Accordion

• Transcript

  James Kotecki (00:00): 

  Hey, now's your chance to register for CES 2025. It's in fabulous Las Vegas, January 7th through 10th. At CES 2025, the greatest minds in business, the most powerful brands, and the most impactful technology are all converging in one place. What are you waiting for? Dive into the most powerful tech event in the world, where what ifs turn into what is, and that is very sophisticated wordplay. So visit ces.tech to learn more and register today. 

  (00:39): 

  This is CES Tech Talk. I'm James Kotecki, exploring the trends shaping the world's most powerful tech event, CES 2025 in Las Vegas, January 7th through 10th. Electric autonomous vehicles, will they take over your town? Will they save the planet? Will your kid even need a driver's license? Are they totally over-hyped or are some of the most exciting vehicle advancements happening with the industrial and military vehicles we may not see every day? Here to give us the latest on industrial strength vehicle tech is Jay Iyengar, executive vice president and the chief technology and strategic sourcing officer at Oshkosh. And do not say B'gosh, because we're talking about the tech company that supports defense, emergency response, aviation ground support vehicles and more, and not the company that makes the little overalls. Jay, I imagine you might get that confusion sometimes. Hopefully I've cleared things up and we're ready to talk vehicle tech, welcome to the show. 

  Jay Iyengar (01:42): 

  Thank you so much. That was a great intro. Thank you. 

  James Kotecki (01:45): 

  I want to start with a specific example to kind of ground us in the reality of what you are building at Oshkosh. I understand you have done or are doing work for the US Postal Service and that might be a good example of something people see roaming around their streets. Tell us about what you're doing there and what the timeline is for people interacting with it. 

  Jay Iyengar (02:02): 

  Yes. So maybe I'll just take about a minute and give you the bigger purpose of who Oshkosh is and then the USPS vehicle makes a lot of sense from that context. 

  James Kotecki (02:14): 

  Sure. 

  Jay Iyengar (02:15): 

  So we design purpose-built vehicles for what we call as everyday heroes. Those who have the most difficult jobs, the end markets we serve, the heroes we serve are the ones, five out of those 10 most difficult jobs, we have products to serve that particular segment. So in that context, the mail carriers have very difficult jobs. They are our everyday heroes. Approximately, there's about 300,000 mail carriers responsible for delivering mail around the country. It's the physical demand, the weather conditions, the safety. An average, they do about between 500 to 700 mail drops a day. The vehicles that they drive today are built in the 1980s and with very little technology, the vehicles are not comfortable. 

  (03:14): 

  There's no air conditioning and very outdated by any modern standards, and they spend 8 to 10 hours a day in the vehicle, six days a week, it's their office. So what Oshkosh, what we've done is our purpose-built vehicle, designed with their work in mind, the vehicle access, the ergonomics inside the vehicle, the visibility, the cabin comfort, and also the cargo carrying capacity. It's twice the cargo carrying capacity of today's vehicle. It can carry packages in addition to the regular mail that it usually delivers. So it really enhances the productivities of what they can do. 

  (04:03): 

  So if the vehicle has all of the advanced driver assistance safety systems like you do in a modern-day passenger vehicle, cross traffic alert, forward collision warning, pedestrian warning, automatic emergency braking, park assist, 360 camera, any technology that you think of in terms of safety related items are on the vehicle. In addition, the vehicle is connected for full connectivity for the fleet managers to monitor the vehicle performance, proactively schedule maintenance, et cetera. Additionally, the vehicle comes in combustion engine as well as full electric vehicle. So we've designed the vehicle to make sure it has a full capability for them to do their entire daily mission. So- 

  James Kotecki (04:54): 

  Is that within the same vehicle or is that you can get a model that is either electric or combustion? 

  Jay Iyengar (05:00): 

  There's an EV version of the vehicle as well as the combustion version of the vehicle. 

  James Kotecki (05:03): 

  Okay. 

  Jay Iyengar (05:05): 

  So it's the same model but two different powertrains, and they're both built in the same manufacturing plant in Spartanburg, Tennessee. And so if you just think of what this vehicle does for the operator, it just makes the mail carriers life a lot easier. They can be more productive and safer. And also our customer, USPS, that has to manage and maintain these vehicles for them as well in terms of overall maintenance, their ability to maintain, their ability to monitor the vehicle performance. So it's a very exciting product. And not to mention these vehicles come in your neighborhood every day. So having a silent EV vehicle that drives in your neighborhood is a huge benefit for obviously the community overall. So it's exciting from a multidimensional perspective. 

