A Discussion of Electric-Powered Vehicles w/ Patrick Doyle

From the spacious KWTO studios, it's the Elijah Harshow, 93am 560 KWTO. Welcome back to KWTO. Don't forget coming up at 505. We are going to have the Attorney General Catherine Hannaway on. She just got sworn in Monday of this week. She's making her way around the state. So we're going to have in talk to her about what's going on, how she's going to continue the legacy of the state of Missouri, obviously with Josh Holly and then Eric Schmidt and now Andrew Bailey. Big shoes to Phil, so we'll talk to her at 505. But first, we're going to do something a little bit different. Joining us now in studios, Patrick Doyle, Highland Electric Fleets. What is a Highland Electric Fleet? Well, we're going to get into that in a second, but first things first. Patrick, we do this on the show every day. It's a question of the day. You came into town last night. What's your favorite thing about Springfield so far? Well, Elijah, thank you for having me, first of all. You know, I had a great conversation with one of the hotel staff this morning, and he was giving me the lowdown on the coffee scene in town here. So I had a chance to have some echelon coffee at the hotel this morning. But, you know, what really caught my ear was that there's only local coffee shops in town. So yeah, you can find like a Starbucks or or and there's like a seven brew, which I think is out of northwest Arkansas, but by and large, most coffee shops here are local coffee. Yeah, they all, I mean, and they're, they're fantastic. Okay. Tell us a little about what is Highland. What is Highland Electric Fleets? What are they? Sure. Yeah. So I'll start with sort of our origin story. So Highland Electric Fleets was born out of. An observation that our founder and CEO made. So Duncan McIntyre is our founder, our CEO. He's an entrepreneur up in Massachusetts, and he'd sold his company that was in the solar finance space. And he was sort of looking for his next venture. And he was taking his kids to the bus stop in the morning to, you know, sweep him off to school. And he noticed that the exhaust pipe on the bus was right at head level of his little kids. And in fact, all the little kids. And he looked at that and he thought, there's something we can do to improve this, right? So the diesel fumes that are coming out of that pipe, they're getting piped right into the kids' faces. So the idea was, how can we make it? easy and reliable for school districts to deploy electric school buses. And that was 2019. You know, since that time, we've deployed close to 1,000 vehicles. Most of those are electric school buses across 30 states and Canada. And at this point, we've just crossed the 5 million mile threshold. So 5 million miles...

And another thing that people don't know about electric vehicles, you know, internal combustion engines have thousands of parts, thousands of moving parts, and moving parts break. It's what they do. Electric vehicles have dozens of moving parts. So there's no oil changes. There's no transmission dropping out when you're idling your vehicle too much, right? All of these maintenance costs that folks are just accustomed to because, you know, gas powered vehicles, that's been the way we do it for 100 years now. And we talk to police departments or parks and rec departments and we say, hey. You guys are getting your oil change once a month, right? And they say, yeah, yeah, we don't like doing that. It's like, well, let's not do that anymore, right? Let's, let's slash your maintenance budget big time. And you can use that money for whatever it is that you need money for, right? Whether it's a new swimming pool or a new teacher's aide or what, you know, everybody could use a little bit more wiggle room in their budget. Elijah Har talking to Patrick Doyle of Electrical Highland Fleets. You guys, you said you started in Massachusetts. You're in 30 states. Where is the most prevalence for these vehicles? Like, where are you guys having like the most success? Yeah, we tend to think about this not geographically, but... as far as the operational, the use case, right? Okay. School buses are great because they basically sit around all summer, and they run very predictable routes. So the range concern comes up all the time, but with a school bus, you know how much it's going to drive in the morning. You know how much it's driving the afternoon. By range concern, you mean like, what if I drive too far and don't have a charge? Yeah, exactly. I mean, most of the time, the response that I get. you know, I do a lot of introductions to electric vehicles, right? And a lot of folks will say, oh, we can't be stopping every 20 miles to charge. Or like the technology is not there yet. And so school buses are very exciting. Municipal fleets, university fleets, if you think about something like parking enforcement or code enforcement or city pool vehicles, right, motor pool vehicles. They don't drive very much, so the range is not an issue. They come back to the same location. So we tend to look at this as a use case-by-use case basis. Obviously, there's more programs that make funding available, either through state governments, the federal EPA, utility companies see dollar signs when they hear about electric vehicles. So utility companies are pretty eager most of the time to... put up some money to install some chargers and deploy some electric buses because they know they're going to be selling the kilowatts to power that. Very interesting. Would you be considered in the tech disruptor space? Is that proper terminology? I don't know what's disruptive and what's not anymore. I remember when I was in the legislature when Uber was coming to Missouri and the taxis are like, like freaking out about it.

