Harbinger’s plan to conquer an underserved segment of the electric truck market

If you build it at price parity, they will buy

• Price parity between EVs and ICE vehicles is widely considered to be a major tipping point for EV adoption. Harbinger Motors claims to have reached that tipping point—at least for the Class 4, 5 and 6 commercial vehicles that the company sells.

• Harbinger CEO John Harris tells us that his company is able to sell EVs at such low prices because it owns all the IP associated with its components, and is able to maintain a supply chain only one or two layers deep, minimizing the margins paid to suppliers.

• Harbinger sells only stripped chassis in Classes 4, 5 and 6. In this market, Harris tells us, today’s electrification technology is fit for purpose and cost-effective, and Harbinger faces little competition.

Charged has been covering the electric truck market for a decade, and we’ve seen a lot of startup truckmakers come and go. The market is developing at a painfully slow pace—lots of pilots, but few large-scale deployments. The major OEMs haven’t fared any better with their on-again, off-again electrification efforts—in the latest round of retrenchments, GM abandoned its Brightdrop commercial vehicle division, and Ford killed its F-150 Lightning electric pickup.

Electric trucks clearly offer cost savings on fuel and maintenance, and by all accounts drivers love them, so why does the sector continue to struggle? Well, John Harris, co-founder and CEO of electric truck company Harbinger Motors, believes the answer is simple: electric trucks carry a hefty price premium that most fleets simply aren’t willing to pay. The recent elimination of federal tax credits widened the gap, triggering another wave of bankruptcies and backtracking.

Harbinger is a rare success story in the commercial EV segment. Mr. Harris told Charged that his firm’s sales grew “pretty dramatically” in every quarter of 2025, and that the end of the IRA tax credits had no impact on sales. Harbinger is focused squarely on Classes 4, 5 and 6 vehicles, and it’s able to offer electric trucks at price parity with comparable diesel vehicles. The company has an impressive list of customers for such a young company. In 2025, it filled an initial order for 53 electric trucks from FedEx, and it’s providing plug-in hybrid chassis for a new RV from Thor Industries, which is scheduled to go into production this summer.

What’s the company’s secret? Read on.

Charged: Let’s start with a quick history of your company.

John Harris: Harbinger is a little less than five years old. We started the company with a very specific focus on electrifying medium-duty trucks, since we think that this is the best market for electrification. It’s a market where electrification can stand on its own based on economics, it’s a market where the technology that we have available today meets the needs of the customers, and it’s a market that no one else is really paying attention to.

When we look at investment and innovation in the automotive industry, it’s ultra-focused down in Class 1, light-duty passenger cars, and up in Class 8, long-haul trucks. The middle of the market, which is incredibly important to our daily lives, is completely ignored.

Charged: Since I started writing about commercial EVs almost 10 years ago, we’ve seen startup companies sign up customers, but those customers insisted on doing long pilots with small numbers of vehicles, and companies starved out while waiting for larger orders. How did you avoid that trap?

John Harris: The issue is that none of those startups were willing to sell a product at a price that was viable. They would place five vehicles with UPS or FedEx or some other large fleet, and I guess they assumed that the orders would come after that, but that’s not how it works.

Those big fleets, they run pilots to validate that the vehicles work, not to validate the price. Let’s say you place five vehicles with one of those fleets and the vehicles work. That’s great. Now the fleet’s going to say, “What’s the price? Is the price low enough that I can see replacing a third of my fleet with these vehicles, or half of it, or all of it?”

If you order five vehicles for a pilot program, it doesn’t really matter what the price is. I think a lot of these companies convinced themselves that because they could sell five vehicles at triple the price of diesel, they could sell 5,000 vehicles at triple the price of diesel. But there’s no path to connect those two points. You can really only sell dozens of vehicles that way because you’re selling them to companies that are doing onesie/twosie trials.

I also think that for certain fleets, trials are a way of running out the clock, not a way of getting closer to purchases. There’s a lot of corporate doublespeak on electrification.

A lot of people have this mentality that they have to electrify 100% of their fleet or not do anything at all. And that’s completely the wrong position to take. The question is, what portion of your fleet activities are appropriate for EVs? Is it 20%? 50%? 80%? I can tell you with high confidence that for almost every fleet, the answer is not zero, and the answer is not 100%. In my experience, the right answer is somewhere between 50% and 75%.

A lot of bigger fleets get this corporate push: you have to be on this path to 100% electric by such-and-such a date. And the leadership of those companies talks a good game about electrification publicly, but they’re looking at their vehicle usage and scratching their heads and saying, “We can’t go 100% electric.” Some percentage of the routes, they’re not going to make any sense.

Charged: So, for some fleets, doing a pilot is a kind of greenwashing—a way to make it sound like they’re going electric while they spend a few years doing pilots.

John Harris: That’s exactly what it is.

Charged: Or to be fair, some of them may be assuming that the technology’s going to get better and they just want to wait.

