Green Markets Day 2025 – RFP Winners Announcement followed by Big Bet: Unlocking the Future of Trucking

Prior to the Big Bets: Unlocking the Future of Trucking” panel during Green Markets Day 2025, GMA CEO Kim Carnahan revealed the winner of GMA Trucking’s pilot RFP: Nevoya.

In this panel discussion during Green Markets Day 2025, Andre de Fontaine of GMA is joined by Christoph Wolff, CEO of Freight Centre, Melissa Bauer, ESG and Sustainability Strategy Lead with eBay, and Sami Kahn, Co-Founder and CEO of Nevoya, the winner of GMA Trucking’s pilot RFP.

See below for full transcripts of both videos.

GMA TRUCKING RFP WINNER ANNOUNCEMENT

KIM CARNAHAN: 

GMA Trucking is the third buyers alliance that GMA had the pleasure to help stand up and run. And frankly, it’s the one that we get the most questions about. Folks wonder why companies can’t just contract directly with an EV operator. I know that our next panel will talk a lot about exactly why that is often the case, but it’s the same in all of our sectors, the devil’s in the details. 

EV trucks run two to three times the cost of a diesel equivalent today, and getting them on the road requires major new and expensive infrastructure. These are costs that most customers aren’t willing or able to pay, and that makes getting any particular route to FID very challenging. 

Now, we know that these challenges are real because EVs make up less than 0.1% of all heavy-duty trucks on the road today. A book and claim approach like the one that we use in GMA Trucking and the buyers alliance that we’re going to talk about in the next session can get new routes off the ground faster, helping to get heavy duty road transportation on track to meet the sector’s net zero climate goals. 

Here is a snapshot of our competitive procurement process that we’ve run over the past six months. We had 36 distinct bids from 9 different carriers. We shortlisted 15 bids from six carriers. We then conducted an extensive due diligence process on 3 finalists, combining our own financial analysis with deep technical analysis by a third-party consultancy. 

So after months of competition, analysis, head-to-head evaluation, one company rose above the rest. And today, for the first time, I am absolutely thrilled to announce this trailblazer that will lead this first of its kind deployment, Nevoya. 

[Applause] Yay! I’m going to say a little bit more about this badass company. Nevoya is a San Francisco-based electric trucking carrier founded in 2023. They impressed us with their AI solutions and AI optimization, which maximizes the use of their vehicles and maximizes, therefore, the resulting emission reductions. 

Nevoya is putting in place a brand new route from Houston to Dallas, thanks to GMA Trucking’s procurement. This will be 40 new Class 8 battery electric trucks on the road, the largest known single deployment of Class 8 battery electric vehicles in Texas, and it’ll double the total number of EV trucks on the road in Texas today. 

I could not be more psyched that GMA Trucking and all of our members get to work with this amazing company. And so now I’d love to invite Andre de Fontaine, our managing director, up onto the stage to introduce our next session, where we’re going to talk about this amazing procurement. 

BIG BET: UNLOCKING THE FUTURE OF TRUCKING

ANDRE DE FONTAINE:

Thank you, Kim. I’m not going to talk much at all. The most important thing for us is to unpack this opportunity and this deal with presentations and discussions from the folks that are participating in it directly. So let me start.

Sami, if you can come join, take a seat. Sami Kahn is the CEO of Nevoya. Thank you.

And then we have Melissa Bauer from eBay, one of the important participants in this process on the buyer side.

And last, but certainly not least, it was a pleasure working with the Smart Freight Centre throughout this process. We have Christoph Wolff, CEO of the Smart Freight Centre, who’s going to offer his perspective as well.

But before we get into the specifics of the deal itself, Christoph, I was wondering if you could help us put this a little bit into context. Smart Freight Centre has been involved on this issue for a long time. Why should we care about heavy duty trucking? Why is it difficult? Why is this important?

