that and But we’ll probably do more there, you know, it’s just a matter of Yeah, how much how much?

We can get on the grant side, you know on the on the voucher side, but what I’m sure we’ll do some more there too But there’s restrictions there.

It’s like these vouchers now. You got to get them for companies that have 50 or less trucks and revenues of 20 million or less and and so Yeah, you got to go find them then you got to go apply for the voucher

in their name, and then you go, you know, lease it to them or rent it to them, whatever. there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of issues on the voucher side that makes it kind of honor us to get these vouchers.

That’s why I think a lot of companies don’t do them either. It’s, it’s a pretty honorous process to get these vouchers.

@1:16:20 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

So is that, what did you say? Is that the HVIP program?

@1:16:25 – SappingtonJ

yeah, it’s part of the, yeah, it’s part of, it’s a, it’s a subset of the HVIP program. It’s actually, it’s called ISEF, it’s part of HVIP money, is what they actually set aside.

It’s a little less restrictive and easier to go get that money than the HVIP money. It’s what they’re trying to do.

There’s a lot of money there right now that people aren’t using because there’s too many restrictions on it.

@1:16:47 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

So whatever happened, or what’s happening with the dealerships, because I know on the site we have EV dealerships that we’ve been talked about, is that still coming?

@1:16:56 – SappingtonJ

Is that in progress? so we, so we were going to be at the They’re for green power. In fact, I read the entire dealer agreement.

But we decided not to do that. We’re going to do it in a heartbeat, right? But if you’re a dealer, you can’t also lease the vehicles out with the voucher money.

So we thought, hey, that’s going to be counterintuitive, we’re trying to accomplish here. So we decided not to be a dealer.

That’s on the HVIP side, but on the core side, the core vouchers for the long-stars, that’s different. But we are a dealer for the long-star, calmer, long-star product.

And the vouchers, that doesn’t hurt us by being a dealer on that side. HVIP side it does.

@1:17:34 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

So how do you guys stay so optimistic in all of this? Because I know that we have other clients who are just tearing their hair out at all of this and kicking and screaming all the way.

hating this whole movement. They’re on the front lines of protests. They’re lobbying to stop all this stuff. You guys aren’t doing that behind the scenes, but it seems like you guys have a very optimistic attitude about all of these brutal changes that have come down in the industry.

@1:18:12 – SappingtonJ

Yeah, I think it’s, I think, say if we’re optimist or if we’re more realist because California makes the rules.

think a lot of what they’re doing is unfriendly for California companies. mean, I’m not going to sit back and say, this is great for our environment.

It’s so great, know, it’s going to cost so much more money. But I think what I would say is we’re not, I wouldn’t say we’re optimist, but I would say we’re realist.

And these mandates are coming down and you can either sit there and kick and scream and protest. And you might have some success, I think the success that’ll come from that, probably be somewhat minimal, you can do that or you can figure it out.

can take your energy and do that or you can take your energy and say, okay, well, let’s try to figure this thing out.

And that’s what we’re trying to do, you know, I mean, Cal and and Cal California is pretty difficult and people think they’re crazy and and you know people don’t like the politics here and all that but You know, it’s not all this.

I mean, it’s crazy. It all sounds and it does It’s it’s not all super crazy But it’s you know, there’s reasons why they’re doing it and this is how California wants to run their state and If you’re gonna operate in California, you know, you got to get on board So that’s kind of that’s kind of our our mindset and you know And like I said, we we’re born here.

We’re not going anywhere. So we figure out we we’re gonna be if we’re gonna have longevity We’re gonna have to figure this stuff out and if we can figure it out better I guess if we’re optimistic at all Jim is maybe we’re more optimistic and in the sense that we feel like we’re a leader here even with even against the real big companies we still feel like we’re we’re out ahead of them and And certainly something like the ones that are protesting were way out in front of those guys So if we’re the ones have the answers and we not just the answers and how to coach our customers and how to

those are prospects for our customers, it’s going to be beneficial for us and I think that yeah, if there’s optimism in that maybe that’s we’re going to gain more market share out here because we’re going to be, we’re going to be the ones with not only the answers but also the equipment and the solutions to help customers better than other people.