John Harris: Maybe. I think when you look at a lot of these big corporate commitments to zero emissions that came out four or five years ago, those companies made the very rational assumption that electric trucking would follow the same path as electric passenger cars—you’d start with expensive vehicles and then prices would come down from the stratosphere to a reasonable level. That hasn’t happened in commercial vehicles. If you go to buy a Freightliner eCascadia [electric Class 8 truck] today, it costs just as much as the eCascadia did five years ago.

Charged: You’ve chosen to focus on the segment that seems most ripe for electrification.

John Harris: Within medium-duty, I think the majority of vehicles are ready for electrification, the outliers being vehicles that have super-high auxiliary loads—things like a refuse truck—or vehicles that are in multi-shift use back-to-back. The technology is ready on the vehicle side, but the multi-shift usage scenario is challenging on the infrastructure side because it pushes you to deploy all fast chargers, which ends up being expensive and very challenging with the utilities. But those are both pretty rare situations.

We think the technology available today will meet the needs of almost every application that’s in a delivery-type use—last and middle mile, delivery of goods, services, all these B2B or B2C activities that are happening within a city-size area.

If you’re talking about a long-haul fleet, it’s very different. Electrification for Class 8 trucks, it’s difficult—the technology is not where it needs to be yet. We don’t touch any of those vehicles. We only do medium-duty.

Charged: So, what’s your secret sauce? How are you able to produce EVs so much cheaper than the other guys?

John Harris: The advantage comes down to the right supply chain. Imagine a world in which every F-150 had a Silverado engine. You’d say, “Why am I going to pay you margin on that F-150 so you can give margin to someone else for the engine? Why wouldn’t I just go to that company and buy their competing vehicle?”

Obviously, no one does that in passenger cars, because it’s absurd on its face. But what I just described is how electric trucks are built today in every company in the world besides Harbinger. When you buy an electric Freightliner medium-duty truck, you’re getting essentially zero electrification content from Freightliner. You may be getting a battery system from Proterra, a drivetrain system from Dana, peripherals and integration services from a host of other people. And when we go a layer deeper, the axles on almost every medium-duty vehicle on the road in North America are from Dana or Meritor, and the suspension is from Hendrickson or Meritor.

So, when we look at the vehicles in use today in medium-duty, both EVs and regular vehicles, the vehicle OEMs have become integration companies who don’t really do component engineering. If you buy a truck that has a suspension system from Hendrickson, axles from Dana and a steering system from Concentric, you’re stacking up layers and layers of margin, and that’s where you get into the three- and four-tier-deep supply chains that have become common in automotive.

When you buy a whole suspension system, very reasonably Hendrickson is going to price it to amortize their investments in engineering and validation and tooling. You’re not paying the cost of steel plus margin. You’re paying the price the market will bear for that system, which is going to be a high-margin product.

When Harbinger buys sub-components on the vehicle, we own all the IP and all the designs of those components, and that’s allowed us to flatten out our supply chain. Almost everything in our supply chain is one or two layers deep. When we look at the axles, for example, our supply chain is a single layer deep. Harbinger owns the build prints, the tooling, the validation data—we only transact with one company, which forges pieces of steel for us according to our drawing and sells the axle to us. 0

So, when we buy that, we’re basically buying steel on a per-kilogram basis—we’re buying a comparatively simple product from a company that is competing on a commodity basis. That means we can compete them against other suppliers. We can take that print and quote it with five vendors.

So, take that concept and duplicate that all over the vehicle. Harbinger buys battery cells. We’re the only truck company that does that. Everyone else is buying the battery pack as a whole, and that’s a complex item. So again, they’ve got higher margins going to suppliers. All of that repeated over and over again, takes all the margin and traps it down into Tier 1, and it massively inflates the cost that gets passed along to the buyer.

Charged: That makes sense, but I still think there must be some secret sauce here. How did such a young company come up with sophisticated engineering that’s competitive with that of much larger, more established companies?

John Harris: Two reasons. One is that we’re more focused. All we make are medium-duty stripped chassis, and that’s allowed us to focus all our manpower and all our capital on building the best product in our segment. Our segment is also fairly small. There are 300,000 to 400,000 medium-duty vehicles sold in the US every year. That’s a really small market by automotive standards—about $50 billion a year. Because this is a small market, it’s getting basically no attention from those automakers, so we’re not really competing with them.

The second part is that we have a team that’s really good at this. Our people have been building new products and rolling out successful vehicles in electrification for decades. Our CTO and co-founder Phillip Weicker has been building battery systems and electric drivetrains for his whole career. He’s the author of one of the leading textbooks on battery management systems. He brings enormous technical depth in that area to the table.

When we look at the chassis engineering, our Chief Engineer Alexi Charbonneau was the lead engineer on body-in-white for the Model S. He was at Honda and F1 before that. We’re a startup, so we’re very lean. We have people who are motivated to put in a lot of effort because they have a real share of the upside.

Charged: How did the elimination of the federal incentive for electric trucks affect your business?

