Jon Summers is the Motoring Historian. He was a company car thrashing technology sales rep that turned into a fairly inept sports bike rider. On his show he gets together with various co-hosts to talk about new and old cars, driving, motorbikes, motor racing, motoring travel.
Notes
Jerry Reed – East Bound and Down
J & Son attend the opening of the world’s first big rig hydrogen station, with associated government and electric truck razzamatazz
The Press Conference and a digression on nomenclature
What colour is “pickle”? An existential discussion
The Hyundai dude (with the waistcoat that rode up)
A Good Question from the LA Times; how clean is the wrap around technology?
The Cummins rep and people who leave the rock show before the encore is over
J’s digression on getting stuck in muddy car parks at Silverstone, and sleeping in the company Vectra
O’s digression on his favorite car – Texaco/Havoline Porsche 962 and Joe’s Soft Serve
“The Science Bit”, which J didn’t understand “A dude with a beard and no hair…..and a bunch of pipes in a shipping container”
O operates the Actual Gas Pump for Hydrogen
O mocks his father’s skills with Podcastle
Nikola – which requires a different pump attachment to “hydrogen up”
J chat’s with Hyundai rep: “why now?”
Hydrogen is not competing with Diesel, rather with BEVs for last mile/fixed routes, because –
- 400-500 miles range (diesel trucks might do 800/day)
- Better Payload
- Faster refueling
- Better vs. natural disasters
The hydrogen station as a single point of failure; may work for some fleet applications, but not right for over the road owner driver truckers
Visual bait and switch – looks like a cabover sleeper truck, but actually what looks like the sleeper hides the hydrogen tanks/. Which “look like missiles”.
“If California is to meet it’s zero emissions goal in 2046, hydrogen must be part of the solution”
So how fully baked is this? J was less convinced after a drive around the Port of Oakland and chatting with real truckers
O reviews the two trucks; Nikola seemed far more wholistic, next generational design, while the Hyundai felt more of the parts bin special it is.
The game changer of one pedal driving; O feels he could drive it, J feels we are very close to autonomy
The challenge is clearly around the delivery of hydrogen, not the trucks
J feels soon the smell and noise of diesel will soon be like cigarette smoke in bars – recently gone, and already forgotten
Transcript
[00:00:00] John Summers is the motoring historian. He was a company car thrashing, technology sales rep that turned into a fairly inept sports bike rider. Hailing from California, he collects cars and bikes built with plenty of cheap and fast, and not much reliable. On his show, he gets together with various co hosts to talk about new and old cars, driving, Motorbikes, motor racing, and motoring travel.
Good
day, good morning, good afternoon. It is John Summers, the motoring historian, in a special episode here. Um, I have my son Oliver with me. Um, Ollie, why are you with me today? Uh, that’s [00:01:00] a rhetorical question. Well, the shrugging doesn’t work well on TV. You can’t, they can’t see you, can they? I could see you, but nobody else could.
And we’ve been to see some. We went and played with some hydrogen trucks, didn’t we? We didn’t exactly play, we just learned about them. Why? And we went to the first hydrogen, um, like, fueling station. In like, this very unattached, next to the highway, kinda area. Because it’s supposed to fuel big rigs, who, er, which, kinda, obviously.
Drive on the highway most of the time. Where, was it the port of Oakland? So like, off the highway, and like, you know. It’s at the port of heart at the port of Oakland, and it’s also, they like doing ports. The reason they were focused on doing ports is because there’s always loads of trucks queuing up there.
So this is not so much. This is not so much about, you know. Fixing global warming. This is more about making sure that people [00:02:00] living in the immediate area of the ports don’t suffer respiratory illnesses as a result of literally thousands of trucks idling in, uh, in their neighborhoods. And those of us, uh, I guess the port of Oakland’s pretty big, I guess, similar in size to Liverpool or South Hampton, but.
So it’s more specifically Long Beach. Um, my God, it it’s, it’s on a different kind of, of scale. So that’s the kind of challenge there that we were, that we went to, to learn about them, uh, trying to fix. Yep. Um, the set scene for everybody listening to this, um, we, we showed up and it was still kind of. Like, you can see the gas, or the hydrogen station clearly, it was a hydrogen station.
There was still like, you know, construction stuff, like, scattered around, because it’s like, they haven’t cleared all that stuff out, they just wanted to get to the, like, presentation as soon as [00:03:00] possible. Anyway, we went into this, like, little tent thing, not like a camping tent, obviously. Marquee. Whatever he just said, and um, And then, and then there was like five, maybe four people who present who did presentations.
Um, there was, um, one, the, the leader guy who organized it was, I think, was Matt the guy from First Element or was he just like the organizer? Yeah, I think he was from first element and it felt as if first element was some government funded agency Who were involved in trying to first element was the company who got the hydrogen because hydrogen is hard to find and Then it was not hard to find but it’s hard to process isn’t it?
