Duncan McIntyre, founder and CEO of Highland Electric Fleets, joins Jeff Dance to explore how electrification as a service is transforming school bus, refuse, and municipal fleets. Duncan explains how Highland finances, builds, and operates electric fleets in more than 100 cities, including 500 electric school buses for the LA28 Olympic Games. He argues that every workhorse vehicle on a predictable route will ultimately be electrified, and that EV fleets can strengthen the grid as data centers drive up power demand. The conversation also covers autonomy, AI-driven maintenance, and new EV workforce jobs.

Podcast Transcript:

Jeff Dance: In this episode of The Future Of, we’re joined by Duncan McIntyre, CEO of Highland Electric Fleets, to explore the future of electric fleets. Duncan, welcome to the show.

Duncan McIntyre: Jeff, thanks. I’m thrilled to be on. I appreciate it.

Jeff Dance: To give a little background on Duncan: Duncan McIntyre is the founder and CEO of Highland Electric Fleets. It’s a pioneering company focused on electrifying fleets. They’ve done a lot with buses and have a big vision of expansion. They’re actually the number one owner-operator of EV school buses under contract in the US, and they’re the official electric school bus provider for the LA 2028 Olympic Games for Team USA. They were one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential Companies recently; I think that was in 2024. Duncan has really created an innovative, service-based model that electrifies transportation, leveraging public-private partnerships to address climate change, and they’re one of the first commercial vehicle-to-grid programs in the US. So that’s a little bit more about Highland.

As for Duncan, I understand your background spans multiple roles in the energy and financial sectors. I’m assuming that’s why you have helped raise half a billion dollars for people in the space to really make a move here. To name a few places prior to Highland, he co-founded Altenex, an energy and emissions management network, and served as a senior vice president at Edison Energy, all before becoming the CEO of Highland Electric Fleets. Really excited to have you on the show, Duncan. Tell us a little bit more about your journey leading up to Highland.

Duncan McIntyre: Jeff, happy to. I think you got the background right. I’ve certainly spent my whole career in the world of energy transition and innovating around cleaner, healthier options across energy and transportation. I started Altenex, my prior company, really to fill a gap I saw in the market. Wind and solar were emerging technologies that showed a lot of promise. The manufacturers were developing great products, but downstream users of power had a harder time figuring out how to adopt them. So we built this company that focused entirely on bringing that marketplace forward to corporations.

I sold that business and really got the EV bug. It seemed to me that it was similar to renewable energy. The products were built by leading global manufacturers; companies like Daimler and Volvo had EV platforms. But it’s stitching together all the downstream pieces: charging, technology transition, and workforce development. You have to finance all this expensive equipment, and hopefully you can get it running and working smoothly. To me, it was an obvious place for new, innovative business models to come together and help make sure these electrified fleets could become a reality for cities, for people, for corporations, anyone who needed them. So that’s the journey I’ve been on. I’ve been running Highland for almost eight years now, and it’s definitely the most rewarding job I’ve ever had.

Jeff Dance: That’s awesome. And you’re in a hundred cities now, I heard?

Duncan McIntyre: Yeah, we’re in a little over a hundred cities. We’ll be closing in on two hundred cities by, call it, Q1 next year, just based on our backlog and where we’re building. So, growing quickly.

Jeff Dance: Very cool. It was great to hear you talk about the infrastructure, because I think we see a lot of innovation with technology, and sometimes it’s missing that connected infrastructure to actually go, right? Obviously that’s been the case with some of the electrification in general. It’s not just one part of the equation; you have to solve for many parts of the equation. So when you can own more of that, or influence more of that, I think you can move things faster. It’s cool to hear about your journey on both sides, leading up to what you’re doing here.

Outside of work, though, when you’re passionate about something, it doesn’t feel like work, right? You could work all day on it.

Duncan McIntyre: I agree. I totally agree.

