AVL's Reimagine Mobility Podcast

Electric Power for Heavy Trucks: The Future of Long-Haul Efficiency w/ Ian Rust

• AVL, North America

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In this episode of Reimagined Mobility, we dive into the innovative technology behind Revoy with Ian Rust, the MIT-educated roboticist and former engineer at Cruise Automation. Revoy is revolutionizing the trucking industry by introducing an electric vehicle module that can seamlessly integrate with any of the 3 million semi-trucks on the road today. This groundbreaking solution reduces fuel use and emissions by over 70%, offering a cost-effective and sustainable alternative for long-haul transportation.

Join us as we explore:

·         The challenges of electrifying heavy-duty trucks

·         How Revoy's  technology works without distracting drivers

·         The economic and environmental benefits of renewable electric power

·         The future of long-haul trucking and the role of hybrid modules

·         Don't miss out on this insightful discussion about the future of mobility and how Revoy is leading the charge towards a greener and more efficient transportation industry.

 

Ian Rust, Founder and CEO at Revoy

 

Ian Rust is an innovator, founder and roboticist with over 14 years of experience of automation and robotics in the clean transportation and the sustainability industry, with the goal of moving trucking into a more sustainable future. Ian has been passionate about technology and how it is impacted by and impacts people and historical trends.Ian founded Revoy (formerly SixWheel), a company backed by Y Combinator, in 2021, creating an autonomous vehicle technology to address climate change. Prior to founding Revoy, Ian led robotics projects at Amazon Lab126 and Google X, later moving into starting notable robotics companies as the founding engineer of Cruise Automation and serving on the early team at Covariant and Petra.

 

Rust holds a B.S. and M.S. in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he focused on robotics.

 

To connect with Ian Rust, visit his LinkedIn profile. 

 

About Revoy:

Revoy, a simple and truly viable alternative solution to decarbonize the trucking industry, is democratizing electric trucking and providing a clear pathway for existing trucking fleets to completely eliminate emissions. Revoy’s charging infrastructure and innovative Revoy swapping network aims to be  the backbone of the future of electric road freight, allowing fleets to lower carbon emissions and costs, while increasing MPG by over 150%. This technology is made in the USA, FMVSS compliant and compliant with all length and weight (bridge and GVW) regulations.

 

Follow Revoy on LinkedIn or learn more at www.revoy.com/. 

 

