Transition Fleets and Employee-Owned Gas Vehicles to Electric and Get Reimbursed for Charging. (Dave Lewis, Founder & CEO of MoveEV)

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Transcript

Angela Simoes:

You're listening to the Mile Marker Podcast, where we explore trends and innovations and fleet automation and shared mobility, helping fleet based businesses make better informed decisions and achieve full digital transformation.

Angela Simoes:

Welcome everyone to another episode of the Mile Marker podcast. My name is Angela Simoes, and today's guest is Dave Lewis, founder and CEO of MoveEV. MoveEV helps organizations and municipalities, transition fleets and employee owned gas vehicles to electric and reimburse for charging at home. Welcome, Dave.

Dave Lewis:

Thank you. So great to be here today.

Angela Simoes:

We also have my co-host, Mark Thomas, EVP of Strategic Alliances from Ride Cell.

Mark Thomas:

Thank you, Angela.

Angela Simoes:

Welcome, mark. All right, let's get started here. So Dave, I'm really intrigued by what MoveEV is doing. Can you give our listeners a little bit of your background and why you started MoveEV?

Dave Lewis:

MoveEV, we're on a mission to scale EV adoption in America and we do it through corporate programs. We're trying to fill gaps with technology and services to make the transition for corporate and municipal fleets easier.

How I got here was a bit of a circuitous path. I started out my career life really at a very young age. My dad had a restaurant in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, small town that I grew up in. I worked it with him for the better part of 20 years and really learned the value of a hard work, customer service, and dealing with people in all different walks of life and providing great services and great experiences for them.

From there I moved on to UVM, University of Vermont which is in Burlington, where I studied economics and it was my first exposure to sustainability in business. At that time I was afraid to work in climate. I thought the problem was too big and frankly, I didn't understand it enough, and certainly didn't feel like I could make a difference at that time. So I did what everyone seemed to have doing in my generation didn't know exactly what they were going to do with their life.

I went to Wall Street. So I got lucky and ended up working at Citi first on their trading floor and then went through their investment banking program, and ultimately moved to Columbia to go to business school, which was great and really allowed me to learn not only the financial aspects of business, but also operating a business and learning how to think as a consultant and developing my brain there. That's where I think the story gets relevant and interesting to what I'm doing today.

From there I joined a little company called Modus that's in the mobility space. That's really where my mobility and fleet life started about 10 years ago. We took that from a little company that was B2B software. What they did was, they were reimbursing folks that drove their own car, their personal vehicle for work. At the time that was innovative and groundbreaking. During the time I was there, we actually grew into quite a large company as I was Head of Strategy while I was there, and now it's the market leader. So while I was there I really learned a ton about expense management and I also learned a lot about folks that drive a ton for work. Then I also learned a lot about fleet.

So from there I decided to start MoveEV when I became obsessed with climate change, about four years ago, deep COVID, walking around my neighborhood and my best friend just moved to California and we're looking at the same smoke in the sky. I've got two little girls and I was just thinking, man, this is a real clear and present danger, I'm worried about it. Is there anything I can do Anything I can do for climate change is MoveEV. So four years ago I picked it right, EVs actually are becoming a thing, there's no going back now. Environmental social governance is also becoming more and more of a thing. What we really do is at the intersection of business or municipal vehicles and climate resilience or sustainability.

What our product allows you to do is, we help fleets understand what's going on in their gas fleet today and we can help them plan for electric future, but the real groundbreaking software that we have, the first of its kind is around the new problem, which is, when I give my employee an electric fleet vehicle, my expectation and desire is that he or she charge that at home overnight so that I can optimize my cost savings from fuel, because overnight charging is two thirds cheaper than charging during the day and in public, but as soon as you start doing that, companies start to realize, I need to reimburse for these new homes that are gas stations, or I need to account for this new business expense. There's no existing mechanism outside of us to do that accurately in an IRS compliant way.