Jeff Dance: There’s a different kind of drive and energy. And what’s cool about this one is you’re bringing together a public good and a social good at the same time. When you can make money and do that, that’s a very magical place. But I heard you’re an organic farmer. Tell us more about that too.

Duncan McIntyre: Well, I would call it a passion project, but yes. I’ve always loved farming. I’ve always loved the idea of growing crops on your own land and being able to sustain yourself. During COVID, we had a few moments in time where our food supply chains were breaking down. I don’t know if you went to the grocery store and saw that there was no chicken occasionally, or they were out of things. It was a reminder of how fragile our supply chains are. Over the last hundred years, we’ve gone from more regional and local farming to very centralized, very industrial-scale farming, mostly in the Midwest. That means we’re relying on trains and trucks and stores. And I think there’s an interesting question as to whether that’s the right model for everything in the long run.

So with my wife, and we’ve got three kids, we’ve put our hands in the ground and started some farming operations at home. We haven’t commercialized any of it yet, but we’ve done it as a passion project, so we can really experience firsthand what it takes to produce meals from your own backyard. I absolutely love it. I like it more than a lot of other things these days.

Jeff Dance: I think it’s a great de-stressor to get in the ground and do physical things, but then to be able to eat what you sow is unique. And I think you’re right; a lot of the problems emerged out of COVID. Anytime you get to an extreme on something, you start to have negative consequences. One extreme would be if we had to farm everything ourselves. The other extreme would be that we have to rely on all the transportation and distribution worldwide for all these things. I would hope there is a happy middle in the future, where you’re eating local, and that might be from your backyard, or your city that has figured that out, or your local farms. I would hope for a future that has the mix, right?

Duncan McIntyre: I think that’s exactly right. It’s unrealistic that everyone’s going to have chickens and all the produce. But finding a good balance feels to me like something we have to swing back to a little bit as a society. So we’ll see. Maybe I’ll have another career someday in ag. You never know.

Jeff Dance: Hey, we’re doing more in ag tech right now. It is a growing, hot space, so it is fun, especially as we think about the role of AI and robotics. But that’s another topic. Let’s talk about electrification. Highland was named the official provider of electric buses for the Olympic Games coming up. Give us a little sneak peek of that experience and what it’ll be like for attendees.

Duncan McIntyre: We signed on as an official sponsor, which is a big commitment but also a great honor. We’re going to run five hundred electric school buses for the Olympics to provide transportation all around LA for staff, officials, athletes’ families, and media. It’s great for a few reasons. One is it allows us to showcase for the whole industry that this technology is capable of doing 16-hour days and serving the largest global sporting event.

One of the things we’ve had to tackle for our entire existence as a company is myth-busting the idea that EVs aren’t capable of meeting the duty cycles. From my perspective, the technology is absolutely fantastic. It’s an upgrade. You have to plan your infrastructure to support the routes. You have to train your staff on how to run it. And the staff includes mechanics, who need to be able to run diagnostics and fix things, which are different, and drivers, which is a function of comfort: getting into a cadence of being able to drive and plug in. Really basic things, but comfort. And then you put all the technology backbones in place so you can run a fleet really efficiently.

I think the LA28 committee was really excited about making it the cleanest and greenest Olympics anywhere, ever, and that included all-electric transportation. We were up for the challenge. We viewed this as an opportunity to build out charging infrastructure, depots, and fleets all over Southern California that were not just for the Olympics, but that would serve the Olympics for six weeks and the surrounding community for 10, 15, 20 years. That’s what we’ve done. As a result, we’ve got bus fleets running in Compton, in Oxnard, and in Inglewood, and we’re building infrastructure in Long Beach, LA, and Moreno Valley. The list goes on and on. It’s a chance to make an investment in communities that can benefit from upgraded technology, cleaner air, and workforce development. And by making those investments, we can serve the Olympics as well, which is exciting for the industry, and it’s exciting for our brand to stand alongside Delta and Starbucks and Honda.

