Rick Dauch: Yes, Chris, that’s a great question. I’ll tell you, first of all, I’m kind of known in the industry as an operational animal. So, I’m going to have to take my operational hat off pretty much in the next 30, 45 days and turn into a commercial animal and reengage with some of those big legacy potential customers, right? I didn’t feel comfortable until we had hard physical products to take out the customers. Showing somebody something on a PowerPoint is one thing, actually have to drive the vehicles and see how they work is another thing. And I think our vehicles will sell themselves once we get them in the hands of customers. We have at least five large commercial, either last-mile delivery or work truck customers who ask specifically for a W56 demo.
They want to be able to test them themselves with their team for two to four weeks. So as part of our pilot and program builds, we’re building some commercial demos that sent out. And each one of our field sales team will have a family of either W750, W4 CC, W56 take around the different regional customers. On the drone side, out of our one of our successful demonstrations that customers ask for two of our drones to be tested for 30 to 60 days at their own test facilities somewhere here in North America. So, I think we’re at a point now after 18 months of super hard work to actually have viable products that are not only technically viable, safe, durable, but also commercially be viable in terms of the way we can build them at a cost and sell them at a price and make money.
That wasn’t the fact when we got here back in 2021.
Chris Souther: Sure. Yes. No, that all makes sense. Great. And maybe just you talked about adding stable installs into another region. Is this about just demonstrating closer to potential customers, going through all the customer incentive processes to help hold customer hands through those processes? Or how many more of these do you think you’ll be setting up essentially is kind of what I’m getting at to?
Rick Dauch: Good question. So, we chose to do the first one here in Ohio. It’s close to our technical team. It’s close to our factory and we can get there as leadership team and is less than literally 15 or 20 miles away. We got buy-in from FedEx, both here regionally and back in Memphis to try it. We built the — we secured facility, leased it. We’ve transitioned it. We put the charging stations in. We’re almost done buttoning up the interior, where we can put the lifts in that go work and service trucks. We have learned a lot, I’ll say, sometimes painful in terms of new transmissions, repairing tires in the snow, having to change the engine, what it takes to maintain and keep qualified drivers and have safe drivers on the road.
So here in Ohio, we’re blessed with the Ohio River and low-cost electricity, but we’re not blessed with incentives from the state of Ohio. We’ve done some work as a commercial team. We spent a couple of days in some trading sessions to make sure we understand the car rules in California and all the different incentives across the 17 or 18 states. And so, Stan March is leading that effort for us, and he’s buttoning down. It looks like we’re going to focus on one of two regions, one in the West Coast or one in the East Coast, where there’s significant commercial incentives up to $100,000 per vehicle in some states, $60,000 in others for our vehicles, and we’ll choose one of those selections. We’re working with FedEx to identify the best location, and we’ll probably have a second operation up and running this year.