So we invented the software and the services and solution to make that a seamless experience for both the employee, as well as the employer. A nice thing about it too is you don't necessarily need to install level two charging at home to utilize our service. In fact, it operates with no additional software or hardware that needs to be installed on site.

Angela Simoes:

It's really I think a unique model because it provides an alternative to charging rather than just relying on the infrastructure that we're all complaining about isn't sufficient. Of course, electrification of fleets is top priority, everyone's talking about that. Did you find that companies were already starting to think about, how can I have my employees charge at home, or was this something, a new solution that they hadn't thought of yet? Then, what has their reaction been?

Dave Lewis:

Yeah, the typical phone call I get is, Dave, I just put 10 EVs on the ground, they're charging at home and now I have to reimburse for that and I don't have a plan and I wasn't aware. So we're happy, that's the best case scenario. Some other scenarios are, we've been working on trying to figure this out in a variety of different ways and it's very labor intensive on our side, or our employees are upset about the way that we're doing because it's very transparent. Like, if you're doing some sort of flat allowance or you're just trying to give someone $100 or something for charging, generally the employees really don't like that model because tax comes out of that money and it's very plain in front of their eyes, that what you're reimbursing for has nothing to do and does not adequately compensate them for the energy put in their car at home. So it's either, hey Dave, we finally figured out to install the chargers. Hey Dave, our cars finally landed, now we really need your help with this.

What we're trying to do is flip the market and say, hey, let's think about a home charging approach first and let's think about, are you going to get involved in this infrastructure at their home or do you want to just reimburse for it? What we're trying to do is remove very real complexities from this ideation of, I want to have EVs, to having them in practice and improving your operations.

A lot of the main complaints that we get when we work with vendors, we always want to know all about their program, where they are, what's working, what isn't working. There are some difficult stories around the supply chain. We have the vehicles, they've been on a lot for a long time, but the chargers haven't arrived yet. Oh great, the chargers have arrived but we're having trouble installing them or now they've been installed and the wifi connection isn't working. Those vignettes just become actual barriers and dissatisfaction with the program. What we try to do is just eliminate that gap or where these negative experiences could come from, because you want charging at home to just be simple because whenever your employees do it just saves the company money, but it does involve their home. So they are protective of their, that's generally the most valuable asset in that person's life and their portfolio and so they really care and want to have say around any physical changes that may happen in their home from the charging infrastructure. Also, what machine they're adding to their home. So we just want to eliminate that from the equation of, I don't like my program because my charging at home experience has been difficult.

Mark Thomas:

So are you a SaaS provider or do you have a hardware solution that's also required?

Dave Lewis:

No hardware, it's just SaaS.

Mark Thomas:

So then how is it if the electric bills are integrated via somebody's PG&E or the electric company? How do you understand how much has been used and what the rate was and all of that information? So, just curious how that works.

Dave Lewis:

There are two pieces of data that are extremely important to us and to running a successful charging at home reimbursement program. One is, what does that individual's utility cost per kilowatt? When you look at someone's utility bill, there's a myriad of charges and we need to be figuring out which of those is the employee getting reimbursed for related to charging at home. So our focus is, we do an energy audit when we start the program where we're looking at everyone's bill with our machine learning and understanding these are the various charges, these are the utility platform gene work. So that Mark, this is your utility rate for this month, which may change every month depending on your utility provider, where you live, a bunch of stuff. So one is getting accurate information from the end user's utility bill and being transparent and communicating to them how we're getting to the kilowatt rate.

Mark Thomas:

So am I sending the PDF of my bill to you for processing or how do you get that information?

Dave Lewis:

Oh, thank you. So the ease of use is, you get alerted, it's time to submit your home charging costs for reimbursement this month. Please take a screenshot or upload your utility bill. Generally it takes a minute, 30 seconds and that's really all the time we want to use it or be spending in the platform. That's how we cover the rate. Then, how do we cover the kilowatts used? How do we put into the vehicle at home? How do we cover how many kilowatts we're putting in the vehicle at home? We do it a myriad of ways. The ideal way is to do it through a telematics connection where we know exactly how much energy was put into the vehicle, where, and when. Then we combine those disparate data sets, we bounce that information across your company's home charging reimbursement policy to create this IRS compliant receipt.

