NC_2024_06_25A
Exploring Typora's collaboration features and Tello Trucks' urban electric design, the episode discusses startup challenges in the EV industry and the significance of customer engagement for sustainable transport solutions.
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Long Summary
Today's show on Tuesday, June 25th, 2024, is an exciting one as it marks episode 999, and we have a double release due to a vacation break. Our live show on Sunday, June 30th will be off the air, but be sure to save the date for our grand 1,000th episode on July 7th. To kick off this episode, we delve into Graham's deep dive into creating physics videos using Typora for scriptwriting, where he highlights the program's sleek interface and support for Markdown and LaTex. We explore Typora's efficiency in editing tasks and its handy features such as word count and reading time estimation, solidifying its position as a robust text editor despite some minor interface quirks.
In our conversation about Typora, we shift gears to discuss the various font and theme options available, showcasing how these choices can drastically alter the text's visual presentation with layout variations and styling nuances like centered headings and all caps. We shed light on Typora's exporting functionalities, enabling users to save their work in Markdown, PDF, HTML, and other formats seamlessly. Notably, Typora simplifies the typically cumbersome task of creating tables in Markdown, streamlining the process for users. Transitioning to our interview segment, we introduce Jason and Forrest from Telo Trucks, who share insights into their innovative electric pickup truck design tailored for urban environments.
Jason and Forrest elaborate on Telo Truck's compact design intended for city use, discussing market analysis, design strategies, and the target demographic of urban utility vehicle enthusiasts. They unpack the distinctive design elements setting Telo Truck apart, such as the unique front wheel exposure and pill-shaped door advocating for interior space optimization. As the conversation deepens, we delve into the aerodynamics and design rationale behind our electric vehicle model, emphasizing how engineering components like an air pressure release channel behind exposed tires enhance range and efficiency.
Further focusing on practicality and innovation, we highlight key design features such as the midgate for flexible cargo solutions and dissect the significance of battery pack design in driving vehicle performance and range. Addressing prevailing misconceptions about battery charging and the challenges facing EV charging infrastructure, we underscore the paramount role of safety features, particularly in pedestrian protection and collision prediction technologies. The discussion extends to software development and user interface enhancements, with an eye towards creating an intuitive and user-friendly experience based on feedback from our pre-order customers.
Concluding the episode, we reflect on our strategy of prioritizing utility and simplicity in electric vehicle design, sharing plans around integrating haptic feedback into the vehicle interface to elevate user interaction. We credit the invaluable feedback received from our Discord community for shaping our product development approach, stressing the importance of community engagement in refining our offerings. Our overarching objective remains centered on delivering a cost-effective and efficient electric vehicle that meets market demands without compromising on functionality. As we tackle the challenges inherent in the EV startup landscape, we outline the key features and competitive pricing of our upcoming electric mini truck, emphasizing affordability and utility. Finally, we touch on the critical role of charging infrastructure and industry trends to keep our listeners informed and engaged, inviting all to join our Discord community for deeper insights and real-time updates.
In our conversation about Typora, we shift gears to discuss the various font and theme options available, showcasing how these choices can drastically alter the text's visual presentation with layout variations and styling nuances like centered headings and all caps. We shed light on Typora's exporting functionalities, enabling users to save their work in Markdown, PDF, HTML, and other formats seamlessly. Notably, Typora simplifies the typically cumbersome task of creating tables in Markdown, streamlining the process for users. Transitioning to our interview segment, we introduce Jason and Forrest from Telo Trucks, who share insights into their innovative electric pickup truck design tailored for urban environments.
Jason and Forrest elaborate on Telo Truck's compact design intended for city use, discussing market analysis, design strategies, and the target demographic of urban utility vehicle enthusiasts. They unpack the distinctive design elements setting Telo Truck apart, such as the unique front wheel exposure and pill-shaped door advocating for interior space optimization. As the conversation deepens, we delve into the aerodynamics and design rationale behind our electric vehicle model, emphasizing how engineering components like an air pressure release channel behind exposed tires enhance range and efficiency.
Further focusing on practicality and innovation, we highlight key design features such as the midgate for flexible cargo solutions and dissect the significance of battery pack design in driving vehicle performance and range. Addressing prevailing misconceptions about battery charging and the challenges facing EV charging infrastructure, we underscore the paramount role of safety features, particularly in pedestrian protection and collision prediction technologies. The discussion extends to software development and user interface enhancements, with an eye towards creating an intuitive and user-friendly experience based on feedback from our pre-order customers.
Concluding the episode, we reflect on our strategy of prioritizing utility and simplicity in electric vehicle design, sharing plans around integrating haptic feedback into the vehicle interface to elevate user interaction. We credit the invaluable feedback received from our Discord community for shaping our product development approach, stressing the importance of community engagement in refining our offerings. Our overarching objective remains centered on delivering a cost-effective and efficient electric vehicle that meets market demands without compromising on functionality. As we tackle the challenges inherent in the EV startup landscape, we outline the key features and competitive pricing of our upcoming electric mini truck, emphasizing affordability and utility. Finally, we touch on the critical role of charging infrastructure and industry trends to keep our listeners informed and engaged, inviting all to join our Discord community for deeper insights and real-time updates.
Brief Summary
In our milestone 999th episode, we discuss Typora for physics video scripting, highlighting its efficiency and exporting capabilities. We also explore Telo Trucks' innovative design for urban electric pickup trucks, emphasizing practical features and community engagement. Our focus remains on delivering cost-effective EV solutions while staying abreast of industry trends. Join us for our 1,000th episode celebration on July 7th and connect with our Discord community for updates.
Tags
milestone
999th episode
Typora
physics
video scripting
efficiency
exporting capabilities
Telo Trucks
urban electric pickup trucks
innovative design
cost-effective EV solutions
industry trends
1
000th episode celebration
July 7th
Discord community
updates
Transcript
[0:00]
NC_2024_06_25
[0:00]Music.
[0:05]A technology geek podcast with an ever-so-slight Apple bias. Today is Tuesday, June 25th, 2024, and this is show number 999. Well, you're going to notice this show is coming out just a hot minute after show number 998, and that's because we're going on a vacation with our kids and grandkids. That means there's no live show this Sunday, June 30th. So don't go there Sunday and be all sad, okay? Now, the next show, which will be published on July 7th, and there will be a live show on July 7th. This is our 1,000th episode. Steve got a ton of wonderful audio comments from the audience that he won't let me hear until the show comes out. I cannot wait. Now, getting two shows out back-to-back like this is a challenge, but we've still got a great show. We're going to start with physics nerd Graham on his mini-series on how he creates his physics shorts videos. This one is why he chose the application Typora to write his script, and he he does a little mini review. Now, I had really wanted to do a review of Typora myself, so after he tells you the parts he likes, I'm going to follow him with a lot more of what Typora
[1:13]
Typora for Notes — by Physics Nerd Graeme
[1:12]can do and the special use cases that drove me to buy yet another text editor. Then the delightful Bodhi Grimm of the Kilowatt Podcast donated a fabulous interview he did with the folks at Tello Trucks. You're going to love the story they have on how they might disrupt the EV truck market.
[1:31]Physics nerd Graham here, continuing my mini-series on my mega-project creating A-level, or high school, physics videos for my students. Last time I gave an overview of the project, so this time I'll start getting into more detail. I made the decision to write my notes for my physics shorts videos using Markdown so that they are in a simple format that has some structure. This will mean I can potentially use AI to put the material in other formats as wanted in future, letting students consume it how they want. I started with Ghostwriter on PC and it was going well but I wanted to switch to my Mac and use something beautiful. I asked ChatGPT for some options for Markdown editors that have minimal interfaces and live preview and one of them was Typora from typora.io.
[2:22]Now this is a targeted tool meaning that I'm getting it to do a single job, create focused minimal teaching videos. It made sense that I would want to create the core content using a minimal interface, removing any clutter and reminding me to keep it simple at every step. TypeAura has a beautifully minimal design. Opening it up gives you a single window that has a blinking cursor, the traffic light buttons at the top left and the title of the new empty note, untitled. It was so clean and crisp I went and turned on stage manager since my settings for stage manager remove icons and widgets from my desktop. It's just me and my keyboard and it's delightful. I know basic markdown which means I pretty much know all of standard markdown so I can just start typing away and not worry about formatting at all. But I was still getting beautiful text thanks to the live preview feature that I demanded, which is implemented really well in TypeAura.