Jeff Dance: Yeah, it’s huge. That’s awesome. You talked about depots and infrastructure being an important part of scaling a program. What other technology advancements have led to your ability to scale? And is there anything still holding back more scaling? It sounds like you’re growing quickly, but are there things that are still contingent on more growth?

Duncan McIntyre: In the industry in general, the technology keeps getting better every year. The batteries are getting a little more efficient. The balance of the system is getting simpler and more reliable. The cost of building the equipment is getting cheaper. So what we’re finding is costs continue to come down as the industry gets to scale.

Secondary to that, we’ve done a really great job at Highland at building what I describe as technology backbones. If a charger isn’t working, more often than not we can fix it remotely with systems we’ve built that look for what’s wrong and do some resetting. It’s like rebooting your computer: reboot the equipment remotely, get it back online, and get it running smoothly and reliably. As a result, our availability and uptime has gone to 97, 98, 99-plus percent. That’s really what a fleet operator needs: high reliability.

Jeff Dance: High uptime, yeah.

Duncan McIntyre: Exactly. That’s exactly right. I also think there are advances happening in autonomous vehicle technology, and we’re very much getting ourselves into the center of that. It may not be appropriate for a school bus that picks up kids today, but a street sweeper drives around a community on a predictable route at two miles per hour. There are applications that allow us to electrify and improve with autonomous driving.

And lastly, I would say the technology has a set of safety features that are really exciting. The buses have improved tech that allows for awareness of surrounding vehicles. The center of gravity is lower, because the bulk of the weight is a battery that sits between the frame rails, centered and low. So we’ve found that drivers find it to be better technology.

Five years ago, there was a public perception that EV technology was new and would be for early adopters. Today we’re finding that more and more cities have switched to a mentality where they’re convinced it’s the future, and it’s more about the right pace for driving a transition in their fleets. So we’re not doing two-bus pilots. We’re doing 25-bus and 50-truck full-fleet transitions that happen over time. That allows us to invest more in the communities we serve and help those communities realize all the benefits and outcomes they’re going for: tackling things like pediatric asthma, upskilling a local workforce, and improving technology to deliver better platforms for drivers, staff, and the communities around them.

Jeff Dance: There are a lot of benefits to a program like this. It’s exciting to hear. When we talked about expansion, you’ve been heavily focused on school buses. Tell us more about where you see this electrification-as-a-service model going and where it expands, near term and long term.

Duncan McIntyre: I’m happy to. When we say electrification as a service, to us that really means that historically a municipal operator would buy a truck and hire someone to manage it. But the “hire someone to manage it” piece is a lot more complicated than it used to be. So our goal is to bring all the components that are needed to make a fleet operate smoothly, reliably, and affordably.

We started with school buses largely because I got inspiration as a dad. My wife Kathleen and I have three kids, and at the time our son Angus was a second grader. I realized that his mouth is at the same height as the tailpipe on a diesel bus. You see all these second graders lined up at the bus stop just breathing in the fumes. You’re very quick to do a little research and realize pediatric asthma is super high in urban areas. That’s not from coal plants; it’s from tailpipes. So the observation that led to Highland was very much inspired by being a father.

But when you start expanding on that, any vehicle that does a fixed route, goes back to the same depot at night, and is relatively predictable in what it does day to day is pretty ripe for electrification. Even if the routes are longer, you can plan around it, and you can ensure that the charging infrastructure, the staff, the support, the training, and the equipment exist. If you do that, you can make a huge impact on communities.

We’re starting to sign contracts with refuse operators, so we’re in the municipal solid waste business now, running electric garbage trucks. If you think about a garbage truck picking up your bin from the road, they’re loud and they tend to be kind of smelly. If you can clean them up and make them a lot quieter and a lot cleaner, and they run at or below the cost—in many cases we’re able to run them cheaper because the fuel is cheaper and the maintenance is less—it’s really a win-win. It’s a full upgrade for everyone.

Jeff Dance: Yeah, there’s some time to pay back from a capital perspective, but it’s not too long when you think about the lifetime of these vehicles, and then the maintenance and all the costs—not only fuel, but the people that go into maintaining these vehicles.

