00:13:16 · Neil C. Hughes
[00:13:16] S0: It's incredibly cool what you're doing here. I must admit, I do get a big kick out of sharing stories on this podcast because I think very often when people take out their trash, they're not thinking about technology. That is the furthest thing from their mind, and I must admit, I get a kick out of sharing stories like this and and really delivering that wow factor because I I was chatting with someone in Sweden recently, and they they had attached cameras to all of their waste management trucks. And they were scanning for potholes in the road, recording it and sending it to their authorities who would then go and fill those potholes before they got big. So technology is everywhere. So where else are you seeing AI improving both driver and community safety at all or just anything? And what evidence tells you it's working? Because it... It's not tech for tech's sake here. You're seeing real results. Right?
00:14:08 · Brett Rogers
[00:14:08] S1: Yeah. So... Absolutely. So on the safety side, we're seeing a huge reduction in our incidents overall, which is driving, you know, our safety aspect of the fence. But we also have advancements in... And I really like your story about the three sixty cameras. There's a bunch of different ways you can leverage that technology. Yeah. We haven't dove so far into that, but we are looking at ways that we can better serve our customers as far as how can we give them visibility into their communities in order to really help them improve. And I I think that pothole scenario is a really good example, but we're also using it with transparency in our routing. And so when you think about it, cities actually contract out their services. Some operate their own. Some some contract out. And if a customer calls them up about a particular question or a customer is asking, like, hey. I didn't get my trash picked up. And the city's really left on their heels, like, how do I react to this? And you're... They're trying to figure out what has already happened. And and you don't know. And so sometimes maybe they didn't get picked up because the truck hasn't driven by yet. Maybe they didn't get picked up because they set their can out too late, or maybe it was a mess, and it needs to get remedied and someone needs to come back. But the cities don't know. And so this technology is really giving us that transparency with the city to give them the tools to see what's happening real time. And so instead of them being reactive and trying to figure out in the past what's already been happening, they really can use these tools in order to see, hey, what's the status of this delivery? And they can talk to their customers like, hey, that truck hasn't driven by you. You can expect it at so and so time. And so now it eases the customer, makes our customers happier, makes our cities happier, and overall, just that increase in visibility and transparency, I think, is gonna go a long ways, and we've started rolling out that technology as well.
00:15:57 · Neil C. Hughes
[00:15:57] S0: And, of course, electric collection trucks operate under very different conditions from passenger vehicles. I'm curious. Are there any engineering or even charging problems that become apparent to a a fleet of the scale that we're talking about here?
00:16:11 · Brett Rogers
[00:16:11] S1: Yeah. So on the electrification side, we we had a heavy focus on, you know, the major components. You know, you have your high voltage batteries. You have your electric motors, and we are overly focused on those, and they have been performing extremely well. We are also extremely sensitive on range, and what we're finding out that the performance is actually better than expected on our EV trucks. They can basically work anywhere across the country, but, obviously, we do a double check with our power draw analysis to make sure they can work well. And so when it comes to EVs, the interesting thing, it... It's not so much about do they work or not. It was about driver adoption. And so we have some drivers and EVs kinda have some preconceived notions correlated to them whether that's fair or not. That's a different conversation. And so some of our drivers say, hey. I'm a diesel driver. I only wanna drive diesel trucks. I don't really wanna get into these EVs. And so they didn't wanna drive them at first. And so that was an interesting hurdle that we didn't really plan on because these EV vehicles have 30% more interior volume because you're eliminating an engine. They have less vibration, less heat generation, less noise, all because the engine's removed and better ergonomic caps. And so we're like, hey. These trucks are just way better. Why would anyone not wanna get in them? But then it turned out it was just those preconceived notions about EV in general. And once we got our drivers in there, then they loved them. It took them about one to two weeks of driving them, and they never wanted to go back to their diesel trucks. But other issues that we've kinda seen is on the charging side. One of the questions we get is what happens if the power goes out?
00:17:48 · Neil C. Hughes
[00:17:48] S0: Yeah.
00:17:49 · Brett Rogers
[00:17:49] S1: Because if the power goes out, you still want your trash picked up. And so we really have these grid resiliency plays in, and there's different stages of our grid resiliency. One is when we introduce EVs, it's not all at once to a location. We want to make sure that we have a spare ratio on-site. As we phase in these EVs, it's new technology and with new technology comes potential problems, we want to make sure there's a backup vehicle, whether it's a RNG or conventional vehicle on-site. That is the most rudimentary way of resiliency. But we've also layered in another layer of resiliency is when we put in switch gears. And so for background, when you put in charging infrastructure, you put in a transformer. That's normally what the utility puts in, and then we put in a switchgear with the transform plugs into. And that's kinda like a gigantic circuit breaker. That's what feeds all your chargers. Within our switchgear, we're actually able to add in components that allow us to backfeed it. Now you can backfeed it in multiple different ways. On the very crude way, you could backfeed it with a generator. And so, hey. In an emergency, if power goes out, you can pull a generator up, plug it into the switchgear, backfills all your chargers, and now you're able to charge your vehicles again. But, you know, the more clever ways to do it are on a microgrid system. And so we're looking at ways where we can use on-site energy storage, renewable energy in order to make sure our resiliency is there on-site. So then we can backfeed our vehicles in case the power goes out, and we can still service our customers. And so there's a bunch of different scenarios that we have to think about. It's not just plug and play this type of technology. We have to make sure it's durable and that we're delivering that reliable service that our customers are seeking.