If you would like to be a guest on the show contact: namarketing@avl.com

This podcast of reimagined mobility. I'm here with Ian Rust from Revoy. Very interesting company. Well, we'll find out more. Certainly on the company. To technology. Very interesting. Addressing a need. That everybody's talking about and nobody really has, I think, found a solution yet. At least the heavy duty truck OEMs on how to, challenge the challenges we have with infrastructure, the challenges we have with cost, weight, etc. for a battery electric vehicle, for hydrogen vehicles, etc.. So I'm very excited about that. And to to hear your perspective and why and how you guys are deploying your technology and how that goes. But to start out with, introduce yourself Ian and you know a little bit of your background, share a little bit what Revoy is doing because I'm sure not everybody knows about it. And then, you and I will dive together into reimagined mobility, at least in your section for sure that, the industry you guys are working on. And then we go from there. Absolutely. And. Yeah, great to meet you, Stephan. So, yeah, in terms of myself, I'm an engineer. I'm an MIT educated roboticist. I'm a PhD dropout. And, what we do at Revoy is we make an electric vehicle that is able to instantly integrate with any of the 3 million semi-trucks on the road today. And what it does is it brings in renewable electric power, which reduces the power demand on the diesel engine, which reduces fuel use dramatically, as well as emissions, by over 70%. Interesting. You mentioned your background in robotics, right? Did I hear you right? Yeah. That's right. When I look on your website, it looks like this vehicle, which is like it's a vehicle, it's a robot. It's an electric battery. I don't know exactly what it is. Maybe you guys have a special name. Does it drive autonomously as well? Then? So, in the yard, it has the ability to drive autonomously and reposition trailers. Right now we just remote pilot those, because that's the nice and easy thing and practical thing to do. Our take on autonomy in general, and this is really driven by my experience in autonomy. So, I was the first engineer at Cruise Automation. Ultimately acquired by GM. We made robo taxis. And I think one of the things I've really learned, especially getting into trucking, is, drivers are doing a whole heck of a lot. And they are very, very important. You know, the myth of of being unskilled labor is a total myth, right? Well, they are very skilled. They're very experienced. And I think what in general, the industry just is it's it's pretty hard to pull them out of the vehicle and, and truly replace them with a software system. And so, my overall approach to robotics is let's, let's not use it to replace humans. Let's use it to help humans. And so we view our, our vehicle as a, a robot of sorts. That is a collaborative robot. It's meant to help the driver do their job easier, better, safer. All of the above. And what we're starting with is the, displacement of diesel teeth, the reduction of diesel. But already, drivers just love using, it's, a lot of fun to drive. You get that extra torque from the electric powertrain. But also, it's a lot safer to drive. Not only do you get that extra torque, for example, a lot of highway on ramps are not long enough for tractor trailers to get up to full speed, and that's just something that's inherently dangerous when you have different speeds of traffic merging into each other. So our technology can get truckers up to full speed by the end of the on ramp and on to the highway. But along with that, they you can also have additional braking power. So not just traction power but braking power. So we have regenerative braking on board that follows along with what the driver does when they hit the brakes. It can slow brake and we can actually stop the tractor trailer 30% sooner, which is guaranteed to prevent crashes and to save some lives. And then when you're at speed on the highway, that's really where the, the vast majority of the fuel use reduction happens. It essentially acts as a cruise control. And in that scenario, you're actually 100% electric. And the drivers love it. Yeah. Interesting. So then I guess when we let's stay for a moment, we don't usually necessarily like to dive too much into the technology, but I'm very interested here. So let's do it. You just mentioned when you break the the trailer or your vehicle breaks or uses regenerative braking, what is the communication link aiming for the gas to accelerate to, to break all the stuff? It's just like I don't know what can communication is, is a wireless communication. How do you do this? Yeah. Great question. So what's really important, just generally speaking, is you don't want to distract drivers. They need to be using just the exact same controls that they're already doing steering, throttle, brake, anything. On top of that you introduce an opportunity for distraction. And that's just really important to keep the vehicle safe. So yeah, you're absolutely right. We do integrate with the tractor, but where the robotics magic comes in is that we do this with zero data bus integration. So there is no canvas link between the two vehicles. What the way it happens is we have sensors and instrumentation in the, upper fifth wheel hitch, the king pin connection to the vehicle. And what that allows us to do is infer what the driver is doing and always follow along with what they're doing. So when they hit the accelerator pedal, we can detect it in those sensors. We assist with acceleration when they hit the brake pedal or the Jake brake for that matter. We detect that. We assist with that. So it's always