Diesel-electric innovation in a 1969 KW: Chace Barber on 'Voice of GO(r)D' podcast

We’ve got a bit of a special edition of Overdrive Radio for you this week. There’s a guest host of sorts, who’s going to walk us through a conversation with Chace Barber, cofounder of Edison Motors. If Barber's name sounds familiar, you may have read Overdrive Executive Editor Alex Lockie’s reporting of some of what Barber’s been doing with a diesel-electric concept that’s similar to the way locomotive work. The system features effectively an on-board diesel generator serving only to charge in this case a lithium ion battery powering an electric motor capable of monster loads of both horsepower and torque. In the case of Barber and company's prototype, that's all inside a beautiful and beautifully tough old 1969 Kenworth they call, simply, Old Blue.

Log hauler, writer, and podcaster Gord Magill recently drew out more of Chace Barber’s company’s origin story and plenty about just where his electric-drive trucks stand to be best applied in his Voice of GO(R)D podcast.

Gord’s roots, like Chache Barber’s, are in Canada, though Magill now calls the United States home, as our own "Long Haul Paul" Marhoefer wrote in his Faces of the Road series talk with Magill: https://www.overdriveonline.com/overdrive-extra/article/15289327/faces-of-the-road-gord-magill

As noted, Barber’s Edison Motors has been making a name for itself by taking advantage of big strides in battery technology to repurpose something of an old general concept for new application, with big potential. It’s not exactly a hybrid diesel-electric in the manner of much of the hybrid technology in cars today, as he told Magill, and over-the-road trucking benefits are decidedly less than more intense applications like log hauling. Yet OTR could benefit in form of fuel savings to the tune of a potential 5-10 percent or more.

There’s some perhaps non-obvious benefits, too -- think things that might fall into the "weird government" classification Magill mentions in the podcast (electric-drive trucks ELD/road tax-exempt?) -- spelled out the podcast.

Find the full two-hour conversation in the Voice of GO(R)D podcast via this link to Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/01IBVRZ1pokC94ZXvguJfR

Here on Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/show/voice-of-go-r-d/episode/old-trucks-new-tech-how-a-b-c-logger-is-making-electric-trucks-less-cringe-211086897

Here on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/voice-of-go-r-d/id1663362014

Magill's writing, featured elsewhere in outlets like Newsweek among many others, is also accessible via his Substack page at this link: https://autonomoustruckers.substack.com/

Alex Lockie's reporting on Barber and his Edison Motors cofounder Eric Little: https://www.overdriveonline.com/business/article/15301066/loghauling-truckings-toughest-niche