[3:27]Now, some Markdown apps give you two windows, one to type in and one to see the final result, but I find that cluttering. Other editors don't give a preview, which is fine, but uninteresting. Live Preview is a feature where the app renders your headings and bold and italics and images on the page as you write, but still lets you focus only on writing. And here's how it works. The Markdown syntax for a heading is a single hashtag followed by a space followed by the text of the heading. When I type this in TypeAura, what I see is a hashtag followed by a space followed by the text of the heading. The magic comes when I press return. Now what I see is just the text of the heading in a big bold font with a subtle line underneath, beautifully styled and rendered. If I want to change something There's a handy shortcut, command slash, that switches to the markdown view, showing all the hashtags etc, and letting me go and edit them. The same shortcut gets me back to live preview.
[4:38]For images, you can't actually put an image in a Markdown document as it's just a text file, but you can add a link. Personally, I simply drag my image into the document and TypeAura puts the image in and provides me with a pop-up menu asking to make changes. The first is Copy Image To, which will let me choose where to store the file. TypeAura creates a default folder to store images, but I like to keep them next to the text file for easy portability. If I want to share the document with anyone, Allison for example, I just need to send the markdown text file an image and it should all work nicely at the other end, now that I have gone into options and told TypeAura to use relative paths if possible. The second option is rename or move image to, which does what it says on the tin. And the third option lets you choose what zoom level to show the image at. Nothing fancy, but all you really need. So with live preview, normally you just see the picture, but if you move the insertion point onto it, you get to see the actual markdown text and make changes directly if you prefer.
[5:53]Since I'm doing physics shorts, I realised I could do with putting in equations, and thankfully TypeAura has wonderful support for LaTeX. In case you don't know, LaTeX is a clever typesetting language that is particularly popular for maths. With something like TypeAura handling the complexities though, LaTeX resembles Markdown for maths as far as I'm concerned. In Markdown, we get italics by typing an underscore, the word, then another underscore. In TypeAura's LaTeX implementation, we get x subscript a by typing $x underscore a $. It's so simple and intuitive, it may as well be Markdown. It can do complex fractions, logs and even graphs.
[6:40]As one more example, let's look at fractions as I need this a lot. And this time, I'll get it on its own line and centered by using double dollars. The equation is I equals delta Q over delta T.
[6:54]And I get it by typing dollar dollar to start doing maths as a block. And TypeAura adds the final dollar dollar itself for me to add things inside.
[7:04]So I typed I equals. then for the right hand side backslash frac states I want a fraction two pairs of curly brackets are used to house the numerator and the denominator and inside the first curly brackets I wrote backslash delta with a capital d then q and inside the second curly brackets I wrote backslash delta then t so overall all i wrote was i equals backslash frac open brackets backslash delta q close brackets open brackets slash delta t close brackets obviously some things get more complicated such as the graphs but thankfully chat gpt is superb with latex and can provide code that works with typora plain text and markdown are often praised as wonderfully future-proof formats formats, and whilst that's true, there are many cases where I simply want more features. But for writing simple, focused, text-based documents, it is simple, focused, and with tools like Typora, it can be beautiful.
[8:13]Typora allows integration of more complex elements, such as images and equations, and I'm certain there is much more under the hood. I don't need that though, I just love the app for its minimal design. Typora is available for Macs, Windows and Linux from its website at typora.io with a 15-day free trial. Then a license costs $15 for up to three devices.
[8:36]
Follow-on Typora Review from Allison
[8:36]Next, in the series for the Nosilla cast, I'll have a quick look at how I use Audio Hijack. If you want to know more about what I'm doing, you can always find me with the other lovely Nosilla castaways on Slack. So head over to podfeet.com slash slack and say hi. I'm realizing now that there's a flaw in my grand plan to just follow Graham with my review of Typora. It made sense in my head, but I forgot what a wonderful voice he has, and listening to my Midwestern-influenced twang might not be the best transition, but I'm going to keep going anyway.
[9:11]When I went looking for a Markdown editor for writing my NoCillaCast articles, Typora was a top contender. It didn't make the cut, though, because it doesn't have an app for the iPad. I do a lot of writing on my iPad for the podcast, so that was pretty much a deal-breaker. I ended up choosing Bear instead because it's very clean and affordable and it's a markdown editor that does have an iPad version. Before I get into the problem to be solved and more detail about what you can do with Typora, you should know that Typora does not appear to be accessible with VoiceOver. There are small bits and pieces that work, albeit unreliably, but great swaths of the interface are invisible to VoiceOver. Just to make sure it wasn't just my lower-level skills in VoiceOver, I asked my friend Slough to double-check, and he reported that there are no standard text fields, there's poor classification of controls, and UI elements. It really seems like a plain text editor should be one of the easiest apps to make accessible, but this is not the one. Slough recommends using the app IA Writer from ia.net.
[10:13]So I've been a happy bear user now for, I don't know, a year and a half, but then a problem did need to be solved where Typeoro would be the perfect solution. Bart has been writing the show notes for Programming by Stealth in Markdown for quite a long time. Our collaboration method is a little different from what most people use. We use the Git version control system. Now, Git is mostly for programmers, but it works just as well for text collaboration. He writes the show notes in a simple Markdown text file on his computer, and then he pushes it up to GitHub. I then pull it down from GitHub, I edit for typos and grammar, add the links to the the podcast, and I push the text file back up to GitHub. He then pulls the changes to his desktop, and now we have the version of the same version of the text file. Now, I've always done my editing of the programming by Stealth Show Notes using Visual Studio Code, because I'm a nerd. Anyway, not always, but for the last few years. It has a mode where you can see the markdown syntax on one side, and a live preview of how it will look on the right. This is the mode Graham mentioned that he doesn't like, and it does have some downsides.
[11:20]Bart recently switched text editors for writing his show notes, and he chose Obsidian. I haven't seen exactly how this works, but evidently Obsidian sorts notes into different folders using some so-called front matter in a language called YAML. I don't know YAML, but we just started learning it in Programming by Stealth. It's a way to write simple, human-readable configuration files. So how's that got a problem to be solved? It turns out this front matter in the form of a YAML configuration file is visible in the code version of the show notes when I view them in VS Code, but it's invisible when I look at the preview version. This means that the two panes are misaligned vertically. If I see a typo in the preview pane, it's very difficult to find it in the code side where I have to go to edit the text. Once I find it there, now the preview pane is scrolled to the wrong location.
[12:14]Realize I'm doing these typo corrections often in real time while I'm trying to learn from Bart, so if I get lost in the show notes, I can't keep up and it's all a mess. I complained to Bart about how his change to Obsidian was making my job harder, but he was really set on this new tool. I was cranky for a few weeks about this front matter. I even would cut it from the text, do all my edits, and then paste it back in when I was done. It was a kludgy method, but at least I was able to read along while he talked and edit for typos. But then Bart suggested I try using Typora for reading and editing the show notes. As you just heard physics nerd Graham explain, TypeAura gives you the best of both worlds. It's a real-time preview of the rendered markdown text, but you can also edit right from the same window.
[12:58]Now, my beloved Bear also gives you a single editor window like that, and it's also the preview. I like how Bear keeps my writing in a database so it's all in one structured pile together, but in order to collaborate with Bart on the programming by Stealth show notes with Git, Typora is a better solution because it works with text files in normal directories. At $15 after the free trial, it was worth giving it a shot. Now that I've justified why I've added Typora to my ever-growing repertoire of text editors, let me add some more flavor to Graham's mini-review. This isn't going to be a particularly methodical review, but rather I'll highlight some of the features that really blow my dress up. Now, Bear and Typora both show you how many words you've typed in a note and how long it would take to read the document. I use this when I'm writing articles for the NoCillaCast to help me estimate how long the entire show will be. Typora has an advantage over Bear. It lets you define in settings how fast you read. I read a long document out loud while timing myself, and I found I read around 200 words per minute when I'm reading out loud. Being able to adjust the setting gives me a more accurate estimate of the length of the article when it's on the podcast.
[14:09]Now, Graham explained how he really likes the simplicity of Typora, that floating blank window with no interface at all to distract him, and he's got Stage Manager going, so he's got nothing on his desktop, and that's the way really likes it. However, you can turn on a left sidebar that takes on many different forms. In the view menu, you can toggle the sidebar on and off and choose what you see in the sidebar. I'm a big fan of using the outline view in the sidebar while I'm writing. If you use heading tags while writing in Markdown, that's like where one hashtag is a big heading, two hashtags is slightly smaller, and on and on and on down, then you see those headings and subheadings in the outline in the sidebar. You can jump around your document by selecting those headings directly in the sidebar.