meant to just follow their lead. And that gets into our overall robotics strategy, right? Of they know what they're doing. Let's trust drivers. Drivers are very, very good at their jobs. I mean, I've learned that we have a staff, test pilot. Her name is Beverly. She used to haul tankers, which are, you know, one of the most dangerous cargos to pull. She really appreciates. And she she definitely not just know you know, how important it is to to keep these vehicles safe. And so, you know, what Beverly says goes both on the vehicle and in our engineering development. Interesting, interesting. So tell me a little bit then where does this idea come from to essentially almost have two camps, right? I mean, if you're looking on pictures it looks like it's a, it's a trailer with two camps, right? I mean, hey, where did this idea come from? Clearly, you mentioned before it's about safety and it was about, emissions reduction, obviously cost reduction in the long run. Right. Well, we'll get to that maybe next. But what where did this idea come from? And was it, was it for a current need. Was it for kind of what the show was about, reimagining mobility? Was it about in the future? We need this, and we don't think in the next ten years we truly have class eight trucks that are either fuel cell or pure EVs for a number of different reasons. Share a little bit about that. Ian. Yeah, absolutely. So just as a as a top of line thing, the main use case here is, is cost reduction. Electric power is significantly cheaper than diesel power. You know, on a per mile basis, you're paying maybe 60 or $0.70 per mile to get the energy you need to move that cargo. When you source that from renewable sources, that can be less than $0.10. That is a huge, huge opportunity for cost savings. So forget that it's renewable. Forget that it's green. This is going to be a moneymaker for fleets. So now where it came from, from a technical approach, is it's all about how do we deliver that power effectively to the fleet. And so yeah, we have a lot of big plans in terms of how we're going to reimagine, you know, mobility specifically in the trucking sector. But what really matters right now is we got to meet fleets where they're at, you know, what they're being asked to do right now is throw out their entire fleet, fully depreciated assets that are working and earning money for them and replace them with something that's more expensive and is oftentimes hard to source, that cheap electricity. So it's it's it's a really hard thing. Typically it ends up being 30, 40% more expensive. And that's where basically every electric trucking project goes today. It's got to be cost competitive. So with this thesis of how do we deliver this electric power effectively? There were sort of there's sort of there was one option and now there's, there was there have become two, outside of us. So the first option that people were presented with was the electric semi. And by and large, we're not seeing any adoption of that. And it's for both the cost reason as well as a lot of the reasons that I can get into around the operational constraints, specifically around charging, but also around weight. It's really based. The problem is, is that the heritage of electric vehicles has been luxury sedans. And when you copy paste that tech stack into what is a commercial asset, you can't expect it to work. You really just cannot expect that to work. And we're seeing that play out right now. So that's the problem with that. Now, there's also been, some innovation on the trailer standpoint, adding batteries and an electric powertrain to the trailer. The problem with that, is, on a fundamental level, it's really, really hard to get a reasonable payback period on this. It all comes a lot at down to economics. The utilization of trailers is extremely low. There's about, there's a trailer ratio in the industry of approximately 4 to 1. So for every every one trailer you see on the road, there's three sitting in a yard. And so if you're putting all that extra cost, all that extra CapEx on a something that's just going to be sitting in the yard and not earning any money, I mean, you're looking at about ten years before you break even, which is really just a nonstarter. And so, funnily enough, that's actually how the Revoy product started. Is it started out as an electric trailer. And what we found out is exactly this is it doesn't work for the industry. And there's, there's also, you know, a little bit of problems on the, the vehicle dynamics standpoint. Generally speaking, you don't want to be pushing from the back of a trailer. The analogy I like to make is it's like pushing rope, right? When you push rope, it folds and that's something you really want to avoid. And so if you put the drive axles where they're meant to be right behind the cab, that's what drivers expect. That's what you should be doing. And so what's really cool about semi-trailer or semi trucks, just from a tactical standpoint, is they are already modular vehicles. It's it's actually really cool when you get down to really think about it. We have a cargo module and we have a power unit module and they link up and you get all this awesome stuff. Power only is really cool. And so when we think about delivering electric power, we already have a modular vehicle. Why are we so laser focused on replacing one of them? We should just add another module. And that's what the revive is, is it's a electric delivery module for an existing modular vehicle. And so, yeah, what you get with it is super high utilization. It can be passed between both drivers after they end their 11 hours of service, across fleets. Right. It can just be either