Paxster: An innovative EV company that could change how packages reach you

hey everybody zach and jesse here and uh we have a really fun interview today with a company called paxter in norway and we're talking today with harold brudelli who is the head of systems and innovation at paxter so thank you so much for joining us harold oh the it's my pleasure to have you here and i wonder to to be on your show for sure so i've been following you for for a long time and uh yeah it's uh it's cool for us well i'm really excited to talk to you today because you guys make really interesting products uh some really cool e-mobility solutions these are kind of tinier four and three-wheel vehicles um and they're not your typical vehicles can you tell us what they're all about what what are you guys doing yeah we're making uh small delivery vehicles uh purposed uh or in the beginning we start with post delivery lately as i've been more against parcels but newspapers foods and everything so everything that needs to be delivered fast in typical urban environment that's where we do our best work and actually we look at ourselves not as a vehicle producer but a producer of an efficient tool so that's what we say to our customers that we are have not so much focus on the vehicle but the tool because what we try to do is make our customers have a more efficient workday because yeah the time they use on delivery it's critical to have a good profit in that area because these vehicles aren't actually being you know bought and used by your typical consumer right these are these the customers that you're talking about are actual uh businesses like delivery companies and stuff like that yeah so so in the beginning we had most postal delivery actually delivering letters and what you have in your mailbox and and then we moved over to typical parcel deliveries like dpd dhl uh big companies actually and and also we have a lot of newspaper deliveries like in germany and in sweden and also here in norway so so now this is not typically used by consumer but we do see that the market is changing because many people's like in norway the electric waves so to say about uh electric vehicles have come really far and people uh low electric vehicles here and so we start to see some interest to use paxtor in new areas like yeah maybe on a campsite or for intel turn transport if you have like a big farm or something like that so so we see new markets but until now we are mostly focused on the professional market and so your vehicles i noticed have i think three different battery options usually right and so your clients can choose depending on what their routes are like what kind of battery they need and i think our viewers would be a little surprised that the batteries are smaller than i think they would normally have heard about right because these vehicles are so small and light they don't need much battery can you tell us about the different options that they have yeah so actually we run for three options it's like five kilowatt hours and seven point one kilowatt hours and nine point two kilowatt hours so these are small battery packs uh for for typical uh uh if you can compare with the typical cars but the thing is that our vehicle is only like 300 kilograms uh light so so uh but fully loaded we are up to 700 so so but still it's a light vehicle and it's small uh so over um rating when we do that tooth obligation is 84 watt hours per kilometer i'm not sure what that is in miles but but it's quite low uh but you know our customers they are using it really hard they are uh their drive cycle is typical full throttle full brake all day and they typically use around 105 to 110 watt hours per kilometer now how much can you put in one of these things because i i bet a lot of people watching are like well that looks really tiny i don't know what you can do with that but i've i've seen some video it looks like it just it's like one of those circus uh carts that like this the clowns keep getting out of it looks like you can just pack a lot of boxes in there can you tell us like what you can carry in a typical packster yeah so so we we have three different packsters in compared to the volume size so we have the delivery packster that they typically used in food delivery and in post delivery when the volume is not that big that's typical 600 liters of cargo space and we have the version that we call a cargo that have one cubic in the rear compartment and we also have the front compartment with about 100 liters of storage we are used to have what you say uh this is really tiny because our customer is normally driving a huge run you know a typical uh machidas benz sprinter in long and high version and we come in here with a vehicle that could go inside this but but what happened is really that when they start looking because we often together with this talk about what type of cargo should you be delivering with this vehicle we are not delivering like pallets we are delivering delivering like typical one-off pieces things that been uh watches um iphones and stuff that uh comes through the e-commerce market and then the packster is so efficient so you can step on on each side and and you are able to deliver maybe a hundred and fifty and up to two hundred parcels on a day and a typical company today maybe deliver fifty or sixty so uh then we start giving that understanding how we could use this uh vehicle in an efficient way and it's really interesting because if you think about delivery it's the delivery vans from the past well before e-commerce we're designed to be delivering large numbers of goods to stores and businesses where they would then be distributed by uh passers-by and people who were commuting to the store to pick it up but this sort of package delivery thing is rather new and there hasn't the paxter seems like one of the few companies that is actually rethinking what the delivery van might look like in a world where you are delivering you know iphones and watches and much smaller parcels you're not delivering big batches of things and you're making it much more usable for the space in which it's going to be used which is residential streets yeah actually