That’s the well that’s what we’ll get to later on in the podcast is that It’s it’s [00:04:00] hard to process to actually be ready to put into Yeah, now so when we rocked up there’s a couple of like hyundai trucks there Um semi trucks and and a couple of nickelers as well. I’ve heard a nickel before never seen the trucks before um both 18 wheeler like style highway haulers without trailers just the tractor unit Both cab overs and we’ll come back to that in a minute because when you first look at them They look like normal trucks and then when you look a bit more massive sleeper Yeah, like a European style sleeper and an aero package on it.
But then when you look a bit more closely, that’s actually not sleeper. That’s a bunch of hydrogen tanks. Yeah, hydrogen gubbins. So, anyway, that was, uh, that was quite interesting. So we rocked up there. So it’s daycabs. It’s still daycabs. That’s what you should take away from that paragraph. Yeah, thanks.
That is useful, that summing up. Because I quite often feel on my pods, I like, nearly make a point, but don’t quite actually close home the point. So people don’t really Well, call me Shakespeare. Yeah. I, I, I will, I’ll call [00:05:00] you King William. Um, Wow, that’s cool. Um, Alright, uh, yeah, so, so the trucks, the marquee, with the great and the good telling us all about it.
Cold California weather, that was quite amusing as well, wasn’t it? You were well equipped with your hoodie. Um, and, and a gas station, which, which kind of looked like a normal gas station, but the more you looked, wasn’t really like a normal gas station. No, well the only point, the only thing that really gave it away that made it apart from, if you looked at two pictures, the hydrogen station and the gas station, you could tell them apart, because, Just to give you, like, just saying, it was very obvious to tell them apart if you look closely at them.
Like, the, the pumps were actually, like, they were, like, squarer and bigger. That’s, like, the only thing that could, that’s the real thing that really changed, or gave it away to anybody who, you know. Yeah, and later in the thing we’ll talk [00:06:00] about this when we actually when one of us actually gassed a truck up as it were um then it was clear that this was much more like this was not yeah yeah it wasn’t really like convention gassing up a conventional you know diesel 18 wheeler.
What’s like the proper verb for like hydrogening up? Yeah, we could make one up, couldn’t we? We could call it Splooting Up. Couldn’t we? You just said that as Arthur. Well, exactly, I was just thinking of that. But it’s like Pickleball, isn’t it? Pickleball is named after the founder’s dog, Pickle. That’s why it’s called Pickleball.
That’s not true. It’s absolutely true. That can’t be true. That’s absolutely true. That’s absolutely true. Was it green? Yeah. It’s lucky the dog Oh Jesus! Yeah! It is green! He just It’s what green? The man here just said it was green! It’s what green? The pig the dog Pickle. He said it was green. I don’t know what color Pickle was.
You don’t know what color Pickle is? [00:07:00] The dog, but I don’t know what color pickle the dog was. You were talking about pickles. Well, no to pickles, as in Branson pickle, it’s brown. Isn’t it green? We’re digressing, aren’t we? People tuned in to hear about the hydrogen, not you and me being silly about the color of pickles.
It’s pickle. It’s either green or brown, isn’t it? Like earthy
Earthtones! Next! Coming up next! The Blue Pickle!
The lady from, um, Cobb, the air resource people, like Gavin Newsome, like, you know, TNF people, she was also like an Oakland person, so that was good. There was, um, a dude from [00:08:00] Hyundai Trucks, and I talked with him a bit afterwards, I got to know him quite well, and there was, um, His waist jacket rode up in a weird way, didn’t it?
It did, yeah. No, and he was like slumped in his chair. Well, it was uncomfortable for them, wasn’t it? It was not, not the Right, they had nicer seats. Did they have nicer seats? Yeah, we we were stuck out in the uh, we were stuck out in that We well actually of course everyone sits around the back, don’t they?
So we of course, I don’t know what we were doing was I was in the loo or something like that but either way we uh We were like a little bit late in and then we have to like sneak across and we sat right at the front And it turned out we were sat right next to the journalist from the la times No, no guy was like guy had like his little pro like sherlock holmes Like, um, spiral notepad.
Yeah. Yeah. Like, like if you could imagine. Yeah. And then he is just like, sit next to us with his pen, like scribbling down thoughts. Yeah. And then he asked this crazy [00:09:00] question, like, yeah, what was it? Reframe it to our viewers. A little simpler. Yeah, the question, just imagine, just imagine this a lot more complexly asked instead of what you’re about to witness with him simplifying it.
Basically reading between the lines of his question and it took me to learn about it, took me to, I’d rather the rest of the demo before his question made sense to me. But his question was basically. Is the delivery system that you have for hydrogen, is that clean? Is that green? Or are you like, are you, you know, are you delivering hydrogen to this station here on a diesel tanker?