  James Kotecki (05:56): 

  And I imagine the fact that literally the act of delivering mail to a mailbox requires the vehicle to kind of be idling out in a specific location for different set periods of time. It's probably nice just from a pollution, air quality perspective, that's an EV as well. 

  Jay Iyengar (06:11): 

  Yeah, the EV has, as I think about this EV, this is a perfect application for an EV vehicle. Because it follows the same route every day and it goes back to a depot, same location every night. And this frequent start stops are ideal for an EV vehicle because of regenerative braking technology. While it is, when you do frequent start stop, it can charge the battery. So if there is one application that is perfectly suited for EV, this vehicle is it. 

  James Kotecki (06:49): 

  And I imagine going the same route every day is important from maybe from a predictability perspective. So there's no range anxiety of wondering, "Oh, do I have what I need for the day?" I mean, if you have the combustion one, if you need to go longer distances that's available, but you know exactly how many miles you're going to be driving every day with that vehicle. So you know exactly if you have the battery power to do it. 

  Jay Iyengar (07:08): 

  Absolutely. And also overall fleet deployments, we already replaced these EV vehicles versus combustion engines. And also we've designed the vehicle to make sure that we cover, there's no question of range anxiety. The concept of range anxiety doesn't exist in these applications we're talking about, and it has plenty of range for it to finish its daily mission. And since it gets back to the depot every night and it's chargeable, easy, infrastructure challenges won't be there because it goes back in the same location every night. So in some ways it's actually a much better application for an EV than a passenger vehicle, if that makes sense. 

  James Kotecki (07:52): 

  It does. And what I think, this is an audio medium, but I would like to try to describe the vehicle a little bit to people just to get a visual of what this is going to look like rolling around their neighborhoods. I mean, if you look, you can look this up, pictures online, you can see it's got the traditional post office kind of, I believe it's called the livery, right? When you design the vehicle design, the paint job, the logo, it looks like a post office vehicle except the shape of it is quite different. Can you kind of describe what the biggest differences are that people notice immediately? 

  Jay Iyengar (08:22): 

  Yeah. You are going to see that the vehicle size definitely is much larger. I mean, size wise, right? And you're going to see the windshield, a huge windshield with the full visibility so that the drivers can see what's in front of them. Not to mention there's technology that helps them, of course, with the forward collision warning. But you see the full visibility and then inside the vehicle, there's 360 camera. Today, even some of the modern passenger cars don't have a 360 camera. Full 360 camera, they can look all around the vehicle. And for them to get in and out of the vehicles in the back to get the packages out, they can actually walk in. 

  (09:03): 

  It's high enough they can actually walk in. They don't have to bend or any, there's no strain from that sense, and it's really designed with their job and the ergonomics in mind. So it's a very distinct looking. I absolutely love the appearance of the vehicle. People can Google and take a look at it. By the way, we are building vehicles in production. We begin to deploy them. So we will be in full production ramp rates by the beginning of next year. So you will see these very quickly in your neighborhoods. 

  James Kotecki (09:38): 

  And is the idea to replace the entire post office fleet with these by a certain point in time? 

  Jay Iyengar (09:44): 

  I think that's the intent of our customer, the USPS. Because today's vehicle, which is called LLV is, as I mentioned, is built in the 1980s and it's a big contrast when you get in that vehicle with no air conditioning and actually a physical fan that's mounted on the dash is the air conditioning in the vehicle. Right? 

  James Kotecki (10:08): 

  I didn't realize they didn't have AC. 

  Jay Iyengar (10:09): 

  Yes, yes. So the comfort associated with, and also I want to make another point, is the package deliveries. As you know, these days there's more and more and more packages are getting delivered, more so than the regular mail, maybe as much as the regular mail. So being able to carry packages really enhances the productivity for our customer of what they can do, how productive they can be, their profitability. So it's a game changer as far as I'm concerned, in terms of what this vehicle can do for that everyday heroes. 