[14:54]If you open a document that's in a folder containing other text files, changing the view to Articles shows you the list of documents that may or may not be in the same folder. This view confuses me a little bit. I can't quite figure out how it decides what files to show you. It seems to pick maybe one folder above where your current file lives and shows you any text files in the same folder or the one above where you are. I know that sounds confusing, but it's because I'm confused. In the sidebar, each file has gray text above it telling you what directory that particular file is in. Now, the other interesting thing about the articles view is you can be working on one document and select a different one from the article sidebar, and the current window just changes to that other document. You're not asked to save your work before it flips, but somehow you just don't seem to lose anything, even if you didn't save it first when you flipped back.
[15:47]Now, there's also file tree view, and it's a lot like the articles view, but it also lets you see the directory structure above your current file. I have the same confusion with how it decides what folders to show me. I was writing this in a folder called Typora Allison, and I can see one folder above that and the folder that's parallel to the one I'm in.
[16:07]Oddly, in the interface in the sidebar, you can select the folders above, like they change the way they look when you click on them, and so you can tell you've selected a folder, but nothing changes. You can't navigate up and down using those. Oh well. When you're in the file tree or articles view, if you hover over the bottom of the left sidebar, you get some additional options. A plus button appears that lets you instantly create a new file, but oddly it creates that new markdown file at the upper level directory of where it's randomly seemingly chosen to show your files. Again, this might be my confusion on how it's supposed to work, but it's still a mystery to me. Still at the bottom of the sidebar, there's a three-dot menu hidden until you hover that pops open a plethora of new actions. You can create a new file, search, reveal your file in Finder, open a new folder, and an odd one called Refresh Folder. Not sure what would keep a folder unrefreshed, so I'm not sure what that is. You also get five sword options with icons that explain themselves when you hover over them.
[17:08]The last bit of options here is the list of recent locations. I thought for a minute this This revealed a clue to how it was going to define this top-level folder that's been confusing me so much. The folder 2 above where I'm working is listed in that recent folders list and has a blue pin next to it and a blue dot. Okay, that's how it's choosing the folder. I tried pinning a different folder in the history list and nothing changed. So I may have to break down and read the manual to figure this one out. Not today.
[17:37]This little three-dot menu pop-up has really, really small fonts, and when I first looked at it, I was worried it'd be too small for some people to be able to read. But stay tuned to learn about the zoom feature in just a bit.
[17:51]Physics Nerd Graham mentioned that he uses a keystroke to flip his view from pure text to being able to see and edit his markdown. When Bart convinced me to try Typora, he showed me a setting that lets you have both views at the same time without flipping back and forth. In Settings Editor, there's a checkbox under Live Rendering that says Display Source for Simple Blocks, including Headings, et cetera, on Focus. With this feature enabled, you can just click on any element like a heading, a block quote, or even just a word that's italicized, and only then will you see the markdown syntax and be able to edit it. As soon as you click away, it goes back to being beautifully formatted text. I told Graham about this setting, and he prefers it the other way. So it's nice that we both have a toggle and we can set it the way we want it to be. On the same settings page, you can set to auto pair brackets, quotes and common markdown syntax. Remember when he was talking about math blocks and he said you do a double dollar and it puts the second double dollar in? That's what he was talking about. It leaves your cursor between the two things. So think about this, when you're just doing regular writing, how many times have you opened a parenthesis or a quote mark and forgotten to close it? With Type Aura, you'll never need to remember.
[19:02]Speaking of settings, they've chosen to use a fixed window size for the settings. It's too small to accommodate the settings in each settings pane. It's kind of annoying to have to scroll up and down a little bit to see everything, and one of the panes actually opens with the top cut off, and you can't really see the whole thing. It's very strange. I don't know why they did that.
[19:23]Now, the default font size when you're typing text is dandy for me, but I wondered whether the standard command plus and minus would increase and decrease the font size for people, but that doesn't work. Then I went hunting the menu to look for control of fonts, but I couldn't find that as an option. I was concerned this might be a problem for some folks, like I said, but then I stumbled across the answer. TypePort doesn't use the standard keystroke to increase and decrease the text, but it does have a feature it calls zoom, and it uses command shift shift, and then plus and minus to increase and decrease the size of the text. In settings, you can also set the default zoom level so it's always the way you like it. Remember that little three-dot menu? I thought it was too small. The font was pretty tiny. When you use the command shift plus and minus, that actually increases the size of the text in that little three-dot menu. So everybody's good.
[20:16]Now, while I was poking around looking for fonts, I noticed the menu entitled Themes. They have six themes to choose from, and I have to say, I think all of them are lovely. I was surprised at how different the themes made the same text look, and I'm not just talking about like light versus dark or solar like a lot of people think is cool. Anyway, the default theme is called GitHub, and it looks pretty standard. But Gothic is totally different. Headings are in all caps and centered, and the paragraphs are full justified. How fun is that? I'll let you play with the themes to see if you find something interesting that you like.
[20:51]Now, TypeAura has a plethora of ways to export your text. If you just want the markdown from TypeAura, a simple Command-A, Command-C will copy it for you to paste anywhere. Now, it looks like you're just copying this formatted text, but it's actually the markdown you get when you do that. In TypeAura, a single hit of the Enter key creates a new paragraph with a visual line feed. In Bear, I use two hits of Enter to create a line feed and a new paragraph. If I copy the Markdown text from Typora to Bear with this single Enter method, I don't get nice separated paragraphs when the text gets over to Bear. However, if I paste the same Markdown text from Typora to MarsEdit, my blog editor, I do get the nice line feed separated paragraphs. Seems that there are two ways to do line feeds in Markdown and and not all editors do it the same. Okay, let's get back to talking about export methods. If you want to export to be in a different format, boy, does Typora have you covered. You can export in PDF, HTML with or without styles, as an image, a Word file like a .docx, OpenOffice, RTF, EPUB, LaTeX, MediaWiki, Restructured Text, Textile, or OPML. That's a lot of options.
[22:06]Now, I love how simple it is to make tables in Markdown compared to the old-fashioned way in HTML, but I don't do it often enough in Markdown to be able to remember the syntax when I need to make one.
[22:16]Lately, I've been using the app MacGPT as my little assistant that runs on ChatGPT, so I can just ask it to make me a Markdown table with, say, three columns and four rows, and in a second or two, I can copy the code and insert it into my text editor. But with Typora, that's not necessary. Under the Paragraph menu, you can insert a lot of different Markdown syntax commands without having to remember them. I don't know why the menu is called Paragraph, but there's some good stuff in here. One of these is Insert Table. Once selected, you'll be asked how many rows and columns you want. Typora automatically drops a beautiful table into your document. Unlike other Markdown syntax, clicking in the cell doesn't show you the table's markdown, but you can use the keystroke Graham taught us, the command, oh I always forget which slash it is, backslash I think is the one next to the shift key. So command backslash, and that lets you see how the text of the markdown, the markdown text is written for the table. But you don't have to worry your pretty little head about that syntax to modify the table. No trying to remember where the colons go to left or right justify the text in a column. Simply click inside the table, and you'll see a little menu pop up in the upper left that lets you edit the table. You can change the number of rows and columns, and you can change each column from left, center, or right justified for the column. It's really, really easy.
[23:41]Well, I'm afraid I have to draw a line under this review, and now I understand why Graham only went with a mini review. It's so much more capable than I thought at the outset. The more I investigate
[23:51]
Support the Show
[23:50]Typora, the more I'm falling in love with it. I truly wish Typora had an iPad app so I could do all of my writing in it, but until it does, I'll have to content myself with using it for programming by stealth show notes, and maybe for those one-off little notes I write. As Graham said, Typora is available at typora.io, that's T-Y-P-O-R-A, and it's only $15 and it has a free trial so you can try it out for yourself. As you've probably noticed, it takes a lot of work to create the podcast every week without fail. I mean, I'm giving you a show early so you won't be disappointed this week and not have a show when I'm on vacation.
[24:31]
Kilowatt: A Podcast about Electric Vehicles – Telo Trucks
[24:29]If you appreciate the work we do here, please consider making a small donation or a big one if you want to by going to potfee.com slash Patreon. I'd really appreciate your support.
[24:40]Music.