Duncan McIntyre: That’s right, but that’s also where our model comes in. For a city, it’s hard to bet on how long it’ll take to pay back, but we’ll make that bet. We tend to capitalize all the equipment, and then a city might pay us three dollars a mile. So their payback is instantaneous, in that if it works, we get paid.

Jeff Dance: That’s really cool. So you’ve taken on some of the financial risk because you believe in the economics, and that makes it easier for them to switch.

Duncan McIntyre: That’s right. And we’re well suited to take on the risks, because we can bring subject matter experts to help manage each of the risks in a way that is hard for a city to do. They’re not going to hire fifty or seventy-five or a couple hundred people to manage all those risks, but we can do it in aggregate and spread that across hundreds of cities. That’s the benefit of having an at-scale partner that can help make the fleets a reality.

Jeff Dance: Right. Here in Seattle, we’ve seen the Rivian vans delivering packages. I know Amazon was an early investor in Rivian, and it seems like they’re trying to start their own program in a sense. But not everyone is building infrastructure like the world’s biggest logistics and e-commerce company. So is part of the thinking to spread deeper into the commercial space as well?

Duncan McIntyre: It’s a good question, Jeff. My vision for the company has always been to make electrified fleets affordable and reliable for all communities. Our focal point is the community, and that tends to revolve around municipal transportation. I’ve been really fortunate to be able to travel the country over the last seven or eight years, and I love showing up at bus depots at six in the morning with an offering of coffee and donuts and getting to know the people on the ground who have to make these fleets run every single day. It’s been hugely valuable in my journey.

We’re serving rural communities and urban communities, and we’re saving money for city operators, which allows them to put more teachers back into the curriculum for students or upgrade their technology. In Central Florida, the school bus fleets we replaced didn’t have air conditioning before, so they’re just grateful they have a better platform that’s running cheaper.

In theory, we have all the skills to serve the logistics providers or the large corporate fleets, which is really at the heart of your question. But we have so much work to do with municipal fleets that I think it’ll be quite some time before we expand. I’ve always believed in focus. I focused on school bus electrification for five years before we started serving cities more broadly, and it’s served us really well. So I expect we’ll continue to focus on our customer being the public sector: the city, the municipality, the school district, maybe the state in some cases. If we serve them really well and get to scale, we get to experience all those amazing community benefits, and that’s become part of the culture of the company I built. So it’s a long-winded way of saying, no, I don’t think we’ll be serving corporations anytime soon.

Jeff Dance: Got it. You mentioned clean air and clean energy, and there’s a lot of alignment in communities and municipalities around some of those holistic benefits. So it seems like this is a way for them to advance some of their own interests as well. It’s a win-win-win.

Duncan McIntyre: Absolutely. Community solar and energy resiliency in communities have been really popular programs across lots of states for years. One of the big challenges is figuring out how you balance the utility. We work closely with electric utilities, because we need power everywhere we operate, and we want that to be the cleanest and best power possible.

But we’ve also realized we have these energy-dense batteries on all of our buses and trucks. They’re needed when they’re running around picking up kids or picking up trash, but there’s a lot of time when they’re sitting idle back at the depot. So one of the ways we’ve been able to engage with communities is by helping shore up their electric grid and make it more resilient. These buses can provide backup power if the grid’s down. These buses can help balance the grid when there’s a lot of power demand and maybe not enough supply. I think they can become an integral part of how the electric system thinks about grid resiliency. We’re involved in tons of those programs, and I’ve been passionate about it for a long time. At the end of the day, it’s about whether you can deliver something valuable that helps provide cleaner and cheaper power to communities and a more resilient grid. That’s what we’re trying to do.

Jeff Dance: That’s cool. We see that at a small scale with an electric car being a backup to your house. But if a city has five hundred mobile batteries, essentially, that they can plug into and that can be part of the grid system in both directions, that’s a really powerful concept.