@1:20:21 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

So is it fair to say that while PCI aspires and is charging forward to lead the green movement, the priority is to stay ahead of what’s coming and the fact that it’s green is a bonus so to speak, it’s not the leading item, it’s really more about this is happening whether we like it or not.

@1:20:45 – SappingtonJ

Yeah, I would say the thing is to stay out in front, make sure that we’re keeping our company out in front so we can keep our customers out in front and be a good resource for the ones who want to know more about it.

Yeah, the mandate is coming down the road, and you know, I think that I Mean we’re gonna look at one thing TCI does we’re gonna do anything That that saves money, right?

mean for us internally too So that’s why that’s why we energized the riffs because that was pretty much a no-brainer to do that and you know It’s amazing.

There’s a lot of there’s a lot of solar up in California But there’s a lot of risk and you know you take a flight and you take off in any airport out here You’re gonna see a lot of risk with a lot of warehouses with solar But you’re see a lot of risk out there without it and those people are there the ones that are the naysayers, right?

they’re like and if they just just put the solar up years ago They’d be I mean they would be buildings outside You’d be like I didn’t say thousands that you’d probably be hundreds of thousands And you know and what you would have saved if you just if you just jumped off the ledge, you know years back So so we yeah, we’re gonna be our focus is to stay out front

be prepared as best we can, prepare our customers, prepare the marketplace that we’re in here, and then have the solutions to do that.

That’s what we’re gonna do. And I think doing those things is gonna make us the leader out there. I think we already are a leader.

Is this gonna enhance our position?

@1:22:19 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

So how do you keep track of it? So you have meetings with Ryan Andrew and the leadership team. You talk about these things.

You kind of go along what things are happening, what things you wanna do. How do you gauge progress? How do you stay on track?

What do you look at each year when you guys have your meetings? And do you literally say, here are our goals.

These are the five things we want to do. Do you have a five year plan? What’s the, what type of marching orders do you have from the top?

@1:22:50 – SappingtonJ

Yeah, so that’s a good question. myself being on the leadership team, we talk about, we’re talking mostly right now about the ACF.

about the mandates coming down and how we how we do that we talk about our customer base how we’re going to take care of them hey we got a bunch of customers out here have reefer trucks and we they have to all go electric you know and how are we going to take care of that how are we going to solve that issue and then we we come back and say okay here’s how we think it needs to get solved and then we go to our CFO and say okay this is what the cost is going to be and we kind of you know we look at all that we say okay hey you know here’s here’s the if we do this this is the benefit and if we don’t do it here’s here’s what we’re going to lose and but here’s if we do do it it’s going to cost us amount of money you know and then is it do we really want to be the out there in the forefront as far as we are or not so we we talked about it we we talked about what the needs are we talked about what the ROI is we talked about what would happen if we don’t do it or what would happen if we delay it um you know all that type of stuff like this charge ready program i mean it’s several millions of millions of dollars to do that and so and it’s a process and it’s a lot of work but

By getting Edison to do it for us or to help us with it, we’re getting them to pay for most of it for us, so things like that.

But it still costs us money, right? We’re going to have these charges in. We’re probably not going to need the capacity charges until we get more trucks in.

So the CFO would say, well, why don’t I charge us in? don’t need them all right now. We don’t have the trucks in.

Well, because we’re getting Edison to pay for it, number one, pay for most of it, and you got to do everything at one time.

So you can’t just say, hey, put two charges in and we’ll put two more later and two more later.

No, you got to put them all in there because right now they’re paying for a big, big bulk of it.

So those are how the conversations go and, and we’ll, you know, and then the bottom line comes back to the bottom line.

If we do it today, we’re going to say X amount of dollars. If we put it off, we don’t spend that money right now.

But we’re going to spend a lot more a year down the road or two years down the road. So that’s kind of how conversations go.

@1:24:50 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

don’t know that answers your question. That’s good. That’s cool. Very cool. I think we’re pretty much ready to wrap up any anything like this is going to be a sound and odd question but.

Do you find yourself saying anything consistently? Like, yeah, I always say, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, when it comes to this industry, I always say, do you have something that when you’re talking customers or clients or a leadership team, you find yourself repeating anything or not really?

