Thomas Healy, CEO & founder of Hyliion joined Cheddar News to discuss electric truck deliveries -- including delivering the giant Christmas tree standing outside of the New York Stock Exchange

Thomas Healy, CEO &amp; founder of Hyliion joined Cheddar News to discuss electric truck deliveries -- including delivering the giant Christmas tree standing outside of the New York Stock Exchange. “Our goal is to make this a practical adoption for fleets. If you have to reinvent the entire truck, it's a very difficult equation, versus if you can use the truck, you already know and love and just switch the power train," he said about truck electrification. 

Hyliion Electric Truck Delivers NYSE Christmas Tree

America on its way to electrification including the commercial transportation industry last week electric trucking company highly on delivering, take a look the 80 ft christmas tree that stands beautifully lit outside the new york stock exchange using its hyper truck, E. R. X. It recharges itself using an onboard natural gas generator. This is so cool. Well joining me now is thomas Healy Ceo and founder of Hi leon thomas, welcome back to the new york stock exchange. Thank you this time. I didn't bring a truck though and the trees already up. You personally delivered this tree didn't you? I did, yeah and to be fair I just did the last mile a couple of miles. So one of our drivers did the going through the inner city streets but you know drove it in and this is the first time that the christmas tree here has ever been delivered on an electric semi. Normally it's a diesel truck. So we're pushing that mission of, we're moving to electrification to reduce emissions. Your company is publicly traded. It's been around for eight years I think when people think of electric vehicles, consumers might think of their own electric vehicles. Tesla is that they drive or the Tesla is that they see on the road and more TVs coming. What do viewers need to know about your E. V. Company? Absolutely. So the shift towards electric is happening and started in passenger car now the commercial vehicle space is being electrified but there's one big difference charging these big electric semis is really difficult. You can't just plug it into your garage outlet and charge it overnight. There's a study out there that shows plugging in two semi trucks will consume more power than the Empire State Building. So you can't just take mass amounts of trucks and make them electric. The grid can't support it. So what we're doing is we're saying, hey, we need to move to electric, but why don't we do it where we produce the electricity on board the vehicle and charge the batteries as you go. We can use natural gas. We can use hydrogen in the future as a fuel source. So we're making that emission shift, but we're doing it in a practical way. So, you provide the charging capabilities. I think that might be the simplest way to understand it, correct? Yeah, the vehicle charges as you drive, which is odd concept. So, how many vehicles are we talking here? How big is this market for you? I guess for people driving on the highway, maybe they would notice an electric semi truck, but it might not be so easy to spot. Right? So there are very, very few electric semi trucks. We're talking like, you can count them on, you know, a few hands kind of deal that are actually deployed out there. Uh, so the shift is just beginning and uh, and we saw last week Tesla unveiled their electric semi truck as well. They're just starting to get them on the road with Pepsi. And so it's just happening and our whole thing is we don't reinvent the entire vehicle. So if you think about the Tesla semi, it's a totally different truck. You can see in the video is being played now we use a Peterbilt chassis so it's a truck that people are familiar with, but we're changing the powertrain over to being electric. So what's the market opportunity for your company? So there's 2 to 3 million of these semi trucks out on the road today and there's a few 100,000 of them made every year. That's pretty impressive. Now, of course, we see the prototypes all the time. You mentioned some of these Tesla electric trucks right that are starting to get deployed for coca cola. I think you mentioned there, how do you want to build out the business? How are you bringing on clients and making sure that shareholders who invest in your company are satisfied? So we're working with some of the largest fleets in the U. S. You look at that defies the ruins of the world, who are operating thousands and thousands of vehicles out there. We've put together a fleet council with which has some of these largest fleets as well as our first production slots, 1st 200 slots already fully booked. We've already lined up the fleets. And so as we go into production in late 23 we've partnered not only with the fleets who need to run these trucks, but then also working with, as a mentioned peterbilt, the O. E. M to install our system on their trucks. So our goal is make this a practical adoption for fleets. If you have to reinvent the entire truck, it's a very difficult equation. Versus if you can use the truck, you already know and love and just switch the power train, you get all the benefits of electric, but without the downsides and you avoid that infrastructure cost issue, which that's, that's my take is the toughest thing to move into electric, is how are you going to charge these vehicles? What's the sustainability impact here? How much can your technology, what you're doing for this space save in terms of emissions. So, so because we're using natural gas and then even bio gas or renewable natural gas, we have the ability to be net carbon negative. So not only are you going to get to zero emissions, but you can actually go below zero. And from that regard, it's actually better for the environment to drive our truck than to not drive it. And that's because we're using What is basically pollution to charge the batteries as you're going down the road. So, so from that standpoint, it's, it's a huge impact. And for these companies that have, 35, 2040 climate initiatives where they want to be at net zero, we can actually get their transportation sector to be a negative number to offset some of the emissions from other parts of their business. What are the expectations for 2023 are companies keen to make investments in your products and technologies. Yeah. So the demand for electric trucks is huge. Every fleet we talked to is thinking about electrification, trying to figure out how they're going to do it. The hurdle we've seen though is as trucks, as fleets, look at plug in trucks, that infrastructure issue having to set up chargers and that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per vehicle. That's where fleets are struggling and that's where they look at our solution and they say I can do this is practical. What about taking this from the commercial vehicle to, as in the big semi trucks to people's own vehicles that they drive on a day to day basis. So my personal take is long term individuals, garages are gonna look where they have one full electric vehicle and then they have one range extender vehicle and that's obviously where we're playing. Is that range extender space Now. Uh right now our company is focused on the commercial vehicle space. We, we see that as a huge opportunity. We shared some of the numbers earlier. We have the fleets lined up but we will look to expand to other types of vehicles as we go forward as well. Okay, very cool thomas Healy. Ceo Founder of highly on the ultimate deliver of the new york stock exchange christmas tree, bringing cheer to everyone down here on Wall Street. Thank you. Absolutely. Thanks for having us on. All right, wonderful tom Healy again there, the founder and Ceo of highly on.