You know, that’s the, the, was the kind of thing that he was driving at. Well, because the hydrogen has stuff, the hydrogen has messed up stuff in it. And the other thing is, is the hydrogen has to be cooled. And how do you cool it? You’re going to cool it using Wait, so are you saying it’s just another way of doing it, other than diesel trucks?
Or is it [00:10:00] just, or is it actually helping? Well, that’s why, that’s why the guy was asking the question, was he was saying, if you’re just, if you’re dieseling all the hydrogen, Into this hydrogen station and then being look at our clean hydrogen trucks here But if they’re if all that is nobody and if they don’t make any sales from the hydrogen then they’re just kind of think Yeah, this whole thing.
That’s one not making the money to Unproving their point, but it’s not even about the sales. It’s about whether or not It’s about whether or that the question was about whether or not the whole You cycle from extracting the hydrogen through moving the hydrogen to the right location through making sure that the hydrogen was cooled.
It was that section before it ever got into the truck. That was the bit that he was asking about. And that apparently is where the industry has not had the greenest credentials in, in [00:11:00] the past. Um, and the CEO of, uh, of, Was ready, was like, ho ho, I was sort of ready for that question. So it’s interesting, so that was pretty interesting wasn’t it, all around, Ollie?
Also, um, I have two points here. If you’re expecting for anything on Nikola Trucks, He, the, the lead dude, Matt, said, um, there wasn’t, there’s not, nobody from Nikola. So everything we learned, really, that we, like, couldn’t see for ourselves, or read for ourselves, There were, the Nicola reps were there, weren’t they?
They just weren’t on the panel. Well, yeah, but, and then my, and then my second point is I just want us to tell you, probably him, ’cause I forgot there were Cummins reps. There was a rep from Cummins as well. Did you see that? He bugged off pretty early, but he was there. Oh yeah, he really did. Um, yeah, there was early leavers.
Um, there always are at places like that. Well, that’s really weird why he’d bother to show [00:12:00] up if you only stay there six minutes. My my point exactly. My point exactly. It’s like people who leave the gig so they don’t have to queue in the car park before the encore. Why do you bother coming at all? That’s like the best part.
Exactly! We waited to go from Bruce Springsteen like, I don’t know, maybe an hour, two hours? Yeah. But it’s not as long as Gammy and I, we went to Silverstone. It bloody rained. Bloody people got their cars stuck leaving the field. We were still there at midnight. We just slept in the Vectra. And tell, tell the viewers how long that was or how, when did the race start and end?
I know the race started at like two o’clock or something. We were late. I was running along that start finish straight to try and get to a cop’s corner where I could see it as the race started. So that was pretty annoying. Um, but what was more annoying was when we got back to the car, then we couldn’t drive out of the car park.
Well, [00:13:00] um, I just like to silverstone’s famous for that, by the way. Having really terrible facilities to access to and from. I always think of it when people moan about the traffic at Laguna Seka. It’s always like, Hmm, yeah, you should try Silverstone in the rain. I this why, how do we get talking about this is nothing.
I like Luga. I like Laguna Se because one, there’s always group C cars there no favorite car taxi going six. Well, when we’ve been at Pebble B, when we’ve been to Pebble Beach. . There’s we thing groups. C cars. Well, that, that, well that’s the only time I really go. Yeah. And then also they have that, um, jump in Joe’s, um, saucer, which I always get, which is so good.
Mm. Yeah. So look soft truck. So you catch that. So the priorities are the TCO have line Porsche 9 5, 6, I believe. There’s only one in that livery. and the soft, which I’m trying to buy when I grow up. And the soft serve ice cream. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So the, alright, this the point like 20 minutes ago I tr I, we got onto this, um, [00:14:00] rat hole, but the point we’re doing pretty well.
We’re only 14 minutes in now. Well, the point I was trying to make before those four minutes went down a rat hole about Laguna sake and all that, um, is that there was like four things or like. I don’t know, like phases of this event. The first one was, um, the press conference, like the press, which we’re talking about next is spoiler alert.
Um, well, I was going to say that let’s do, let’s talk about the refinery of the hydrogen, the science bit. Yeah. Which was sort of in the, which was sort of in the middle. So it’s right Stop. But right between Like, a long and thin rectangle, which was sort of in the middle of the light and medium duty area and the heavy duty hydrogen trucks, which they had on display there, and then they had one [00:15:00] SUV hydrogen light duty.
Anyway, in the middle, there was the refinery and everything, and a really long and thin water tower that we talk about. Then the next one, which was, now we split into groups and stuff, but of course we were late, so we were just like, Can we join this group? We didn’t really understand how they split the groups.
Well, we did, we just didn’t, we were meant to be like, I don’t know what we were meant to be doing, but our group was taking a long time to form up, wasn’t it? So I was just like, let’s just not be in the right group. So we went over to the group with that that was going straight into the science bit, which is the right way to do it.