  James Kotecki (10:46): 

  How have you thought about autonomy and self-driving aspects as you've designed and rolled out this vehicle? Obviously you're still going to need a person in the vehicle no matter what. This is not one of those use cases where you theoretically could have no driver. Because you need someone to actually physically put the packages in people's mailboxes, right? Even if it was full self-driving. But what's interesting to me about what you're building is it's not some flight of fancy kind of thought experiment. This is like a day-to-day thing. It's literally tires on the ground, everyone's neighborhood, there's a specific, we all understand this. So then how have you thought about the self-driving aspects for this actual real world example? 

  Jay Iyengar (11:20): 

  Yeah, so autonomy, when we think of autonomy, we think of moments of autonomy, not just a fully autonomous level five autonomy vehicle with nobody in it. That's the panacea that you see when it comes to the passenger vehicle side of it. Here, what's really important is the moments of autonomy. What do I mean by that? These vehicles aren't just transportation for our end customer. Let's take an example of a refuse collection vehicle where our refuse collectors go in and collect your garbage every day, recycling vehicles, recycles and garbage every day from the neighborhoods. So for them, the vehicle is an equipment, not just a transportation. So when they are in the vehicle, they are operating the joystick, deploying the arm to identify and to actually go grab your containers and to empty them. So just think of the tasks that they have to do. I can go on about every one of our end markets, very similar. 

  (12:30): 

  These are very complex machines and there's a lot of repetitive tasks like this that they have to do in every single place where they stop. We think of autonomy as clearly automating those difficult and repetitive operations is a huge productivity gain. We are working on technologies where your vehicle automatically recognizes a refuse container and it alerts the driver that, "Hey, there's a refuse container," automatically deploys the arm and grabs it and unloads the refuse. Or recycling, depending on what it's picking up. So automating those, take it to one level where it can actually help the driver stop in front of the refuse collection, in front of the garbage bin, so that every time they don't have to do drive and stop and drive and stop and drive and stop, that fatigue is taken care of. 

  (13:37): 

  This is what I mean by moments of autonomy. Another example, take our fire trucks. In some cases, a few of our fire trucks have two cabs, one at the back and one at the front because of the tight angles it has to turn and the steering associated with it, supported from the cab in the rear, that can be automated. So the way we think about autonomy is it's not always driverless autonomy, but it's also assisting moments of autonomy where we actually automate complex and repetitive tasks that they do. In defense sector, we are working, we have autonomous solutions where we call it a leader follower. A vehicle is driven by, if you just think of a caravan of vehicles driving through where you can have one lead vehicle and all the other vehicles just following autonomously so that you don't have to put people in the harm's way, a lot of people in the harm's way, looking at that. So autonomy has a tremendous amount of value proposition, more so than just a driverless vehicle. 

  James Kotecki (14:57): 

  And is it the case too where it's maybe more productive for your team to be focused on these moments of autonomy like the autonomous garbage pickup? I thought that was an interesting example, where the problem of self-driving and full self-driving and this idea, this dream that there's just going to be vehicles roaming around with no humans in them, and that's what we're aiming at, has proven I think very challenging in real world situations. And especially because if you're right, 999 times out of 1000, that 1000th time could be catastrophic. But is it the case where if you're automating something like garbage pickup, okay, that 1000th time, maybe you just miss the can a little bit and you can have them just manually scooch it over. So are you choosing moments of autonomy where it's just a more productive process for your team because even in the inevitable case where you get it wrong, just 0.01% of the time, that's kind of more okay? 

  Jay Iyengar (15:51): 

  Well, and also if you just think of, we talk about technology deployment. Just because you build an autonomous passenger car, it doesn't mean the customers will take on. So in our case, what we do is we understand customers pain points, what are the biggest challenges that they're dealing with? That's where we are bringing in technology. Technology for the sake of a technology doesn't do anything. It really, really needs to go after a customer solution. 

  James Kotecki (16:17): 

  Yeah. 

  Jay Iyengar (16:17): 

  And it's not so much because even if you are wrong 1%, it's not... It's more from the value. As an example, if I can save one hour of a person's daily job because it's more productive, that's a huge savings for our customers. So the overall total cost of ownership of what the technology can do is tremendous. And that makes the technology sticky, right? Customers really don't care as much about technology as to what it does for them. So we focus our conversation on what it is that we are doing to make their life easier. Oh, by the way, the technology is secondary. And we apply AI, it is all done with the purpose of addressing the most difficult challenges the customers have. 

