EV Obsession & The 2023 ACT Expo

For a dozen or so years, Gladstein, Neandross & Associates (GNA) have been putting on the Advanced Clean Transportation, or “ACT,” Expo, fighting the good fight and trying to get companies to at least pretend to feel bad that they’re burning a billion tons of planet-killing diesel every year. And in that time, the market has sort of come to them. From a mere 500 or so people at that first conference, the 2023 ACT Expo counted more than 12,000 registrants in the days before the doors opened. That’s 50% more than last year, when the number of big electric and hydrogen-fueled semi tractors poured out of the Long Beach Convention Center and onto the streets, and that was 50% bigger again than the show’s previous record, in the last “normal” year we had before we stopped pretending that society was being held together by stockboys and cashiers making minimum wage. And, for the second year in a row, I found myself headed out to Los Angeles on a cold Chicago morning — but this year the vibe was a bit different.

For starters, the Clarity pre-check line at O’Hare security didn’t seem to be any shorter, or moving any faster than any of the other lines. The secret is out on that, and $179 a year isn’t enough to be treated like a super-citizen. Which is fine. I’m used to it. Being a tree-hugging car guy means I’m rarely ever treated like anything but a leper: always too much of a tree hugger to be taken seriously by the car people and drag racers, always too much like the car people and drag racers to hug a tree or two without at least imagining whispers of greenwashing and pandering.

The next round of eco-friendly surprises came at the United terminal, which was plastered with posters about sustainable aviation fuel and diversity, with smiling, dark-skinned lady pilots casually, maybe even playfully, looking over their shoulders at everyone who made it through the TSA pat-downs. The food court was in on the act, too, with more posters advertising Beyond breakfast sandwiches. (They taste fine, if you’re curious and you like falafel and you’re willing to spend $16 on a fast food breakfast.)

The flight itself, despite being an unforgivably early one, was uneventful. I tried to listed to American Kingpin while I stared out the window (I could never sleep on planes). I shared an armrest with a tall Indian kid who was folded uncomfortably into his economy row seat, fast asleep with his AirPods blasting EDM into his brain and mine — the bass lines pumping loud and clear over the dull roar of the jet’s engines and Nick Bolton’s dark web classic.

I’d made this trip several times, but this was the first time I really noticed the snow cap over the mountains. Was it bigger? The glare was blinding and I turned away from it, thinking of the snow blindness and those slick, cyberpunk goggles the First Nation Eskimos carve out of seal bone — but not before I noticed a lot of green, too. Lakes and rivers and blue waters, and golf courses that I would swear had been a dull brown in trips past.

It was just 9AM local time when I landed at John Wayne Airport, and it was the same friendly place I’d visited in the past. If LAX is a cynical, high-pressure shopping mall built to shill duty-free Rolex wristwatches and Coach handbags, John Wayne is a small-town strip mall that’s trying really hard to support a decent wine bar.

There was nothing scheduled to happen at ACT for several hours, and I’ve never met a Hilton that would let me check in before 11AM, so I did my part to help support the wine bar, ordering an Argentinian Malbec to wash down my second breakfast of various “locally sourced” cheeses, breads, and honeys.

We all suffer.

It’s nearly 11AM now. Though, I’ll admit it snuck up on me.

I caught a Lyft to the Anaheim Hilton (Uber still has too much of “frat boy” vibe for me, no matter how far they advance the EV movement) and got checked in for the Expo. It was here that I began to wrap my brain around how big ACT had truly gotten. The line to pick up passes seemed to be a dozen or so deep in the Hilton lobby, and the plebeian’s line to check in reached back to the Starbucks and wrapped around again. It seemed to me that the shop could clean up on mobile orders placed by the poor saps waiting to get through the line.

I wouldn’t stick around long enough to know if they were. As a Hilton Honors Gold member, I walked right to the front of my own, cordoned-off line and up to the smiling clerk — pleased that I could, at least, still buy exceptional service at the Hilton.

My room on the 14th floor wasn’t yet ready, but if I wanted a room now I could have something on the 5th with a patio. “Praise Jeebus,” I said. “Anything. I don’t even care if you have to hit me with the garden hose — I just need to get this airplane funk off myself.”

If your only exposure to me has been CleanTechnica, The Truth About Cars, or (God forbid) the Electrify Expo, you may not yet know how much I absolutely, wholly, and thoroughly detest flying. The mere thought of hurtling through the ether in a tightly packed metal tube breathing in recycled cabbage farts while all the fluid that is or has ever been in my body tries to drop-kick my eardrums out of my head while nibbling sadly on an $11 Toblerone is enough to jack up my blood pressure, no matter how good the restaurants on the other side of the trip are.

She laughed, politely, and asked if I was in town for the ACT Expo.

“I am.”

“What do they have there?” she asked. “There are signs all over the hotel but I don’t know what the ACT Expo is. Is it, like, an acting thing?”

“Trucks,” I said. “It’s a big truck show. Big eighteen-wheelers, cement mixers, garbage trucks, cranes, tractors. I like the tractors.”

“I always wanted to drive a tractor.”