We had to put these heavy coats on, didn’t we? Yeah. And these eye defender things. Yeah. I don’t even know how they helped cause I took them off and then, uh, anyway, it was something to do with cooling and expanding and this dude with a beard, he explained it three times and we, and I still didn’t bloody understand it.
No, and I made live TV. Which we’ll talk about later. Then the [00:16:00] next bit was the fueling demonstration, which I imagine we Hang on a minute. Do you not want to say anything more about the science bit? Well, I will say but just we’re not we’re not doing an overview here. Let’s do we do the science bit We don’t tell him what’s coming.
It’s not like a It’s not like a tv show from the 1990s where you tell him what’s happened And then you tell them what’s happening in case they just came in after a purchase After a commercial break or in case people are stupid. I often think people do that Really? Yeah. Yeah. I don’t really, I don’t like to recap ’cause recaps boring.
If you paid attention, if you’ve been paying attention, you’re like, why do I need the recap? Only stupid people need to recap. Honestly, I’m watching my favorite TV show on like channel tv. I’m, I’m watching the ads. Yeah. Well you like the story of the ads as well, which is the delicious thing about being as young habit your way.
You suck. Alright. Yes. Thank you Ali. Um, alright. The science bit. Do you wanna say anything more about the science bit? We didn’t understand it. The dude had a beard. He was very clever. He had a beard and no hair and was very clever, and [00:17:00] the TV camera guy asked him some stuff and he explained it quite well, but us dummies still didn’t understand it.
Also, the only thing that I really remembered was There was a bunch of pipes inside a converting shipping container shipping container. Yeah Yeah, very nice shade of blue when it just arrived on a shipping container It was the same scale because they they moved It was a converting shipping container because it had doors in the side of it Yeah, but anyway, let’s go on to talking about the fill up section So I was imagining this so we got our robe we got our like shirts and like security like I defender affairs Off didn’t we?
Trooped out across and now we’re in this filling station with this great big hyundai truck parked up As if you were like and we’re at the gas pump now, we’re gonna like, you know gas it up Well before we tell you what happens with this I just want to tell you I was imagining this when I read like the description of what’s gonna happen in the day on my dad’s phone It, it said, [00:18:00] um, it said, like, demonstration, so I was imagining, like, everybody at the event, we’d be back into that tent thing, whatever thing you call it.
Marquee. Marquee. Um, and we’d like, you know, watch it happen, like, in action. But instead, it was one of the, like, rotation group things. So we strut on over and we. So, let’s talk about that. Well, this guy was also Well, this guy was this guy was also bold. Um, he, um, asked me, you wanna do it? And I said, yeah, of course.
I mean, why not? Why not, yeah. Uh, and then he asked Kid can do it, anyone can do it, right? Kid Probably not true in fact, but yeah, you couldn’t have done it where I had a like it seemed to have like you have to[00:19:00]
You want to save that detail Hey, who got who got mad at me on the pod because because I don’t like going too fast I don’t like going too fast. Yeah, we did this once and then it didn’t record for some reason skillfully Yeah. Yeah. He’s such a pro. Yeah, I’m such a pro. Yeah. Guy’s done like 18 episodes of this pod and still hasn’t figured out how to work podcasts.
Alright, anyway. Tell us about the collar. No, first, and then he asked my dad, can they do it? And he was like, staring at his phone, like, you know, texting, whatever. Doom scrolling. Probably doom scrolling. No, no, I wasn’t. I wasn’t. I was texting with your mother. I was trying to get the camera up to film you doing it.
Whatever. And then you said, he said yes, because he was doom scrolling. [00:20:00] Assumptions. Anyway, um, so I grabbed the thing. Maybe about I don’t know 10 pounds pretty heavy and I and we open this like rectangular Door on the side like longer than a regular Gas opener on your regular car. I mean obviously it’s a truck, but heavy duty Highway hauler, but anyway open it up with a little button like the Tesla handle bar Uh, what do they call, um, He uh, not handlers, um, How am I forgetting this?
Door handle. I forget that. Um, So, he takes the thing off, I ker chunk it into the, Onto the slot, That was like, it was like a, Like a circular, Like thing sticking out. [00:21:00] Approximately what diameter would you have said? Like a, like maybe, like an espresso cup. Okay, what was it made of? Or the circumference of a Espresso, yeah, what was it made of?
Metal. And it was like, maybe a little longer And I put the pump, which was round as well, maybe Maybe, like a, like a, a new roll of tape thing. I put it onto the espresso mug shape thing. Mm hmm. And then it, it made a nice click right on there, really smooth. I don’t know if that matters, it’s brand new. It, it, it, it would matter, because if it didn’t click on properly, the freezing cold hydrogen could, like, spread out everywhere.
