Inside Canada’s Trucking Revolution with Edison Motors CEO Eric Little (#171) — Transcript
THE PICTURE OF WEALTH · EPISODE 171
What does it take to build a truck company in Canada? Eric Little of Edison Motors joins Dustin Serviss to discuss diesel-electric trucks, manufacturing, crowdfunding and the choices involved in building a hardware business in public.
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Transcript
[00:00:00] Eric Little: Crowdfunding is the future. It's here to stay. It's only gonna get better, and it provides an incentive for companies to be ultra transparent and ultimately participate in capitalism, which is basically everyone gets to participate. Right?
[00:00:17] Dustin Serviss: Hey, everyone. Dustin here. And today's episode is one I've been excited about for a while. I sat down with Eric Little, CEO and cofounder of Edison Motors. Yes. The same Edison building Canada's first diesel electric hybrid trucks. What started as an off grid dream in Merritt, BC is now a full on transportation revolution, complete with trucks named Carl and Topsy. I mean, if the truck has a name, you know it's got soul. Eric's got this wild idea that trucks, like trains should generate power going down a hill then climb back up without guzzling more diesel. Seems obvious right? Well, it took someone like Eric to make it happen.
[00:00:54] Dustin Serviss: In this episode, we dive into what crowdfunding really means beyond just clicking invest on a shiny website, how peer to peer investing could change the way startups grow in Canada, and why your first fifty dollars into a company like Edison might teach you more than a business degree ever could. But before we get rolling, let me just say this is not investment advice. This is what I like to call edutainment. Think of it like a pit stop for your brain, part insight, part engine revving inspiration. Talk to a professional first before making any investment decisions. Alright? Now that that's out of the way, let's hit the ignition and get into
[00:01:33] Dustin Serviss: it. I got so many questions, and I'm excited to have you on the podcast because I know you guys love content, are transparent, just share everything. So give me the Coles notes where things are at setting up a brand new town outside of Golden.
[00:01:49] Eric Little: Yeah. It's pretty surreal to... You have a three hundred acre property where we, you know, have the ability to really scale the business up. And crazy to think that, yeah, five thousand people used to live out there. So who knows what we'll build? We're already building fifteen houses, and we just moved there in April.
[00:02:05] Dustin Serviss: Yeah. That's, like you said, you're finding all sorts of things on the property. But have you got any pictures? Have you seen what it used to look like when it was rocking and rolling?
[00:02:15] Eric Little: Absolutely. Yeah. So the realtor ended up giving us an old portfolio of about fifty pictures. And crazy, Like, all those old train engineers used to wear five piece suits while working on the railroad. It's just unbelievable what they used to do back in the eighteen hundreds. Super inspiring.
[00:02:32] Dustin Serviss: Yeah. Listen, if you didn't catch that, Eric and his team have purchased a three hundred acre site, the headquarters for Edson Motors. And I think people can look up your story, and there's tons of content on the origin story. But can you condense it to two minutes? Because I really wanna get into really, the lifeblood of what makes your company so unique and the situation and what the future is gonna look like.
[00:03:00] Eric Little: Yeah. We're pretty excited by this, this wild journey that we've been on. Right? So Coles notes is Chase and I are renegade truckers, and I got a passion for solar. I ended up starting a trucking company with Chase about ten years ago right out of uni and just wanted to have some fun using some of the profits from trucking to do generator hauls, solar projects up north. Really was able to sink my teeth there, and those passions turned into us getting the first preorder for a Tesla semi when Elon went on stage there back in two thousand sixteen. And we just got sick and tired of waiting after about four years of
[00:03:39] Eric Little: broken promises, so we decided, screw it. Let's build our own. And, you know, Chase and I are a deadly combination because I got the passion for the technical side, and he's probably the biggest trucking nerd I know. He's got a lot of cool experience too. I can't believe he was on Ice Road Truckers and Highway Through Hell, Mud Mountain. It's just crazy how he's been able to turn that fan base and that awesome passion he has for logging and just trucking in general to a company that builds trucks in Canada.