“They’ll let you!” I told her. “Just walk over there (the hotel was part of the convention center campus). Don’t stop at the gates. Walk around like you own the place until you see a bunch of big trucks lined up next to each other. Someone will let you drive one.”

I assumed that was true.

Showered and properly dressed, I made my way to the convention center proper and up to the Volvo-sponsored media room. The swag at the journalists’ tables was phenomenal, even though it looked like the trucker caps had already been picked clean. Fair enough. I’m a sucker for waxed journals and smooth-rolling pens, anyway.

Joe Annotti, GNA’s Senior VP and one of its managing partners, was the first friendly face I found. “Hey, Joe!” I said, extending my hand.

“Hey,” he said, reaching for my hand as I awkwardly tried for the fist-bump. “When did you get in?”

“Just now,” I said. “The hats are all gone.”

Joe nodded, but didn’t say anything about whether more hats might be coming. “The keynote presentation is set to start at 3,” he said, “but it fills up. You’ll want to be there by 2:30.”

I strolled into the main hall at 2:53 and cursed myself for not listening to him. Remember how I said ACT had gotten big? The main stage at this year’s ACT Expo was just as deep as it had been the previous year at the Long Beach Convention Center. But now, in Anaheim, it was about three times as wide.

Worse, it was balls-to-the-walls packed with fleet, utility, and ag guys. There wasn’t a facemask in sight, and I knew, in my heart, that we were at a “superspreader” event.

“When in Rome,” I said, shoving mine back into my pocket. “At least we’ll die together.”

“What’s that?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Just mumbling.”

Looking around the room, I felt a genuinely weird vibe. These should be my people, after all. The Advanced Clean Transport show had always been the type of place that people had serious conversations about reducing emissions, how many miles would have to be driven to offset the carbon cost of batteries was, for example, a normal thing to discuss here. These were data people. Numbers people. And, no matter how good or promising or even clean a new technology might be, “everything has to pencil.”

Looking around and soaking in some of the conversations around me, though, I felt like this new, bigger space had been filled by apologists.

Maybe “apologists” is the wrong word, but that’s the one that came to me. These companies were here to sell electric semi trucks and hydrogen and progress and maybe even “sustainability,” sure, but only because they have to.

Don’t get me wrong. GNA, as I said, has been fighting the good fight for more than a decade — they’re not apologists. They do great work. But the people at the show this year? In the minutes before the house lights went down, I heard talk about BEVs not being ready, about hydrogen being the future, and heard at least one person lament the fact that California was “keeping all the renewable natural gas for itself.”

The house lights went down, and ACT Expo 2023 got underway.

ACT Expo kickoff, photo by the author.

GNA’s people hit the ground running, patting themselves on the back (as they should) for the billion-plus dollars of state and federal grant money they’ve helped dole out to America’s fleet buyers in recent years, goosing the electric fleet market to what it’s become today … and what has it become today?

Let me put it this way: if the traditional auto show with its booth babes and static displays and $18 all-beef hot dog combos served with a watered-down, lidless Pepsi is dying, the clean tech trucking show is the opposite. The ACT Expo is positively exploding with life — like one of those nightmare spiders or a vampire that bursts into a cloud of bats, but not horrifying. It is a glorious thing to see and be a part of. Looking around at the thousands of people sitting quietly, taking in GNA’s every word, it could feel, just for a minute, like the good guys were winning.

The slides change. ACT is too big for California, they’re saying. We’re going to Las Vegas next year, and thank God for that! (No one makes a cucumber smoothie like the Wynn.)

My notes (from Google Keep) here get short and clipped as we get into the meat of the presentation. They read:

• More than 40% of the community in SoCal is vulnerable, low income, and ACT is putting the social and environmental justice aspect front and center with its first speaker.
• JETSI project is set to launch 100 new electric trucks in California by June of this year.
• Remember why we are doing this. Poor kids, old ladies, the sick and crippled.
• The “whole of government” approach.
• Daimler has a launch video talking about “the Speed of Right.”
• It must have cost a million dollars. A sad crooner chants “it’s a wonderful world” in the background. It’s a weird scene.
• We are the problem, the video says. But we are also the solution.
• Rainbow flags. Diversity. Daimler seems to be moving in the right direction, which is the left direction (at least until the taxman cometh). There is no apology in their video. It’s a straight “f*ck you” to the MAGA diesel big rig culture.

“Good for them,” I remember thinking. “I’m not sure it’ll fly with the Freightliner crowd, but they have to do something to differentiate themselves, and the tree hugging/gay agenda messaging has certainly worked for Volvo.”

We’re moving forward into a future of change.

They’re singing about moving forward, forward into the future. It’s like that episode where Kang and Kodos wear Clinton and Dole skins. Twirling, always twirling. It would be almost laughable if it wasn’t a multi-billion dollar company trying to convince a room full of industry people that they all needed to work together to build out the EV charging infrastructure. I laughed anyway.