[24:45]Hello everyone, my name is Bodhi, and I feel very self-conscious right now. I never know how to do these introductions, and it's really awkward, so I'm going to take a moment and embrace the awkwardness, because it's just, I feel really awkward right now. While we're all busy being awkward, let's just take a second and think about pickup trucks. Are you someone who thinks that current pickup trucks are entirely too big and they need to be much smaller while still having much of the same utility that a bigger pickup truck does? Well, you are in luck because I sat down with Jason Marks and Forrest North of Telo Trucks and we talked about their upcoming pickup truck that is the size or the length of a two-door Mini Cooper. It is 152 inches long, and it seats five people. But you probably don't want to hear me talk about the truck. You'd probably rather hear Jason and Forrest talk about the truck. So let's go ahead and welcome Jason and Forrest to the show.
[25:54]Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Yeah, I'm really excited to have this conversation with you. There is a lot that you're doing that I find very interesting. I like the products that are just kind of like weird one-offs that we don't typically see. And I think that's what you're doing at Telo. But before we get into that, I just wanted to introduce yourself and just kind of give us a little bit about your background. And we'll start with Forrest on this.
[26:21]Sure. Hi, I'm Forrest North. I've been working on EVs for 20 years. I was early at Tesla and started an electric motorcycle company. Company, sold an electric charging station finding app and started Tello with Jason here.
[26:36]Excellent. And how about you, Jason? Yeah, so I'm Jason. I'm the CEO of TeloTrucks. I've been working on vehicle safety now for about 12 years. Started in the semiconductor space, working on radar and LiDAR chips. Ended up working on software and hardware systems that do things like driver assistance and lane keeping assistance for some of the electric pickup trucks that are on the road today.
[27:01]Excellent. And either one of you can go on this one, because I'm sure you probably have a similar answer. But what inspired you to enter the electric truck market like how did you go from you know building an apps like plug share which is what you that that was your app right for yeah yep correct so you built plug share jason you worked with big oems on safety features what inspired you to move on and form your own company and build electric trucks yeah so i'll give you a little bit bit of a genesis here.
[27:32]I drive a pickup truck, a Toyota Tacoma in downtown San Francisco, largely because I have a 150 pound dog that I take to the beach fairly frequently. And he's not going in the back of a sedan, that's for sure, after he gets covered in water and sand. So having a truck is incredible. You can take all your friends mountain biking, go up to the hills and go snowboarding, take your dog to the beach, and you're everyone's best friend on moving day. But it's impossible to actually navigate the downtown cities. So I'd gone on a trip to Japan, I don't know, 10, 15 years ago. And I saw the K trucks they had in Japan, the small Japanese trucks they had that fit into a very small form factor for tax reasons. And I thought, that's ingenious. Why are we not doing something like that in the US? And when we dug into some of the reasons why we can't do that in the US, we thought, huh, now's a really unique time in the technological landscape and history to actually be able to address these main reasons that we can't have K-trucks in the U.S. And so it kind of spawned this endeavor we went down.
[28:34]Was the idea to always build a mini truck? I mean, what was the original concept? Yeah, that's exactly right. We came together. Jason wanted to build an electric motorcycle. I had built an electric motorcycle before. So a lot of people who are starting off building electric motorcycles come and find me.
[28:50]We decided to work together and we built a really cool motorcycle behind us here, which your listeners can't see. But that was our first prototype. prototype um it was basically like kind of cafe uh motorcycle to go like 100 miles and could do you know a little over 100 miles an hour you know kind of like not a sport bike um and it kind of felt like i was hitting my head against the same wall uh when i'd started after i'd started electric motorcycle before um but in general we both you know have come together because we want to electrify the world um and so we're always looking for like what is the next way that we can do that so as we were doing the motorcycle we kind of realized that market's not very big we're not going to displace a lot of carbon and everyone we showed our presentation to we had this kind of roadmap of doing a motorcycle and then a small car and then a mini truck everyone was like oh i want the mini truck right now can you just make that um and so we ended up pivoting yeah i mean the the interesting thing about kind of force and i meeting each other we met in 2018 we were both.
[29:53]Separately kind of trying to solve the problem of city mobility. And the thesis that we both had was micromobility or small two-wheel transport would be the best way to solve that challenge and solve carbon emissions at the same time. But what we kind of stumbled upon almost through our own volition was like, there's this big opportunity we had around fixing the biggest contributor to carbon emissions in the passenger vehicle space. And that was really around trucks. And that's when we pivoted and went down that route.
[30:21]Do you want to talk a little bit about the mini truck that you actually are designing and creating right now? Because it's pretty unique. It's just as long as or maybe a little shorter than a two-door mini. Is that right? Yeah. Same distance as a two-door Mini Cooper, 152 inches long. That's also our pre-order deposit amount. That's why it's exactly that number. But yeah, we built a crew cab pickup truck and we wanted to really be an uncompromising crew cab pickup truck. So something that had the capability to carry as much as maybe a F-150 or a Toyota Tacoma to fit five people, to have a five-foot bed that can transform into an eight-foot bed. So uncompromising in every single way you would want to use a utility truck, but be extremely space efficient in a way that could actually navigate the city. And we kind of chose the Mini Cooper as a great benchmark for what really constitutes a small vehicle and a small footprint. And it was our engineering effort that let us package that vehicle together, the powertrain, the battery, the safety, the occupants, all that had to get packaged into that. And that was the real engineering challenge we had.
[31:27]And so in order for you to get eight feet you gotta you gotta fold the back seats down right and then is there any expansion that you can do with the tailgate like you get a little flip up, because i from what i can see you guys can hold full sheets of plywood in this yes and you could without putting the mid gate down you could put the tailgate down we haven't designed any uh special uh tailgate like there's a lot of tailgate uh, accessories out there, little features that are new, but we haven't focused on that yet. Okay. Okay. How far along are you in this process?
[32:02]Well, we have one driveable prototype that, again, your listeners can't see, but you can see in your vision as well as the exterior model of the vehicle. We just raised a nearly $6 million round.
[32:16]And the intention of that round was to build two fully functional, press-ready vehicles to be driving around the city streets to showcase exactly what our vehicle is capable of doing. Who's your target audience? Who are your customers for this vehicle? Yeah, it was. So we launched in June of last year, really thinking that this would be people like us, people that were fairly young, you know, between 20 and 50, that would that live in downtown cities that go out and explore the world. But they have a really big space constraint. So and they want to be able to go explore the world in many ways. So urban adventure, we called them, and we were blown away by the reception we got after our launch, we're nearly at 3000 paid pre orders. And it's kind of that classification of people that you might expect. It's Los Angeles, New York, San Jose, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Dallas, surprisingly, Seattle are kind of our main pre-order kind of recipients that fall into that category. What was really surprising to us, though, was that we got a huge influx of interest from corporations that were using pickup trucks on a day-to-day basis that operate in downtown cities and found that pickup trucks have just gotten too big to do the job they need to do. And that was kind of an aha moment for us, being like, wow, if we look at the landscape of pickup trucks that are purchased in the U.S. every year, about two-thirds of them are purchased for commercial reasons in downtown cities.
[33:41]We look at the landscape of downtown city purchases about two-thirds are for commercial applications and we thought wow there's a huge opportunity to kind of solve this problem and these are people that that really feel the pain of the gigantification of the pickup truck, Which was almost a little bit of a surprise to our thesis when we were starting out. So we kind of did this market analysis of what exists. And I think one of the things that everyone is noticing and starting to notice more and more is that trucks have just gotten absolutely gigantic. And when you dig into why that is, it's really this unintended consequence of the EPA's 2010 rules, which finally put mileage requirement, miles per gallon requirements on trucks and SUVs. But they did that based on the footprint of the vehicle and that and and all of the footprints of vehicles you know basically the length because you can't really do much with the width.
[34:36]Every year that ratchets up and it ratchets up less and less the bigger your vehicle gets and to a point where it just does where it doesn't actually change and that's where all the vehicles now are being made is at this giant size and so we were kind of thinking well big trucks are good for fleets and construction and things like that, but it's the people that want to use them every day in an urban area that would want them. But fleets use them in urban areas too, and they're the ones really feeling a lot of this pain of the trucks getting so big.
[35:07]Yeah. I mean, I live in the city of Tempe, and I will give all the credit in the world to Tempe because our taxes are high, but they provide great services.