  James Kotecki (17:10): 

  So it sounds like what you're saying, if we look out five, maybe 10 years, we're going to see way more advanced vehicles in many different contexts. They will probably still have humans in them doing some aspect of the job of what that vehicle is to do. I know it's difficult to look out this far, but if you look out 20, 30 years, in our lifetimes, do you see some of these emergency vehicles really having no people in them or is that even really the wrong way to look at this even under those long horizons? 

  Jay Iyengar (17:37): 

  For us, we're not looking to replace the humans, but what humans do would be different. An example would be instead of having two humans in a vehicle, two people in a refuse collection truck, there could be just one person and what they do would be very different than what they do today. I think that's what we're going after. I'll give you another example of, you mentioned the airport. We are the leaders in ground support equipment including jet bridges, and I don't know how many times you've waited for the jet bridge to dock, right? 

  James Kotecki (18:17): 

  It's a classic, yeah. 

  Jay Iyengar (18:17): 

  And it's interesting though. You can actually quantify the benefit. I was reading up something that every hour an aircraft is delayed. It's literally thousands of dollars. Depending on what it is, it could be as much as a hundred thousand dollars, it depends on what aircraft it is, of a true cost impact. And that jet bridge is difficult to operate and it requires a lot of training and it requires someone to be available, which is another issue with labor shortages. And that's a great example of something that autonomy can solve, where it can identify an aircraft, identify the door of an aircraft, maybe get the bridge a few inches away so that the operator can do the last inch of it physically, by manually. So that's another example of a huge productivity gain. If you take that 10 minutes away and make it three minutes to dock it, that's a huge benefit. 

  James Kotecki (19:20): 

  I'm really liking this idea of moments of autonomy and autonomy built into and augmenting human processes. I want to go back to the electrification issue. When you talked about the USPS vehicles, how it makes sense for them to be electric, maybe even more so than the use case for some passenger vehicles. You have a wide portfolio, as we're talking about, of different types of vehicles and equipment that you're making. Where are we in the tipping point of when it makes business sense for industry X to go electric? Are there certain industries where there's a clear use case today, just business dollars and cents, who cares about the planet, it just makes more sense to go electric from a monetary perspective? And are there other industries where maybe we're not quite there yet just because of what those vehicles have to do and how are we trending towards those tipping points in different areas With electrification? 

  Jay Iyengar (20:12): 

  Electrification is one of our main themes. I mean, clearly it's great for the planet, we get it. Electrification certainly because, I gave an example of a USPS truck stopping in every household. Same thing with our refuse collection. For those cases where you don't need to worry about the range, if you design it appropriately to do a daily mission, electrification makes perfect sense. Again, as the vehicles go back to the same place every night, charging is not an issue. Makes perfect sense. So we are launching a Volterra ZSL electric vehicle. It's launching now. You're going to see it with our customer Republic Services very soon. Fully electric vehicle. Even in the fire truck space, there is a lot of carbon emissions. In this case, the emissions where the vehicles are idling inside a fire station. 

  (21:12): 

  All of those things are avoided by having a full EV vehicle. We even have an EV in terms of airport fire trucks and the low end torque that you get from having a full EV and electric motor, you can get to the aircraft much faster than you could do with the combustion engine. There's a lot of benefits as we talked about sustainability and everything else, but we talk about total cost of ownership. When we have a conversation with the customer, we talk about the value proposition of total cost of ownership. 

  (21:44): 

  You can get rid of hydraulics in so many cases where you don't need, even in our access equipment where people working at height, scissor lifts, et cetera, a full electric vehicle can be deployed inside a hospital. You don't have to, in clean rooms, you don't have to worry about a hydraulic fluid leak. So there is many concrete benefits. What we do is we talk about total cost of ownership conversation with our customers. We take a look at their ability to apply the vehicle, the maintenance costs, the labor shortage and the training of the new people that come into the workforce, their ability to manage the fleets, the speed of operation. In fact, we were just doing a technology demonstration where when you deploy an arm, how quickly it can be done with an electric actuation versus a hydraulic actuation. 