[00:04:09] Dustin Serviss: Yeah. It's a fascinating site. You're being very modest, so I'm gonna pry pry it out of you. But I think we... I don't have a structure. We're gonna go all over the place, and I will share. Listen, I did tour Edson Motors, the first edition of the shops, and to see a semi converted to electric. And, again, you're gonna expand on this later in the podcast. I know you are. But it's... It was mind blowing to think when you guys were telling us and showing us on the one unit, it's like the engine doesn't have to go in the front. And so with that sort of setup, what does a semi that's electric look like?
[00:04:49] Dustin Serviss: Because I see it in my head as a very spaceship looking thing on TV or that thing, but you got a unique twist and a vision.
[00:05:00] Eric Little: Yeah. Well, the vision was pretty simple. We just build a train on rubber tires. So train uses electric motors. They have been since the thirties. So all we did was we got really compact, really powerful train motors to work with pretty standard lithium ion batteries now used in EVs all over the world. Right? We have a lot of chemistries to play around with now. And the package is reducing the size of the engine. Because if you're doing login, you're using, like, a fifteen liter, sixteen liter massive engine to do the work. And now because it's electric, you can actually end up using a nine liter
[00:05:38] Eric Little: engine where its job is just producing power to recharge the batteries. And you can actually recapture energy, which is the coolest thing about our vehicle is you can regen. And instead of using energy to slow you down, which is, you know, why you have JKEDS and retarders and and all of that stuff on a standard truck. Our truck, you can actually capture the energy back when you're going downhill loaded, and that itself will save you tons of fuel, let alone the smaller displacement. Typically, you're seeing anywhere from fifteen to thirteen liter engines. Now we're using a nine liter, so that's about a third fuel savings right there.
[00:06:15] Eric Little: Crazy to think you're not gonna have to idle an engine anymore. Right? If you're sleeping, if you're hanging out, if you're working your PTO or your hydraulics, the battery could just take that on for hours. So the opportunities are pretty endless here.
[00:06:28] Dustin Serviss: Yeah. For sure. It's... I was fascinated. But... So walk us through what sort of happens. And, again, you could start with big blue and, you know, how... Because I think that's worth five minutes of Yeah. How you actually had a logging truck, and you figured out how to put an electric motor in it.
[00:06:49] Eric Little: Yeah. It's pretty wild. So we ended up... Our trucking fleet consisted of a lot of nineteen sixties, nineteen seventy Kenworths. Like, Chase and I love those old Kenworths, the LWs. And we ended up buying those out of university because those are the only ones we truly can afford and we knew how to fix. They really built high quality stuff back then that was made to last. It's sixty year old that still works and nuts. So this truck that we wanted to convert as the first project after raising money via crowdfunding decided that let's use a Tesla platform. Right? So let's just convert it to electric.
[00:07:27] Eric Little: So we took apart a Tesla model s from two thousand fourteen. I was able to code and hack into it and get the motor spinning. And we ended up attaching it... The motor, put a spline through it, and attached it to the center driveline system. So it looked and felt like an old Kenworth where you had an auxiliary going to standard rear axles with regular hubs. I think it was like a five to thirty two displacement. And from there, instead of having the big cam four hundred, we put a thirty three thirty... Was it thirty five zero six or thirty three zero six cat engine? So that ended up powering a generator,
[00:08:09] Eric Little: just standard, right, a standard setting gen set that we got hooked up to a bunch of chargers. And we were so blown away that it actually worked. So the Tesla was able to produce all the horsepower we needed to move and spin the shaft. We had to get an auxiliary, actually, because the thing was too fast. So we had to really reduce the the gearing on it, and the engine just worked flawlessly. I see you fired up, and it could charge the batteries in real time. And that one proof of concept that we built for about four hundred grand was the catalyst to tell ourselves that we can actually
[00:08:49] Eric Little: do this as a business, and even more importantly, that we could build our own truck from the ground up, like our own design, our own truck brand. Right? Not be dependent on Kenworth or Peterbilt or all the big boys, but actually build our own trucks from scratch. We went back to the market, and it's crazy how a year later, with one point five million bucks, we actually did it. We built our own truck from the ground up, from our own designs, all our own engineering efforts. But the one lesson that we learned from Carl, which was the first prototype, the converted one from Kenworth, was that we couldn't do the center drive. Right?
[00:09:27] Eric Little: Using the driveline was actually a big weakness point for the trucks. I kept snapping it. Electric motors are just so torquey, and you need a more sophistication on the motor side to to to really make sure that it was communicating properly and you weren't working it out. So we decided to pivot and make sure the motors were built into the axles. And this is our vision, building a train on rubber tires. You get all the torque, all the benefits of a train, all the efficiency, but for the highway.