CHRISTOPH WOLFF:

First of all, Andre, thanks for having us. I also enjoyed the strategic partnership with GMA. So maybe a few words on SFC because not everybody in this room may know who SFC, Smart Freight Centre is.

So we are a global platform, 12 years old, have developed the emission accounting standards for everything in freight. So work with 200 global partners on scope 3 accounting and are very much besides the accounting itself about scaling solutions.

So that’s what actually brings us to book and claim. So, we have over the years defined some emission accounting, market-based measure emission accounting. Now more normative piece called the Specification and together with RSB actually. So we had the announcement earlier today, we have established the so-called Book and Claim Community and we want to work with you as a partner with that.

So now trucking, trucking is a hard to abate sector. So– and the application of book and claim in trucking is what I would say at the beginning.

So first of all, I mean, also under GMA, so SABA and ZEMBA were first because I think it’s simply a kind of exchange of fuels or basically fuel solutions. In trucking, it’s more complex. Now, but it’s important. It’s 10% of global emissions. But it’s a much more complicated environment for a variety of reasons.

And yesterday, some of you may have been to our publication of the 2026 edition of the Bloomberg, our partnership with Bloomberg Commercial Vehicles Factbook for Investors. And that actually gives you a full rundown of all these complications. So it starts with the, and we’ll hear about it later on, the upfront purchase price is much higher. So it’s a cost. At the end of the day, commercial vehicles are being bought by fleets, and they are being bought by fleets on a cost basis.

So it’s all about economics. So not about taste, it’s about economics. And that needs to work in a very specific environment. And the upfront cost is an issue. But it’s a CapEx OpEx shift because the running costs are a lot lower. And the application, if it works in practice, it’s very much locationally dependent. So you have to really go into the nitty-gritty. So the total cost of ownership that you read in literature in the practice don’t matter. So you have to actually look at your own use case and say, with your terrain, with your utilization of the trucks, with– but basically, all the factors, the energy, the energy purchase, the diesel parity, or the diesel equivalent diesel price, does it make sense?

And only if it makes sense, and if there is some guarantee that this is not like a one-off thing, but it’s actually going to be there. You have a consistent actually procurement for your truck, so volume for your truck, then as a fleet you’re going to go there. And now we have to actually make sure that in practice all these different boxes can be ticked and that at scale with then hopefully lower truck prices, because only with this lower truck, bigger volumes, OEMs are willing to lower prices. If all of this is met, then we see more.

So today it’s actually single digit. So in the US, it’s actually, I think it’s 1%, in Europe, it’s like 3% of new sales. In China, it’s like 15% of new sales. So the 100,000 electric truck on the road is basically a China story. It’s 90% from China. a variety of reasons, because they have been focusing on easily electrifiable use cases, like in the mining sector, in portage, we have a portage alliance, and so on. So we have to focus on these and actually book and claim, and we will probably get to that, can actually play a major role in making this more economical.

ANDRE DE FONTAINE:

Okay, thank you, Christoph. Great overview.

Sami, let’s try to put that into slightly more practical current terms. You’re trying to make a business out of this. Christoph talked about it’s more expensive. It’s location dependent. It sounds difficult. How are you making this work as a new entrant into this market, really pursuing all electric, zero emission freight services?

SAMI KHAN:

Yeah, thanks, Andre. Well, first off, just before we get onto that, I do want to say one thing, which is massive, massive thanks to the GMA for getting this procurement across the line. I don’t feel like you guys get the credit that you deserve for the amount of work that you put in. And in particular, Andre, Sam, and Clayton, who have worked tirelessly to get this done. So just want to give a round of applause because I think for every hour that we put in to getting this done, these guys have put in hundreds. So it’s —

ANDRE DE FONTAINE:

You haven’t gotten to the contracting part yet.

SAMI KHAN:

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, the devil is in the details.

And when it comes, for us, when it comes to deploying new electric trucks, we really see three key drawbacks.