actually i preach a lot of this these days and some of the people in this company is calling me the priest because i try to convince some people but i can give you just just a little overview of some numbers to understand how this market is changing because in 2018 it was 290 million parcels delivered in 2018 and compared that to 2014 that was an increase of 104 percent so so it's it's really increasing you know and out of that parcels uh 30 of all these parcels are single parcels so one delivery on one address and 60 of all these parcels are actually smaller parcels than a shoebox so the thing is that the amount of parcels that are individual parcels on different addresses that is really small has increased extremely so so it's need to be some changes here to be able to do this efficient so so this is uh yeah it's really interesting let me get this straight if i'm say dhl and my normal model was a big van a big sprinter van and i'm delivering to jesse's house you know a small box i've got to drive my big van quite a distance to his house using a lot of energy how much energy and money can your customers save by switching their model to a paxter yeah it's uh it's hard for me to actually say a number but but but i i know that uh when we started in london because dpd we have their customer of our vehicles and they run about 30 packsters in a microhubs in in london so they instead of me driving all these big ones into the city and start delivering they drive one big e fuso in an electric lorry into the center they drop off all the parcels into small pastures and then they deliver out and i know that they on twitter they tweeted that they have saved uh one pound on each delivery uh when they started using the packster and that's uh at least a significant number for sure wait wait so that's over a dollar a delivery they've saved that's a i mean anyone in e-commerce knows that that's a huge huge deal because that goes right to your bottom line yeah yeah it's uh it's it's uh it's big time but but on the other hand you have to remember that they have to adjust their logistics because they still have big ones so the packster is not taking out all their vans it's like they take out 30 ones and put in 30 packsters and then they have to split like their parcel sizes so they are delivering typical goods smaller than one shoebox in the packster and bigger parcels in the bigger vans because for sure there still are big parcels but uh in that parcel it could be really efficient with a big van because then you are not able to do like 120 deliveries if you have a lot of big parcels and you have to use your uh yeah a cart or something to to to deliver it so so i'm just trying to think so with the paxter does it have regenerative braking yeah absolutely so we have a setup of drive modes we use uh three different drive modes so the the driver are able to choose between them uh one mode is what we call typical winter mode uh the reason for winter mode is that if you're going on really slippery surfaces like snow war or or ice then it's better to have not so hard regenerative brake then you have an eco mode that's the most efficient mode where you when you got go off the throttle you start region uh quite hard so we are use regenerative brake instead of your normal brakes i mean i'm picturing a city like new york where uh delivery vans have a really tough time they have to basically park at the end of blocks usually and then you know cart all the stuff down the block to to the resident or to the business whereas it sounds like with a smaller footprint paxter you could get right to the door where you're going and it wouldn't interrupt the flow of pedestrians yeah that's correct and actually normally when we start up working with a new big customers we often do uh logging so we are going out look at their routes how they are working and we use measurements and gps's and stuff and measure how much they are walking how much they are driving how fast the average speed is and stuff like that and what we see is that in typical big cities we see that drivers are mostly using their vans as a depot so they're finding a place oh here i was able to park so they parked their van and then they walk around for them back to the van picking up a new parcel go over a complete block to another location it's a lot of work walking but with the packs you are able to park really everywhere now almost and you can go directly to the door so you save time and receive a lot of walking and you it's almost room for a pastor so so yeah it's quite narrow so now i was noticing on your website that you can charge a packster a couple ways you can charge it level two which a lot of our ev drivers will be familiar with and that's a pretty fast way to do it but because the batteries are so small it looked like you can also just plug it into a regular wall outlet even though it takes longer but it's a small battery so it you know overnight it would easily recharge i would imagine so can you talk to us about i'm assuming you have different size clients right you've got your big dhls but then i assume you also have some probably like some mon paw stores that use it yeah yeah we have some clients with only one packster for sure so uh considering charging i think like 99 of all paxters are charged on a typical chico a normal household plug actually yeah so because uh the packster is taking out only 1200 watt from the from the wires so so that means that your your coffee machine is is using a lot of more power and that's also an important thing because then you don't you need to use so much money on the infrastructure you don't need to set up a big charger station or something you just plug it in so and you know this is not homologated as a car it's it's really what we in in europe called a moped so it's uh 45 kilometers per hour that's i think 27 miles per hour or something so so it's a low speed vehicle uh and and 16 year olds can take and drive that in norway and most of europe so because cars they need to have a charging station a lot at least in norway but this vehicle is uh is legal to charge on a normal plug because of the the small power outlet and so how fast do they