XL Fleet – Fireside Chat with Pivotal Investment Corp. II and XL Fleet Conference Call, October 26, 2020
A big differentiator for us, we’re on the road with major customers and lots of products. Everything you see here, everything from vans, pickups, delivery vehicles, shuttle buses, those are real products, everything with an XL badge, the Class A refuse and Class A tractor are under development for 2022 timeframe.
When we look at the opportunity here, we really look at the new vehicle sales, as well as the energy usage of the commercial fleet, as well as any charging infrastructures, the total market we’re going after. And that globally is over a trillion dollars per year. Those industries take a long time to move. You’re really talking about the intersection of the oil industry, the automotive industry and the grid. Each are massive in their own right, but they take time to move and customers are demanding solutions today. We have a broad range of products right now with those customers. Over 200 customers with over 3,000 systems on the road, well over 130 miles with customers. To put that in perspective, Tesla had about a thousand units deployed and about 4 million customer miles when they went public and that was on the Lotus Elise platform, which they were selling as the Roadster.
So we’re out there with real customers and then we’ve proven ourselves. We’ve been through hurricanes and (inaudible) in some of the leading fleets, and that’s critical for an industry where the reliability is number one. I mentioned cost-effective earlier. Our price point for our hybrid is in the $12,000 to $15,000 range. Our plug-in hybrid is in the $25,000 range. Most solutions in this industry are well north of $30,000, as high as $100,000 or more in many cases; especially if you go all-electric, you can be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars per unit.
The approach we take and to get the product to market is really about leveraging the existing production capacity, how these vehicles are already getting built, which we’ll get into in a little bit. That’s a two-stage manufacturing process and our existing partners already produce over 100,000 units per year. Our production capacity is about 6,000 units per year right now, but that can scale extremely rapidly, which Dimitri will get into. But it’s on the order of about $500,000 for us to get up to 10,000 units and up to 100,000 units per year with a $5 million investment in 18 months; whereas an existing—trying to build an entire factory or a vehicle from the ground up you’re talking about hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars.
The final point here is the long-term opportunity around electrification as a service. That’s where you’re wrapping up the powertrain, the vehicle, the charging infrastructure, the energy supply and making it as easy as possible for the end customer to electrify. So you offer that by the month and by the mile. You take all that complexity off the table and that’s a great way to scale a business. That’s one of the things that drove the expansion of solar power and we see that happening in fleet electrification and there are a massive amount of very large infrastructure investors that want to fund this. So there’s a great opportunity for XL to continue leading and bringing those types of solutions to market.
A quick point on the all-electric landscape. We do have all-electric products in development. We see it as inevitable. We do see all EVs working in certain segments of the market and it’s going to take a multi-decade kind of timeframe before EVs have a big enough—a very large penetration in the industry. And this is from Bloomberg New Energy Finance, by 2040, about 10% of heavy-duty, 20% medium and just under 40% of the light commercial vehicles on the road, and at that time will be EVs, which means that the majority will not. So it’s a huge opportunity to get hybrid and plug-in hybrid products out into the market and where the drive cycles are extremely demanding and are not going to be cost-effective for EVs for sometimes, but XL can then bring in all-electric solutions into those segments where the economics make sense at the right time.
So, leveraging the supply chain, the production, the service, the customer base, the data and everything we’re doing with our hybrid and plug-in hybrid offering to get into all-EV segments at the right time, again, where the economics make sense.
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