So the first is that it can actually be really, really inefficient when you’re dealing with direct procurement. And the reason is that you’re really narrowing down the pool of potential customers that you can sell to, because you’re looking for those customers who really care about EVs and are willing to go that extra mile and perhaps pay a premium to do so. And so in narrowing down that market, you’re naturally producing quite an ineffective network, because you might have one customer in Southern California and then another customer in Northern California, and you’ve got to try and find a way of pinning all of these customers together. And that’s why at Nevoya, we’ve been building this AI-enabled technology which actually allows us to do this in a really efficient way.

But another thing we see is also the underwriting of the actual investment and the vehicles. As I alluded to before, these vehicles cost two to three times more. And the other issue that they have is that they’re very, very new. It’s new technology and therefore debt and infrastructure providers are unwilling to underwrite this initial investment because they don’t know what the residual value is going to be.

And then the final thing we see is the infrastructure. Ultimately, we have to deploy where there is charging infrastructure for these trucks. And today, that is all concentrated in markets and in states where there are heavy incentives. So that means that some of the kind of lower hanging fruit or the heavily trafficked markets, such as Texas, which actually make more economic sense because electricity is cheaper, because land is cheaper, they get forgotten about because they don’t have the right incentives in place to actually procure and put these vehicles onto the road.

So amazingly, book and claim can actually get rid of all three of these issues at one time. So firstly, when you think about those inefficiencies, by packaging up the EACs and selling them separately, you can then sell to the rest of the market. And therefore, you can look at the entire market and think, where can I get the most efficiency out of these vehicles? And that’s why we’ve chosen Houston to Dallas, because that is a very, very heavily trafficked bi-directional route, which means we can get 95%, 98% utilization out of our trucks. And ultimately, that’s where you get a much lower total cost of ownership.

The second thing that I alluded to was around the investment. And here, having a long-term off-take agreement with a reliable partner, such as eBay or some of the other members of the GMA alliance, means that we can then go to debt providers. And instead of giving them this vehicle to underwrite, we can say, “Hey, why don’t you underwrite this long-term four-year contract for these off-takes?” And that’s a much easier sell to them. They understand these financial instruments, they’re able to underwrite them, and they’re able to then give us the funding we need to go and get these trucks on the road.

And then finally, with respect to infrastructure, again, it allows us to actually look at a map and think, where does this make the most economic sense? And that’s why we landed on Texas, as I said before, where economically these trucks make a lot more sense than some of the other markets where we’re seeing a high uptake of electric vehicles today.

ANDRE DE FONTAINE:

Okay, terrific. Thank you, Sami. Melissa, let’s turn it over to you now, representing the buyer’s perspective. Obviously, you can’t do this deal without a customer. So what was your motivation for getting involved, and what are the benefits that you hope to see from participating in this procurement?

MELISSA BAUER:

Yeah, so we really view book and claim as a real unlock for us. And we think it’s a big unlock for actually the entire industry. Because when we talk about direct procurement of electrified vehicles, you’re leaving out a really large chunk of capital, which is all of these companies like eBay that have really aggressive science-based targets that are really interested in putting their capital towards decarbonization, but we do not ship on a container basis. And so we cannot contract directly with a carrier for the most part and say, we will electrify this particular route or this particular truck.

And so we are not the only ones in this place. And so book and claim allows us to use our capital and use our investment dollars to look at ways of decarbonizing the entire system, and really putting our financing towards that, rather than we’re looking at one particular corridor or one particular carrier or those kinds of things.

And as a buyer, what’s also the benefit is these are really high-quality claims. So I can put this through my financial and accounting assurance. I can put this towards my SBTI. I can put this towards my annual inventory in a way that is getting through our traditional accounting heads.

And so we think we are very excited because it gives us an opportunity to really start making actual decarbonization progress towards our science-based target, which, you know, truck freight represents or transportation emissions represents 84% of our scope one, two, three and combined. It’s the ball game for us. But if people will only talk to us about, let’s make sure that your yard is electrified or your fleet is electrified, or let’s look at route optimization or container level optimization, we haven’t been able to play in those games.