And now it was like, can you imagine if we didn't have Uber? And now it's like, well, what's the next? But I didn't know, you know, obviously the idea of moving from gas to electric has been around for some time. Right. Most people probably have not thought through trash trucks or school. They've just not thought through that portion. Right. Yeah, I think definitely the title of disruptor is appropriate. And, you know, I've been in the electric vehicle charging industry for close to a decade now, and it's highly chaotic, right? And what we do is, I suppose you could call us a disruptor, but for our partners, whether it's a school district or a city government or a university. We tend to make sense out of the chaos, right? So in an inherently volatile industry, we are coming in and making this make sense for people. We're taking away the financial risk. We're taking away the operational risk. But, yeah, the industry in general, it's exciting, right? There's never a dull moment. What are the big, and again, I'm Elijah Har talking to Patrick Doyle from Electric Highland Flates. What are the big misconceptions about EVs? Yeah. I know one of them is range because I'll be honest, I just bought a new truck and I test drove a fully electric truck. Okay. And I asked the guy, I was like, hey, you know. What if during a snow storm, I'm stuck out there on the highway. I was like, if my car dies, I just somebody brings me a can of gas. I was like, there's a wheel a hole. But candidly, after driving, I was like, this isn't the worst idea in the world. Like, maybe it's a good idea. And I feel like there's this sort of mindset change that's happening, not just cross-country, but primarily in the Midwest, people are like, hey, I could actually see where this would make sense to me. Yeah. Yeah, the things that I hear most frequently are. they can't go far enough or there's not enough charging infrastructure, right? There is some truth in that. Most of the time, if you get an electric vehicle, you really better have a charger at home or at that vehicle's home, wherever the vehicle's going to be spending its time. I try to reframe the question, right? You don't go to a charging station to charge your iPhone. You just put a charger wherever you already spend your time. So the range is a common objection that I hear all the time. And there's, you know, like most things, there's a little bit of truth there, but it's... in a surprising amount of applications and use cases. If you map it out and you think it through, which we do on behalf of our partners, you can size your charging infrastructure to support whatever the operations of the vehicle are. Right. The other concern I get all the time is around cold weather performance. And again, there's some sure. Oh, yeah. That's what. Yeah. They, they're not going to run in the cold, right? Well.

We've deployed electric school buses on Red Lake Nation and the far reaches of northern Minnesota where it's negative 20 about three weeks out of the year. This is a very rural environment where the buses are running long distance. And some folks in Michigan or Missouri or Illinois, they'll say, oh, it's too cold here for electric buses. And I say, yeah, it's cold here. You know where it's colder, the northern reaches of Minnesota, right? The kernel of truth there is, you know, when a diesel vehicle is heating the cab. it's not really affecting the range of the vehicle that much. With an electric vehicle, all of that heat energy, most of the time is coming from the same power source that's driving the motor. So you do have to take it into consideration, right? Red Lake Nation is a great example where we've kind of conquered the cold. In Colorado, we've also conquered elevation, right? So it's sort of the mountain folks version of cold weather is the hills, right? They've got cold and they've got hills and mountains. We've confidently addressed the cold weather, the elevation. Is hot weather a thing you have to, like do people, is that a misguids? I don't even know if people worry about hot weather. Yeah, no, well, they don't, but they need to think about it. Not worry about it, but think about it, right? So the same concept, you know, your air conditioner is going to be sapping power that could be used to propel the vehicle, right? Another concern that comes up all the time is around safety. Again, It's right to be conscious of safety. You know, I grew up working on construction sites and always got a lecture every morning about everybody's going home safe today, right? Electric vehicles are built on. Today, it's mostly lithium ion battery packs. The same thing that I'm looking around the room, I see about a half a dozen lithium ion battery packs in here, right? I have a lithium ion battery pack on my thigh all day, every day in my cell phone, right? Don't talk to the conspiracy theorist. They'll tell you not to put it in. Yeah, I mean, that's its own conversation. That's its own conversation. But the combustion concern is something that we hear a lot of. And if you look at the statistics. Electric vehicles catch fire at a much lower rate than combustion engine vehicles, right? Sometimes vehicles catch on fire. That's why we have fire departments, right? The issue with batteries is that when a battery catches fire, a lot of times fire departments don't know how to respond to it. And it is a real issue when a battery does catch fire. So whenever we deploy electric vehicles, we only use equipment that is, you know, UL, that's an industry standard. They're a testing lab. So everything is vetted in the lab. tested to make sure that it's going to be safe to deploy. And we'll go out and we'll train the first responders as well. Like, look, these things are generally safe, but things happen, right? Whether it's a collision or a lightning strike or, you know, things happen. We'll work with them to help them understand the risk. It's not something you need to be afraid of, but safety first, last and always, right? You want to be conscious of whatever the technology you're working with is.

Absolutely. All right. Again, Patrick Doyle, Highland Electric Fleets. Patrick, if people are interested in what you're doing, they want to know more. We've got obviously, we've got a bunch of municipalities and colleges in the area that may have heard this and think, hey, that's something I'm intrigued by. How do they find you guys on social media online or how do they reach out to you? Sure. Yeah. So highlandfleets.com is our website. We've got a pretty great YouTube channel as well. So if folks are curious, you can get on our YouTube channel. We've got a series called Bus Talk, I believe it's called. And it's conversations with our clients, our partners, and our in-house engineers. So if you're curious, you can check that out and you can reach out to me. So I'm Patrick Doyle. Emailspatrick. Doyle at... Highlandfleets.com. And, you know, we do a ton of education and, you know, consulting work up front for everybody. It's an industry where there's a lot of unknowns. So if you got questions, I'd love to hear them and love to see if there's an opportunity to put some electric vehicles into the mix. Very good. Patrick Doyle, Highland Electric Fleets. Check them out on social media or online or check out Bus Talk on YouTube. I'm Elijah Hart. This is KWTO. We're going to be back. Top of the hour news coming up next. And then Attorney General, Catherine Hannaway in, talk about how she's going to continue on the legacy for Missouri. We'll be right back.