I’m sure that wouldn’t be at all dangerous. Yeah, I’m sure, I’m sure, I’m sure my dad wouldn’t screw that up. No, I never could. But the idea is, right, that any old trucker can do it. That this is the, this is the thing with this. I mean, they’re pros. Yeah, but, you know, [00:22:00] millions of, there are millions of trucks making millions of fills every day.
And this mechanism has got to work. Well, uh, anyway. Um, so it works. And then, um, funny story. He, my dad was still doom scrolling when I did this. So, um. I didn’t, I’ve got some film of him doing it, I don’t know what he’s talking about. But yeah. Whatever. Tell your story. Whatever, he wasn’t paying attention.
And then, um, there was like what seemed to be two grades. And I, and while it was still filling up, I asked the dude. Um. That question and about the two different grades that I didn’t really there was just medium of light duty Yeah, there was H. It said H 70 and then an orange M or just H 70 H70 is for the Heavy duty trucks.
And then 870 star [00:23:00] is if you are part of a truck company, this negotiated a special prepaid rate with like the gas station, which was that first element. Was that the name of the gas station? Um, true zero. True zero is the name of the, the, the gas station. Wasn’t it? I, uh, I’m going to rustle my papers now and get, um, the notepad that I actually had.
The notes that I actually took. Let’s see who was, let’s remind ourselves who was involved. TrueZero, FirstElement, Hyundai, and Nikola. Well, also, Yeah, so, so, um, but, but, but, but, um, also just for reference, I don’t think, you can look this up yourself, but I don’t think that Nikola has anything to do with Tesla.
Yeah, no, we didn’t know anything about Nicola Trucks, and of course I should have done some research about that. Have we finished at the pump? Because after the pump we went over and looked at the actual trucks. We’re ready [00:24:00] to talk about the actual trucks. Um, I just have one more thought on the um, on the pump.
I, after we were like, the group was kind of pressing on to the trucks, and I, and, And we hung back and sort of asked the dude a couple questions. And then the question that I thought was really good actually, and the dude thought was good, was I asked him, on the side there was like a plastic thing sticking out from the pump that was big.
That was really big. And there was nothing in it, but it looked like it’d hold something. And it looked like it’d hold just a bigger version of, of the, um, The receptacle, like the, the, what would be like the, the, the bit of the gas pump, like in a normal gas pump, that you would put your hand on and that you would lift out of the pump and put into the side of your car.
It was like, there was an alternative one of those, wasn’t there? There was like, there was like an extra one. Yeah. And [00:25:00] what did he say it was for? Was it for a different kind of truck or something? Yeah, it was. It was for the I think, but there wasn’t, but there wasn’t actually one. There wasn’t actually a pump in, in the slot.
Also, though, if you’re wondering how the, um, how the metal, how the, Um, How the, P the, like, nozzle, Gr gripped onto the side of the truck to let the hydrogen in, Was, um, There was like these li there was like these three little teeth, That would grab on To a thin pipe inside the espresso mug And, um, And that’s how it held on And then to And then there was like a sleeve Or like a collar Around That you pull down to detatch The, the thing from the The [00:26:00] nozzle from the truck And, um What was I gonna say about that Uh, Well, we’re going to talk about the trucks now.
Well, I had one more. I, I just lost for the like finishing of that. Oh yeah, well, on the collar in, you just pulled it back and it came out and oh, it auto stops when it, when it senses that you don’t want to do a full fill and you pull the, um, the sleeve back That, um, it auto stops the hydrogen coming in, so you can pull off without the hydrogen spewing everywhere.
So now we can move on to the trucks. Yeah, um, I’ll just add a look at my notes here. So, I spoke to the Hyundai guy, didn’t I? Yeah, you told me. Before we did the truck thing. And this was pretty interesting because, um, this reflects on what Oli’s going to tell us about the trucks in a minute. Is that the, [00:27:00] when I said to him, why now for Hyundai?
That’s what he basically said, but he was lost for words when he tried to say that. Thanks Holly, yeah. But basically I was like, you know, why now? He also said this in the press conference, right? Well, I asked, I asked the question in the press conference and then I found myself, I thought I was asking a different question when I was chatting with the guy.
And then as I was like talking, I realized I wasn’t asking a different question. I was asking actually the same question is like, why are Hyundai hot for this now? And the answer he gave me was surprisingly candid, which is, you know, most of the heavy haulers on the road in Korea anyway are Hyundai’s, right?
So we already had, The body and the chassis and all of that. And they already had the drivetrain, the hybrid drivetrain, that they’d built for other applications. So they just put the hybrid drivetrain in the, or at least they were, you know, they were going to build the hybrid drivetrain. So it was, it was like a Lego like application.
Also, what you should take away from that to simplify what he just said, [00:28:00] or to sieve it a little bit more, is that, Um, they just converted the truck. They just bought a couple hundred. Hunai Trucks and converted them. They converted the sleeper into hydrogen tanks. Yeah, whereas the Nikola is like a bespoke electric truck.