@1:25:17 – SappingtonJ

The thing I find myself repeating the most lately is I cannot believe customers aren’t jumping up this where program, aren’t taking advantage of the cost savings and mitigating penalties.

I just can’t believe that they’re moving so slow. We have customers, Jim, that have paid the penalties. And I said, why would you do that?

And I don’t want to say, hey, you’re stupid, but I mean, that’s what I’m thinking, right? I said, why would you do that?

You know, we got the solution right here. And I guess if I find myself saying anything, it’s like this, in my 35 years, this is the biggest no-brainer I’ve ever seen.

You know, it’s because you got… got these penalties. You have a company has a voucher against them. You got to save a boatload of money on energy costs compared to diesel costs.

know, what’s holding me up? Why aren’t you doing this? What is wrong with you?

@1:26:13 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

You know, it’s like you can lead them to water, right? can’t make a drink.

@1:26:16 – SappingtonJ

And that’s probably myself saying that more than probably when it comes to the EV space, I’m probably like, I can’t, I can’t believe like we got these 111 trucks, right?

I thought, I thought they’d all mostly be gone by in the march.

@1:26:29 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

And we only moved to the bathroom. Yeah, it’s incredible. So last question, and then I can kind of wrap this thing up for you.

And I typically ask this question when we do these interviews last. It’s if you imagine yourself at an industry event, it’s some type of a conference, or maybe it’s an awards dinner or something, and you’re sitting next to guys in your role from Penske from Schneider from Dominion or Dominion, whoever named the company.

These that are kind of at that level and these are peers of yours and one of them leans over to you and says John How you guys doing it?

know how to what what do you recommend? Like what’s your advice for me? I’m trying to get my company to think about this.

How have you been able to do it? What would you tell that person as a peer not as a client or a customer but as a peer as a peer?

@1:27:21 – SappingtonJ

Yeah, it’s uh, so I get those questions a lot, you know, you’ve heard a Hogan, right? The guy at Hogan calling about well actually a little more than a week ago asking me more about the The rules in California with the reefer trucks and what are you doing about that?

So I basically say, you know, and I don’t I don’t hold anything. go learn it yourself because you’re a competitor I say well, this is what we’re doing.

You know, I’m pretty open with it And I answer the questions for it, you know, and then I’d say well, what have you done?

know and but you know Hogan’s not super they’re in California, but they’re not super big in California But if some are a pescuer to ask me that I I I’d really I’d really lean back to that

So what are you doing? know, here’s what we’re doing. What are you doing? And so, because, you know, best keys, they got way more trucks to California than I do, you know, than we do, for sure.

So when they reach out and ask me what we’re doing, I’m pretty open with it. I say, this what we’re doing.

This is what’s going on in California. This is, we feel is the best place for us to operate right now.

And as far as like, our best place to focus our efforts right now is in this area. And, you know, and we got to, it’s kind of like eating an elephant, right?

Eating an elephant one bite at a time. right now, this is what’s in front of us right now. It’s yard tractors and class four or five vehicles.

That’s where, that’s where the ACF is hitting all companies right there. And that’s what we’re attacking and we got to figure out how to attack this over the road, you know, tractors or trucks, you know, in 2026.

then we’re going to our customers and saying, Hey, you know, you have 30 trucks, you know, these are all class four vehicles.

know, three of these things have to be, have to be at the end of, at the end of 25, they’ve got to be.

electric and so so things like yeah I’d be pretty open you know if that’s what we’re doing is there a secret sauce like is there is there one thing that you look at that you say TCI could not do this without blank yeah TCI could not do this without vouchers TCI yeah TCI could not do this without vouchers I guess that would be one right and because you’re going you can only shift cost to your customers so fast right I can’t I can’t go back to my customer and say hey we’re gonna get you all electric vehicles here and here’s your here’s your rate per month or here’s your rate per week and they say John you’re you’re insane because I got your competitors going out with a lot less less money here or less cost because they’re using diesel and you’re using electric and I said oh well you’re gonna need electric and here’s why well hey you know these guys aren’t tell me I need

@1:30:00 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

I need electric so but yeah, I’d say we can’t really do without vouchers, but you know the whole charge ready program I couldn’t do without as I would not be putting all these charges in without us itself There’s no way I want to go spend two million dollars in Fontana another two million dollars in commerce to go do all that stuff You know, so so we yeah, we couldn’t we couldn’t do it without the help of the government for sure So where is this program going where where not program where where you know what what what do you see coming down the line?