But if someone says we have a mechanism that is going to offer you really high quality credits that your investors will believe in, that the standard setting organizations will believe in and can count, and we can look at actually decarbonizing the entire sector, that’s something that not only us, but a lot of other companies, it provides the unlock to participate in this problem in a way that hasn’t really existed before.

ANDRE DE FONTAINE:

OK, that’s great. Melissa, let’s stay with you, because I want to use part of what you just said to bridge us into what’s next. You talked a little bit about high-quality transactions, high-quality attributes. What is it that you look for? What determines high quality for you? And do you see yourself doing more of these kinds of deals in the future? Or what might hold you back from doing more?

MELISSA BAUER:

So what has been holding us back, and I can say, is this, can I put it towards our SBTI? I’m just gonna be completely frank. And that’s what it is. The second I go to my CFO and I say, “I want a big old check,” and they’re like, “Great, what’s this gonna mean to our inventory?” And I say, “Absolutely nothing.” That becomes a very hard sell.

So on the previous panel, my colleague, I think it was on Meta, I was like, I cried when the new guy, and I was like, oh my gosh, thank God we were, I remember we were all at Smart Freight Week, I think, this year when the new guidance came out, and there’s literally like, people popping champagne. I was like, this is going to be great.

So I’d say that is what has traditionally been holding us up. This is by no means the first. This is the first step of many. We signed our first sustainable SAF fuel, sustainable aviation fuel for air. We inked our first deal for that in January. This is the first step of many, and we really look at this as a great way to bring other stakeholders. How do we get procurement? How do we get our auditors? How do we get everybody comfortable with this? And then really start taking a really portfolio approach.

But to the first question is, what are we looking for in these? Does it align with GLEC? Does it align with the latest greenhouse gas protocols? Does it align with SBTI? Can I get it through my assurance process? And so those are the things we’re really excited about with this.

ANDRE DE FONTAINE:

Let’s stay on the theme of what’s next. And Sami, maybe if you can talk about this for Nevoya. Are you guys growing? How do you see the future unfolding? How are you using this deal to move ahead? And then also, we spent a lot of time talking about book and claim, but you also provide physical, low-carbon trucking services. How do you see the balance between those two mechanisms currently and how they might change over time?

SAMI KHAN:

Yeah, it’s a great question. Sometimes when we talk to people about book and claim, they envisage it as a competitor to direct procurement. And for us, we see it completely differently. We actually see book and claim as a catalyst to get into new markets and to alleviate some of that cost pressure so we can do more direct procurement.

Again, taking the specific example of Texas, I actually looked back through the RFPs that we’ve been looking at from a direct perspective. Every single one of our customers has been looking for capacity in Texas. And every single one of them has not been able to find that capacity until now. With this deployment, we can actually go and serve those direct customers in Texas and actually give them direct access to low-carbon solutions. So it’s not this either-or approach.

And for us, we want to continue to go out and use book and claim as the mechanism to get out into new markets, to underwrite that initial investment, particularly with respect to the trucks and the infrastructure, but then we’re going to go out and sell that directly to customers. And in certain instances, you can do both with the same customer, and that’s where you get a really, really attractive relationship where they can help you underwrite that investment, but you can also decarbonize some of their direct procurement where maybe they don’t quite have the scale that they would be able to invest in it just themselves.

So we don’t see it as an either/or approach, and we really, really see book and claim as just the start and catalyst that gets us into markets, but really we have to focus on the direct procurement as well, because that is how we’re going to decarbonize the market as a whole.

ANDRE DE FONTAINE:

Great. And Christoph, maybe you can comment on that as well, because Smart Freight Centre has been running some really important demand aggregation programs focused on physical procurement. How do you see these two mechanisms working together or not over time?

CHRISTOPH WOLFF:

Absolutely. So we are a big fan or big, actually, protagonist of book and claim to scale low-carbon solutions. I think you mentioned the GLEC framework, so our colleagues actually wrote the first market-based measure mission accounting guideline based on GLEC in 2020. So this has actually grown ever since in importance.