Duncan McIntyre: Absolutely. We think of our bus fleets as being able, in theory, to power and back up all the hospitals in a city or all the municipal buildings in a city, provide cold storage, and allow elder care centers and homes to be backed up for weeks if the grid goes down. That’s pretty cool.

Jeff Dance: That is cool. Let’s transition a little bit to the future as we look ahead. Highland has already accomplished a lot, and I’m sure you’re still scratching the surface of what you can achieve. But as we think about electric fleets ten to twenty years from now, what does that look like for you and for the industry in general? What do you see coming to pass?

Duncan McIntyre: It’s interesting. We’re probably at less than ten percent in light-duty vehicles in terms of electrified vehicles in the US. We’re more like two or two and a half percent in terms of buses, and less than one percent if you go to heavy-duty trucks. The future’s incredibly bright. We’re doubling year over year as a company. We more than doubled this year, and we will double next year just based on our current backlog of projects that will come online. So it’s a good data point for thinking about market adoption.

I think once a city gets an electrified fleet, the drivers like it, the mechanics like it, and the members of the community really like it. It’s hard to go back. If you read the headlines over the last year and a half, you would almost believe that electrification is on its way out or not growing. We’re seeing exactly the opposite. When it comes to people’s personal cars, consumer choice is always going to be incredibly important, and the products have to meet the needs of the way people use their vehicles. But any vehicle that has a job—any workhorse that shows up, does a job every day, and then goes to bed at night—is ultimately going to be electrified. I’m pretty confident.

So when you think about the five-year and ten-year horizon, I’d expect we’ll go to 10%, 20%, 40%. We probably never get to a hundred percent, because I think there’s a question around long-haul trucking and certain applications, but I have high confidence that over half of our surface fleet will be electrified at some point. You look at other countries and see their electrified vehicle industries thriving—not just one country, but most other countries. So it’s a function of consumer acceptance, cost, reliability, and just the general mood. But I’m incredibly optimistic. We see the writing on the wall in terms of the cost trajectory, the demand from customers, and the viability of the technology.

Jeff Dance: That’s great. Thanks for sharing that vision. We recently did an episode on the future of batteries, and I think a lot of the public doesn’t understand that the time to charge will continue to go way down. The capacity will continue to go way up, the intelligence will continue to go way up, and the supply chain will keep broadening in terms of materials and inputs. So there are a lot of things happening in battery innovation that pave the way for the economics to be amazing.

Duncan McIntyre: Jeff, I couldn’t agree more. One of the key obstacles to people buying an electric vehicle is range anxiety. You can pull into a gas station and fill up your tank in five minutes, and everyone knows that’s a pretty reliable system. But the reality is that the charging technology now exists to go from 10% charge in your battery up to 80 or 90 percent in about 10 minutes. And 18 months from now, it’ll be five minutes. The chemistry, the way these batteries are designed, and the charging infrastructure have gotten better so quickly that I think a lot of that anxiety breaks down in corridors where fast charging gets built out and people get comfortable that it’s just easy.

Jeff Dance: Right. I think those perceived problems are going to continue to become less significant as a hurdle. If you can charge an electric car in ten minutes… But I think the biggest thing with electric cars and electric fleets is that you’re charged when you wake up. We have two electric cars, and we haven’t gone to the gas station in a long time. When I do pull up to the gas station, people are like, “What are you doing here?” And I’m like, “It’s for the boat. I’ve got to get gas for the boat.”

Duncan McIntyre: Yeah. And I need a Gatorade, right?

Jeff Dance: Yeah. Even electric boats are picking up some steam. I think you’re right: the efficiency of an electric motor compared to a combustion engine, and then the cost factors and the economics, are really contributing to this. I’m really excited about the future of electrification in lots of things. A lot of the improvements we’re seeing in consumer electronics are purely because of battery technology and some of the materials being used. My phone just charged twice as fast. And in talking to some of those innovators, they’re saying, “We’re bringing this stuff to much bigger things.” So it’s an exciting time.

