Software-Defined Transportation

Carlos Ponce (00:00):

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to another edition of Tech Leaders Unplugged and joining me today is my fellow teammate and co-host Wade Erickson. Hi, Wade. Good morning. Thank you for being here.

Wade Erickson (00:25):

Hi, nice to meet everybody out there.

Carlos Ponce (00:27):

Thank you so much. And of course, we have our guest today Siddharth and he is with Canoo. And we are going to be talking about …he's the, I'm sorry, he's the VP, the Vice President of Engineering at Canoo. And we're going to be talking about charging forward the road ahead for electric vehicle charging. Look forward to this conversation today. I'm sure it's going to be an interesting one. So first of all, Sid, thank you for joining us today. Welcome to the show. Let's start with you, Shah, introduce yourself, please, you know, whatever you want to say about yourself. Tell us a little bit about you, and your background, and then of course, tell us about Canoo. Thank you.

Siddharth Shah (01:13):

Hi Carlos. Thanks for the introduction. Yeah, so my name is Siddharth. I'm currently the VP of Engineering, focusing on the software side at Canoo. I've been in the industry for about 15 years. I've covered different kinds of EVs. I've been also the, in the oil and gas industry early on in my career. So it's been a transition from, let's say, the oil and gas industry all the way to like, clean energy at this point. Then, as far as Canoo is a pre-revenue company in the stock market. We have we've introduced a range of vehicles that you can, you can find on our website. We are heavily focused on fleets. We are also working with Reef as far as recently, we've given our first CTVs to NASA, right? So we're working with, and so we have a few other contracts with the DOE and the DOD. So those are publicly available to find out about. So Canoo is the interesting part about Canoo are, we started off as a, we built a platform, which was, which it's like which has a steer by wire system, so it's flat, low, right? And you can put a lot of different top hats on top of it to actually change the configuration of the vehicle which works very well in the, as we kind of like move forward. And EV adoption is growing to make custom-built design vehicles fit the particular use case that you really want. So that's, that's the intent of where Canoo is trying to take the EVs trying to make EVs for everyone, trying to make it more available to, to the general public.

Carlos Ponce (02:58):

Excellent. Thank you so much for elaborating on Canoo and your background Sidd. So, we're, I understand that we're going to, we're also going to be talking about exploring the infrastructure and technology innovations needed to charge up the electric vehicle revolutions. Right?

Siddharth Shah (03:19):

Right.

Carlos Ponce (03:19):

Okay. So tell us a little bit about why you feel this is the way that this is direction that the industry, that the space is going.

Siddharth Shah (03:29):

So, for me, I think that's been the biggest hurdle right up till now. I think even though EV adoption has increased, and I think Tesla has a big hand to play in that, right? And has really, you know, fore fronted the industry. I think as we move into the next stage of, of the adoption, I think charging is one of the biggest aspects that needs a solution in the short run to actually appease range anxiety in folks to, you know, ensure that we are putting the right infrastructure in place such that we can work with the, work with the grid to ensure that when every home has a EV how to best utilize the entire infrastructure around us in order to ensure that the adoption continues to expand at the rate that it's been expanding over the past few years. And we keep more, we, you know, get more people onto the bandwagon of like, trying to get an EV in their house, you know, so that we can have a, you know, much better you know, future in the EV industry.

Carlos Ponce (04:37):

Thank you so much, Wade.

Wade Erickson (04:40):

So, yeah. So, you know, as we envision like you said, the ho houses are going to start having a EV in every, in every garage, right? Do you see that? And then of course, the impact on the grid, cause the, you know, it's going to be the hit is when everybody gets home from work those that are not remote workers. And do you see maybe some other battery driven solutions that maybe are charging the battery set during the day so that when you actually plug in, or maybe even some smaller solar systems, solar based panels, so that you're not necessarily charging the whole house with it, but it's really focused just for the vehicles. Tell me a little bit about the technology on kind of a distributed micro site charging that you kind of see for the future.

Siddharth Shah (05:30):