charging or discharging 24 hours a day, and that's how we make it work. And that's what we've seen play out in our commercial deployments. Is is it actually works for fleets? Yeah. So really, you created a hybrid module. You created these the electric portion of now, a hybrid a hybrid semi, so to speak. So then, yes, one of your ultimately again, maybe not necessarily today, but ultimately do you see your your target customers to be for this technology. Is it all the fleet owners. Is it ultimately also you're looking at maybe I'm actually selling some of these things directly to the OEMs who then provide a complete solution to the to the fleet owners or to buyers. Is it more use sort of on, demand that, hey, I need one of these things today because I'm going from whatever from LA, I'm going to Houston and I need this for that drive. So I'm just going to go in kind of sort of a hybrid on demand because I don't want to own it. Share a little bit about that. Again, not necessarily what's today, but as you reimagine the usage of this technology or you can see it going, yeah, yeah. So certainly in the long view, we want this to be very much on demand. You know, it's a new energy source. And we already have a great model for sourcing energy, which is you pullover, you go to a truck stop, you fill it up with diesel, and that's what we're we're really, reimagining for how people go electric is you show up with your truck, it takes two minutes to hook up. You could have heard about it five minutes ago from a billboard on the highway. And you can go over 90% electric. That's how simple it can be. And that's what that's what we've managed to build now in terms of go to market. And you know, what we're doing initially, we are really, focusing on two things. The first is line haul. So dedicated logistics sometimes it's called that. And the reason for that is basically, it's really nice to have regular loads going through an area. And, it allows you to book high volumes at a very initial state. You know, when you're doing, you know, on demand, self-serve, you can call it, it basically makes it a little bit more difficult. And so we really do focus on B2B line line haul. The other reason, though, are the other thing we focus on is long haul. And that is something that we almost are the only electric, mobility company in trucking that are focusing on that. The, the, the whole industry is really laser focused on short and regional haul. There's a lot of stuff happening in drayage specifically down in La port of Long Beach port of LA. You know, the the trouble with that, is basically cost of energy. In LA, the demand is super high for energy, for electricity. You have a whole mega city there that is all consuming electricity. And so the the rates you get, especially when you mix in demand charges, are really prohibitive to adoption. Your ear, it's hard to actually make it less expensive. Especially when you're, when you're, also incurring a higher cost for the, the tractor itself. Right. That's, you know, 3 or 4 times more expensive. The other reason is, one just emissions impact and also market sizing. So one of the biggest misconceptions in the industry, that I, that I love being able to talk about this because it is a misconception is and you may have heard this before, 84% of freight is, below 250 miles. Specifically class eight freight. It's, actually not not true. It's true in a very narrow sense. And what it is is this is that 84% is by trip count. So a trip that is ten miles counts the same as a trip that is a thousand miles. And when we talk about an energy transition, it's trips. Trips are almost a nonsense metric, right. It's miles. Miles are how you occur. Energy. Every time you spend go a mile, it takes a certain amount of energy. And so when you look at a per mile basis, it's the opposite long haul. And you ask anyone in the trucking industry, what is the biggest part of your business? Long haul, always long. So and so our take on long haul is that it's right now it's a technology constraint. You know, battery energy dense energy density is nowhere near where it needs to be for a long haul truck to operate on a full day without having to stop multiple hours multiple times per day for a charge. And so that's a nonstarter for fleets. I mean, the biggest cost besides fuel is driver wages. And so if you're paying a driver to sit there and wait for a charge, you know, more on the order of half their day, that's you just can't justify that. You cannot justify that. And so our take is it's it's not so much the range that's the problem. It's what is the stop at the end of that range look like. And so, this is where the, aspect of the swap, the Revoy swapping station comes in, which is, okay, you go for 200 miles. That's a pretty standard electric semi range. Instead of stopping in and holding that that unit down and that driver down waiting for a charge, why not just swap out the batteries and hit the road again for four minutes? That's what we can do. And so it's really cool that our technology and this ability to really quickly and easily integrate with the truck, the I mean, all it uses is the existing tractor trailer modular interface. So you can do it in two minutes. But, what's really cool about that is, you know, battery swapping has been talked about for a while. And the challenge with that is it requires really heavy infrastructure, literally lifting batteries out of trucks. But also it's a it's a standards it's problem. It's an interface problem. You have to have a whole trucking industry decide, this is our battery swapping interface, that the ship isn't locked. Right. Yeah, exactly. But what's really cool is if you're