[00:09:56] Dustin Serviss: And so so... And, again, the... Explain as far as you want to for your proprietary stuff, but where do you put the motor then? Like, where Yes. The motor... It's confusing. Right? The motor that generates power, and then there's a motor that turns the wheels. And I think that's something that needs to be explained.
[00:10:16] Eric Little: Absolutely. Yeah. So it's it's not obvious, but it's called a series hybrid architecture where you have the motor. In this case, we're using a Scania nine liter now, not the thirty five zero six or thirty three zero sixes. We ended up using a liquid cooled generator that sits in the back of the bell housing of this nine liter engine, and it produces electricity. And that electricity flows directly to the batteries, which in turn can power electric motors at the wheels. This means that the vehicle is truly an electric vehicle. Right? It only uses battery power to work.
[00:10:58] Eric Little: And what's cool about this system is that your engine doesn't need to operate all day long. It only needs to operate to act as a fast charger when you need it.
[00:11:08] Dustin Serviss: Mhmm.
[00:11:08] Eric Little: So you could drive down the road for more than half your shift not using fuel at all and just running quietly on your batteries. And throughout the day, the engine fires up to charge your batteries while driving because it's still a very powerful engine. Right? We're still talking about two hundred fifty kilowatt, three hundred kilowatts of power going into your batteries. And, yeah, it'll just turn on and off throughout the day. You'll never have to worry about recharging the batteries. You're basically carrying your own onboard fast charger.
[00:11:40] Dustin Serviss: Yeah. That's that's exciting. You mentioned something about the early days of, like, crowdfunding or sort... Getting funds, which is not easy, but you guys have done a great job of utilizing YouTube as a social media side and is. I'm twenty years in the finance business where, you know, low and slow is always the best way to go, but there's a new emergence of younger person that doesn't want that. And that younger person's always been around, but now with the Internet, now with meme stocks, now with Reddit and all this kind of social energy behind investing. And I don't know what to call it, but I view it as, like, peer... Not...
[00:12:20] Dustin Serviss: It's not peer to peer. It's like peer beside peer investing where you're going and you're like, hey. Oh, you're putting money in that? Okay. Yeah. I'll put money in that. So what have you found with dealing with that ecosystem as, like, an exciting... You didn't think it would be that way and also an obstacle of what... You know, not dealing with just one big massive financer that just comes down with one big check and says go when you're dealing with lots of people.
[00:12:51] Eric Little: Well, this is a big reason why I came on the show. Right? Because my job is really educating all Canadian entrepreneurs to use crowdfunding exemptions. Right? You have to do it. It is the most liberating financial mechanism for our generation. And I definitely wanna take the time to break it down and all the successes we've had with it as well as some of the challenges so you don't make the same mistakes I did. But, ultimately, crowdfunding is the future. It's here to stay. It's only gonna get better, and it provides an incentive for companies to be ultra transparent and ultimately participate in capitalism, which is basically everyone gets
[00:13:34] Eric Little: to participate. Right? And, eventually, going public is the goal for any successful venture. And this is the perfect pathway to use if you're serious about growing a big business that actually can access a large market, especially in automotive. It's why it was a no brainer for Chase and I to do crowdfunding right out of the gate, which is rarely done in Canada. So a bit of background on this. We ended up using an exemption called forty five one zero six f. It allows any Canadian business to issue capital through this exemption up to one point five million Canadian. It's a very small number.
[00:14:12] Eric Little: It's very limiting compared to the US because they have a ten million dollar Reg DC platform. So I think Canada should really wake up and smell the goddamn roses and at least give us the same amount of access because it's been a huge limiting factor for us, and I definitely wanna stare my discontent with the realities of the situation. But it's still one point five million. You could basically get any prototype built with that. We're a testament to that. We built a freaking vehicle with one point five. You know?
[00:14:39] Dustin Serviss: A semi.
