Timothy Luchini on Intramotev's autonomous railcars and the untapped potential of rail freight

Find your happy place. Book a Wander with Aspiring Views Hotel, Great Amenities, Dreamy Beds, top tier cleaning, 247 concier service. It's a vacation home but better. Our next guest is in the Roostream waiting room. Timothy, welcome to TBPN. Fantastic background. How are you doing? What is behind you? Break it down.

Introduce yourself. What are we looking at? Yeah, guys, good to good to be on the show. Excited to share what we're doing here at Motive. Uh we're building a battery electric autonomous rail car.

So, when you think of trains going across the country in two or three mile long strings, we make every single one drive themselves. No way. Crazy. Train maxi. That's amazing. Uh we've been waiting for this. This is the I think this is the first We've interviewed hundreds of founders. I'm blown away.

Um this uh this doesn't seem like something that like like give me the why now. Like why why didn't this happen 10 years ago like you don't have the same problem as Whimo where you have to steer as much or do you like what why is this just happening now?

No, it's a great question and it's a great natural place to start from and really uh rail's out of sight, out of mind for a lot of people, especially when you think about our tech workforce and the people that are trying to solve really hard problems out there.

Uh and that's exactly why there's so much opportunity here in rail to do exactly that. Take the technologies that have been pushed forward maybe for a decade on the perception models, the control systems, the electrification happened in industry and bring that to rail um and uh to build a team of tech workers around it.

That's really what we're doing here. And uh it naturally makes sense. You do have fixed infrastructure. You've got track. You got uh points of rail that go across the country. You've got a 160,000 miles of track generally utilized at a 3% utilization factor.

And all that stuff just stacks up to make this a very logical place to implement these types of technologies first. And uh we're excited that we're in in production. We've got vehicles out in service running for customers every single day. Wow.

Going to move over 3,500 carloads in production this year and uh really just focused on getting America's rail system back on track where it's forefront in the front part of people's minds. Uh and let people know this is an exciting place to to come put technology in. It's important for the US economy.

Uh it's important for our customer stakeholders in agriculture, energy, mining, any of those places and and just get that supply chain right uh uh with rail. It's fantastic. When did the when did the idea click for you? How did it Yeah. Well, I'm I'm an engineer by training.

I did my uh uh undergrad in South Dakota, did a PhD in Michigan State, and then I went to work in the defense industry. So, I went to go work on cruise missiles, fighter jet platforms, a bunch of unmanned systems.

And uh that's really uh an industry that's been doing some of these things since the 70s in a lot of ways, building systems that can fly themselves. Um and then 2017 came and everybody was going to fly to work.

So, I got to build a flying car and a package delivery drone and help build a team of 40 engineers behind that. And then, as many founders know, you got the right co-founder in in the team that uh gets you to go look at something different.

And he was doing his uh NBA at USC, studying supply chain, logistics, and looking at rail in 2019 and looking at competitive threats to autonomous trucks, electric trucks, and then came to me and said, "What do you think happens if we uh bring these technologies to rail? " And that's really what got us off and running.

So, we uh have built a system that's backwards compatible with the existing strengths of rail. So, if you think of a 2-m long train running across the country from the Port of Long Beach to Chicago, we can uh fit in that train. We can hybridize the whole train and ride along with a a large diesel locomotive unit.

But really, that 2 miles of stuff isn't consumed in Chicago. You got to break it down and get it to Gary, Indiana, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Poria, Illinois. And that's really where we can make short trains with unit economics of those two mile long trains. So you can now say, I need five cars in Gary.

I'm going to cut those five cars off, use Intramot's products, and get it there. And I need 10 cars up in Milwaukee. I'm going to go feed a brewery somewhere. I can cut 10 more cars off, just send them on the uh unit economics of a short train.

And and that's really a gamechanging paradigm shift for speed and flexibility on rail and it already has a cost advantage. So that's really how we think about it. And where we build out and and where we started is in some places like mining uh and plant railroads and and facilities just like this one in St.

