PACCAR Inc (NASDAQ:PCAR) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Rob Wertheimer : Okay. Perfect. And then another 1 just on the battery investment. This has been the subject of some debate as your future trucks will presumably have higher content with batteries and autonomy and other things, but just sticking with the batteries for the moment. And some question as to whether those batteries would be commodity provided by somebody else or more individually designed for your trucks by you. And this seems to lean in the latter direction. I wonder if you could comment on the proprietary nature of it, the chemistry and what you expect on this investment and the timing of when those trucks might actually start to roll in numbers to market. I’ll stop there.

Preston Feight: Yes. There were a lot of questions in there, but let me kind of give you an overview and come back into it if you want to. So what we see is, as we move forward, there’s going to be a host of technologies employed for how we use motor power. I think clean diesel is going to be part of it. We obviously think that batteries are going to be part of it as we did this joint venture into proprietary battery cells. And we think that hydrogen can play a role as well, whether that’s internal combustion or it could be through fuel cells. But in the case of batteries, when you create a battery electric vehicle, the cost of the vehicle is highly impacted and influenced by the cost of the battery. So having it be more vertically integrated is an advantage, we think, for our customers and gives us an ability to control both the energy in the battery as well as the battery energy management system to the vehicle.

So we felt like getting involved in that space was important, and we think that will be a few years before it develops. Obviously, we don’t have our regulatory approvals yet. And so we’ll give a little bit of caution that we need those approvals for forward-looking, but that feels like it’s going in a good direction. And then as I think about the kinds of chemistry you asked about the technology we’ve chosen is LFP, lithium-iron-phosphate or some derivative of that that we might use. And the benefit of that is it’s a safer battery chemistry. It doesn’t rely on rare earth minerals. It’s more durable, it’s faster to charge, and it has a better life capability. So — and a better cost structure. So all of those factors are the reason we chose that technology and just huge credit to our technology teams who have thought this through for the last several years as they made this decision and got us going on this great path.

Operator: Our next question is from David Raso from Evercore ISI.

David Raso : The comments earlier about the first quarter of ’24 are starting to fill up quickly. Can you give us some insight on how the pricing is for those first quarter deliveries? And then maybe a sense of the cadence year-over-year that you expect the U.S./Canada down 8% to play out for the industry?

Preston Feight: Well, I think if you think about pricing, what we did is we shared with you where our vision is best, David, and that’s at the fourth quarter. So that’s where we gave you a gross margin expectation of around 19%. And as I said, it’s filling in quickly. But I think that the key we’ve been focusing on is making sure that customers do realize the value of the products, they are. That factors into the pricing, obviously. And I’ll say it’s a competitive world out there. So I think it’s — look forward to having the conversation with you on pricing and what’s going on in the marketplace as we get into the earnings in the first quarter there. So that’s kind of where that sits. From a secondary question of cadence, I think we’re seeing, as I said, the first quarter looks pretty good.