[00:14:40] Eric Little: You could you could build any commercial mass produced product prototype for that capital, and you could use it every year. But the most liberating part of the crowdfunding exemption is that the issuer, the company, gets to decide their valuation, and people could go onto a platform. Right? In this case, you know, they can either go onto a platform like Front Thunder. Big shout out. You know, they're the big, big player in Canada. They got a phenomenal platform, and we're using them currently to execute these crowdfunding campaigns. But you could do it like I did too and just do subscription forms
[00:15:18] Eric Little: with a registered lawyer, a securities lawyer, and you could do this all yourself. Right? As long as you're following the rules under the forty five one zero six f, Any any business can access this. And as long as you have a good term sheet and you're comfortable talking to anybody who's interested in your venture, why not? Just freaking do it. Why why should startups limit themselves to just venture capital and private equity and angels when you can have fans be your biggest promoters? And, ultimately, you're gonna be more transparent over time because you have more people to give awesome updates on and stay motivated every day.
[00:16:01] Eric Little: So it's it's been a dangerous combination for us in terms of our growth because here we are. We started off with a few followers on TikTok, and now we have two million followers on social media, over five hundred million views on all our platforms. And it's because people are participating with their own money and wanting to see us succeed, and we're just so thrilled by what we've been able to achieve. Now we're actually beyond the forty five one zero six f. We're actually using different means. Right? So Americans can participate under the reg d five zero six c and b. And this has been a huge thing for us because US investors
[00:16:43] Eric Little: who are credited can participate in this deal. And it allowed us to also come to our own valuation and access the capital through our fan base. And we've been hugely successful using these two exemptions. We've been able to raise in the last year eight point five million Canadian. And we're about to go back to the market with, I would say, the ultimate in terms of the Canadian finance schemes for this, which is called the offering memorandum, which is kinda like a mini prospectus. But through crowdfunding, I really wanna emphasize this, we were able to go in less than four years from an idea to a pre IPO company. Right?
[00:17:24] Eric Little: And it's only through crowdfunding. I don't think any private equity guy or any finance bro that's in venture capital would have ever provided us the capital to do this in this record time. And we wanna be that shiny example of being able to use these exemptions properly to advance a venture.
[00:17:43] Dustin Serviss: You think that it would have been pulled off? Do you think someone would have to create the amount of content that you and Chase do to get that? Like, I think that would be somewhere else. Like, someone's watching. Well, yeah, you guys produce a lot of content. So that would be hard, but financing and getting the company going is hard.
[00:18:06] Eric Little: Yeah. It's... That's a really good question because I really wanna emphasize, like, Chase and I, we're go getters. Right? But we're definitely not the smartest guys in the room. Right? We're just really passionate about what we're doing, and we're trying our very best. And I wanna tell all your fans that anybody can do this. Right? And we have to leverage these exemptions because they're there for us to use. Why pigeonhole yourself with venture capital and private equity exclusively when you could really expand your network and get yourself in this mentality of showcasing your venture in the best possible light?
[00:18:41] Eric Little: And at the end of the day, that is the secret. Right? So for us doing regular informal updates has been the most amazing thing internally as well as producing content as a byproduct. You know, why not show off the cool work that you're doing, especially when you have fans that are paying to see it happen? Right? It's the greatest motivator. And who knows? Maybe just even getting the subscription forms ready and getting yourself in this mentality of raising capital is the first step. Because once you do access capital, you're always gonna be in this cycle of trying to showcase to your investors all the exciting work that you're doing.
[00:19:22] Eric Little: It really is a catalyst, and I think you just gotta jump in two feet forward and give it your best shot and see what happens.
[00:19:29] Dustin Serviss: Yeah. No. I agree. We say to people, invest in your circle of competence. So, you know, don't be taking high flyers just because your buddy at hockey beer league is doing some sort of investment. But when you're able to make an investment or see the content, see the transparency, see the stuff, you know, and, again, whatever people put online is is just information, entertainment, but you're also... If you're investing time watching it, you're understanding compared to just throwing your money at some other investment. I would say from a risk standpoint, and I get... Maybe we could have a...
[00:20:05] Dustin Serviss: We could put our boxing gloves on for a couple seconds from, like, a... Is this a higher risk investment than somewhat... If they only had a a dollar, should they put all that dollar into something like this? Or I would share... It's okay. Well, how old are you? How... What's your other net worth? Like, oh, your house isn't paid off. What's your other investments for rainy day? Like, all these kind of questions. But what would you say to somebody who was, no. This is all their money, and I think it's totally fine.