Louis where we're headquartered and uh continue to build it out and utilize that infrastructure better. So you guys have track that runs into your facility. Yeah, this car is sitting on track. We've got uh two parallel production lines here in St. Louis and uh honestly St.

Louis is the right type of place to be for this because we can access all the railroads in the entire country from here. Wow. Um and uh it's up and spoke model and we're at one of those hubs in St. Louis and we can get to all the spokes from here. Uh talk about the electrical systems. How do you charge this?

Do you swap the battery or does I imagine it takes a ton of time to charge uh the the actual train or maybe it doesn't? I don't know. Break it down. Yeah. That's the beauty of the system. So, uh when you think about rail, you think about where it came from. Came from a steam engine in the 1800s. Yeah.

Where the smallest power system that they could make was this giant steam locomotive. Yeah. But maybe it pulled 10 cars with it at that point. Yeah. And that necessitated steel track and steel wheels because of how heavy that system is. It also drove the infrastructure the way it is.

So that's why we have these tracks run across the country get one two 3% better every year for the last 200 years and now you look at a system where you have a two or three mile long train. Um but what happened there is that you have the rightways at all the crossings. You don't start and stop a lot.

You go through mountains instead of around them. And all that energy efficiency that goes into that then just makes a battery system actually work pretty well. And we granularize it. So we get down to the single car size where we can make a battery pack the size of a a Tesla car battery or I drive a a electric truck.

So the size of my electric truck battery and uh we can actually move 100 tons of freight several hundred miles with that system. And if you want to go further you just add more of our units and you get really granular.

But that leads to us be able to use level two charging infrastructure and a lot of the investments that the automotive industry's done to get those standards up to to par um and also not try to recharge what a locomotive would be, which is 50 to 200 megawatts of power on that unit plus. This is fascinating.

What's the state of the company? Like how big are you guys? Have you raised money? Um uh what like how big is the business? Yeah, we're we're uh in St. Louis here. We've got a 67,000 foot production facility. Yeah, we've raised uh up to a series A at this point to fully deploy these assets. Congrats.

Generally, we're around 50 employees at the moment uh with largely engineering coming from automotive, aerospace, and rail. Kind of this perfect mix where you can guarantee something cool is going to come out the other side. Yeah. And about 5 years old at this point. Fantastic progress. Remarkable.

Um last question from my side. Um, uh, is there is there anything that you're I mean I this is obviously like an American re-industrialization project in many ways, but are there any um top of mind asks for DC or American lawmakers? Like if you had a make rail great again agenda, like what would you change?

What are you asking for? What do we need to do more of? Um, just at a high level, what like way like what else would help that that's maybe out just outside of your control? Yeah. No, I think really we just need to talk about it a little bit more.

So people talk about highways, they talk about autonomous trucks, they talk about autonomous cars. It's in the news every single day. Yeah. We're getting people to talk about rail and talk about that infrastructure because in reality to make rail better, all it is is me making stuff move more frequently.

You don't need a a hyperloop type of technology where you fire packages in a tube. you just need to keep the stuff on the rails moving more frequently. Uh we don't really need to rebuild anything.

Uh we just need to unlock that massive network and uncongest it and uh we can make this extremely competitive and our technology positions us to do exactly that. And then from the regulatory perspective, they've been very uh open to these types of technologies in a really positive way.

Um and uh we've proven it out in whole section of the market that's unregulated. So we can just go out there and and use those use cases, collect the data that's necessary to get to the regulated use cases from there. Yep.

And then uh generate that data that then goes directly to how we would certify these products in a a regulated use case. Well, thank you so much for taking some time out of your busy day to come talk to us. Thank you for training. Somebody had to do it. Somebody had to do it. We will talk to you soon.

It'll it'll look obvious in hindsight, I think. Have a great rest of your day. Awesome. Talk to you guys, man. Thanks. Cheers. Uh up next we have Nebus which was in the news just uh yesterday or the