  (22:44): 

  So we quantify all these things. Our conversation's all about TCO. And the TCO, that's what the customers like and that's what makes the technology sticky. 

  James Kotecki (22:55): 

  I suppose the question around the charging infrastructure that we have when we're talking about personal vehicles and are there enough chargers and can people charge their vehicles when they want to on road trips and things like that. Is that not as much of a factor here? Because presumably in most of the cases we're talking about, there'd be kind of charging base stations built into the home office of wherever these vehicles go back to every night, the post office, at the airport, at the fire station. And so is the infrastructure conversation important in your world? 

  Jay Iyengar (23:27): 

  It is not a concern as it is that you see in your passenger vehicles, because of the reasons you just mentioned. These vehicles do go back to the same place. And as we are deploying these vehicles, by the way, we'll have the largest EV fleet in the country with the USPS. 

  James Kotecki (23:45): 

  Sure. 

  Jay Iyengar (23:45): 

  And our customers always plan working with us on the charging and where the vehicles go back to and putting together charging infrastructure. We want to make sure that our vehicles are compatible with it, we work very closely with them. In some of our construction applications, we make sure that there's mobile charging. Many times in off-road construction applications, there may or may not be a charging infrastructure available. And those are remote cases, but we do want to make sure there's a mobile charging as a part of what we offer in terms of a solution. But by far the conversation around what you see in passenger cars around range anxiety is not there. All we want to make sure is the vehicles can meet the entire day mission that it's designed for. 

  James Kotecki (24:39): 

  Yes. When we talk about passenger vehicles on that side of the world, are there ways that the technology that you're building and the things that you're doing are able to inspire, lift up, augment developments that are going on in that sector? Not necessarily maybe directly, but just by the virtue of the fact that you're doing it now, will there be an uplift to the consumer side because of what you're doing on the industrial side? 

  Jay Iyengar (25:09): 

  There's always technology transfer between the consumer side and the industrial side, right? Our applications are pretty harsh applications, so we are working on more rugged sensing technologies, which may have an application in the passenger car side. Clearly the connectivity piece and overall fleet management that we are focused on would be an application for a rented car fleet, as an example, could be part of it. And we do exchange battery technology between what we do and what happens in the passenger car market. So there's probably, and clearly skill sets, right? Of skills that developed are probably going to be needed across both industries. So there are common points of intersection. By the way, I grew up in the automotive industry, so I do have a good background on the auto industry. Spent a number of years early in my career in the auto industry. So there's always intersection of technologies between various industries, but I think this moments of autonomy is going to be, I think, equally applicable to when it comes to passenger cars. And you see some of that already today. 

  James Kotecki (26:32): 

  That's a great point. I want to make sure we talk about the strategic sourcing and the supply chain part of your work and your title. You're not only the chief technology officer, you're also the chief strategic sourcing officer, and I'm sure that's on purpose. Obviously as you're building all of this technology, the supply chain matters and supply chain issues were something that every single person thought about during the pandemic. And now maybe that's receded in many of our minds, certainly not yours. So can you give us a snapshot? What are the challenges and opportunities with supply chain now when it comes to your ability to build the near term future of your industry? 

  Jay Iyengar (27:09): 

  Yeah, obviously supply chain was really, really popular in every other conversation during pandemic, and we are past some of that of course. But still, we are still working on, we have a lot of backlog on existing vehicle demands. We make sure we can manufacture at the rates we need and supply chain can catch up. There's an effort going on there in our conventional vehicles. But the strategic sourcing is really exciting. As you said, in many cases it is, anybody can put a vehicle together with a new technology, but doing that at scale and making sure it's cost-effective, and that is where the challenge comes into. And it's really critical that the sourcing has been thought about very early on. And it's not that you traditionally write a spec and send it out and get multiple quotes and go through your normal process. 

  (28:05): 

  That does not work anymore, especially when you're talking about new technologies and there's always better mousetraps that are out there. We need to make sure we are actually plugged into all of those. That was one. And critical suppliers, we need to make sure we, I call them supplier partners. They aren't just traditional suppliers. We want to make sure that we actually have the right level of partnerships and core development as needed. In many cases, the technology is jointly developed because it's not mature at the supply base. We need to work together with our suppliers to make sure we apply the technology properly on the vehicle. 