Now what’s really cool now with you as winning this prize, so we have a second way of working together, which is on the I-10 corridor, which is, so we have this consortium since two years from covering from Port of Los Angeles into Texas. And so Nevoya is part of that. And so we have now the, and there’s, I mean, there’s quite a number of actually shippers that are part of the coalition in this room. So thank you very much for working with us on this.

So now we have the great opportunity to connect in a project, physical procurement, and virtual procurement, because I think there are, I think we still have to work on this, how to precisely do that. So I think you, I mean, in the RFP, I mean, obviously, these, your claims need to be, or your proposal need to be locationally anchored. So I think one has to work on what are the boundaries of this location anchoring and how does it fit together, because I think we all are very much focused on integrity of book and claim. So you can’t just basically take claims from a different legal category in a different geography, in a different segment of the market, and then throw it all together and say, it will work. No, it won’t. So we have to be precise. We have to be precise and diligent.

But we have the great opportunity now. So I-10 and then we have our ZET SCALE program, which kind of scales the adoption on the collaboration with the 15 to 20 motivated shippers actually across more corridors in the US, also work on the portage. And so we have the great opportunity now to make it work, to fit it together.

ANDRE DE FONTAINE:

Great. Thank you for that, Christoph. And I think there’s a lot of really great analysis that we’ve started to do that thinks hard about this question of how you combine physical procurement with book and claim. Tomorrow at the Smart Freight Centre’s Charging Ahead Together event, we actually have an hour devoted to getting into that in a little bit more detail. So if you’re not signed up for that event, you might be, maybe I’m not doing the right thing here, inviting people to your event. But it’s going to be really great.

I think conceptually, though, the important thing here to note is that, as Sami said, for a while there’s been this view that these are competing approaches, that there’s a zero-sum investment landscape. Every dollar that you put towards book and claim is a dollar less that you can use for physical procurement. And I think our answer to this is that that’s actually not the way it is. That if you can do both at the same time, you can reduce costs for everybody and you can actually produce more investments, so you’re growing the pie rather than carving up an existing finite set of resources across two different mechanisms. So this is going to be a really important next step for us and the Smart Freight Centre and all the stakeholders that care to participate. We’re really excited about that.

I think we actually do have some time for questions from the audience. So I will open it up. If you raise your hand, I think I’m seeing Sam beginning to mobilize, so he will run out with a microphone. And if you could just say your name, who you’re with, and then state your question. And if it’s directed to a particular person, please let us know so we know who to answer.

JULES KORTENHORST:

Jules Kortenhorst, RMI. Congratulations, Sami. Congratulations, Chirstoph, this sounds like a great compromise. How does charging fit into this? Because that seems to me to be the additional piece of the puzzle that you need, whether it is from Dallas to Houston or Los Angeles to Texas, how does that fit into the picture?

MELISSA BAUER:

Christoph sits up, gets ready.

CHRISTOPH WOLFF:

Let me. You should say something about that as well. Do you want to say go first?

SAMI KHAN:

I’m happy to go first from our perspective. So the GMA Procurement and the RFP is allowing us to put charging in place in Dallas and Houston to enable this route. So without it, currently there is no charging for trucks in Texas. Without it, frankly, I think it would still be many years off because there aren’t public incentives in that market to go out and build heavy-duty charging infrastructure.

However, because of this procurement, we have been able to make an investment case for that charging infrastructure and then work with our partners to actually get that in the ground and start working on it. So it’s completely accelerated that entire market, frankly, by several years, in our view.

MELISSA BAUER:

Can I bring up something? I’d say from a buyer perspective, this is something we were really interested in because we had conversations of, that’s great if you have electric trucks, but what if you’re charging them on a dirty grid? And so the fact that GMA and Nevoya have thought about this and what does this mean for RECs and green charging, once again, going to that integrity of the credits was really a selling point for us.