So let’s just, so let’s just talk about this. I thought this was quite interesting. Four key advantages for heavy duty applications for hydrogen over a traditional Battery electric truck. So this isn’t in competition with diesel trucks This is in competition with other battery electric with other Electric trucks that have a battery like a conventional like electric car That’s, that’s, the, the, the, um, Really?
They’re, they’re like enemy as like Google is like like rivals with Apple It’s sort of like diesel trucks [00:29:00] aren’t really in the picture for hydrogen trucks being, um, rivals with So let’s, so let’s talk about that, right? Hydrogen trucks are basically rivals with EV trucks, not EV or hydrogen trucks are rivals with diesel trucks.
They’re just the diesel trucks are out of the picture. And, and the reason that they’re out of the picture is, is that an over the road truck might be doing six, 800 miles a day, and it might be going to all sorts of different destinations. It might not even know, you know, do where it’s at. And, and just, so the whole, whereas what works for hydrogen is you fill up in one place or what works for electric generally is.
You charge in one place and you drive and you do local routes, maybe with a lot of stop start, probably with quite lightweight. And then you come back and then you come back to base. But with like 400, but with like, it takes like four hours to fill your. To fill [00:30:00] your, um, or to charge your electric, your, your given electric truck.
And even if you take like some Tesla Model X or whatever, it takes about that time too. So Well, no, it’s, it, I mean, you, the, the point is that any B. E. that the point that, that’s a point that hydrogen u that, that the mat used, used as an advantage to prove their point during the press conference. Is that EV trucks, because their rivals with them take longer, just to use it as a compliment?
Yeah, um, so the, the BEVs, uh, battery vehicles, um, the application in heavy trucking is difficult because They take such a long time to recharge, even if they’re, they’re supercharging. Um, these Hyundai’s have a 400, 500 mile, [00:31:00] 450 mile out. Those were the numbers that they were talking about range, which.
Which is okay if you’re doing local deliveries, you know, last mile stuff, um, obviously not good as a, as a highway hauler. Um, they have a better payload, a hydrogen truck’s gonna have a better payload than a traditional battery truck, because the traditional battery truck has to carry the weight of the battery, um, as Which is why electric trucks, this might be with hydrogen trucks, I might have got confused, but I think Well hydrogen trucks are electric, aren’t they, that’s the thing.
Yeah, but it’s not quite the same thing. No, because one uses a battery, the other uses hydrogen. Yeah, yeah. To create the electricity. But the hydrogen, um, Was it the hydrogen trucks that, um, That partnered with Fritos? Because their chip potato chips are really light. No, that’s the Tesla truck. Proving that the Tesla truck is not You mean the Nikola truck?
No, the [00:32:00] Tesla Big Rig. There’s a Tesla Big Rig. So Nikola Tesla separate companies. Yeah, totally separate We’re not talking about the Tesla bigger again because that is battery powered not hydrogen. Yeah The other example they used was we’re probably aware of that traffic jam in Germany where some people are just sit in the car overnight and people who had the electric Cars that to run the heat is overnight in the morning.
The cars wouldn’t start to drive away, whereas, of course, the gas people, they could just leave the motor running all night and there was still gas in the tank and they could drive off in the morning. So this kind of flexibility in the face of a natural disaster, it’s Pretty clear that the, you know, the Minnesota, the Minnesota winter, um, it, you know, the freight liner with the Cummins diesel is going to be the, uh, the one for that.
Um, still for, for some considerable time, however, local staff, regional staff, the local [00:33:00] stuff, last mile stuff, stuff where, You know, these trucks, it’s at the port of Oakland so they can fill up, go to a distribution center, drop off and then come back. And as long as that’s 500, you know, that’s less, that’s 200 miles there and back, that’s going to absolutely work for them.
One thing that is quite interesting is. For this concept to work, this gas station has to work absolutely faultlessly because, of course, if that’s gas station doesn’t work faultlessly, there is nowhere else for the trucks to go. So those people who are using those hydrogen trucks, those people don’t have a business anymore.
And, of course, that’s the challenge getting diesel operators to flip is they might be able to see economies of scale. There might be economies of scale, but getting them to flip into a situation where if one gas station. goes down, they’re screwed, or where they need a particular driver with a particular set of skills and if he is, you know, taken sick that day, they don’t have anybody who can operate that truck.
You know, that’s [00:34:00] the, uh, the challenge that they’ve got. But this is, this is a challenge with any kind of technological development, right, is that you have, um, path dependency, don’t you? And this may be obvious because of what we said later, That um, they didn’t have sleepers because they couldn’t because it’s all hydrogen tanks that kind of look like missiles but um Well, no, let’s talk about that.
They’re not regional If you’re really taking all this in the They’re not regional things like it’s not going these hydrogen trucks unless they make a new model They’re not going from here to new york. They’re going from like here to la Maybe hydrogening up once And on the like a maybe going there and back in two days So let’s talk about the design of the truck.