charge so let's talk level two and the small power outlet ah actually it's the same uh it's the same uh time on level two and also on the normal charge plug because we use the same charger actually uh inside so so there is no difference in charge time for level two but we if we have customers that need uh fast charge we are interesting to to to develop these things together with a customer and that's typical whole packs to work actually because we go together with the customer and we look how they are using it and we try to make the best solution for the customer so if there is a customer that typically will run their packs through like tree shift or something like that then we probably will will take from or develop some some fast charge option because our batteries have no problem to charge much faster so i was looking on your website harold and i saw that there is what looks like something new in 2020 but i don't understand the european um designations of l6 and l7 can you explain that yeah so until now we have produced only one vehicle category that's the l6 so l6 is what we call in europa moped it's limited in speed to maximum 45 kilometers per hour or 27 miles per hour and it has also a power uh maximum power of 6 kilowatt so this year we also have started making a model that is l7 so that's what we call a motorcycle a light electric quadricycle uh and that's limited to 15 kilowatts so it's almost a double of the power we don't all use the full power range for our l7 now because we don't need it but we go for faster and we have more power so for some needs typical if you need more tran transit out to where you start delivering that could be a really good reason to have higher speed so you said that the smallest battery size was what five kilowatt hours and i mean a level two charging station at least here in the states puts out 6.6 kilowatts which means that if you could charge it at 6.6 which i'm not sure it would take less than an hour to charge so i mean that is the the amazing part of small battery cars is that they charge faster um and even the largest one at about 9.8 kilowatts is that right yeah 999.2 you're going to be charging that in no time right that is really really cool um to think about because normally when you're thinking about charging like a model s it takes a lot longer because it's you know 100 kilowatt hours this is you know five percent of that well you know what i want to talk about is something i saw on your website that i couldn't believe i saw a model s being charged by a paxter you guys it appears have an option where you can have what vehicle to grid on your on your vehicles tell me about this yeah you have typical handyman that is uh doing a lot of work around on a company or maybe on a farm and stuff like that they normally you need some power outlets so so we found out that uh it would be interesting to include this in the packager because we do see that most of our customers do use only 30 of the biggest battery actually so we have uh homologated a system where we have an inverter that are able to put out three kilowatts of power uh from a normal uh household stick and actually we are also allowed to do this in three inverters so we can do three phases so then you are actually able to output nine kilowatt of power so then you have a quite big inverter in the packster so yeah i have used it for different purposes like angle grinder or a drill or charging up drills and battery stuff when you have it back in the cargo so yeah it's uh it's fun i can think of so many businesses right now like first of all you're right a handyman like i'm i'm a building contractor so the idea of being able to pull up to a job site and quickly be able to just plug something in and do my work that's amazing but also you could start a business where you go around and like charge up vehicles that need to charge in the parking lot like you know they're getting stranded or something like this just that's so cool i love vehicle to grid i'm glad that's an option on your vehicles yeah it's it's uh cool um so i want to talk about a viewer who might be watching right now and is like okay well this is norway those guys are the kings of evs you know they're like got perfect charging infrastructure and a mindset but it wouldn't work in my country you know where whatever country that might be can you tell me are you guys just in norway right now or have you made this work in other countries well actually the the biggest part of our vehicles are outside norway so so our biggest uh fleet of vehicles are actually on new zealand so that's quite far away from norway uh but we have focused on europe because our obligation and approvals are our european so so it's easiest for us to to to go to european countries but we are in in almost all european countries now so yeah we are we are looking out from norway absolutely and now talk to me about your fleet size so you guys started what around 2 2013 2014 yeah so the project itself started in 2011 then we started the the packster was actually a project in a company called lloyds so lloyds was typical producing automotive parts for uh toyota and uh and cargo interiors for vans actually so they were working together with the norwegian post and they did typical rework of vehicles so that you took out the front seat and they placed a shelf for the postman so he could have post in instead of the passenger seat in in vehicles so the norwegian post contacted lloyds and asked them to could you try to rebuild or help us uh change on an electric atv that we could use for post delivery so that was how the process started and some clever guys here at lloyds they were saying oh this is will never work we need something better we need better ergonomics and we need to reach both sides and you have to go go easy out and in and how hard could it actually be to make an electric vehicle so that's how it started really and what what's your scale for the future so i mean so you've got 2 000 in your fleet now what what do you think is going to happen in the near future uh we hope for growth as everyone else but we realized that there is a lot of work to to to be a pioneer to have something