CHRISTOPH WOLFF:

Great. So no, obviously, Jules, great question. So charging is absolutely necessary, no electric trucks without charging.

And I think from the work that we’ve been doing together in this consortium for the last two years, so it started with actually exactly mapping the flows, down to postal code, frequency and everything, that basically build a model, and say, OK, based on– in order to get this economics of this working, high uptime, high utilization, because only with this high utilization, the electric truck economics will work. So you have to do that.

Then where would the charging need to be? So actually, and we had actually also collaborators at Terawatt and we have collaborators and a few others. So there’s actually quite some parties, there’s Green Lane, there’s WattEV, and there’s quite some parties on that corridor that actually have offering. And you need to pluck together public charging opportunities. You need to look at the grid reserves. So then it becomes a grid, actually, is important. With depot charging, also. And you can have shared charging, because that brings the cost down.

So you need to feed all of this into the economic model. And I think we have made great leeways. I think in order to cover the corridor, I don’t know what the latest numbers were. You need like five or six charging stations, and I think they’re being built. Some exist, others need to be built. They could probably connect well to the Texan corridor, et cetera.

So I think indeed, so this is absolutely key. So charging is important for these infrastructure finance is another one, by the way, because you have a lot of small operators who still may all work out, but then the ROI for the small operator may still not work if the capital costs are too high. That’s another piece. So you also have to solve for that.

ANDRE DE FONTAINE:

If there’s other questions, please raise your hand. As folks think of other questions, I’ll just add a couple of quick points.

So one, yes, bids were evaluated on a total cost of ownership basis inclusive of the charging. So that gets wrapped into the premium.

And then I would say, just to build on Christoph’s point, of all the sectors that we’re active in, trucking is the one where the benefits of demand aggregation are most immediately obvious. A lot of that is because the more trucks you can pile on a given charging network, the lower the cost because you’re spreading those across many users. You see those benefits of bringing multiple buyers in more quickly than you do in sectors like aviation or cement and concrete.

NICOLE GENEAU:

Thank you. Nicole Geneau, Cleantech Project Investment. We’ve been talking a lot about electric trucks on the panel so far. I wondered if you could comment on fuel cell electric vehicles and the complexity of hydrogen fueling and availability of green hydrogen.

ANDRE DE FONTAINE:

I’ll start. When we launched the RFP, we wanted net zero solutions. So we did not exclude fuel cells. We did, however, exclude biofuels. We wanted zero tailpipe emissions. We had some opinions about the scalability and sustainability of biofuels for road freight, but we did not specifically exclude fuel cells.

It just so turns out that the cost advantages currently for the use cases we’re looking at electrification appears to be the clear winner. I think there are going to be certain discrete use cases where fuel cell hydrogen can make sense. Maybe that’s something we tackle in the future, but right now we feel pretty comfortable with electrification as a solution for heavy-duty trucking.

SAMI KHAN:

Yeah, I might offend a few people here, but I’ve also spent three years doing nothing but looking at the economics of running zero-emissions trucks, and compared to EVs, fuel cells make no sense. The economics just don’t work. Maybe they will 20 years in the future, but there is a lot of hurdles that they have to overcome.

And frankly, green hydrogen should go into the areas of the market where there is no alternative. Like, how are we going to make green ammonia if the hydrogen doesn’t go there? So why are we concentrating on a solution that, frankly, in my mind, doesn’t make economic sense when we’ve got another one in the shape of EVs that does?

And when you look at the technology that’s coming through the pipeline, if you look at the Tesla Semi, you look at the cost of electricity that we’re able to get through charging now, these vehicles are already economic on certain routes and certain use cases, and that’s only getting better.

So personally, as I say, I would spend a lot of time looking at this. We spend a lot of time comparing. We believe hydrogen is a complete distraction. We think EV is the way forward for both short-haul and long-haul zero emissions trucking.