Duncan McIntyre: I agree. If you look at the investments happening in the space, it’s not just for electric cars. It’s investments in battery chemistry, battery technology, and the balance of the systems to convert electrical power into a unit of propulsion, a unit of something. If you look at the world of drones and autonomous boats, it’s electric power that is more fungible and more efficient than anything else. So I’m convinced that not only are we getting better and better at it, but the improvement in efficiency around the combustion engine is not happening nearly as fast. It’s reached about the point it’s going to reach. We’ve been improving it for over a hundred, a hundred and fifty years, and it’s there. So I think it’s inevitable.

Jeff Dance: Talk to us a little bit more about autonomy. Obviously that’s a big thing. We’ve seen it in a lot of cities with Waymo‘s proliferation, and then Tesla expanding with their Cybercab, and other tech companies—Amazon’s got Zoox. A lot of that is driven not just by electrification but also by autonomy, right? Driverless now or in the future.

Duncan McIntyre: It’s really exciting. I think the technology is finally at a place where it’s viable and scalable, versus five years ago. It’s interesting: we’re in the municipal transportation business because we think it’s an incredible place to innovate and transition fleets in ways that have huge benefits for communities—health benefits, technology benefits, cost benefits. But in most cases, it won’t be the early adopter. Getting kids to get on a school bus without a driver is, I think, a long way away. Although many buses today have two full-time staff, a driver and a monitor, so possibly we can be in a world where one person can cover both roles.

Putting that aside for a moment, there are various stages of autonomy that make a ton of sense. Do these buses pull up to a depot and then go park themselves at the end of the day? Do they park themselves and plug themselves in? All of a sudden, in urban areas you don’t need as big a depot. You can be more efficient with your real estate, more efficient with your power, and create better conditions for your staff.

We’re investing in partnerships in autonomy. We’re an owner and an operator, so Highland will never be the company that develops the autonomy itself.

Jeff Dance: Yeah, I was curious.

Duncan McIntyre: But we think there’s an incredible amount of work that still needs to be done in specifically what we do, which is that we’re experts at bundling and packaging the capital, the technology, the people, the equipment, the know-how, and the process. When you stitch it all together, you’re really integrating 25 things that have to come together incredibly elegantly, and autonomy is maybe the most complex of those things. So we’re trying to take it at the right pace. I’m confident there’s a real role for it in surface municipal transportation, but I believe the workforce component will continue to be incredibly important for a while, and probably for a long time.

We’ve also prided ourselves on being enablers of insourcing for cities. They don’t need to outsource transportation; they can insource with Highland. We can provide the capital, fill the gaps, and provide all the know-how and the technology backbones, but we show up and train local staff. It’s really fun. We love the people side of the business, and we’ll keep looking at how to find the right balance as autonomy gets better and we find the right applications for it.

Jeff Dance: That’s great. Even with an autonomous bus, you may still want someone always there, but their time and attention could be devoted to the kids, for example, versus just driving.

Duncan McIntyre: I couldn’t agree more. I think that’s exactly the right way to think about it.

Jeff Dance: Great. As we think about energy and drawing on electrical grids, there’s more competition now with data centers. Some of the AI that’s driving our fast improvements in technology is also pulling energy from somewhere. Do you see that affecting electric fleets at all, or is it a non-issue?

Duncan McIntyre: It’s a macro industry that’s clearly moving faster than just about any other industry, so we have to pay attention to it. But I actually see electrified fleets as the solution. Think about the way we’re making investments in our electrical grid—more generation, more transmission and distribution—to meet the demand of data centers. There’s this big sucking sound of power going to data centers. Electrified fleets are uniquely suited to charge during off-peak times when there’s an abundance of available power, like overnight in most places, or, in some places, during peak solar production, like parts of Southern California.