[00:20:35] Eric Little: Well, what's great about crowdfunding is that you can ask for a very small amount. And this was what Chase and I wanted to enforce is we don't want anyone to to invest their life savings into this, and we definitely don't want people dumping three grand on their credit card on our behalf. So we were very specific on our questionnaire when investing that, hey. This is a very risky investment, and, please, we don't feel comfortable with people putting stuff on their credit card or dumping their life savings, but our minimums are very reasonable, two hundred and seventy five dollars Canadian.
[00:21:12] Eric Little: And, actually, when we did our first round, it was fifty dollars Canadian. So what we're trying to do is get our generation involved in this exciting opportunity, and it's amazing who came out of the woodwork. Right now, we have over seven thousand shareholders, and it's all because investors, once fans, saw the opportunity and decided to participate in this. And they're along for the ride with us, and it means so much.
[00:21:38] Dustin Serviss: Yeah. And so from a administration and the guy who deals with all the paperwork, what would you do different next time to... Or did everything go so smooth that I, in my head, got a heart palpitation thinking seven thousand clients? And so maybe it's different with investors. It's, hey. You take the money. You give them a bit of, hey. Here's explaining, and that's it. And you just... You're along for the ride. You don't have to service them other than produce content and kind of that side. Did you find it a big sort of effort to manage that many people?
[00:22:10] Eric Little: Oh, yeah. And this has never been done in Canada's history. Right? Like, we're definitely pushing the limits of all these exemptions. And quite frankly, we're so happy that the securities commission was willing to work with me because I definitely made them scratch their heads a couple times, especially in the early days. But I really wanted to use this in education. Right? Hey. This is a... This is an opportunity for everyone to learn about this exciting method of investing. We need to see these cool innovations happen. And the last thing we wanna have is a bunch of VCs and guys in Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary strong-arm every freaking bright
[00:22:46] Eric Little: Canadian that wants to do cool shit. Right? We gotta make sure that our generation is just saying, hey. We have the ability to throw a hundred bucks, a thousand bucks at a start up saying, hey. Let's see what happens. And our strategy has been, hey. We have a great securities team. We do regular newsletters. I don't try to bombard people. It's about once a quarter. But, ultimately, it is the social media content that's driving that regular interest. And I'm hoping that all of our investors are tuning in regularly to see all the cool things that we're doing. And because we have the amount of shareholders, we need
[00:23:23] Eric Little: a lot of the minimum conditions to go public. So by stressing the fact that we are shooting to become a publicly traded company one day, it provides people with this insight that, okay. Let's let these guys grow. Right? Let's support them, potentially even reinvest once we do open up other funding routes because we are regularly seeking investments typically once a year. They can essentially be hopeful in anticipation of having liquidity in the future once we go public. And that's the cool thing about this is there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Right? This is when I'm very fortunate.
[00:24:00] Eric Little: So I grew up around the table with a dad who was in the public markets. He was a CEO of a publicly traded company. But I really hope that in my lifetime, it doesn't have to be a guy like me who grew up in it to do this kind of stuff. It pains me that I had this education. I could use it. I wish more Canadians were fearless and want to do something like this because it's totally doable. Right? If I can do it, anybody can do it.
[00:24:24] Dustin Serviss: Well... Yeah. And I think there's... Being a YouTube influencer gets shit on a lot by people who don't do stuff online, but I... And I... It's public knowledge. Your financials are on your website for investors, but there's a line item that says YouTube revenue. Can you help us understand? Do you need a certain amount of views to collect revenue? Does YouTube just knock on your door and say, hey. It looks like you're getting lots of views, or do you apply to them, or do you, like, get hired by them? Like, how does that work?
[00:24:53] Eric Little: It's all based on critical mass. So once we were able to get a certain view count, that's when we were able to, essentially, through their portal, a sense, register and then collect a certain amount per thousand views. And it really just depends on the integration of ads that you're willing to put in there. We also, beyond this, we work with some phenomenal partners. Right? These are our software providers. Onshape is a great example of this where we wanna showcase the innovations and the cool products that we're using internally. And because of this, we're getting compensated a bit in ad revenue. Right.
[00:25:31] Eric Little: But we're not trying to make it feel like an ad. We're trying to make it feel just like everything else we're doing, educating your fans on all the cool things we're doing and how to turn an idea into a proper business.
