Go inside America's busiest electric truck charging depot

Paul Gioupis 

This is the first, shared charging hub that I know of that's been put into the United States for about a mile and a half away from LAX airport. We have a 7.5MW interconnection here. We have 78 DC fast charging ports. And, this is the most active depot in the United States that I know of. 

Jay Traugott 

I'm Jay Traugott, senior editor of Clean Trucking. I am just outside LAX at ZM solutions flagship charging depot with founder and CEO Paul Goobers. So how many trucks pass through here on any day of the week? 

Paul Gioupis 

So on, truck level and let's say commercial vehicles from class three all the way up to class eight, you're pushing about 100 vehicles a day. That'll come through here. The bulk of the activity that we get is going to be rideshare vehicles.  

Jay Traugott 

Okay. 

Paul Gioupis 

And those could be anywhere between 300 to as many as 6 or 700. So on a daily basis, you know, we'll do as many as if you're talking about a 5 or 600 charge session day, you're going to be pushing about 20, 25,000, kilowatt hours in a day. And then on a monthly basis, you know, we've had, anywhere between 700 to 1,000,000 kilowatt hours a month. 

Jay Traugott 

And I've noticed, is a lot of class eight semis surrounding us here. These are all clients of yours. Do you own these trucks? Explain to the audience how this works. 

Paul Gioupis 

So in some cases, we do own the truck. And we'll bundle it with the parking and the charging and other ancillary services. Okay. You could buy a vehicle and operate it out of our site as well. Before you go and invest millions of dollars in infrastructure at your own site. The majority of the trucks that you see here are owned by the actual trucking operator, and they park in charge here because they have an infrastructure problem, and we help support the vehicle through maintenance and other fleet management services that we offer as well.  

Jay Traugott 

Do you see a certain sweet spot in the different type of vehicle types coming to charge here, whether it's last mile, light duty, medium duty, heavy duty, do you think there's one that this model fits the best at right now? 

Paul Gioupis 

It's a really good question. I would say because we're at an airport, it's very heavy rideshare car rental. Okay. Now that said, the class eight operators that are coming out of here you would think are operating out of LAX. LAX is actually a big cargo airport. But what's happening is we only have two trucks that operate just cargo out of the airport. 

Paul Gioupis 

Everybody else is actually operating Long Beach doing drainage out of this site. And it's because they don't have infrastructure where they are. And just to give everybody perspective, we are out of the route. We're about 20 miles out of route here. So for them to actually operate out of here tells you how difficult it is to get infrastructure in the ground and what fleets are actually willing to do to actually operate here and be able to test out of the Long Beach port.  

Paul Gioupis 

So that said, they're making money operating out of this site even though they're 20 miles away from the border. You know, our offering started with a heavy duty, medium duty slant. What's happened is it's been hard to get equipment. So for us, medium duty is an obvious area to, electrify. The problem is the equipment is very expensive, and it happens to sit in a sweet spot where batteries are just too expensive for the medium duty to pencil out from a diesel comparison. 

Paul Gioupis 

On the tractor side, what's happening is there's enough incentives here in California that allow us to operate all the tractors on the site at a total cost of operation that's below a diesel. So that's the key. So what's great here is we're getting heavier on the tractor side. We're getting better deliveries from tractors. 

Jay Traugott 

So one of the first things I noticed when I came here today was this right here, the Tesla megawatt charging system, also known as the MKS. Tell me a little bit more about this. 

Paul Gioupis 

What you see here is a skidded charging solution. This is their 3.5 system. This is being used right now to operate their demo. So they're delivering in mid 2026. GM has been a fortunate partner to be able to get one of these mix chargers on our lot for demonstrations. So we have customer orders that we're fulfilling. And then Tesla has some customers that want a demo from the site.  

Paul Gioupis 

So what we've done is we have this hooked into our switchgear panel here right in the center aisle, and we're providing charging for Tesla demos. 

Jay Traugott 

You and I spoke exactly a year ago at act 24 in Las Vegas. What has happened to them in the past year? Obviously, there's been a lot of changes at the national level, and the presidential administration has a very different, let's call it, outlook or viewpoint on electrification, whether it's passenger or commercial vehicles. So where is the solutions at one year later? 

Paul Gioupis 

So a year later we see much better vehicle variety and price points coming down. So that's a very very good thing. Number one. Number two finance agencies that are getting more comfortable financing these vehicles and putting a better residual value. That's going to start moving the needle here in a very, very big way. And and really fleets adopting. 

Paul Gioupis 

So ACF was a major blow for the entire industry. But what's happened is there's fleets who have chosen that they want to electrify. Right. So there were the fleets that were being forced and that wasn't something that was well received down to the fleets that started to try before they buy. Then they realized this is working and they're all going all in. 

Paul Gioupis 

So what we're seeing is less reliance on needing an incentive to be able to actually start off. So that's great news. And I'm hoping that we get to a parity, much sooner than everybody thinks. 

Jay Traugott 

All right. Well, I hope to have this conversation again with you in a year or two years time. And I can't wait to see the advancements, that you guys are going to be making. 

Paul Gioupis 

So glad you came at this time. 

Jay Traugott 

Thank you for having us.