ANDRE DE FONTAINE:

Okay, I do have a question that came in from the computer, which is and this one’s a bit of a silly one I’ll start with, but has GMA thought about calling it TUBA, the Trucking Buyers Alliance? And so the answer is no, we haven’t, that one hasn’t crossed yet.

But a more serious question is, regarding utilization, we’ve talked a little bit about how it’s important in trucking, and the questioner is asking for a little bit more details about procurement like this can drive increased utilization, which brings the cost down. Sami, you might be best positioned to talk about that.

SAMI KHAN:

Yeah, I love this question. And this was honestly the thing that got me the most excited when we first got wind of the RFP was starting to do the analysis and starting to run the numbers because what you realize is that it perfectly aligns everyone’s incentives around maximizing utilization. And I often show people this kind of cost curve because we are basically able to generate more and more revenue because we’re able to generate more credits the higher our utilization is, but also the cost of running those miles is coming down the higher that utilization is. So we’ve got effectively a double incentive to go out and maximize the utilization of these vehicles.

And as I said before, that’s coupled with the fact that we don’t have this distraction of having to find those limited customers that are willing to pay a premium or are willing to underwrite the investment. And because the trucking market is so huge, because there is so much freight on the roads in these areas, we’re able to find markets and find areas where we can get really, really high utilization. That not only brings the cost down for us, which ultimately brings down the price of the credit for our end customer, but it also allows us to maximize the greenhouse gas reduction that we’re making through our trucks.

So everyone’s incentives are aligned, and that’s why I think this is such a neat solution.

CHRISTOPH WOLFF:

If I can add to that, so indeed you talked about the cost curve and I think with high utilization and I think there’s a kind of a proxy number. You always say like if a truck runs like 300 to 400 kilometers a day, so consistently, predictably, so I think it should be in the money, more or less.

So now you find applications where that is the case, so that’s why we have other countries like a cement initiative. So we have a mining initiative, because we know this, you’ve got this predictability and portage. Portage is wonderful. You need to basically from a trucking point of view, because you need to empty the ship and load the ship. So you have bi-directional flow, like 150 to 200 kilometers. Great. So this is exactly the kind of thing that you need.

And this cost curve, you don’t have that in with diesel, so it actually doesn’t go down, so this is a key difference. We talked yesterday at the Bloomberg New Energy Finance thing about now the finance sector. So I think if you’re trying to educate basically lenders into it, and some lenders, for example, have fleet procurement where they say, okay, if your truck runs more than like X kilometers a day, then your interest goes up. And I say, okay, those guys haven’t gotten it yet. So this is exactly the way how to not finance electric trucks.

And I think there’s a whole residual value conversation about, I think it’s– we have much more data about that actually the trucks can run much more. I think currently it’s often being priced as if after like five years the battery was zero value. This is not true. After five years or seven years, actually it’s still at 70%. It can go to a second life. The materials are still there. You need to recycle them, etc. So I think some of these financial structures need to be completely rethought, and that would also unlock a lot of value, a lot of actually opportunity.

GABBY LEEDS:

Hey, I’m Gabby Leeds from Brambles. I just had a question more around the book and claim mechanism. So do you view this mechanism as sort of a permanent player in procuring this kind of vehicle? Or do you see it as a temporary until we get kind of that critical mass and then we’ll have to kind of detangle it to direct procurement from book and claim?

ANDRE DE FONTAINE:

I will start. I mean, I do, we see book and claim as a catalytic mechanism, which will be most important in the early stages of trucking and these other markets that we’re active in. And so certainly there’s a point at which you’re reaching scale and the services are more or less ubiquitous and you don’t need it anymore.

And so I don’t think that it’s permanent, especially in trucking. Aviation might be a different story just because there’s a value chain barrier that prevents the end customer from ever really buying the sustainable aviation fuel. But in trucking, you can procure it. And so we would think that in this sector in particular, you would want to begin to move away from it, at least in certain geographies.