[00:25:42] Dustin Serviss: I have... This is a side tangent. This is definitely not on my notes that are in my head, but, nerdy passion for drones and unmanned vehicles, if you will. So what... In manufacturing things that are electronic, what is a choke point or, like, a common design problem with autonomy AI? This is... I know you guys aren't autonomous trucks, but you're dealing with switches. You're dealing with controllers. Like, when you're dealing with electronics, what is a thing you don't think of or see? The common person doesn't see that you're having to deal with.
[00:26:20] Eric Little: Yeah. So we have a great electrical team now. Before, I was just chasing lease, so I was taking a lot of off the shelf relays, just a lot of, like, fuses that I can get at Princess Auto, Canadian Tire, Napa. There was a lot of kind of mix and match and making sure that we didn't blow anything up. And trust me, we did a few times. Right? But now we have a great electrical team that is able to leverage more industry standard practices in terms of our architecture, and it's really great. Now we have a power distribution unit that we've designed in house, which manages all of our fusing, all of our contactors,
[00:26:58] Eric Little: which are computer controlled by our own software that we developed with our computer systems. And to do this in, like, less than three years, it just blows my freaking mind. To think that I was using, like, PuTTY and DOS to hack into a Tesla a few years ago to now using a really great Danfoss product as our ecosystem to be able to do all the software for our vehicles and select some of the electronics, mostly from top, like, tier one US as well as European suppliers. And getting this all built custom for us, it's been a huge challenge. And I think those would be the biggest challenges, right, for us as a
[00:27:38] Eric Little: team is to get into production mode with some of these more, quote, unquote, custom parts. Because I really wanna emphasize here, we are using off the shelf for everything else. Okay? Like, we are a truck assembly plant. We're using off the shelf because I wanna make sure that every driver, every operator that owns our trucks can fix it. And that includes the electronics too. If you open up our power distribution unit, we will show you how to switch the fuses if things actually need to get changed. But the way it's been designed, we're really making sure that you'll never actually
[00:28:12] Eric Little: have to interface with electronics, which is the safest route, of course. But, yeah, I wanna emphasize, we're all about right to repair.
[00:28:18] Dustin Serviss: Yeah. No. I thought that was that was thing. But another side tangent, what do you think about, like, where the market's at for innovation and tech? Lots of hype. There's lots of shit going on in the world with... There's a war, there's not a war. There's this, there's that. But the market continues in tech to to just keep plowing forward. Like, you're on that side as an investor. And on this side, I'm always reading and sifting things. But what do you... Like, what's your... And not even specific to Edson Motors, but just in general, what is your view when you're scrolling your stock tickers or your whatever it is
[00:28:57] Dustin Serviss: looking at tech or Twitter, what what do you see right now?
[00:29:00] Eric Little: Well, I'm pretty biased. Right? So I love hardware, and that's what I've been doing since the last decade, right, with Chase is developing clean technologies and trying to get our trucks to obviously be more clean. This is why we started Edison. I wanted to save on fuel because I still can't believe how much fuel those freaking trucks burn. It's crazy. It's insane. So my bias, though, tells me that we are on a cusp of something really incredible. Right? Electrification is happening in every segment of our lives, whether it be appliances, vehicles, just heating. There's so many different solutions that are getting electrified.
[00:29:42] Eric Little: And this is a really good passion point for me because we have to implement these solutions to be more green, mean, and more cost effective. And I'm quite amazed by the little resources you need now to build your own hardware and potentially manufacture things in Canada. It seemed a bit impossible when I was a kid because, well, we were still using China in a big way, and we're using wholesalers to bring stuff in. But the tides have changed. Right? There's a huge amount of technology now that our generation could access for very cheap to design, build, and make change here.
[00:30:19] Eric Little: On the software front, especially with the AI revolution that's happening, it's a little bit crazy to me to see all the variety. And I was at a Web Summit down at Vancouver a few weeks ago, and I was just a bit confused by the number of oddball AI ventures that are down there stealing the spotlight when I'm trying to actually build a product that you could feel, touch, and drive down the road. I I do hope that we wake up a bit and do some more hardware in this country because let's face it. Right? It's great to play with the software on your computer, but we need cool shit to just do some stuff in this country. Right?