They are basically cab overs both the Nikola and the Hyundai were cab overs Where the engine would normally be [00:35:00] is the electric motor Where the sleeper would normally be are all the hydrogen tanks And there’s a lot of them. There’s Because it looks even bigger for a sleeper, right? It doesn’t, the more you look, the more you think like, no, this doesn’t look like a European sleeper.
And of course, to American eyes, where most trucks, especially trucks with a sleeper, are conventional, you know, they’ve got the long square nose on them, Um, for, to their eyes, The cab over with the sleeper. That’s a configuration you never really had. No, but I I always thought it was a sleeper But we both walked in and we first saw because the first truck we saw when we came in was a nikola truck And we saw the big the the bigger The bigger sleeper Or what we thought was a sleeper.
We were both like that’s a big sleeper when it’s not also these long thin Hydrogen tanks that we said that kind of looks like missiles There, um, there were six of them, I counted. [00:36:00] Yeah, and they’re all like stacked up, aren’t they, in the space? Yeah, three on like each. Yeah, so, so, so there is a payload implication, right?
That this is taking up less weight than that payload. Then a battery might, but there is still a payload implication. So, so at this point, right before we went out on the test drive, I was feeling like I felt the technology was pretty much 80 percent baked of one of the panelists. I forgot to say this, but the most compelling panelists made the point that because of the way that BVs are, if California is to meet its goal of zero emissions in trucks by 2046, if, if California is to do that hydrogen.
Has to be part of the solution. So in other words, there’s a lot of pressure to develop better solutions than what we have at the moment. But as I say, at this point, I was feeling like the solutions were pretty, you know, you know, kind of 80 90 percent baked. As we moved on Definitely the hood and eye trucks is what he, [00:37:00] is what I believe in what he’s saying.
Maybe like, maybe 90. It took 95 percent with the Nikola trucks, and I’ll tell you why in a little bit when we start to get to the ride that we did in the Hyundai truck. So if, so, so 80 or, you know, it felt 80 percent baked at this point. Um, looking at the trucks themselves, um, You know, I’m not, I’m not saying a modern Freightliner or Sterling to, to know how, how, how they might compare, but of course, automatic transmission screens, um, you know, and, and pretty much of a muchness.
They had a couple of different drivers, didn’t they? Who were actual truck drivers. And this was quite interesting. I’m gonna know of screens and nicer and better to drive and more efficient. I sat, we sat, or I sat in both of the trucks, but we drove in the Hyundai truck. [00:38:00] At the end we’ll talk about final thoughts and Hyundai truck driving, but from the sitting in the truck’s perspective, when I sat in the Nikola truck, during the press conference, they’re like, This is the future!
The Nikola truck struck me as more of the future. The, the Hyundai truck struck me of more of a hydrogen truck of today. And then when they say it’s of the future, The Nikola truck is the truck of the future. And, and the reason I feel that way is because the Nikola truck is like, It has like, it has like heated seats, air cooling seats, Like a pretty decent sized TV.
Or not TV, um, like screen for directions, facing at the driver, and it had electrical adjustable seats. Which is, and it’s more like [00:39:00] slicker and more like efficient looking. Even if it may not be, it still looks like that, so you might, so if I was a company like Ryder, I might buy the Nikola, and I was in the market for hydrogen trucks, I might buy the Nikola truck instead of the Hyundai truck for those reasons.
And then everything that I just said, the opposite of it, is the Hunoi truck. So they laid on these proper truckers to talk to us about the, the trucks as we were like, you know, climbing in and out of them. And, and yet then they drove whilst, you know, we, uh, whilst one of us sat in the passenger seat and the other one struggled to cross his legs, crammed in the kind of sleeper, kind of center console, kind of passenger seat.
Plastic tray in between the, uh, in between the two seats. Well, the plastic tray could have fit a corgi if you know how mean they are. Um, so conventional truck, diesel truck, 17 or 18, 000 pounds. [00:40:00] These guys, 35, 000 pounds. Which is why they partnered with a potato chip brand. Well, no, that was because Where it’s hydrogen, not, you know, battery?
Yeah, up to a point. But there’s still, you know, the sheer weight of the vehicle itself, which, you know, is double what it was. So there’s a payload implication there, isn’t there? So I feel like, um, That made me take the, that took the wind out of my sails a little bit. And then I began to really think about what it was as we drove around the port of Oakland, I began to think about what it was really going to take to make even a big fleet like Verner or Schneider, think about making a flip, let alone, uh, you know, one man band truck, you know, truck driver, um, I guess the other thought I’d had, I had is the, [00:41:00] the drive, because it’s like an electric vehicle drive, it’s, it’s, you know, two pedal, one pedal with heavy, you know, regen braking, um, which, which, which, which we talked about, which we talked about a lot, but I just, I guess we, Ollie, you and I didn’t talk about this.
