Building an electric truck from the ground up was a journey that started with frustration but quickly transformed into a passion project. With billion-dollar companies like Tesla struggling to bring their electric semi to market, we – two truck drivers with a tent shop in a parent’s backyard – decided to take matters into our own hands. This is the full story of how Edison Motors built a working electric truck when the giants couldn’t.
The Origins: A 1969 Kenworth and a Dream
Our story begins with “Old Blue,” a 1969 Kenworth LW truck, built in Vancouver, BC. When my business partner Eric and I met at university, where I worked as a truck driver to put myself through school. We decided to start a business together yet faced the same problem many young entrepreneurs do: lack of funding. Despite being able to secure student loans, banks weren’t willing to give us money for a business. So, with the $110,000 we managed to scrape together, we bought a $4,000 logging truck and trailer.
Old Blue was rough, but we stripped it down, repainted it, and got it up and running again. This was just the first step toward what would eventually become Edison Motors, as we began to grow our trucking business by purchasing more trucks, one by one.
Transitioning to Hybrid Power and Solar Energy
Eric and I are huge solar nerds. We love the idea of free energy from the sun, and after making some money from our trucking business, we decided to invest in solar power systems. Our big break came when we built a hybrid power system. Eric, a genius with electrical engineering, figured out that many systems were oversized to meet peak capacity. We realized we could optimize the system by meeting average demand with a generator and using batteries to handle peak loads. The result was a hybrid community power project, the first of its kind in British Columbia.
We continued to grow from there, tackling off-grid projects and realizing that this hybrid knowledge could be applied to our love of trucks.
The Decision: Building a Hybrid Electric Truck
While we were building hybrid trailers and solar systems, we reserved a Tesla Semi – excited by the potential of electric trucks in the logging industry. But after five years of waiting, the truck never came. We began thinking, “If we were going to build an electric truck, we’d do it this way.” After running the numbers and finding flaws in the battery size, we decided we could build our own hybrid electric truck.
So, we canceled our Tesla reservation, asked for our deposit back, and officially started Edison Motors. We turned to crowdfunding, raising $500,000 in just four days, to build a proof of concept. Using an old project truck and components from Tesla vehicles, we succeeded. Our first electric truck, powered by a Cat 3306 generator and Tesla batteries, was a working prototype.
Crowdfunding and Proving the Naysayers Wrong
After proving we could retrofit an old truck, critics doubted whether we could build a completely new electric truck from scratch. So, we did what we always do – set out to prove them wrong. With another round of crowdfunding, we raised $1.5 million to build a truck from the frame rails up. This time, we designed every nut and bolt, and the result was a road-legal truck that passed all inspections.
The Secret to Our Success: Mechanics and Truckers
Our secret was simple: we are truckers and mechanics. We’ve been restoring and servicing trucks for decades. Instead of reinventing the wheel, we used tried-and-true components that work. We sourced parts that any truck driver or mechanic could understand, which made our truck reliable, simple, and easy to maintain.
The electric part of the truck wasn’t the challenge; trucks have used electric motors in industrial applications for decades. What’s essential is knowing how to build a truck that works in the real world, and that’s where our expertise came in.
The Future of Edison Motors
We couldn’t have achieved this without the support of our fans. Through your generosity, we built “Carl” and “Topsy,” our first electric trucks. Now, we’re gearing up for the next round of crowdfunding to start production at scale. If you believe in our vision of building trucks in North America again, this is your chance to invest.
We’ve proven that blue-collar guys can get things done, and we’re excited for what’s next at Edison Motors. Thank you for being part of this journey with us.
About Edison Motors