that is new it's it's quite a lot of work to actually prove that we are worthy to do this and also we have realized to to build up the service department is really important so in norway and in in germany where we have many pastors we have our own service fleet with own cars running around and using service helping out if if people are typically making making a puncture or crashing so because our customers need all their vehicles to be 24 7 operational so we hope for the the production line we have here is really made for four vehicles per day so right now we are producing a little bit less i think we output about six to seven vehicles each week now so we have been producing all along this uh in in 2020 so we're happy about that but but we need to we want to increase but still we look at ourselves as a niche producer so we are not going for a million vehicles i think for for uh for the next year but for sure we hope to to increase up and then it will be quite good for us if we were able to go up to 2000 vehicles or something like that first and yeah keep increasing i hope and so as we look at 2020 and the global pandemic and the global lockdowns and everything like that i would have to imagine that parcel delivery and food delivery and grocery delivery has been much more popular than in years past just out of necessity abs absolutely and yeah there have been some crazy months actually in many ways for sure but we hear about our customers that in some routes experience 400 increase you know and then you have quite a demanding task to to be able to deliver all this package packages and and also in norway in norway like food delivery have not been that big but the latest uh months have uh really exploded you know so and and typical medicines and stuff like that is it's it's really good business these days so yeah we have a lot of contacts from new customers that are interested in our product because they see that if you want to deliver packages fast in a town then there is probably no better vehicle than the paxtor so we have a lot of new uh possibilities now but on the other hand i think many companies are a little bit afraid of investing these days because it's uh yeah it's they are not sure what will go back to normal and what will not so yeah we also do feel a little bit uncertainty for for some of the future another thing that i want to talk about is this uh well it kind of relates to the global lockdowns is in um seattle for example and lots of other cities around the us and i'm not sure about europe they've actually closed down streets to uh to through traffic to cars and that allowed pedestrians to kind of uh roam those particular streets that way they could get outside and that kind of changed the way we think about streets because for the longest time all streets were designed for automobiles we need to drive our giant cars down here i'm wondering if as this idea becomes more popular because i think it will people are going to look at these streets and be like wow this is you know these streets that are permanently closed to cars but i can live on them and still get all all of my necessities those are going to be very uh sought after sought after houses because uh just for the benefit that you can walk outside walk across the street without looking both ways and i think that the paxter fits in perfectly to this type of street where you don't want big loud delivery vans roaming up and down the streets because this is where we're going to have pedestrians and the paxter seems like a perfect fit for this type of new thing that might be emerging yeah absolutely i agree and what we see in typical the big cities in in europe is that uh even before the pandemic uh thing that has happened now we see that the city center they want to make it like more green more focus on people closing down streets for for driving is really typical in in the european towns i think um i agree baxter is perfect here now actually normally i do a really interesting project together with bring it's a big parcel company here in norway and the wrong cells they are they are doing delivery of parcels and when they deliver parcel they take with them waste that going back to recycle they're taking goods both ways in an efficient way and together with them we have tried something we called geofence so over paxter it has a on board on-board packster connect system and it's recognized where it is so then it's a allowed to go into pedestrian areas but then the maximum speed is lowered down to six kilometers per hour that's what we've been talking about oh my gosh that's perfect i love to fear that we're not crazy that this could work yeah um the norwegian road authority have always already acknowledged this and this test was actually about to start in march uh into oslo where they are going and we also do a research study around this to to to check how people react to this to have pastors into these pedestrian streets and one of the reason that we are allowed to do this is because on paxter we are looking into uh the future and for sure in the future we will also see some autonomous uh drones or pods that are running around in in streets but on from oversight in pakistan we we say that if we going to have drones that should go on road it has to be road legal you know but if it should go on pedestrian areas and it has to do if if you should have a pod that is delivering to you locally uh then it needs to be another category so first we need to have this working with a human because if not i don't think people will accept to have this without a human so so actually this is a beginning of like testing how big should a vehicle be that should be delivering autonomous as well how are people in in norway and the other cities where paxter is how are they um interacting with paxters how are they are they uh timid about them driving down the street i mean how do they interact actually people are really enthusiastic when they see a baxter and i have a funny story about it because when we started in london no one had seen the paxtor in london before and we shipped over 10 packsters at caxton or or yeah in in centre of london and when the post drivers started