So whenever there’s an abundance of available power that’s not being used, EV fleets can charge. When the grid is strained and at its peak—for lots of reasons, and AI data center computing is a big one—EV fleets can not only avoid charging, but actually send power back to the grid to help meet peak demand. That’s what Highland’s doing across a dozen states already. We generate income by providing battery storage for the grid from our buses when they’re sitting idle. When school’s out in the summer, buses are sitting idle, and they can act as big energy storage tanks for the grid. So instead of becoming a strain on the grid, they become a resource to support the grid, which creates more resilient local communities and also enables regions to drive their economies with new industries, and the data center industry is one of those new industries. So I think when you really unpack it, EV fleets are in some ways the killer solution to grid instability and demand for power.

Jeff Dance: That’s cool. I know some municipalities don’t love the battery energy storage systems that are popping up to supply that. So if you can bring in a fleet that also solves that issue, and it’s mobile, I can see how that could address some of the demand they’re already trying to solve for. You’re bringing in a good that’s multifactor. It’s great.

Duncan McIntyre: Exactly.

Jeff Dance: As we think about technology, the future, and how it shapes our lives, I love the human focus, the people focus, of your company. I think that’s really important. But technologies tend to accelerate and converge, and that’s where a lot of the biggest opportunities for innovation lie. Are there other technologies you think will play a role in the future? Obviously AI is changing every tech company in a sense, and we see physical AI being the next wave for the next 10 years, where it’s going to impact more machines—not just robots, but essentially any hardware could be ripe for embedded intelligence. I’m curious if you have other thoughts about technologies that will play a role in future innovation.

Duncan McIntyre: Yeah, Jeff, we’re trying to be very forward-leaning on the right-sized approach to integrating new technology into what is a relatively old industry, which is transportation. There are lots of ways we’re doing that today. Routing would be one. Routing used to be done with a map and a pencil and paper: let’s go this way because we think it makes sense. But if you embed intelligence and start looking at fact patterns and real-life data, you may shift your routing and create more efficiencies in the process.

We’re also using technology to be more right-sized and more thoughtful about how we engage with the grid and the power system. You don’t need to charge a bus to a hundred percent overnight if the power’s not available and your route only requires a 30% state of charge. We may give that driver more space and get them to 75 or 80 percent so there’s no anxiety, but the point is there’s a whole set of algorithms that stress-test the right sizing of how we charge, how we fuel, and how we manage around the energy ecosystem.

There’s a whole world of operations, too. One of the problems we see in cities is that they’re struggling to get young people to become diesel mechanics. Simply maintaining a fleet of a couple thousand buses and trucks is getting harder and harder because fewer young people want to go into that line of work. We’ve found that with electrified fleets, you can bring in engineering expertise that can constantly query your equipment in the field. Whether it’s vehicles driving around, charging infrastructure, switchgear, or distribution equipment, all of it can be assessed from a health standpoint. And we’ve been able to build our own layer of intelligence with AI tools that allow us to proactively get in front of maintenance, reset equipment, assess the engineering health of something, and bring it offline to fix before it breaks. So we’ve created a reliable fleet world where you need fewer people tinkering to figure out what happened and what needs to be fixed, and you’re doing more active management with technology.

There are lots of other examples, autonomy being one of them. But I do think electrification gives you permission to bring more advanced data analytics and AI tools to bear, create more efficiencies in the way we support cities, and give them a better experience—give them an upgrade.

Jeff Dance: Yeah, it’s huge. We have two cars, and when I have friends switching to electric, they reach out and say, “This is amazing,” especially with autonomy. You’ve got to experience it, essentially: waking up with the car fully charged and not going to the gas station for four months.

Duncan McIntyre: Not going to the gas station ever. And Jeff, do some of your friends comment that it actually has better acceleration, more torque, and better braking?

Jeff Dance: For sure. The one-pedal driving is awesome.

Duncan McIntyre: Exactly. I have friends who’ve been lifelong diesel truck guys, and I have a Ford F-150 Lightning, a pickup truck that’s all electric. They’ve driven it and said, “My goodness, the thing takes off. It’s amazing.” And you can run a bandsaw out of the bed. It’s pretty cool.

