Workhorse Group Inc. (NASDAQ:WKHS) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Rick Dauch: We saw the announcement that they awarded some, I think, their Class 2 or Class 3 transit vehicles to Ford. So, congratulations Ford Motor Company, well learned. We do think there’s opportunity at some point with us with the U.S. Postal Service and other government agencies for our Class 5, Class 6 trucks and potentially for our drones. That’s all we’ll say for now.

Mike Shlisky: Okay. Maybe last one for me. The Aero demos that we’ve talked about here, it’s hard help in the pictures. So, with those drones, those Aero products actually taking off and landing on a workhorse truck, — or is that the next level of kind of public demo? And is there a large difficulty leaf from the old demos to any moving truck demos to make that happen?

Rick Dauch: Great question. Those were not off the truck. The customer — the first customer, we did the demo for where we did the 50 deliveries across sex different addresses. They were done from ground-based locations. At the request of that customer, they want to prove out the concept of being able to deliver from a warehouse or a fixed location to multiple individual or business locations first. We did that test, and we passed that test. The first month I was here, I went down to that customer. They gave me a three-page list with about 25 specifications to include, you have to have a parachute, you have to be able to deliver off a tether. You have to be able to pull the package back up in cases an issue with it. You’ve got to handle a certain range, you got to hit a certain payload.

We’ve met every single one of their specifications. It took us almost 18 months to get there. Hell, of a lot of work. We doubled our engineering team. We tripled our software team. We tripled our flight operations team. We have countless hours now, and we’re pretty confident. The customer asked us to prioritize the fixed location delivery first and then come back to the vehicle delivery. And we have only tested that flight off the old engines, which were no longer — we have some in service, but we’re not building any more of those. And we’re going to have to use — we got to modify a W56 and a W750 the tops at some point to do that, but that wasn’t our priority in 2022 or 2023. We’ll probably get to that sometime in ’24.

Operator: Thank you. We have reached the end of the question-and-answer session. With that, I would like to bring the call to a close. We do appreciate your participation. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Enjoy the rest of your day.