• Daimler’s talking head is committing to “all three,” which is: electric, hydrogen, and natural gas.
• In the meantime, we’ll continue to improve our diesel engines as much as possible.
• Supertruck 2. It doesn’t have the same vibe as Volvo’s “purple haze,” but Fred didn’t ask me for any names beforehand, so I’ll ignore the fact that Freightliner has a wealth of Transformers lore to call upon when naming its show trucks.
• Optimus Prime.
• He’s teasing that infrastructure is the holdup. Will Daimler step up? Is that the tease?
• Greenlane Project Juno is now a JV with Daimler. This is it!

For a hot second I was genuinely excited. It seemed like Freightliner was announcing its own national charging network on the ACT Expo stage. That’s news! Hot damn!

Nope. Walking it back. Talking about not being able to do it alone, government support, get the utilities on board, blah blah. All problems that Tesla solved on its own dime over a decade ago.

“How do we manage the infrastructure component? Together.”

Weak f*cking sauce.

ACT Expo hall, photo by the author.

The next morning, I was still visibly salty about it.

“It’s all bullshit,” I said to Lawren Markle, GNA’s head of comms, as he sat down across from me in the Volvo-themed media room. “You look at a company like Tesla. Say what you want about Elon Musk — he’s a racist and a Nazi coddler and a dipshit chess club nerd with a pre-teen sense of humor and whatever else you can think of — but when Tesla needed an EV charging network to sell their cars, they went out and built one. It cost them billions of dollars, and it was a huge risk, but they did it. Daimler? Daimler has billions. They’re way ahead of where Tesla was when Elon announced the Supercharger network. They could do the same thing here. Pick a few popular routes, maybe along I-80 or I-10, and they could build one. And it would be theirs! And everyone else would look like an a**hole with his hand out begging for loose change!”

Lawren hadn’t asked, but remained the consummate professional. “I hadn’t thought of it that way,” he said.

Fair enough.

I went back to the floor and conducted a few more interviews, meeting up with old friends at ABB, Flo, Trillium, and a few other places. I had great chats with the guys at GreenPower Motor Company and Highland Electric — past guests on CleanTech Talk — and generally had a grand old time, if not an unexpected one.

As for what was unexpected, there were a few surprises at this year’s ACT Expo.

REE Booth, interview in progress, by the author.

First off, I want to give a hat-tip to REE CEO Daniel Barel (another past guest on the show), who had a fully-conceived, production-ready REE Automotive electric box truck on display at his ACT Expo booth, as well as one of his patented REEcorner technology. As far as the tech goes, I am intimately familiar with Daniel’s concept — a fully self-contained wheel, steering, drive, and suspension unit that can be placed just about anywhere in relation to three other such corners, and which would then connect to the rest of them to create competent steering, dynamic handling, and braking characteristics using software as opposed to geometry … and it’s not that the tech was unexpected, it’s that Daniel’s company was still alive at all.

“I can’t believe you’re here with this,” I said, shaking his hand and eye-balling the hand sanitizer just to his right. “I thought this would be too smart for most of these guys.”

“It is,” he said. “But I do not need a thousand people to understand it, I just need one or two of the big guys to understand it and give us a try. They will try one or two or maybe ten, and then they will see that it works. Then they order a hundred trucks, then a thousand. This is how it works. Nothing starts at scale.”

Smart.

I get a notification on my phone from the ACT Expo app. Amazon is switching to 30,000 fuel cell forklifts, moving them away from natural gas. They’re aiming for sustainable electricity sources to make the hydrogen, not relying on external supplies from legacy fossil brands.

On the other side of the ACT Expo hall, GE-backed Hyliion brought a 3D-printed, external combustion engine that uses a heat exchanger to push a linear piston, and that piston’s movement through a set of magnets creates a current that can then be stored in a battery or passed along directly to an electric motor. This thing can burn just about anything flammable with thermal efficiencies that would make Rudolf Diesel flush with shame, and despite being a combustion engine, it is an incredibly slick piece of technology.

I excitedly grilled one of the engineers for over an hour before he told me that he couldn’t be quoted, and everything he told me had to be “off the record.”

The Hyliion engineer introduced me to the brand’s booth babes, who connected me with Ryan in comms. As she walked me through the display (yes, the one named “Jo” makes do with he/him most of the time, “Ryan” goes with the she/her), there was lots of talk about straining the grid, fuel supply logistics, everything you could think of seemingly designed to take the shine off of EV’s apple. “We need to have a 360 think about it,” said the media-trained Hyliion staffer. I’m supposed to nod along.

It’s too bad, too. Their linear piston is the nuts.

As for me, I’m already headed back to Chicago as I type this, grateful for the experience and the trip out to the 2023 ACT Expo, and optimistic about the future of low-emissions transportation. Still, I am but ever so slightly concerned that the foxes have found their way into the henhouse this time. The stink of the oil companies was everywhere and in every conversation around hydrogen and natural gas — but we celebrate every positive change regardless, right? A heroin addict who goes from using dirty needles to using clean needles is moving in the right direction, at least — and maybe the hydrogen pushers have their hearts in the right place after all.

Or, to put it another way: always bet on the dark side.

Original content from CleanTechnica.