John Harris: The federal incentive brought us well under price parity—it was an artificial advantage. But our sales grew pretty dramatically every quarter in 2025, including the period without the IRA credit. What we saw later in the year, through Q2 and Q3 in particular, is that, considering the general tone from the US administration, people didn’t think the IRA credit was real. Most buyers didn’t think they could count on that credit, so when it went away, it had no impact on our sales, which is not really what we would have expected.

Without the IRA credit, we are still at price parity. That doesn’t mean every model is exactly the same price as a diesel truck, but if you look at the MSRP of the product that we believe is the benchmark for the industry, which is the Freightliner MT55, the MSRP on those is something like $90,000 to $130,000 and ours is like $100,000 to $140,000. You can still buy a diesel truck for a little less, but the majority of the range is overlapping.

Charged: And that’s without considering of the savings on fuel and maintenance.

John Harris: Correct. And that’s without the improvements to emissions and driver safety and driver comfort. There’s lots of reasons that you should be buying our vehicles even if they were at a premium. But at the same price, we think it’s a no-brainer.

Charged: Are there still some state incentives that are attractive?

John Harris: There are, and in fact we’ve seen the state incentives going up. The states that have incentives tend to be left-leaning states. (Not always—they have surprisingly compelling incentives in Texas, for example.) But when you look at the left-leaning states, many of them have reacted to the elimination of the IRA credits by doubling down and pushing electrification even harder. California has phenomenal incentives. New York and New Jersey too. Washington is now rolling out their own set of incentives called WAZIP, inspired by HVIP, the very successful California incentive program.

Those are particularly great if you’re a small fleet. If you’re a big fleet with 1,000 or 10,000 trucks, I don’t think those incentives really matter, because usually you’re limited to getting incentives on 10 or 20 trucks, or a million dollars max. There are specific limits in all those programs so that some big fleet can’t go in and take the entire pot of incentives, which is the way it should be.

For the bigger fleets, our price parity is critical. For the smaller fleets, the guys with 10 to 20 trucks, those state incentives are a great way for them to jump in and essentially not take any risk because in the states with incentives, the cost is somewhere between free and the cost of a used truck.

Charged: You’re selling a stripped chassis. Is it the same for every customer, or is there some customization?

John Harris: There’s a matrix of configurations they can pick—I wouldn’t really call it customization. We have three different wheelbases. The customers can choose from 158 inches, 178 inches or 208 inches. Then you’ve got four gross vehicle weight ratings. You can pick from 16,000, 19,500, 22,000 or 26,000 pounds, and you can have four, five or six battery packs.  We’ll probably introduce a three-battery-pack option next year.

Within medium-duty, the market split is fortuitous for a new company like us. Within every other segment, you have to sell the whole vehicle, so you end up with this massive option tree of different colors, different interiors, different bumpers, different seating configurations. On an F-150, there’s probably two million combinations you can order.

Medium-duty vehicles in the US are all sold as a chassis plus a body, from two different sources, whether it’s a stripped chassis with a walk-in body, or a box truck where you’ve got a cab chassis from one company and body from a different company. That allows chassis companies like us to build a very low-mix, high-volume product.

Charged: Is it a challenge to make sure your chassis are going to work with all the bodies customers might want?

John Harris: We’ve designed our chassis to be just about a drop-in replacement for the existing stripped chassis in the market. We work with the upfitters pretty closely to make sure they don’t have too much complexity to deal with. It does require some coordination to make sure we don’t design a component into a spot where it won’t fit with their upfit, but in general, we’ve tried to design around their existing standardized interface.

Charged: You developed a plug-in hybrid chassis for Thor Industries’ new Embark motor home, which is going on sale this year.

John Harris: We’ve got a long partnership with Thor, and we’ve continued to double down on that partnership every year.

We had talked about building all-electric RVs. Thor did a lot of research and said, “We need a couple hundred miles of range because you’ve got to drive out to where you want to camp.” While we can do that with batteries, it gets expensive—the batteries increase the cost quite a bit, and also add weight. So, we decided to pursue a hybrid option. In September, we showed that product off for the first time publicly—it is basically one of our electric chassis, but we took a battery pack out and replaced it with a range extender.

When you say hybrid, people think of a vehicle that can’t go up hills, can’t pass people on the highway. It’s a sad driving experience, and that’s because you’re talking about a parallel hybrid. A series hybrid is an entirely different experience. In a parallel hybrid, you have a really small gas motor and a really small electric motor. Neither one of them have the performance to be responsive.

Harbinger’s hybrid is a series hybrid. It has a complete electric drivetrain with electric vehicle performance, plus a generator. You’re driving around with electric vehicle performance 24/7. When you need more range, the generator turns on and charges the battery. And if you integrate that properly with good thought in the software, you have all kinds of interesting modes. You can say, “I’m just going to the store, I want to drive in EV mode the whole time.” Or, “I’m going on a road trip, give me maximum range.”

Thor has a really significant capacity to do innovation at a big company, which is rare. If you look at the Embark, it’s phenomenal. They’ve won a ton of awards for it. The industry is loving that product. We’ll have more announcements with Thor next year. We’ve got more exciting projects coming down the pipeline with them.