  (28:42): 

  So it's a much more complex sourcing process, and it's more strategic than a traditional sourcing process. And I use the term our innovation ecosystem and all of these supplier partners are a part of our innovation ecosystem. We do technology roadmap exchanges. We know what they're working on. They're very good at working on certain things. And what we need to do is make sure we leverage their strength to what's needed for Oshkosh vehicles and for our customers. So to me, that's what strategic sourcing is all about. 

  James Kotecki (29:18): 

  Understanding that you're all about not just nifty proofs of concept, but actually doing this stuff at scale in the real world. With that in mind though, is there a technology demonstration or something that you're specifically looking forward to that makes you feel especially excited or that's made you say, "Wow," when it comes to vehicle tech? 

  Jay Iyengar (29:44): 

  Oh, the list can go on and on in terms of what autonomy and AI can do in our applications though. You're going to see some of that at CES and very excited about, we can show the art of the possible, right? The example is we have access equipment, vehicles that work at height, job sites, construction job sites. The vehicles can coordinate with each other. One vehicle can lift something, the other vehicle can do automatic welding. So automating our overall job site is an example. I described the scenario of a fully autonomous, very high degree of moments of autonomy on the refuse collection. The vehicle knows that this is the house, it knows there's the garbage can. It automatically stops or helps the driver stop the vehicle, grabs it. We're also working on technology where you can identify what's in the waste stream. Many times people mix up recycles and non-recyclables altogether, and many times there are things like, people throw away things they shouldn't throw away. 

  (30:56): 

  And you see there is causes of fire in some cases in the refuse stream. So being able to identify and prevent all of those technologies. Just in the airport segment, I talked about autonomous jet dock where the bridge can autonomously dock to the vehicle. We also have de-icing equipment right? Today in de-icing, I'm sure you've traveled in the winter. You see how much they spray all over. So all of them can be, it's a sustainability issue, it's a cost issue. And applying technology to it, you can actually surgically apply the de-icing fluid exactly the way it's needed, ensure that the de-icing has been effective. So I mean, the opportunities of what we can do with technology, with our applications is super exciting and a lot more to come. 

  James Kotecki (31:59): 

  And that reminds me of the precision weed spraying technology that I think people like John Deere are deploying in the field in agricultural settings. It sounds like something similar for de-icing. That's pretty cool. And I know that this is going to be a big milestone show for Oshkosh at CES 2025. You're talking about a lot of cool things. So are we going to see vehicles and equipment and big cool stuff on the show floor there at your section at CES? 

  Jay Iyengar (32:23): 

  You are going to see our vehicles, equipment. You're also going to see the vision of the future we have, right? It isn't just today's technology and what we could do. You're going to see the vision of the future. 

  James Kotecki (32:34): 

  Yes. 

  Jay Iyengar (32:35): 

  I personally love the CES theme of human security for all. And in our minds, I can relate to it because in my mind, everyday heroes provide the human security for all. 

  (32:48): 

  And we say technology for everyday heroes, right? That's what we talk about. And you are going to see a vision of a neighborhood of the future, you're going to see an airport scene of the future. You're going to see a construction site of the future with connected vehicles. You're going to see, by the way, we are also into racing with the Pratt Miller. So racing technologies that actually thread across between what you could do on racing technologies in terms of sensing and data analytics that applied to across all the other applications. You're going to see that as well. So really looking forward to the CES Show in 2025. 

  James Kotecki (33:28): 

  Well, Jay, we so appreciate you sharing your vision of the future with us here on the show, and we can't wait to see more at CES 2025. Thank you so much for joining us today on CES Tech Talk. 

  Jay Iyengar (33:39): 

  Thank you for your time. Thank you. 

  James Kotecki (33:42): 

  And that's our show for now, but there's always more tech to talk about. So if you're on YouTube, please subscribe and leave a comment. If you're listening on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeart Media, or wherever you get your podcasts, hit the follow button. Let's give those algorithms what they so desperately want, and you can get even more CES and prepare for Vegas at ces.tech. That's C-E-S dot T-E-C-H. Our show is produced by Nicole Vidovich and Paige Morris, recorded by Andrew Linn and edited by Third Spoon. I'm James Kotecki, talking tech on CES Tech Talk.