Um, I, I just found myself thinking, I feel like we’re very close to autonomy. There was so little. No, literally, I think there was only, there was like, the brake pedal was like, only Like, you know how, um, there’s like the 18, um, like gear, highway haulers, diesel highway haulers, who have like, who have like a creep gear, for like traffic on the highway, You don’t even need a creep gear with these.
You just kinda have to, like, kinda feather, [00:42:00] and it’ll just kinda regen break into a creep. And you’ll Yeah. Yeah. So you don’t need it, I suppose. Yeah, so we’re, uh So, any final thoughts, Ollie? Um, I like the Nicola trucks better. I just, they just You know seemed more of the of what they stated the the reasons the state the reasons that they stated in the press Conference the Nicola truck seemed to fit the fit them a little bit better so There have been other hydrogen initiatives apparently There’s been sports cars and stuff Well, no, but that within California, there’ve been other hydrogen initiatives, which haven’t really, which by implication haven’t really gone anywhere.
I can’t pretend to be an expert on them, but clearly they haven’t. So that made me feel like, well, maybe this isn’t, you know, a shoe in to succeed. And, and, and certainly, um, the [00:43:00] technology seems if the technology is hard to explain, it must be bloody hard to run properly. Um, so I feel like we’re You know, and even, you know, clearly the difficult part of the technology is the science bit in getting the hydrogen and they’re even and cooling it and so on.
And they were and they what we spent a lot of time talking about was how to make that more efficient. And as we said, you know, the L. A. Times journalist, his question was around the process before. So it feels like Yeah. Um, you know, the the trucks themselves are like, you know, David Beckham’s boots. You know, they’re they’re a part of, uh, the machine.
The important thing is his brain and his leg. Not really his shoe. Although his shoe is the part that the ball’s gonna, you know, connect with. If that’s not a really Stupid metaphor, um So, you know, I just feel like I just [00:44:00] feel like the trucks aren’t that relevant, you know So I was I disappointed I wasn’t able to drive one.
No, was I pleased that ollie had a chance to sit in it? Yeah, was I struck by the fact that he could probably have driven it Yeah, I I was I was struck by that watching these things There was one pedal I’m watching these things One pedal driving I’m watching these things creep around the filling station, you know, and then creep out silently, you do find yourself thinking You know It wasn’t that long ago when you could smoke in pubs and bars It wasn’t that long ago when you sat in traffic you could smell the exhaust fumes from every car You know when LA’s traffic was full of you know No smog You know, no smoke v eights, you know, with knocks and traves hydrocarbons and popping out the smoke.
Yeah. So it wasn’t that long ago that we were there and we just accepted it. You know? You [00:45:00] just accepted that when you went to a bar, even if you weren’t a smoker, you came out stinking a smoke because everyone in the bar smoked. I think the noise of diesel, I think the smell of diesel is going to go the same way.
What music do you think we should use for this episode? The Halvar and Clarence ad. All right, we can use the Halvar and Clarence ad. What else do you think we should use? What other music do you think we try and pull out baby by jack harlow I don’t think I don’t even know that I I our music listen to it.
Well, no the music is so good the music I literally sing it if you want the music. No, thanks the music in our um, The music in the [00:46:00] episode as gam as discussed with gammy is we try and publicize like little known or unknown Cheesy heavy metal bands Crowbar. Crowbar. Crowbar, yeah. Crowbar, I’ve seen you six times and you were shit every time, really.
The worst live show. The worst live show I’ve ever seen. No, and look up, look up like pictures of Crowbar. They’re so I don’t know why I keep saying it like that. Look at pictures of crowbars. You wouldn’t want to meet them in a dark night, Ollie. They were mean looking. No, they got like face tattoos. And like And like And like They got like They have like Um They have like I think one of them has like So one of them has like a A tattoo of a butt.
On his butt with a butt shaped motif. No, he has like a cobra on top of one of his eyes or something. And then you Have we come to a natural conclusion, Oli? Yeah.[00:47:00]
By popular demand, The Chronicles of Halvar and Clarence will soon be released as a series of audiobooks. Join me, Halvar, the world’s greatest, most brilliant, strongest, and best. toughest, sexiest, and most modest barbarian as I crush wizards and kick ass. Oh, and yeah, Clarence might bother to show up. He’s a gnome thief, the smallest member of the crew.
Ha ha ha ha! A real, uh, tinky winky. Ain’t that right, Titch? Very true, big man. However, I can always introduce a comely wench. To a truly massive cock, now can’t I? Ha! You can! I, of course, have a Hey! Hold on! Hey! Hey, fuck you! Come back here, you little [00:48:00] bastard! Double or Quits by J. D. Gammy. Available now on iBooks, Audible, and everywhere that’s cool.
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