FreightWaves's Alan Alder does a great deep-dive into our electric truck financing partnership with Climate United. Really worth a read. Immediate term, the project will provide really low-cost electric truck leases to fleets working California's ports. “You take that residual value, low-cost capital, the tax credit and wrap those all up in a truck financing,” said Matt LeDucq, CEO of truck-as-a-service and infrastructure developer Forum Mobility. “We can now deliver a lot of trucks at parity [with diesel]. And get rid of the chicken-or-the-egg debate that’s been going on for years.” If you want to learn more about how to take advantage of the deal, Ron A Hunt can get you rolling. Longer term, this program will establish a market residual value, and catalyze an active financing market for electric trucks: "But the real benefit is that Climate United will begin to establish how much a used electric truck is worth. Until the used value of an electric truck is known, a market is non-existent. Banks typically shy away from lending for an asset without a defined future value." Finally, as the author says, it's about "creating and preserving American jobs." 500 trucks is a lot of trucks, and will help build the economies of scale necessary to bring down costs. And for Forum: “We’ve engaged owner-operators since we started the business,” LeDucq told me. “We’ve always had the mission of making sure that any fleet can equitably make the transition [to an electric truck]. “The game changer is we can now efficiently finance a lot of trucks to any fleet.” https://lnkd.in/gpnwyDXD