using the the trailer hitch interface. Well, every single semi truck on the road today is already a battery swapping hybrid. Today it's just missing its battery pack. And that's what we're offering is, is that so the other aspect of level two is you can get out into lower electricity demand areas. Also do onsite generation if you need to. And you can get that that really large difference in energy pricing that the industry has been promising for a long time. So, you know, as, as just as a whole, what we're able to do with this long haul battery swapping model for vehicle swap, really, it's not actually the battery being swap. It's really deliver on the promise of electrification. And that's what we've been able to do. Interesting. So would you then fundamentally saying that again, you're a battery swapping company or what? Everybody those trucks those trailers will be then re hooked up to a like a Dulos gas station or at a Bucky's I don't know. Yeah. And then we'll have like now that's why I have to bring it out. Yeah I love Bucky's too. But they don't allow trucks unfortunately. Yeah. But I love Bucky's but absolutely. Yeah. It's it's a it's a refueling process, you know, rather than the fuel coming in through the tank. It's coming in through a pre charged battery into the hitch. So but but in terms of how our customers buy it it's it's by the mile. It's a it's a pure opex model. Our customers do not pay for the chargers. They don't pay for the vehicles. What we commit to them is when you show up we have a pre charge Revo EV ready to go, ready to feel your fleet just like any other fuel. Stop. Right. And so absolutely. Yeah, it's a truck stop model. It's it's it's it's an genius. I would say it's a brilliant, brilliant idea. So then going back a little bit into the technology because now I'm very interested in it. So what is the range then that let's say a fully loaded. Yeah. Trailer, whatever the top weight is, I have no idea there. But fully loaded, heavy weight. How long can I go purely with one of your battery modules? Let's call them. Yeah. So right now on our, our current, vehicle in, in market, we it's a 170 miles of all electric range. Our next generation vehicle coming out later this year is 240 miles of all electric range at a lower weight point. Which is pretty cool. What's really interesting, though, is, one of the challenges with the short range of, of vehicles along with, you know, the, the downtime that a charge cycle presents is, range anxiety. That's a problem. You know, that's why Tesla had to build the supercharger network. You know, no one was going to buy, model S if they couldn't actually drive it anywhere, I mean, obviously. Right. And so they had to go out and build at cost, a whole bunch of charging infrastructure. And we just have that same problem. Not us personally, but us as the industry. Yeah. And as a country have that same problem, you know, 10 to 100 fold in terms of the power requirements for heavy trucks. And so, it's presents a chicken, a problem that I would love to talk about. The chicken egg problem a lot. So let's put a pin in that. But, when it comes down to range anxiety, the nice thing about being a hybrid is let's say you run out of mileage five miles before the next Revoy swapping station. It's no big deal. It's, you know, now you revert back to diesel. It's very natural. It just happens in the background and you make the delivery. It doesn't jeopardize mission success. Mission being deliver the goods. Right. Whereas, you know, you look at taking an electric semi somewhere where the battery capacity fluctuates, for example, a temperature, the north. Right. There's a reason why the Tesla Semi is only being operated in California. It's because if you go up north, well, a route that you expected to be able to make with that truck one day, it goes to below Now you can't make that delivery. Now you have to send a different truck. Now the Tesla semis in the yard just sitting around with us. Sure you don't get as much of an mpg improvement. It's a little, you know, marginal 10 -20% But it doesn't jeopardize mission success. You could still run your exact same route the exact same way. And that's really important. That's part of just making it work for fleets, right? They need to make their deliveries. It's it's as simple as that. You know, when you when you talk about. Wait for a moment. Yeah. I mean, we as a company do quite a bit in India and heavy duty trucks space on it. No. Not only on diesel engines but obviously on transmissions. We do a lot in batteries in a lot of the discussions that we have specifically with batteries is like, you know, we're concerned with the load that we want to put it on. And now with a heavier vehicle, because the batteries are so much heavier. Now I need to reduce my load. So now my total cost of ownership changes because I can't hual as much because, you know, with bridges and with weight restrictions and different regulations in different countries. How do you guys look at this? Is it all certain routes? I don't have a problem because there's no bridges. So my, you know, are perfect for this or yes, there is a problem, but it's offset by the by the reduction of fuel cost. So share a little bit about that. Yeah. Yeah. No I love to this is something that, that we've thought a lot about and is one of the main reasons why customers buy us is because, we have zero impact on payload capacity. Now, that may sound like a bold claim, and I'll tell you why that is. Our vehicle weighs 22,000 pounds, and we're probably one of the only electric vehicle companies out that our trucking companies will actually tell you. Straight up, we weigh this much. I