[35:16]But they have a pretty decent and size fleet of electric vehicles mostly like leafs and bolts but i could definitely see the telotruck being something that they could use uh for a variety of different reasons like the the water department was come out and help you set up your your uh irrigation so you're not wasting water and stuff like that but you know this guy has all sorts of things in the back of of his leaf that he needs for his job and it's it's maybe not the most practical but a small pickup would be very practical for him absolutely we see that around here as you know a lot as well water departments and a lot of times people are idling in their trucks forever you know there's someone got a job they have a truck because occasionally they need to bring some large thing that you don't you know that you don't want to necessarily have in your in your vehicle but for the most of the time they're doing logistics of being somewhere making sure something happens sitting in their car staying cool or warm and evs are just great for that right like so let's take a lot of trucks and let's keep them from idling all the time and let you know when trucks need to be big and need to haul stuff great like they should be diesel or hydrogen or biodiesel or something but let's let's electrify the ones that don't need to be hauling stuff across the country absolutely can you talk a little bit about the unique design.
[36:37]Yeah, so, well, Forrest is probably good to handle some of this. Our third founder is Yves Behar. So because we were going for the urban users and the city users, we really felt like a modern design was going to be something that could help us a lot, a modern, simple design.
[36:57]And Yves is really well-known for that. And he worked with me on the motorcycle at Mission Motors 10 years ago, 15 years ago. Yeah. So we, like Forrest had worked with Eve for, you know, he'd known him for 15 years, all the way back in Mission Motor days. And Forrest and I were chatting, we were like, we know we want to do this mini truck concept. And we had an idea of kind of how we would package the people and the powertrain and the tires and kind of like the engineering pieces of it. But Forrest kind of looked at it and goes, this thing isn't going to sell to the masses. Like we need to have something that'll stand out that really kind of make an impact in the world and from a visual perspective. Perspective and he was like nobody else makes sense but to bring on eve who i've known forever and eve got when you told me about it he got so excited about doing this project he's like this is the coolest project ever i'm so excited about this and he came on as an investor first then as a partner then as a co-founder so he kind of just ratcheted his involvement up and up and up because he got more and more excited about the project yeah i i'm i'll put a picture um as the of the the truck as the actual show art. But for anybody who hasn't looked at this vehicle, they should go look you have a very cool feature, at least I thought it was really cool. You have an exposed front wheel. And then you have the pills shape on the door. Can you explain why you have that this is like I when I first saw your truck, I was like, Oh, that's a cool design concept. But then there's an actual function and utility behind that.
[38:26]Yeah. So the, one of the challenges we had is how do you package people as effectively into the vehicle as possible? And the way to do that is to kind of move the tires as far away from the people as you can. So we moved the front tires all the way, almost all the way to the front and the back tires, a good amount towards the rear. What that did is it prevented us from actually having the fully enclosed front tire because the tire has to turn and move up and down. And so in order to actually keep the vehicle short, you know, if you throw a bumper over it or cover over it, it actually has to be significantly longer than the actual movement of the tire to avoid any rubbing. So we said, okay, we're going to try to have exposed front tires as much as possible that the regulations allow.
[39:05]And in doing so, what happens is air is automatically hit by the tire and the exposed areas around the tire as you move through the vehicle. Aerodynamics is a huge component of an electric vehicle because the better aerodynamic components you have, so the less aerodynamic drag you have, the more efficient your vehicle is, the longer it can go, the better range it has. So what we wanted to do is even though we had exposed tires to have the best range we could. So when you have exposed tires, you get this big pocket of air that goes really high pressure behind that tire, because that's where the wheel well sits. And we needed a way to release that pressure back into the world and kind of reattach it to the flow of air around it. So what we have is a channel that kind of directs air back into the flow of air next to the side. And in doing so, it's an engineering component similar to how an F1 car has a barge board, but we added a design element to it as well to kind of call it out so you can see that visually.
[39:59]Yeah that's that that is that just shows i mean not to say that you guys aren't thinking but that that's like really creative for us are there any other hidden design features that also have a utility interesting um i we're very excited about the midgate um you know we're just our midgates have been done before but i think it's uh really practical for this type of vehicle um where it's not a truck where you're necessarily going to the to the landscape store and getting a ton of gravel. It's more set up for going on a mountain biking trip or camping or hauling stuff around the city. And so especially in the city, you want to have tonneau cover and you want to protect stuff in the bed. So it allows you to put really long objects in.
[40:46]So a lot of people do that with hatchbacks already, right? They'll put surfboards in their hatchback and move seats around. And so it just gives you a lot of capability. So I like that one. I would say another design feature really is just, you know, just what Jason was mentioning about moving the wheels. Part of that's for spacing for the passenger compartment, but also it's for the battery pack. So we really, you know, I personally feel like you've got to have over 300 miles of range to have a decent electric vehicle. We get some pushback from people are like, oh, I'm in the city. Like, you know, why not smaller battery packs that could be cheaper? And maybe in the future, we'll have some different sizes. But we wanted to really anchor at the most range that we could get in this vehicle, because we want to we want to take people from the city and let them get out into the country, you know, get up into the mountains.
[41:33]Let's talk about the battery technology a little bit, because I know this is kind of your specialty. As much as you can talk about, I understand there's probably some things you don't want to talk about. But what's different about the Telo truck than, say, what Tesla is doing or Lucid or Hyundai?
[41:50]Yeah, well, I'd say, you know, battery pack is really equivalent to when you're thinking about the past of the automobile world. It's really equivalent to the engine of the vehicle. And people often think that it's more equivalent to the gas tank. But really, the battery defines all the characteristics that the motor will just end up delivering. So how much torque, how much power, which is essentially current, how much top speed, which is voltage, how fast it will charge, all of the things that really kind of start to matter to the user. So battery pack needs to be designed for the vehicle and for the purpose that it's intended in. So for us, the real strong intention is this form factor, getting as much capacity into a small space as possible and doing that where we can still cool it and have the safety and all of the important things of a battery pack. So other vehicles will have different requirements.
[42:50]A lot of them are taller. Ours is very efficient in the Z height because any height of the battery directly translates to the height of the roof. And the height of the roof directly translates to your coefficient of drag. So, yeah, we've really optimized this pack for our vehicle. And we've also used some of the most modern technology in making a manufacturable pack at small volumes. So we feel great about us building this pack in a cost-efficient, manufacturable way. We're using off-the-shelf cells. So as chemistry improves, the capacity of cells improves and we get those improvements right off the bat. Excellent. Are you using 2170 cells?
[43:33]Yes. Yeah, one thing that's really important, what Forrest just said, I want to highlight is when you design your vehicle, you set up a set of requirements for that vehicle. If our set of requirements were we need to hit zero to 60 in sub two seconds and be the fastest vehicle out there, that would require a set of design parameters that are significantly different than design parameters we have. Because we're still a zero to 60 in four seconds, which is, massively impressive for a mini truck, but it gives us the opportunity to really focus on the things that matter for the utility of our vehicle and that's packaging efficiency and manufacturing efficiency yeah and we felt like that wow factor like that worked for for the early companies but now people are kind of like okay i mean you might do that a few times to impress somebody but is that really what you should make massive compromises around the vehicle for oh yeah the things that make evs fun um even the most basic ev has that it's not it's not as if If you're going to go buy, I mean, a Hyundai Kona, the Hyundai Kona EV is a great vehicle, but you're not going to go buy a Hyundai Kona EV and be disappointed in the pickup. If you, when I say pickup, I mean, acceleration.
[44:39]If you came from a gas vehicle, if you came from a performance Model S, probably you might be a little disappointed, but most people aren't going to be disappointed in that. Yeah. All right. What about what are your expectations? You said the range was going to be 350 miles. How do you how were you designing for durability of that battery pack? Are you using LFP cells or like how are we going to keep our battery pack happy and healthy for as long as possible? Possible great question yeah i mean our focus is on keeping the pack um the term is isothermal so like really um keeping every cell uh cells thermal experience to be the same as all the other cells so basically you can think about a cell as a chemistry experiment if you ever you know we're doing any chemistry in high school or whatever basically if you add heat to any kind of chemistry experiment experiment it usually goes faster um so temperature has a big you know uh.
[45:39]Effect on chemistry so these little batteries as as I assume in the little chemistry experiments if they're going through life and experiencing different thermal gradients uh they degrade at different rates and that is a real problem in batteries um that's why cooling is so important So the durability of a battery essentially is about good cooling strategy and protecting those batteries from any intrusion. So those are the two things that we've really focused on. Keeping the Z height really low, keeping the cooling to be as isothermal as possible, and moving the cells as far in from the edges as we can to protect them against intrusion. You know, this next question was not one that I wrote down, but what do you wish people knew more about when it came to like battery cell technology? Because you hear all sorts of things in the media and then that gets parroted in, you know, at cocktail parties or barbecues or whatever. What's like one thing you wish you could just dispel that myth altogether when it comes to batteries? Yeah.