So I don’t think, we get asked this question a lot. I don’t know that it’s on today, it’s off tomorrow type of binary, yes, no. It’s more perhaps we evolve the mechanism in a certain manner, increase the ambition, or try to deploy it in certain geographies where you might hit market saturation in some parts of the world, but in other places, it could still be quite useful to use book and claim to drive progress.

So generally speaking, we don’t see it as permanent, but what that looks like over time, unclear at this point.

NICO DE GOLIA:

Yeah, hi, my name is Nico with Microsoft. I have a three-part question, which I’ll try to be succinct on. So the first part of the question, and most of this is directed towards Sami, and first of all, congratulations to Nevoya, very excited for the company and excited to see where you go. Would love to learn a little bit, we’ve talked, I think, about the first part a lot, the intersection of the physical and the book and claim. From you as a carrier, how does this, how does it unlock? Like what are, would just love to hear some more high level thoughts about, hey, how do you leverage book and claim as an instrument to accelerate the growth faster than you would have previously? That’s part one.

Part two is we’re in an era in the United States where there are opportunities for regulatory streamlining. I’m trying to put as positive of a spin on that as I possibly can. And so we’d love to understand and, you know, what are some of the regulatory hurdles to electric truck deployments that might be able to be streamlined at the federal level to enable you to deploy more and faster? I’m thinking around, you know, driver hours of service, mandatory rest periods, all of those things which are critically important for safety. You know, so we’d just love to hear a little bit more about that.

And then last but not least, there are 100 people plus in the audience here. What can we do next week when we get back home to help? How can we unlock more electric trucking together here as a community of people in this room? We’d love to hear your all’s thoughts on that. And that’s open for everybody here on the panel. So thank you.

ANDRE DE FONTAINE:

And for the record, those were three distinct questions, Nico. That was not a three part– But Sami– But they were all good ones.

SAMI KHAN:

Yeah, so I think starting off– I’m going to have to try and remember all these– but starting off, the direct versus indirect piece, I think really here, we use both sources of information. So where we are looking to deploy with respect to where we know we can get high utilization for our trucks, as well as where our direct customers are looking for capacity.

And ultimately, it’s the confluence of both of those things that dictate where we’re going to use a book and claim deployment to get trucks on the road. So for us, this is just the start of this deployment. And it’s not– we didn’t just do this just as a single deployment where we would just run these trucks and that’s it. We did this because we know we have direct customers who have been crying out for capacity in those regions.

So as I said before, for us, it’s always going to be a catalyst and it’s always going to be what next. It’s always going to be how do we now move directly with our customers in these regions. But having underwritten the trucks, having underwritten the charging infrastructure, it makes it a lot easier to have those conversations and say to our customers, “Hey, we can actually do this now at a cost that is comparable with diesel or even lower than diesel.”

And one of the things that we’ve done as well is said to customers, “Hey, if you want to be part of the procurement, that’s great, because then we can actually give you direct access and indirect access. And that’s something that resonates with quite a few of our customers as well.

ANDRE DE FONTAINE:

Maybe in the interest of time, maybe skip over the regulatory one, but just talk about what can we all do together to help drive this forward.

SAMI KHAN:

Yeah, so another thing that I love about book and claim is that the demand is coming from the people who actually care, frankly, right? And it’s not at the whims of whoever is in the White House or the administration. But underlying all of that is everyone. Underlying all of that is the fact that when we are procuring goods and services, we are preferring brands that are doing so in a meaningfully green way and are committing to going green.

So from our perspective, we need to vote with our feet. We need to vote for those brands that are committing and actually putting funding behind going green and being able to do so and actually making meaningful investments in the space.

And if we do so, then, as I said before, the regulation doesn’t matter. Who’s in the White House doesn’t matter. We can actually drive that change by preferring those brands because ultimately that is how we enable the private sector to put the funding in that enables us to do what we want to do.

ANDRE DE FONTAINE:

1. Thanks so much. We are a little bit over time now. We’ve got some important other issues to cover today. So if you could all just join me in thanking the panelists.