Mark Thomas:

Does the OEM have granular enough data for you to be able to get that level of information or do you need a third party telematics device that reads the ODBD too, and Canvas information? So are you requiring people to put in a dongle or anything like that?

Dave Lewis:

So we meet our clients where they are today. So if the client is using OEM telematics solution or if the client is using a third-party telematics solution like a Geotab or a Samsara or something like that, we're able to. We integrate and in a seamless way, capture that information. Some of our clients, for many reasons, mostly cultural, have decided not to track telematics machining, and that's where we rely on our AI tech expert that has developed this algorithm where we can just use more standard miles traveled information combined with other stuff that affects how efficient your car is at using the energy, to create a 90% accurate rate. Some clients are happy with that, that's a level of detail that they're actually extremely happy with. You can see why, because culturally that fits their scenario of not having telematics. Yeah, go ahead.

Angela Simoes:

No, I was going to say, so that also, the uploading of the monthly bill if you will, addresses the compliant or the privacy issue. As you were saying culturally, some don't want to have the telematics connected, so it's an opt-in and people don't have to worry about, I'm giving away a bunch of personal information. So, I mean that's a positive there.

Dave Lewis:

I would say how this... My old life was vehicle reimbursement and so I know a ton about this. This is different. In vehicle there's a lot of leeway in what you get reimbursed and all that. I don't want to dive in too much, but here you're in a situation where 75% of Americans are upset about their utility bill already. They look at it. So the level of confidence that they have that they're getting reimbursed correctly by submitting their actual bill, makes this seamless transparent experience for them, which otherwise they get very upset about. If they can't figure it out, they get very upset about it because it seems unfair.

Then also, why you want to be hyper accurate here is that in California, which is I know where you guys are HQ'd, there's a labor code there called California 2802 and it clearly states that when an employee uses their own personal asset for work, that their employer has to have a mechanism to accurately reimburse them for the use of that asset, period. You cannot sign that right away. So our view here is that there's a best in class technology solution. We store receipts for seven years, if you do get audited, you've got a package to get delivered to the [inaudible 00:14:49]. Again, what's different here or obvious is that if there is an electric vehicle given to an employee, 100 out of 100 times you want them to charge at home overnight. [inaudible 00:15:01] of the vehicle, their days work, and 99% of the time it's going to be far less expensive than charging on depot.

Angela Simoes:

Absolutely.

Mark Thomas:

What about the people then that live in apartments where there isn't charging or just have street parking? If you're a city dweller, it's pretty common that you're just parking on the street. How do they get reimbursed?

Dave Lewis:

Another great question we get a lot all the time. So we're focused on reimbursing for charging at home. So if you do live in a building where you do have access to a charger, our programs are exactly the same. Exactly what I laid out for you, that's how it works. If you're someone that needs to charge into a field, we do offer the service to reimburse for that, if they're going to use their own credit card. Some of our clients take us up on that solution as well. That does give you a more wholistic view of field and home and depot. So we do encourage that, but the groundbreaking stuff is like at home accuracy.

Mark Thomas:

Are people trying to then decipher how many miles are done for personal and prorate, or do companies just in general charge, reimburse for all mileage, whether they're personal or used for business?

Dave Lewis:

Yeah, you'd think there'd be one answer. Really, this is reflective of other culture and policy. So we're trying to meet our clients where they are and so whatever they're doing today for gas, we recommend they do for electric. So that policy would be the same as it is for gas today as electric.

Angela Simoes:

Got it. Does this apply to personal vehicles as well that could be utilized for work as part of a fleet, if you will?