[46:48]That's an excellent question. Let me think on that. Do you have a... I do. And it's really though around, I think there's a lot of misnomers around charging and what people consider when they think about charging. I read an article recently, actually it was just last week, that was like, we hit this amazing charge rate for this battery pack, but the battery pack was over 200 kilowatt hours. And so if you look at the charge rate that they hit and the size of the pack, it would actually take longer to charge than the existing packs that exist today at a lower charge rate. And so there's a misnomer around what it actually means to charge quickly, and what that means for the battery pack, and what that means for over time. Because a lot of times people hit a very fast charge rate, very instantaneously. But if you look at it over time, that charge rate is actually the average of that charge rate might be a little lower than you'd expect, which is why charging takes so long. There's so many things associated with how over time, if you look at voltage versus time in a charging, it's not a linear fashion there's it's a very unique kind of graph that's that's um maybe people don't understand that's that the charging it isn't one-to-one with voltage and it isn't one-to-one and you have to compare it in a different way when you look at the the grand scheme of things yeah i would compare it um uh a little bit with what jason's saying on the charging side so you know i started tesla in 2005 uh working on solar cars before that since 94.
[48:14]Oh my god for 20 years trying to tell people like the charging is not like filling up a tank of gas and i still i'm looking online and and like people need to be shouting it from the rooftops they need to be telling everybody like you're not going to drive a vehicle like from 100 state of charge to zero percent of state of charge and then expect to fill it up in three minutes because that's just not how you would use it like it's not how you use your phone right you don't you don't just like drain it to zero and then be like, Oh my God, I need to charge. Right. Like you, you charge it based on your life, like your, your schedule, you know, so you're, you go to work and you, maybe you plug in your computer while you're at work. You, you, when you get home, you plug in your phone before you go to sleep. And that's exactly how charging should be happening with the, with the vehicle. It gets harder with, if you have an apartment or you're in a condo in a city. And so there's, there's a lot of charging infrastructure that still needs to be built, but is definitely charging is much more about opportunity and charging in appropriate times than the gas station model. Now that being said, the gas station model needs to be there so that you can go to other cities. But that happens so rarely. I mean, I've been driving an electric car since 2011. I still have a Nissan Leaf from 2011. And I mean, I've fast charged maybe like less than a dozen times.
[49:32]I just, cause every morning it's full. And it just, you know, charging basically regresses to the mean and that everybody drives essentially eight kilowatt hours a day worth of charging.
[49:44]And that's kind of what ends up happening. Yeah, I could see that. And a lot of that, I think, what you're talking about in terms of where people might get frustrated, like in Chicago last year, where it was really cold, that nobody was preconditioning their batteries. Some of those vehicles weren't even able to precondition batteries, and then it just took forever to charge. A lot of people had to be towed away. way. I think automakers, all of them do a pretty poor job in terms of educating their customers on these edge cases, because it's fine when you're plugging in every night and you get up and it's cold outside. No big deal. Your car was plugged in. It's probably heating the battery while it's plugged in. But when you are an Uber driver and you need to go to work and there's 50 other people in front of you and tow trucks are coming in and out because cars are bricked it becomes problematic and it's it's bad pr for the automotive companies yeah absolutely you know i charging is is a huge issue i think it's it's the it is the thing holding back the ev industry at this time, um and i've you know i felt like there were so many companies tackling it that we would be farther along by now um but but it needs more work i do have a question about that but i'll wait till the Yeah. Based on recent news.
[51:02]Jason, you are in charge of safety. I mean, you're the CEO, but your specialty is safety. Can you talk a little bit about what Telo's truck has in terms of safety features? Yeah. So I think that kind of setting the tone of this conversation, like we're currently at an all-time high on pedestrian deaths on U.S. roadways. They estimate 10,000 pedestrians will be killed on U.S. roadways this year. And 40,000 will be killed in vehicle accidents altogether in the U.S. And if you look at the statistics, the majority of those pedestrian deaths are caused by light duty trucks, which includes SUVs and trucks, vans. And many of them are happening in downtown areas.
[51:43]So we see that the size of the pickup truck getting so massive and egregiously large and throwing 3,000 pounds of batteries on it to make it electric is only going to exacerbate that issue and cause a lot of issues. use.
[51:56]We're at a pretty decent state with occupant protection in crash safety these days. A lot of science has gone into it, but a lot of the science that goes into it doesn't actually make its way into the vehicles. So one of the things I learned working at in kind of the space of vehicle safety was that all this investment had been made into different types of safety, both active safety, which we call ADAS, autonomy, and passive safety, which we call crash safety, that just could be used to make a vehicle significantly safer than it was today to save occupants and to save pedestrians. So we do things like we employ the same type of technology that was used in autonomous driving, but instead of using it for autonomous driving, we do it to survey our surroundings to predict collisions. And if we can predict collisions with near certainty, we can do things that very quickly anticipate a collision right before it happens. And we can save occupants and we can save pedestrians as well when you do that. So we use a lot of predictive technology to actually determine a collision, what kind of collision it may be, the likelihood of that collision, and to deploy safety in various areas in the vehicle to actually save the vehicle. On top of that, we still have crumple zones, right? Just like a vehicle would have crumple zones. We pass FMVSS 208, which is the frontal crash safety. We will pass it. We're working on all the simulations right now.
[53:14]And it's really interesting to note that the history of frontal crash safety has kind of existed with these long hoods, these four foot long, five foot long hoods of vehicles, because it has to push a V8 engine out of the way somehow in that crash. That's a big, giant brick of iron that's immobile, incompressible, incompressible. So when you don't have that giant engine in front of you and you have a small motor that's tucked underneath the footwell of a vehicle, you can do things that just focus on minimizing the change in acceleration of that frontal area by employing strategies that have been researched in the past few years, but using different types of materials, doing a different type of crumple that pushes the crumple out of the way. It makes it so you don't need 30 inches, 48 inches of hood to get the same results for change in acceleration for the occupants.
[54:05]Yeah the in terms of crumple zones right my audience is pretty familiar about this because talk about this kind of thing all the time but one of the things uh it's great to have a crumple zone a great it's great to have this big long hood but if you get hit hard enough that motor is going to get pushed back into the cab so that is that is a um i mean there's no way for the motor to crumple like you can have crumple zones all around the motor the the whole point is that it to is for the crumple zone to design it's designed to take the energy away from the cab of that vehicle as much as possible but when you have that motor that gets smashed into the passenger compartment that that kind of becomes problematic one of the things i was curious about though in terms of pedestrian safety the front of your vehicle is pretty shallow now from what i understand and i'm not an expert in this but from what i understand a lot of especially like smaller cars are designed to kind of like if they hit somebody, it's kind of designed to like flip them up onto the hood to protect them instead of like pushing them out into traffic so they can get injured more. Do you have that kind of a.
[55:12]What happens if somebody gets hit, as best as you can tell? We don't ever want to discuss this, right? But we want to know that car companies are thinking about it. We don't want to put that into the world that somebody's going to get hit. Without giving you too much in this space, because this is kind of a little bit of our secret sauce, is that we look at what happens right before a pedestrian would hit you, would hit the vehicle, and we do things that actually make it so that impact is significantly softer, than the impact would otherwise be. And there's a couple of ways we do that. One is that we use those same predictive sensors and we deploy safety in a certain way. The other way we do it is that we have a significantly lower hood than any other truck does. Our line of vision, by the way, is very, very good from the downward angle because our hood isn't very tall. So one of the problems that the pickup trucks of today have is, I don't know if you've walked up to any of the pickup trucks built today, but I almost can't see over them.
[56:09]And they're huge. huge so if you get hit you get hit square on flat on you have nothing it's just it's just you and your body um a sedan is built in such a way that if you hit on the legs you fall over the front then you run into the issue of your head hitting the glass because you actually travel so far from a vertical position to an overhanging position so we actually have looked at kind of what is the ideal way that is you cushion a pedestrian impact and it's a combination of not hitting them too high and not having this huge amount of distance you fall and not falling onto something super hard. So it's a combination of all three of those.