Five years from now, is this all gonna iron itself out and be perfect like what do you what’s your vision of the next?

You know how this is gonna go.

@1:30:35 – SappingtonJ

Yeah, I think the OEMs can keep up Jim easy enough whether you buy a Volvo or a Freton on or what a heck You’re buying I don’t think there’s an issue with that.

I think they can keep up The I think thermal king and carrier on the rear side are gonna keep up once they get once they get this thing rolling Cuz they already got the design done and again They’re gonna start I think they already start selling right now, but very limited supply, but I think I think they’ll be able to keep up

Um, I think five years down the road, um, who’s going to be, you know, just, you know, hidden as hard as they can.

going to be the, the PUCs are, you know, uh, all right. was saying PUCs, but the, um, the, the public utilities, you know, Edison and, and PG&E and SDG&E to keep up with the grid demands, I think that’s going to be the tough thing in five years.

they get it. If we’re going to go, if we’re going to go push everything electric and we’re going to mandate by the, by the ACF, by the, by the, you know, five years down the road, we’re talking 20, 29, right?

If you look at the chart in 2029, you got to have a lot of, a lot of your fleets got to be electric and, and, and these trucks take a lot more juice than cars do, right?

So, um, I think that that’s, that’s the piece that is gigantic question mark in my head, can they keep up?

so I think with, with all that, um, California might come back and say, Hey, we’re going to push the dates out further.

We’re not going to make these mandates in 20, you know, 26. We’re going to push those dates out to push out two more years, push them out, and they’re going to have to massage with how fast we can build out the grid because I don’t.

That’s my biggest question. How are you going to build the grid to support all this? That’s me. the OEMs, I think, yeah, the OEMs got to figure it out.

think better. I think they’re going to figure out this range. think the batteries can get better. So the range anxiety might go away.

I think these chargers, Tesla’s envisioning this whole thing, that they want this to be like a diesel truck, not just with the range anxiety.

want to have good range in their trucks, right? But when you stop and get fuel for big truck, it’s not like getting gas in your car.

You stop at a station, get gas in your car, it takes you from the time you put the nozzle in and pull the hose.

If you’re totally empty, it might take you, what, four or five minutes to fill it up? It moves. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Trucks have bigger tanks on them. might take maybe 15 minutes if you have the right location because those pumps, those commercial pumps pump a lot faster.

So maybe you’re talking 10-15 minutes to pump or fill your truck up. So Tesla, once you’ve been able to plug that cable in to your battery and charge the same, that’s why they want these big 750KW chargers.

So I want you to plug that in. I want you to be done with 15-20 minutes too and have a full charge.

So I think that’s where things kind of evolving too, but I think the OEMs are going to be able to stay on top of it.

I think they’re going to keep moving with it and going to get better batteries, better range. I just don’t know if the grid can keep up with it.

That’s my concern in five years.

@1:33:40 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

I didn’t even think about that. It’s interesting because also immediately when you start talking about that, my mind goes to, well, what if the grid goes down?

@1:33:49 – SappingtonJ

If everything’s electric, you’re stuck.

@1:33:52 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

now, if the grid goes down, we have power outages. People can still get around because good old-fashioned gas. in that situation when you’ve gone all electric now, you’re, I mean, we’re even more reliant on that grid.

And we’ve seen how vulnerable it can be as it is right now. So it’s fascinating, it’s really fascinating.

@1:34:14 – SappingtonJ

Anything John, we didn’t touch on that you feel is important? The only thing that we didn’t touch on, and it kind of goes to what we just said there, is, you know, five years, what’s going to happen.

The other thing is, you know, is working on the fuel cell, so hydrogen fuel cell, right? So there’s going to be other technologies coming in the next five years, too, you know, potentially, something might be down electric.

So we might go to electric for a bit, and we might end up with hydrogen at some point, you know?

@1:34:38 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

Like VHS and data, right? Beta came out was better than, you know, was a great technology, and VHS came, and that was everyone.

@1:34:47 – SappingtonJ

Well, like, like, Nikola’s got that truck right now, it’s, they got their fuel cell truck done, nothing to go like 500 miles, but it went through hydrogen.