mean, it's because it's such a hot button issue. You know, you're you have to reload those trailers, when you have that extra battery weight. Totally understood. The key comes down to modularity. So the the ability to take it on and off is always true. And and that helps with the swapping methodology, but it also helps with weight. And the reason is this what we do is we weigh every trailer we encounter. And we actually can do that with the vehicle. We just go up and shimmy it and figure out how much it weighs. We also have scales on site for double checking, and when a trailer is loaded to the gills and you're going to be at 80,000 pounds, even with that diesel semi, we say, okay, go ahead, we'll skip this one. Right? It's not the only power unit on board. You can just go back to diesel if there is battery. But that weight budget that we identify, we hop on, we provide fuel savings, we provide emission savings, we provide cost savings, safety improvements, and we hit the road and do all of that. And so in both of those situations, it's the exact same payload, the exact same trailer, the exact same truck. So there's no payload impact engine. And when you look at the national average data, what's really exciting about this is that we don't need to be perfect right? 64% of tractor trailers on the road today can handle that extra 22,000 pounds. If we just need the ability to individually address those vehicles. But the thing is, you don't know what that vehicle is, is until it gets loaded. Right. And so if you can do it at point of use, well, now you've solved the problem. And so the ability to be a trip by trip, trailer by trailer decision is everything for weight. And so yeah, we've we've solved the weight problem. And obviously we're going to start we're going to be light weighting the vehicle. Our frame rails are double thickness for extra safety right now. You know, the the way it's going to come down, we'll go from 64 to 70 to 80 to 90 and ultimately 100. But we can start with the the vast majority of the market today. And that's what we should be doing. Yeah. So then maybe two more questions, please. As it relates to reimagining mobility again in your sector. What do you see next? Is it I see solid state batteries coming that give me a bigger, better and power density for the same weight that I have. I can instead of 240 miles, I can go 500 miles. I can charge them even faster. Is it is it new materials? Is it new applications? Maybe you go from class eight, you go to seven and six, maybe even medium duty trucks where you see an opportunity. You share a little bit about that as a, as a really as more of a final question related to what you guys are doing, at Revoy. Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah. Class seven and below, I think, the current battery stack works really well. Those are typically short haul. The range works for it. We're seeing great successes there. So I think that that works great. And the issue just with class eight is just how how long call prevalent it is. Now, what do I see in terms of the tech stack, you know, when it comes to batteries or solid state or hydrogen? Basically, I'm not holding my breath. We need multiple breakthroughs specifically on energy density when it comes to batteries. And we need huge breakthroughs in terms of per kilogram cost of hydrogen to make hydrogen economical. And the way I see it is, you know, shippers are asking for this every single time they negotiate a contract. They want it renewable. And it's because they have public ESG commitments. They have their shareholders asking for scope three emissions reduction, along with all the other things. And they need it. They want it. And so what I what I predict in terms of, you know, where mobility is going to go, is that the trucking fleets that are able to actually deliver sustainable options to their customers at either a same price point or below, they're going to be earning way more contracts than everybody else, and they're going to have a huge head start in terms of that transition. So yeah, basically, I see it as you know, I think a lot of people see it as a far off vision, but I think, I think actually it's going to happen a lot quicker than people expect. At least if we have anything to do with it. Okay. Okay. I think you and I could go on. I have another ten questions in my head lined up, but, we need to wrap it up here. So the maybe final question and again, totally off heavy duty trucks or anything. We've talked today, but what's the next vehicle you're going to buy and why? So my plan is I'm actually going to be, retrofitting a 70s, 80s era two tone pickup truck with lead battery packs, for my own personal use. Because I've been wanting a pickup truck for years. So you make your own. I'm going to make my own for fun. Yeah. There you go. Good person. I just love the styling of those classic ones, you know? You know what I'm talking about. The two tone, yeah. No, I, I guess you're not the only one. We we as a company quite often get some inquiries about that. The problem is it's a way for us to do it's. I mean, you're looking at somebody who has to spend millions in order to get this and get the trunk safe. If you can do it safely, by yourself with components you buy is a whole lot easier, right? Yep. And it's a great product project, for sure. And a profit. Yeah, sure. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Thank you so much. And this has been super interesting for me. And like I said, we could keep on going. But this is definitely the type of stuff we want to talk about in this Reimagining Mobility podcast series here. And exciting what you guys are doing. Thank you so much.