[56:42]Yeah, it's really about the acceleration of the brain and the heart. So everything that we do is not necessarily about the acceleration of the B pillar or anything. It's just about, you know, where are all the squishy gray matters in the situation and how can we accelerate them in the smoothest, decelerate them in the smoothest way possible. But the best, you know, pedestrian accident is the one that doesn't happen. And if your vehicle is a lot smaller and you can see the ground in front of it, we think that's one of the best things. Let's let's move on to something more positive um yeah let's talk about dead puppies no i'm just kidding um no let's talk about the software do you have um are you prototyping software now i would imagine because i think you said at some point um in something i read at 2025 is when you're, expected to start shipping how is the software coming along how is how is that a user interface experience going to be for the customer? Yeah, I think one of the really cool things we do is we have a Discord forum in which a lot of our pre-order people are part of, and they give us a lot of direct product feedback of what they want to see from an HMI perspective, from a UX perspective, how they want to interact with the vehicle. One of the biggest points of feedback we get on that Discord channel is that they want a simplification of the user experience.
[58:02]You know, one of the things we're doing is because we're such a unique vehicle for a specific utility case, people tend to say, look, I don't need some crazy luxury interior with screens everywhere that I have to go figure out all the interfaces to. I want to have haptics. I want to be able to touch things and feel them and move them around. So we're currently in the design phase of those type of haptics so that they abide by the electric vehicle world, but they're easy to use. They're simple. They do exactly what you expect them to do. You don't have to stare at a screen for 10 seconds to change columns to actually do something. You just, while you're driving, you can put your hand on something, you can turn it and it changes the thing. So we're pushing towards a simplification and really focus on the utility of the actual use of the vehicle. So with that said, we are prototyping a lot of those elements of them and designing a lot of those elements, but it's a little simpler than maybe you would expect. We don't want to have a scenario where our screen goes black and your vehicle's bricked for a time period. and we want to really make a lot more analog components that actually don't have that same risk. How about Apple CarPlay and Android Auto? We fully intend to do that, but we haven't spoken to, we haven't penned a contract with either of them. Okay, excellent. I want to talk a little bit about the Discord because you're not exactly building in public, but you are getting direct feedback from your customer base. So do you want to talk about why you set up a Discord scored and how valuable that's been.
[59:32]Yeah, I mean, it's been extremely valuable. So we set up a Discord. Actually, one of our friends of mine had his building flooded. And when his building flooded, he established a Discord community where everyone was sharing information and trying to help each other out. And he came to me, he's like, dude, you got to check out this community I built based on this situation I had. And we now are all like, we get so much feedback. We're all friends. We all have this really great experience. And I think that you could have a similar situation at your company. You could get product feedback. You could have people sharing how they use it. You could kind of track how they want to intend to use the vehicle, and you can directly feed that into your engineering cycle. So we actually built a CRM, a customer relationship manager, around brand management tool around our Discord. So as people provide feedback, it directly channels it into our product portfolio, and it goes right into our engineering front and center. So we wanted to make sure that we had an active Discord community so that we could get as much feedback as possible. So we could prove that we were doing the right things. I feel that a lot of people when they build, especially a consumer product, they go heads down for years, especially if it's hardware, and they come out of it and the world's changed, and they've built a product that no longer pertains to that world. So we really didn't wanna run into that situation. We wanted to make sure that we were building a product that pertained to the world as it grew, and we were making the right design decisions at the right time. And so the Discord has been an awesome way to do that.
[1:00:56]And we learn so much about our customers. I mean, it's pretty amazing. Yeah. Yeah. That's a great loop, right?
[1:01:03]Is it just your pre-order customers get access to this? Can anybody get access to it? Anybody can get access to it. And we have people like, we know, like we've had investors that have looked at our company that have joined under a fake name. We know if we kind of figured that out, they're trying to pry a little bit into things like that. But like, everyone's welcome to join 100%. We want people to be active in this. We want it to be an open forum. We don't moderate it in terms of like, if you have feedback for us, that's negative. We're not going to remove that feedback. We take it as a learning opportunity. And how would people get on the Discord if they wanted to do that? Is there a link on the website? Yeah, there's a link on the website, the bottom of the website. Just click on the Discord link and it'll take you right to it. You are required to introduce yourself. Okay.
[1:01:47]That's the only requirement we have. And if you're a VC, you're required to introduce yourself, right? With a fake intro, maybe. you don't have to say don't just say who you are just just the question is how how would you use the truck we want to know okay because like we don't want people to necessarily just lurk we want to have at least a little bit of feedback from everybody that yeah yeah of course see the, the whole point is to bring value to the actual product um okay these next two questions i'm only have two more left uh this is not meant to be in a negative way at all but the reality is you're a startup and there are going to be challenges that you're facing now and you'll face in the future when you decide you're going to start production and all that stuff. So you got companies like Canoe, Fisker, Lordstown. And I'm not saying like this is not a judgment on because some of those companies had some sketchy leaders. This is not a judgment on any of that stuff. But how do you do you look at those companies to see kind of where they failed and how are you handling when you come up against something that's similar?
[1:02:50]So we've seen this graveyard of electric vehicles over the last 20 years. We totally agree that it exists. And especially right now with the headwinds we're seeing in the electric vehicle industry, it's a bloodbath out there. It's crazy. But we absolutely have learned a hell of a lot from a lot of the people. But also, it's a little bit different time now than it was five years ago as well. So this combination of these two things really puts us in a unique position. Fundamentally, we want to be the most capital-efficient automaker that's ever been around. And we feel that it's possible to do that because of both the learnings and the current situation of the world. So I'll give you a couple of kind of areas that we've really focused on. One is building a financial model that doesn't require high volume manufacturing that we build from our own factories to get to profitability. So, you know, one of our investors and advisors is Andy Palmer, the ex-CEO of Aston Martin and the ex-CEO of Nissan. And he really helped us build a financial model that allows us to get to profitability at that low and mid-volume and all the things necessary to actually do that because he did it at Aston Martin. He's done it before at other vehicle programs. And that's possible because manufacturing doesn't require us to build our own factories anymore. We can contract manufacture at a mid and low volume, and we can do that profitably now.
[1:04:08]Commercial off-the-shelf components is a huge component of what we do. We only innovate where innovation is necessary to build our vehicle. That's in the battery and the safety and the design. Those are the only areas we innovate on. The rest of it is actually all almost entirely purchased as commercial off-the-shelf components. And if you look at how that's changed over time, it's been absolutely incredible. If you look at an inverter from 20 years ago that went into some of the first EVs, it was the size of the back of the entire trunk of a vehicle. And now that same 250 horsepower inverter fits into the palm of my hands. It's just wild what's been possible. And the last piece really is software and AI and things that have enabled us to actually design and develop at just this crazy order of magnitude faster and efficiently than before. So we've already crashed our vehicle 100 times. In the past, you had to build 100 prototypes, run them against a sled, slam them into a wall, and that's tens of millions of dollars to do that project. We hit a few buttons in software, it goes and executes a couple of crash tests on the cloud overnight, and we get a bunch of results back. We can make modifications and learn from that in a very short duration of time. And those three things together is kind of how we're building our company.
[1:05:12]In a really cost-effective way. So I think Jason's really just addressed like these other companies may have spent a lot of money sometimes trying to engineer things and differentiate on ways that we don't think were maybe necessary.
[1:05:25]I would like to kind of step back and just be like, well, the whole market analysis. Why did those other vehicle companies that you've named, why were they going after big trucks by making an electrified big truck? Because what were they going to differentiate on? So we've already kind of talked about how the market, you know, has grown to be big on the, because of this unintended consequence. Well, when the market does that, it leaves a hole where the hole is the size of a vehicle that was, that was super popular for 20 years.
[1:05:55]You know, like the Ford Ranger, the Toyota SR5, like all these small trucks that people will come to us and be like, I loved that truck. It was amazing. It could maneuver it. it um and so you know none of those vehicles that you were mentioning were really differentiating on anything and what's hard is if you're a giant truck the thing you can do better than anything else is you can you can haul you can tow 10,000 pounds and you can tow it all day long and evs are just not going to be able to do that until there's a charging network that could support that um and so so you're just entering a market where you're already kind of like a step down and they all experienced problems. So regardless of whether the leadership made the right decisions or whatever, in the end, they were going for a market that I think was a tough one to go after. I think in general, it's hard to build a vehicle that takes an existing vehicle platform and make it electric. I think that for the electric enthusiasts, they'll be super excited about that. But for the other enthusiasts, 60% to 80% of the market, it's very hard to be like, what trade-off am I actually giving up? Like the electric vehicle is more expensive. I have to learn a new mechanism of charging.