Hydrogen is, is, is a pretty expensive fuel source, if you They’ve got to get the, they call it the manufacturing of hydrogen if you will or the, that’s not the right word for it, but the, to get hydrogen out of water, you know, there’s a process of harvest, know, how to harvest hydrogen.

It’s a fairly expensive process to do that. So they got to get that price down, but I think that could be really cool because who doesn’t have water, you know, to make hydrogen and all that.

So, and Shell is putting like 25 hydrogen stations in California, I think between now and the end of 2025.

I think Nicholas is throwing about 25 stations out there too. So there’ll be other technologies out there and then that’s going to get rid of range anxiety.

But again, what’s your cost to buy the hydrogen compared to by electricity and now the grid. it might, it might end up being an all the above type of thing.

the hydrogen, that’s a, that’s a zero emission way to power a unit.

@1:35:53 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

You envision both technologies working together hand in hand where I can see that.

@1:35:59 – SappingtonJ

Yeah. I could see that. Yeah. And maybe, I mean, made you a hybrid EV hydrogen.

@1:36:04 – Crystal Velasquez

don’t know. That was good.

@1:36:06 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

If they can solve the distance issue with the hydrogen, and then for anything short term, local and close by, you’d go electric, to me, it’s almost like they could be, they could, they could work hand in hand without having to really try to push electric more than maybe it needs to go or is able to go.

Yeah. But you know, that’s really, that’s fascinating. When people read this interview or this article, what’s the most important thing you want them to walk away with?

@1:36:40 – SappingtonJ

I want them to, I really, the ones I really want to hit here, to our best benefit here, is to look at TCI as a source, a good source to go to.

I’m hoping that we can get a lot of people calling in. Hey, I saw this article and, you know, sounds like you guys are really on top of this stuff.

But what I really want out of it is, is, is getting a more, more of that where stuff for us and help us move some these long stars.

That’s, that’s why I really want this article to do more than anything else.

@1:37:09 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

So, and one thing I missed was the acquisitions program, right? this, this EV acquisition service that you guys started up, that obviously is because of the where program.

Yes, I mean, you’ll do it anywhere. You’ll do it in Texas or Florida. You’ll help people kind of get themselves where they need to be.

But it’s really more to be able to, California, be able to tell people, come to us where you’re one stop shop.

We can solve, we can get to your vehicles, we can make sure you’re compliant, XYZ based off of whatever.

@1:37:43 – SappingtonJ

Is that where that basically came from? Yeah, and then we can also, we’re the source too. And you may not need all, you know, we’re not saying you got to take your whole fleet electrical at this point.

You know, we also, know, our fleet is 95% diesel at this point, right? So, you know, we’re getting there to

But we have the right solution for you, we can help you with your percentages and give us a call, we’ll help you figure it all out and give you a recommendation on what’s the best way to navigate California and then the best way to navigate California, the best way to have an EV, maybe a compliance sustainable solution, we can help you with that.

And whether you’re in California or not, we can help you with whatever initiative you’re, because I mean, companies are, I mean, like Cal Accessions, they’re probably going to take a truck in Texas and TGX already did, right, and then they paid full pop for it, which is an Ashley Furniture, they took one too, and they’re in California, they paid full pop for it.

So these big companies, they’re getting on board, but we can help, now we have a big companies, we can help the small companies, and we can, you know, if you don’t have a compliance person in your company, we’ll give us a call.

we’re all over it. We can help you with your compliance issues. Like sometimes companies, Jim, they don’t have a very robust safety program for the drivers and they have accidents and, hey, IRS, we’ll show you, mean, we’ll show you where the safe is fleeting in California now, you know, we’ll show you how we’re so safe, we’ll help you be safe too, know, in high-risk, know, and then if you don’t want to, if you really want to get out of it as far as, you know, your risk on from a driver standpoint, give it to us, we’ll put our drivers in there, we’ll fully take you out of the risk.

So we got solutions for everything, whatever is most on their mind and what concerns them the most, think TCI is uniquely positioned to help you with EV all the way to your safety and everything in between.

@1:39:43 – Jim Olen (Dreamentia)

Okay, I think we’re good.