Yeah, so it, it's interesting. There's a, there's a range of solutions out there that'll help in these, in this adoption, right? So obviously as most, most people charge at home, it's always level two charging. It's slow, it's overnight, right? That's, that's the best use case as of today, right? So you come in, you plug your level two charger as we go into the aspect of greater adoption of like V too G technology, so vehicle to grid technology, right? Vehicle to home technology, I think that there's, there's certainly advantages of then powering your house via the EV right? Having an extra battery resource in your house, right? So, solar panels now that we've moved towards, say, you know, with, with more clean energy being adopted and everyone having solar panels on top of their houses, right? It acts as an additional resource to actually capture energy, right? The excess energy doesn't need to be sent back to the grid. You can capture it within your car, you can power your home from it. So there's, there's certainly, you know, use cases on that side. At the same time, it keeps your battery healthy because you're using, you know, you're doing level two charging, you're not like fast charging. You're, you're allowing the, the battery management system to do a better job at like managing how charges charge and discharge cycles take place. So it's really important to take all those into consideration and have the right infrastructure. So there's also workplace charging. So while you mentioned most of the people who don't work from home actually take their cars out, right? So certainly companies like us promote workplace, workplace charging because it, we are an EV company, but as general adoption increases, you'll see much of this in other places where while you're at work, you have your, you know, car connected. Obviously, it's a secondary source of income too, if you are giving back to the grid, right? But it also helps the you know, to actually charge it at work too. So the number of battery packs that are increasing there's a lot of energy storage devices that'll be all over the place, and the best utilization of it comes from that. I think the, the, the overall, I think just vehicle to home, vehicle to grid technology is, will pay the way to actually ensuring that, you know, we have a balanced grid we balance the grid versus charging all across in the regions that are going to get graded option right in, in the EV side.

Wade Erickson (07:56):

Great. So, I know in your background you did a lot of work with the autonomous vehicle space. Tell me a little bit about how and, you know, most of the vehicles, EV vehicles are trying to get that in place. Tell me a little bit about your work with autonomous vehicles and some of the challenges you've found in, particularly in putting that car in general.

Siddharth Shah (08:19):

Yeah, so autonomous vehicles or, you know, even assisted driving, so I like to call it like a slew of different, like, you know, from going from like what's now commonplace, which is like blind spot monitoring all the way to like, you know, a [INAUDIBLE], right? So, you're lane centering and then going to a point where you're, you don't have a driver in the car. So, there's, there are levels, right? And as we move forward, software becomes extremely complex as you go up the level two level four, level five, right? Those kinds of up the autonomy stack. I think it's the specific nature of autonomous and assisted driving is as you go up the stack, the safety kind of starts becoming a much, much more productive thing, right? You also have to have redundancy right? In the system. So it starts from the hardware as let's, I mean, if, let's we talk about like some of the autonomous systems it starts from the hardware where it's fully redundant hardware, right? That can have, that can fall back if something goes wrong. And then even in software, obviously there's, there are specs like ISO 2 6 2, 6 2, which is like you know, functional safety aspect of every function, right? That you're actually performing. For instance, if you're doing lane centering, you're doing adaptive cruise control how do you, what are your backup systems, right? What are the monitoring systems, right? And this goes across the V cycle that they call in automotive from, from the time you do feature definition all the way to like, implementation, going through testing, and then feature validation. So it becomes even more important in the autonomous side like it is in like, let's say, powertrain development and so the development.

Wade Erickson (10:01):

Great. Now, I, I know you had a press release here in July around NASA. Can you talk, you brought that up a little bit in the beginning. Tell me a little bit about that NASA work and some of the important crew that you'll be carrying with that vehicle.

Siddharth Shah (10:16):

Yeah, so it was an awesome experience to work with the Artis team. We were, we won the contract to actually transport the astronauts from the base to the, to the actual rocket, right? We've done a lot of customizations for them in the car, right? To actually accommodate their requests but also to just work with them and actually, you know, see the vehicle to go from, like, you know, deliver a vehicle to them that meets the standards that they require, right? So it's been a great experience working with the NASA team as we've gone through the process of building these vehicles, customizing them, and going through requests. The team has been, I mean, I, you know, the canoe team is a fantastic set of engineers and they've, they've gone above and beyond in like, trying to make this a vehicle that'll, that'll be well suited for this use case as well as, as has all you know, general aspects of what an EV takes to build from scratch, right? So it's, this is a culmination of about four, four and a half years would work for me to actually deliver something that'll be used, which, which is an amazing experience in general.

Wade Erickson (11:31):

Yeah. Great. Great. And then, so the company's fairly young, 2017, right? From what I understand, tell me a little bit about that growth trajectory. You guys started in California, if I'm correct, right? And then you're in quite a few other states. Tell me a little bit about some of the growth, the entrepreneurial aspects that the company's gone through.