Dave Lewis:

So we are not in the vehicle reimbursement space. Where we do play in the personal vehicle space is under our commute EV product, which is a green commuting benefits that our clients offer their employees to incentivize them to drive electric vehicles to work, and most importantly, charge them at home. So because there's so few vehicles on the road right now, the way that companies historically have encouraged you to get electric vehicles is to put 10 chargers at the HQ, first come first serve, and it's free. That's awesome. We strongly encourage that you do that, but when you have a 1,000 out of 1,000 employees commuting to work in an EV, it is an insurmountable task to install the charging for that benefit.

So we want our clients to get a head start and say, hey, it's even better if they charge at home, it will cost you less money. In mass it can scale like the infrastructure can't. It's just a great little perk because you find that it's actually not an expensive benefit to offer. It's less expensive than offering generally a bus compensation or even some of the biking to work benefits are far more expensive than this. But we do think the commuting aspect is something that we do want to encourage the most sustainable companies to focus on those that worry about their scope three emissions because for information workers that driving to work is the vast majority of your emissions.

Angela Simoes:

Right, I think one of the stats you had given us in our previous conversation was that commuting transportation is 15 to 20% of all emissions in the country. That there's 150 million people driving alone in their car and 80% of that is commuting, it's driving to work. So it would have a huge impact, to your point.

Dave Lewis:

It's huge. 150 million people commute to work alone in their car. The average commute is 16 miles each way, 32 miles a day. All this information is on the census, you can look it up. I just did some math and put it together. A lot of people are saying, well, COVID, everyone's working at home and it's just not really true. Maybe 5% of the world or America is now working at home that wasn't before, but the vast majority of people, maybe now it's 70%, get up drive to work alone in their car.

So you can see that, just one other benefit while I'm talking about it is that if you can encourage your employee to get an electric vehicle today, they have the opportunity to get $7,500 benefit from the federal government, and often more than $2,500 from the state. For people in America that on average makes $60,000 a year, that's a life-changing event. Then habitually, it's forced savings because every time you fill up that car at home or even in the field, you save at least half the cost of your gas if at 75%. You force everyone to save that money. Then because my dad worked in a restaurant and he worked a lot, I like to think that we get people home a little earlier for dinner because they didn't have to stop for gas on the way home.

Angela Simoes:

The reason I asked about the use of personal vehicles is because, so I'm thinking about, so my husband works for the neighboring city where we live. They have a limited fleet of vehicles, but on the days where he has to use one, but then there's no vehicle available, if he was able to use his personal vehicle but then maybe had to charge or knew that he was going to have to go on site for something and so he charged at home because there's a shortage of vehicles. I think that's another priority is sourcing vehicle assets for fleets. So if fleets can't procure all the vehicles that they need, if their employees are using their own vehicles, and of course there's certain situations where you can't. You have to have, whether it's a truck or something like that, but in other situations where a personal vehicle could be used, I wondered if that would alleviate some of the pressure of a company having to source additional vehicles.

Dave Lewis:

Yeah, absolutely. I think where reimbursement makes sense over owning a vehicle, I think that that is something that companies should definitely look into and do. There's a lot of... It's good for driver safety, insurance purposes and all sorts of other reasons.

I would say there are supply chain issues. A lot of our clients are still having some trucks and other vehicles delayed a little bit on them. I think we're just going through these growing pains of switching from gas to electric that I think will continue to persist, but we need to work with the tools and the situation that we're in. We often talk to our clients, sometimes we're there before they even have any EVs and we're working on a plan for them. We talk to our clients about, let's look for the exception and let's try not to talk about the rule that much. Let's look for the exceptions where this makes so much sense you can't not do it, because that's where we are. You want to get folks to 2% of their fleet to 5 to 10 to 15 to 25 to 50. There's a long ways ways to go, but you got to start and start now.