[00:30:51] Eric Little: We're a resource powerhouse. We got a lot of people to feed. Right? We got a lot of farmers that could use this tech. We got a lot of construction equipment that could use this tech. I'm just hopeful that we get it done and we build it here.
[00:31:03] Dustin Serviss: Yeah. Well, it's tangible. I think that's anchored in my question is that where this tech always... It's never rational, and it goes up, and AI is crazy and chips and all different things. But it's all... I just come back to... Okay. Well, for a company to be worth that much, they would have to sell a certain amount of things. And so, again, going back to my nerdy drone example, you think, oh, this is a drone company. It's... Well, you'd have to sell a lot of drones if it's just a drone manufacturer. But then there's the... Then there's, like, military ones where they're counter drones or attack drones or
[00:31:37] Dustin Serviss: that kind of thing where you got big contracts, big dollars. But everywhere in between, you do have to kinda do that research of the tech of what is... What's the scale and application use where... When you think of trucking, again, you would know the numbers better of what is the trucking market share.
[00:31:56] Eric Little: It's enormous. I actually ended up... We pay for market research because, obviously, our data room is very valuable. We wanna make sure that we're presenting the best information that we can, and it it blew my expectations out of the water. So here I was thinking that the market is only about fifty billion. That's actually more like a hundred billion a year in terms of truck sales. And our serviceable market for us at Edison is vocational trucks. So this would be a more custom vehicle. It typically has something on the back that isn't goods, but more of a specialty application.
[00:32:35] Eric Little: You can also use these vocational trucks for heavy duty haul, which is its own category. This would be like logging very heavy stuff for oil and gas, mining, etcetera. And this subset is still, like, a huge opportunity, about seven billion dollars a year in Canada alone. And there are over three million trucks in North America to service. Right? It's an enormous market. So all we're trying to do is just break a little section of that off for ourselves and really showcase that electric is the future here because it pains me when a transmission breaks on a big eighteen speed truck, and it's because that transmission... That that suit...
[00:33:18] Eric Little: Like, hundred year old technology. Right? When a train, they don't have any transmission, and that saves them a ton of time, ton of maintenance, and a ton of fuel. And it just seems so obvious to us. It actually is scary why no one else has done this yet
[00:33:34] Dustin Serviss: Mhmm.
[00:33:34] Eric Little: Because it is freaking obvious. So it kinda answers your question a bit. That is weird because what seems obvious to a few, like Chase and I, may not seem obvious to the players that are the big market drivers and do have the monopolies, quote, unquote. So it's up to us, the disruptors, to bring stuff to the market, And, hopefully, there'll be investors out there that can see the vision and make it happen. Right?
[00:34:00] Dustin Serviss: Yeah. Hundred percent. What... If we're checking in six months from now, what are we likely to see in the town site of Donald as it applies to getting you guys leveled up one more rung?
[00:34:11] Eric Little: Well, really exciting. Right? We purchased the property back in January with the proceeds from our last investment round. We're now going to the market to ask you for twenty million in Canadian, and this will allow us to build in the next three months a thirty thousand square foot production facility, a truck plant. And we've already purchased all the building materials. We got the crew set up to come and live on the property in September, October. We're gonna build the only truck plant in Canada, and we're gonna build it in Donald so that we can manufacture up to five hundred trucks a year.
[00:34:42] Eric Little: And we're super excited considering that this time last year, we were in Chase's mom's backyard in Merritt East.
[00:34:49] Dustin Serviss: I've been there.
[00:34:50] Eric Little: Yeah. It's pretty surreal that we went from a tent to a proper steel building in less than a year. And we're doing it because our fans and our investors, they're just giving us such motivation to get it done.
[00:35:03] Dustin Serviss: Well, Eric, I... I'm excited for you guys cheering you all the way. And where can people find more information on what you're up to?
[00:35:10] Eric Little: Well, our website's always the greatest resource. And when we do launch our offering memorandum soon, I encourage listeners to explore our page. You can access it through our website. It's via front funder. And, yeah, two hundred and seventy five dollars Canadian is the minimum. And I just hope that we can get people excited and want to join us on this incredible journey. It's been a wild ride.
[00:35:31] Dustin Serviss: Well, thanks a lot for coming on the picture of wealth.
[00:35:33] Eric Little: Hey. Thanks for having me. It's been a lot of fun.