to go around they were stopped all the time because people want to talk to them because oh what kind of vehicle is this is it electric how big is the battery so so actually they ended up they had to make a flyer so so the driver had a flyer he could lead over because he the the productivity was falling because they were talking to all these people all the time so it was uh yeah it's uh i i think uh i could say that uh almost everyone uh liked the paxtor around in town yeah and i think it has a lot to do with the design it's a very friendly looking vehicle it's not your typical truck that's just very utilitarian looking it's it's nice and small and and the the person sitting in it is going to be just about at eye level so it's very nice to you have that human connection um where people are just like oh this is like it's more human than it is vehicle and we're not used to that normally it's a giant truck and you don't get to see the person inside as much and i just want to talk about idling uh you know most delivery vans have to idle so they pull up park and then the engine right you know and all the emissions and stuff a paxtor obviously it's electric it's not idling and so i've got to imagine that people aren't annoyed by them yeah that that's fully true and you know we have some customers that that delivery really early in morning they are delivering newspaper you know that the newspaper should be in your box before seven um each morning so they are typically starting their work at uh maybe two or three at night and working through the night and you can imagine the difference by having a pastor going up to you outside your door on delivery and newspaper instead of a typical diesel car people really like to not have the noise and i agree with you that the fact that we don't have any doors makes it really open so you you feel you are more connected to the driver you see the driver easily on and the complete front of the pack street is is a clear glass so so you see everything so i think it's uh yeah it has a friendly look and also we in the early stages we we actually did a lot of good work on the design and we had the norwegian designer board he is uh uh yeah he's yes working with koenigsegg with an also big comparison maybe but uh but he's really clever at the design and we actually get some design prices on on the design of the packster as well so yeah i think it's uh a good look and speaking of your factory there so you're producing you know about one a day it sounds like or more um are you production limited or are you demand limited uh demand limited yeah so we are we are able to we can now put four each day on on this uh production line but also we need to we try to keep our uh stock of people quite stable so we try to have a steady flow on the on the line so that's really important we have earlier had some problems with that we have tried to do really high deliveries in in some months and then low in other months but it's hard for for the people we want stable uh stock of workers so well let's help with that yeah i mean you know if you're watching this right now and you're in europe and you run any kind of business small or large well i'm just thinking about local governments i mean if you're a city and and this is a tool that can go in your in your tool belt of either i mean because let's think about like parks and thinking about um trash cans in parks i remember we were in uh we were in london about a year ago and yeah that you have these giant trucks driving around these beautiful pristine quiet parks these diesel trucks you're just like why why do you need this yeah i mean if people are interested how can they find out more about paxter actually i will recommend the website just go into the website and if they want to order one it's really simple just send a mail and say you want it and you will have it delivered on door and so are you delivering to the united states at all no say yes say yes say yes no unfortunately not so um we don't do that today so but for sure everything is possible so so i'm interesting to take that um discussion with someone that is interested i think so well let me just ask you so if enough of us americans go on the website and and how how can we let let you know that we're interested maybe the biggest uh thing when you're going to to the states is that we need to go through all the regulations for your area and then do the homologation over to to be able to sell it there so i think that's maybe a biggest step so but but yeah we have not looked too much into it so so uh challenges on that so all right you heard the challenge folks let's email paxter let's fill up that email box yeah let's let them know that we want it over here get some demand yeah yeah and i agree with you i think that every government and all all cities that want to go green they need a packster for sure we we sell too many cities for park and control you know this parking uh people are going around and check weakest it's really good for that uh and for handymans in in the government or cities and yeah it's it's uh every city that they want to go green should have a pack straw i think i love it well thank you so much for taking the time today earl to tell us all about paxter i'm really intrigued i want to learn more i want people out there to go find out about it because yeah again i didn't know about it till you reached out and told us about it and we cover this stuff so thank you for doing that yes i'm happy to be able to be on your show so and if you go to norway or or europe any time you're for sure welcome here and try some paxters and have some fun together so so just tell me we're gonna take you up on that that's awesome thank you so much now you know

Channel: Disruptive Investing

Views: 7,293

Rating: 4.9872613 out of 5

Keywords: disruptive, investing, stock market, stocks, stock exchange, new york, usa, companies, startup, invest, what to invest in, future, technologies, tech, company, disruptive investing, club, top, investments, money, save, bank, growth, exponential, science, sustainability

Id: hNIAhUMN7gE

Length: 34min 11sec (2051 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 25 2021