[1:07:05]Maybe I just stick with my gas vehicle. What's really unique about our vehicle is that we didn't just throw batteries and an electric motor on an existing vehicle. Our vehicle is only possible because of the electrification process. You can't build our electric mini truck with the capabilities of an F-150 and the size of a Mini Cooper with a V8 gas engine. It wouldn't fit. It wouldn't pass crash safety. It wouldn't have enough room for passengers. So it's really unique for us that we're able to actually build this vehicle only because it's electric and we're offering it as a new market segment for somebody that would want this type of vehicle.
[1:07:38]You would have to get 55 to 60 miles per gallon. Yeah. Yeah. Because of the EPA, Forrest is right. In order to actually build this vehicle, you would have to meet the EPA requirements, which for this year are 55 miles per gallon and in four years from now are 65 miles per gallon which is you know you're not going to meet that without having a battery pack anyway so it's like you know you now you're going to put two systems on a vehicle this size so so we're really doing something that electrification has enabled it's awesome yeah i had when 1984 i bought a mitsubishi two-door pickup truck my buddy had a volkswagen pickup truck very both very small vehicles and i loved i loved both of those trucks they were a lot of fun to drive and you know if i could go back and and pick up another one i absolutely would because it was the perfect size for me especially at the time because i was single but this your vehicle seats five people five adults it's very comfortably do you want to talk about before we get to our last question do you want to talk about the specs and the price of the truck.
[1:08:38]Yeah. So, I mean, we wanted, again, everything we wanted to do is an uncompromising utility vehicle. So what we did is we kind of thought, we surveyed the markets and what do you really need from an uncompromising utility vehicle? Well, 6,000 pounds towing, we heard. Great. Our vehicle can tow 6,000 pounds. 1,600 pounds of payload. Great. Our vehicle can carry 1,600 pounds, no problem. Four-wheel drive, check.
[1:09:03]350 miles of range, seats five people. These are all things that you would expect from a utility pickup truck that we all include in our vehicle. And we can do that because it's such a small and efficient packaging of the vehicle at a price point that's fairly impressive in my mind, but $50,000 before incentives. That's what we're talking about here. So a vehicle that really comes in at an approachable price point, if you look at the average cost of a pickup truck in the U S it's $61,000. And there's no electric incentives on the average pickup truck in the U S. And the luxury market is even higher 75 above. Sure. Sure. And then the EV market is right in that same 75, 80. Like it's really hard to get a truck that is an EV truck that is affordable by mere mortals. You know, like I never thought in my life when I was 18 and I bought my truck for $9,000, I didn't think I'd ever spend 50, eight thousand dollars on a car and after everything's all said and done like that's this is just ridiculously expensive so what you guys are doing is great you're keeping it affordable so that people can actually buy them and use them okay so this is the last question you can decline to answer this last question but it has to do with charging infrastructure.
[1:10:16]You're i believe i read somewhere or saw somewhere that you're going to use, NACs on the truck for charging? Yes. Do you have any concerns about Elon laying off the entire supercharger team?
[1:10:28]Yes. We're keeping an eye on how things play out. I think that we don't understand all the pieces of the pie right now, so we can't really comment on it too much. What we do know though, is that the NACS plug, the North American charging standard plug, you know, it's not the Tesla plug, it's the North American charging standard plug is an extremely space efficient package plug. It kind of abides by our whole thesis of our company around space efficiency and it's capable of charging our vehicle extremely quickly uh so we quite we quite like that technology, so our plan is to be native like so the outlet on our vehicle will be that nacs not no adapter or anything sure sure and i i like anytime elon does something that seems crazy it always seems to work out in some way whether he reverses somebody cleans up the mess i don't know how it works but it does seem to work out on on some level um as far as and you may or may not know this as far as the society of automotive engineers the j3400 standard does does that not just mean that anybody can use that now maybe they have to pay a licensing fee to tesla to build those things but is that not isn't that what we wanted was that to be opened up as a as a national standard or an international standard.
[1:11:46]Well, you know, the greatest thing about standards is there's so many to pick from. Yeah. So on the charging side, I think it's less about the standard that people adopt, and it's more about the quality of the charging stations that exist. And is there a business model that supports them being put in the ground? And I think that's the thing that everyone's still struggling with. And so the reason I'm a little surprised at the recent move is that the most successful network out there has been Tesla's.
[1:12:22]And it's been they put it in originally and they put that price as part of the vehicle. And that's what to me makes the most sense for the charging network, because there isn't a great business model that I can see for putting in fast charging. Charging uh if you're just a if you're a private third party you know the gas station model is not quite that isn't the same because a hundred percent of gasoline vehicles have to have to fill up at a gas station um but when you look at electric vehicles it it's like less than 10 will even ever you know use it on a on a per kilowatt scale so just the amount of energy being delivered is like 10 is coming through fast chargers and then as far as numbers of people using them it is very small but you need them there to sell the vehicle because people need to use them in that few instances that they need to use them so it's just a tricky model and the large oem so far have not wanted to weigh in and support by putting in stations uh you know with a few exceptions but you know by and large that they've wanted it to be a third party like an evgo or a you know a shell or somebody to come in and put in stations so that's that that's the chasm I think right now is like, how do we get.
[1:13:36]10 times or maybe a hundred times more fast charging stations out there, who's going to pay that? And who's going to get value from that? Because the value is to society and to EV drivers. So any OEM can go and install the NACS receptacle port, get it to work with their battery pack, hook up the right contactors to it. It's that interface that you have with a particular charging station that is the software challenge effectively associated with that. And, you know, right now, the truth of the matter is the Tesla superchargers are extremely reliable in terms of in the grand scheme of things. And they have a great amount of uptime and compared to other charging stations out there. So people really want to interface with them because of that uptime and reliability.
[1:14:23]And that directly translates to what seems like the usefulness of your vehicle. So i think that it's less of a challenge on the oem side of things because it's not really that hard to just build the build the hardware to do it build all the pieces necessary to do it it's that interface that has to happen uh that has to get figured out sure and i'll say this part so you guys you don't have to say anything after this but the the the i would imagine the scary part is again you don't have to comment is that uh you know what happens if If Elon cuts that off, right? That's a scary part, especially for companies like Ford, Rivian, GM, that's scary altogether. But we won't discuss that too much. But I do agree that it is something that sells vehicles. I know a guy in Maryland right now who's waiting for Rivian to switch over to the NACS port so that he can buy one because he wants to use the supercharger network. Work it it's not only selling teslas it's selling other vehicles as well so all right and i can take that part out if you want i won't i won't add it no no i don't want to make things uncomfortable all right well thank you very much for one being so kind and two being so candid with your answers where can people find you if they're interested in what you're doing.
[1:15:40]Yeah. First off, please come join our discard, talk about our vehicle, talk about how you use our vehicle, give us feedback on the product. We're currently still in the design phase of a lot of pieces of the pie and we would love to get your feedback. So the discord, which you can find on our website at telotrucks.com, T-E-L-O trucks.com.
[1:16:00]We'll be more active on social platforms as well. We do have an Instagram, although it's relatively inactive currently, but we're bringing people on to help us make that more active but i will say that you will get almost i will definitely weekly but almost daily contact with our team if you join the discord channel that's excellent do you have any personal uh social media that you would like people to follow not that i would share okay you don't need to see me all right all right now that's a challenge i think he's an amazing interviewer all right Gentlemen, thank you so much for coming on. In a tele-truck interview, I love the concept and I love the technology, the way they talked about it and what I learned about how the mileage requirements change by the length of the vehicle and why that's why they have such giant vehicles. Anyway, I loved that interview and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.
[1:16:51]Well, that is going to wind us up for this week and next week is 1,000 episodes. Have I mentioned that? I'm really excited. Anyway, did you know you can email me at alison at podfeed.com anytime you like? If you have a question or suggestion, just send it on over. Remember, everything good starts with podfeed.com. You can follow me on Mastodon at podfeed.com slash Mastodon. Want to listen to the podcast on YouTube? Podfeed.com slash YouTube. If you want to join in the conversation, you can join our Slack community at podfeed.com slash Slack, where you can talk to physics nerd Graham and all of the other lovely Nocilla castaways as he told you. You can support the show at podfeet.com slash Patreon. I'd really appreciate it. Or you can do a one-time donation, which I would also appreciate, at podfeet.com slash PayPal. And if you want to join in the fun of the live show, especially the one on July 7th, where we can have the 1,000th celebration, head on over to podfeet.com slash live on Sunday nights at 5 p.m. Pacific.
[1:17:44]Music.