Siddharth Shah (11:54):

Right. So we started in California in 2017. I joined about eight or nine months later, right? It was a young startup. I mean, but when I joined, there were four models, right? We had no, no controllers or very few sets of software engineers. So it's been rated building that team from two or three software engineers to about a hundred plus now, right? And with the different departments focus has changed as we go to. So, as we grew through this, through these phases, we first were doing extremely in powertrain development, right? So, a lot of powertrain development, back management, charging a little bit of body controls powertrain gateway, and that kind of stuff. And then it's going to be shifted a little bit more towards, okay, those are reaching some form of maturity. Now we focus on connected vehicle and infotainment space, where now we have a, you know, we have an info controller in the car, there's a screen, there's also connectivity to the cloud. A lot of the OTA and remote commands and remote diagnostics aspects have been brought in. We've done a lot of that infrastructure in-house and then beyond that to move to get a lot of the assisted driving aspects of it, so the level two aspects of the vehicle. So it's been a journey trying to come from, from nothing, but, you know, a blank sheet of paper, no code on, you know, no code on our, you know, Bitbucket repos to now having this massive set that we've kind of built out over four and a half years. And it's been an amazing experience building the team out.

Carlos Ponce (13:35):

Thank you, Wade. Yeah, I as you, well, we're, we're talking about, I have a question actually for Sid. And of course, we're talking about what's ahead in the electric vehicle revolution, right? So, it's exciting. There's a lot of innovation going on. There's a lot of excitement about the industry itself, but at the end of the day, we are still talking about some form of energy, right? So, we're moving, from fossil fuel to electric vehicles. So, my question to you is what do you think that, let me, let me put it this way. How for example, other sources of energy like solar, and wind renewables, how can they contribute to a cleaner and more sustainable energy ecosystem and address concerns about a potential strain on the electrical grid?

Siddharth Shah (14:43):

Right. So, so imagine the, I just try to put a scenario, right? So, you come back home in your, EV you walk into your house, which has solar panels on top of the roof, right? You have a, you have possibly a battery pack behind. You may not need that battery pack if you have your EV to give you the off-peak, you know, bring down the off-peak energy by your home-connected EV that powers your home, right? And all this is done using some form of clean energy. Like, you know, taking wind energy converted that you're actually getting in from you know, whenever as required from the grid, right? A lot of the aspects of these are that you are, you're, you're creating a self-sufficient ecosystem within everyone's house, right? Which is, which is trying to do best energy management within a house where you're actually powering your EV you're powering your, you know, EV batteries are, are huge for, for powering a home, right? I mean, they're, you're talking about 80 kilowatt-hours, 66-kilowatt hour even in the, in the lower end, right? So most solar companies will not put anywhere around that size for you in your house. Cause you don't need to store that much energy because you're not going to burn through that to power just your house. So I, I think the entire ecosystem when put together creates a more, much more greener kind of like you know, you, you're contributing a lot personally through the green space by, by having that full ecosystem built out for yourself. And, and just, I mean, that's what we, we are trying for, right? Trying to reduce the effects of climate change. And I think every person doing this would be, would be an amazing thing. And it'll actually really, really speed up our goals to hit for ensuring that, you know, we reduce the effects of climate change, which are already being seen right across the world.

Carlos Ponce (16:35):

Okay. Great. So one, one more is something else that I was thinking is, so what sort of collaboration efforts are needed between, for example, governments, private sector and utilities companies to establish a widespread charging infrastructure that caters to urban and rural areas alike?

Siddharth Shah (17:02):

Yeah, that's an important question. So I think we are quite nascent in terms of collaborating with each other. There's a lot of isolated components built out, right? A lot of this working seamlessly has been a challenge in itself, right? There are obviously organizations like you know, ISO that have put up specs, right? Which help in like how you communicate between the charger and the network. So, so ISO 1 5 1 1 8, for instance, is a, is a good spec that is going through, is it's been there for quite a few years but has not really has now picking traction, right? As we go into plugin charge, for instance, right? Where you plug into the DC fast charging network and you don't have to swipe a head cut, for instance, right? So that's, that's one of things where, you know, you are integrating with a grid where you have a common ecosystem of keeping certificates in the cloud where you can then you know, you have a root of trust which you can trust so that you can charge the right user so that you have no, you know, there's all this existing network of charge providers, right? There's the, there's the digital wallet side of it, which is the I think they call the MSP, right? The ones that charge you for the money. And then there is the, there's the EV itself that's holding the certificates that are required to ensure that, you know, they're charging the right people right when you're going outside. So there has been that con you know that that collaboration started as we kind of like moved to get the charge provider working with the, with the EV, right? Folks. So that you have this synergy in there where you're kind of like ensuring that the right person is charging, the right rates are being charged right. And it's are being negotiated between the different parties, right? So, it's moving in the right direction. Obviously, it's not going at the pace that the rest of the industry is going as we are adopting EVs very quickly, right? But there's certainly, there's certainly a path to actually getting much better collaboration between charge providers, charge networks the grid and the, and a lot of the, a lot of the things that are done recently with on the solar side are also kind of helping out, right? Where we are promoting a lot of the solar side. The, obviously the infrastructure bill by the recent government has helped a lot too in promoting these things.