Angela Simoes:

When we are, again talking about charging at home here, it reminds me of the solar conversation and how you can't build solar farms everywhere, but if we encourage people to put solar panels on their home, you're capturing energy from many more places, but then the consumers can use that energy for their own consumption, so spread the wealth on the grid. Is that a good way for people to think about it when thinking about charging their vehicle at home? That they're essentially adding an asset to their home to be able to charge at home because they're able to again, it's more affordable, but as more and more people are having or buying EVs, should they stay there? Should they sell their home? It's an asset to have an EV charger at home. So can we talk a little bit about that and how people are accepting or maybe not accepting, but I think maybe a little more open to charging at home based on this solar panel model?

Dave Lewis:

Yes, you bring up a good point. I mean, knowledge is key here. I think it's about the homeowner or the employee needs to understand all the benefits that are involved to them. Similar to solar, solving a broader energy problem, helping to decentralize the grid. Charging at home actually accentuates that and improves upon it. So you're not creating all this charge demand in a specific location. Now all the vehicles are going home at night, and so that helps to decentralize. I also love, like you were saying, is that your employee is now driving an EV, is charging it at home, and so you're melding their personal sustainability efforts with that of the corporation. I just love it from a cultural perspective for driving sustainable change.

Then from a cost or a savings perspective, what's wonderful about this program is when you have solar and you're putting energy back, your energy is less expensive. So charging at home, it can actually benefit that individual because there they may have done the extra effort and the extra cost of putting solar on their home, but that should not negatively impact what the company should be reimbursing them.

Mark Thomas:

So if you put solar in, you'll still get reimbursed at the rate that the local utilities would've charged you so that in essence, you can help cover some of the cost of that person's solar install?

Dave Lewis:

That's our recommendation, because the fact that the employee is selling electricity to the utility company has nothing to do with the company. So we just want that employee to be fairly and accurately reimbursed for the charging at home. Whether or not that's decreased by solar, that's a separate argument. To your point, that creates a tax-free opportunity for that person to benefit from their charging at home and the corporation is in the same position.

Angela Simoes:

Right, and then if you think about it too, if someone has solar and then that opens them up to charging at home, and that opens them up to storage, energy storage at home. So it's this nice trifecta where they can create their own little ecosystem of energy production and usage that would be much more affordable. But then to your point, perhaps getting reimbursed for part of that through their company, if that was the policy. So I think it's win-win all the way around if you look at it that way.

Dave Lewis:

You're totally right and I love where your head's going, and I love storage, and I do think that's the next thing to be part of everyone's home. By educating, I don't know where they're going to start. Some people have solar, that's wonderful, but think about the opportunity where someone doesn't have solar, they drive a truck for work, maybe they don't even like electric vehicles, and then all of a sudden they get an EV, they realize it's great, they're seeing how much less money they're getting reimbursed for than they're gas bill was because the ones swiping the credit card. Over time, they just through osmosis or however you want to think about it, get to see the benefit of electrifying. That's something that the corporations really are involved in and it's a great byproduct of this.

The reason why we're using, we try to work with corporations to scale through their employees is because in America, that's how change actually happens. The reason why folks have retirement savings is because corporations got together and started to offer 401Ks. The reason why we have all of healthcare, the same thing happened in the '70s. That is the only way that we seem to be able to reach broad swaths of people and actually can dispute the naysayers. Well, we need to move away from the machismo of, I don't have healthcare, to, I don't have healthcare and then other people thinking that doesn't make any sense. Then similarly, I don't like EVs. Oh, I've got this one from work, it's actually great and you're telling your friends. All of a sudden it just spreads because they're cheaper, better, faster. I'm sorry I haven't mentioned that yet, but this whole experience is far better.

Angela Simoes:

Well, thank you so much, Dave. We've reached the end of our episode here today, so we're going to have to wrap it up but thank you so much for joining us and we really appreciate what you're doing. We wish you the best of luck.

Dave Lewis:

Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed our time together.

Angela Simoes:

Thanks for listening to the Mile Marker podcast. If you liked what you heard today, give us a like, share this episode on social media, and even take a minute to give us a review on iTunes or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe to our channel so you can join us for future episodes full of insights and ideas to keep the mobility industry moving forward.