Jeff Dance: It is awesome. What about jobs? You mentioned that with autonomy and advances in technology, you can reduce the demand for the workforce, and for some organizations that’s really important because they can’t get enough people as it is. But in other cases, you actually create jobs, and you’ve alluded to that a few times. What do you see as some of the new jobs coming out of this innovation that we might not have today?

Duncan McIntyre: It’s a good point. Universally, cities and schools are short on drivers, and corporations are short on drivers. It’s tough to find enough people who want to drive vehicles around, all types of vehicles. So there’s certainly a bottleneck there, and we’re definitely seeing a bigger shortage of mechanics.

But at the same time, we’re bringing on people who—I wouldn’t say have super advanced degrees—are willing to take on new training, where they may be running diagnostics equipment. There’s some engineering involved, and some training and know-how, but ultimately it’s diagnosing problems and then acting as project managers and quarterbacks for getting repair work done. A lot of it can happen remotely, but sometimes you also have to send people to sites.

That’s one area where we’ve been really encouraged. We have fleet technicians who work for Highland, and they do all of that. They drive around, engage with customers live, fix things, and help quarterback and manage the process of organizing spare parts and training. They actually train local staff. And they receive a lot of training, both from us at Highland—we’ve built a whole training facility at our headquarters—and from the manufacturers. The big auto manufacturers are offering more and more training to bring people up to speed on how to maintain and manage these fleets. These are really good-paying jobs with full benefits. I think they’re really attractive, upskilled labor jobs that are part of this modern EV workforce.

Jeff Dance: That’s cool. We do a lot with robotics and industrial autonomous vehicles, and we also saw a need for a robot technician—a new type of technician that can draw on some traditional engineering know-how, but is a little more IT-based versus physical-based than some of the prior mechanical jobs. I think that probably appeals more to the new generation that’s grown up with all this technology and expects to have a mobile app that’s going to help them diagnose something, and maybe an AI assistant that’s going to guide them through the whole thing. A lot more intelligence and a lot more sensors are pairing with these new technician jobs.

Duncan McIntyre: I think that’s really well said. That’s a good analogy. The modern world of robotics is a lot like an electric vehicle. We have people in their late twenties who have grown up with more of this. But we’re also trying to empower them with Claude and other tools that allow them to tap into the broader body of knowledge that’s out there, but also tap directly into our database, so we can look across the couple thousand buses we have running and look for similar fact patterns. That’s a whole world of machine learning, where we’ve created a body of information that we think is incredibly valuable in making decisions about how to bring on people and train them, and also how to manage the fleets that are out there.

Jeff Dance: I really enjoyed the conversation, Duncan. Is there anything else on the future that you want to share that we haven’t hit so far?

Duncan McIntyre: Jeff, this has been fun. I absolutely loved the conversation too. I would just reiterate that this technology transition is really embedded in communities. I touched on it a little earlier, but when you see it in play and you see the community benefits of showing up in small towns and big cities… We serve some cities that are very affluent, but we also serve communities that have historically been incredibly underserved. They are candidly grateful that businesses are showing up, that capital and investment is coming in, and that people are getting trained on modern technology. The health benefits are unbelievable. I’ve had the chance to go to ribbon cuttings in rural and affluent communities, all of the above, every little slice of America.

Universally, my observation is that we’re in the middle of an incredible movement that’s gaining some real steam. I think we’re going to see a lot of transformation in the next three to four years in adoption of this technology and excitement around it. I’m biased because I’m in the middle of it and I run a company that’s trying to lead the charge, but I also see the writing on the wall. It’s an absolute privilege, we’re having fun doing it, and we have a great team doing it. So thanks for engaging and having an interest.

Jeff Dance: Thank you. I really appreciate your insights, your wisdom, your passion, and the leadership you’re taking in this space. Grateful to have you on the show.

Duncan McIntyre: Thanks, Jeff.