Carlos Ponce (19:20):

Thank you so much. Sidd, Wade back to you. Do you have more questions?

Wade Erickson (19:24):

You said you are pre-revenue. Tell me a little bit about expectations of when we might see some of these out on the road.

Siddharth Shah (19:33):

There's already a bunch on the road, right? As of right now. Obviously, we are hitting, we finished out, we finished our low volume build last year, and we are about to hit start our high volume build this year, right? So you'll see a lot of them. We have existing contracts with Walmart, ZigBee with King Bee, and Zebra, right? So, you'll see a lot more in the coming years starting from this year.

Wade Erickson (20:00):

Where’s your primary build factory? In California or in...

Siddharth Shah  (20:05):

It's in Oklahoma.

Wade Erickson (20:08):

Oklahoma. Okay. All right. Also, I saw you're doing work with the D O d. Is that for vehicles or is that, in your battery technology? Tell me a little bit about your do, because I know the DOD is headed for EVs in a big way, which is kind of surprising given, you know, the history of how warfare is, is handled, and the need for fuel. But tell me a little bit about your work with the DOD.

Siddharth Shah (20:36):

I mean the, you know, publicly the information that's available, we made an LTV for them, a light terrain vehicle. Where they're going through testing with that, that I think that the, for the DOD as well as for a lot of these defense organizations, EVs are a, is an interesting use case. It's a, it's a portable battery pack, right? It can be taken into the field. So, I think there are some very unique use cases for the defense that are not generally seen as an obvious use case, right? But for sure, if you can, you know, you can power the same thing, you can power any site at any point in time, right? So there is, there are certainly very unique use cases, which I'm pretty sure are the ones that are exciting. The DOD while they work for us. So as of right now, we've built a very purpose-built vehicle for them. It's, it's with them and they're, they're using it. And yeah, hoping for more collaboration with them in the future.

Wade Erickson (21:34):

Great. So if you don't mind, a lot of our viewers are in the software space. If we could pivot a little bit to some of your experience, not just in, just in general software development. I, I've seen in your background, you've built a lot of teams from scratch and brought them from different companies and pulled 'em together to become productive fast. Can you tell me a little bit about some of the best practices you could share on what you've experienced in building teams that are developers and testers and, maybe even if you're using offshoring you know, how, how have you used offshore teams to blend those at all, if you've done that?

Siddharth Shah (22:11):

Right. So we've done that. So when, when I try to build teams, obviously you know, I always say they're like, there's the one X engineer, 10 x engineer, and the hundred x engineer, right? So, you're looking for that 10 x and a hundred x engineers to build the foundation of your teams, right? So a lot of this is because they're the ones that can like, put, put practices in place, build teams around them, right? So we've been, we've been lucky to have a bunch of them at canoe and, throughout my career, right? I've worked with a bunch of them. As far as practices go, the automotive industry is, is pretty strict in the way that we kind of have to put some process in place, right? It's called organized chaos in my mind, right? You have to organize your chaos when you're a startup. While you are trying to build fast, you want to build on the right footing, right? So having the right, everything from having the right requirements, and management tools to actually ensuring that the developers are, are very clear about what their sprint goals are running really efficient two-week sprints, right? Where you're, where you're going into the details prior to the sprint and ensuring everyone's clear and aligned and then ensuring at the end to actually see what went wrong and what went right, right? Apart from that, ensure that you have all the build tools in place, right? So everything from, let's say you know, put it in some kind of source control to having CICB platforms, right? Having nightly build systems, having you know, things to go, you know, things in a loop, right? Where we are actually testing repeatedly and then doing very, very focused hardware and loop testing software and loop testing, then going into like the ECU testing, hill testing, and then going to subsystem testing, test, you know, system testing. So you kind of have to go through all those that, that's, that's what I feel. If you have that in place, then you make fewer mistakes and this becomes a well, well-oiled machine, right?

Wade Erickson (24:02):

So, great. Great. Thanks for that. All right, I think we're coming up on the end. Carlos, I'll let you kind of wrap up.

Carlos Ponce (24:11):

Thank you, Wade. I appreciate it. Yes. first of all, before we go thanks again. Sit for having joined us today and I just want to, I just need to make a quick announcement about what's coming. This is our guest. Tomorrow we're going to be speaking with Roei Ganzarski, I hope I pronounced it correctly, the CEO of Alitheon. And the topic is going to be how optical AI slices, counterfeits, and gray markets are Unmasking the Shadows, talk about an intriguing and cryptic an interesting title for our conversation. So that's what we're going to be having tomorrow right here on Tech Leaders Unplug at 9:30 AM Pacific. So join us tomorrow right here. And again, thank you, Sidd. Thank you. Wade and see you next time. Thank you.