Who Makes Money From America’s Firetrucks

Wisconsin-based Oshkosh Corporation is a one stop shop that makes fire trucks, tactical vehicles, news vans, mail trucks and construction lifts, among other things. It serves about 20 different end markets and pulled in about $8.3 billion in sales in 2022. Its Pierce brand is also the largest maker of firetrucks in North America. A single truck can cost up to $2.5 million and all of them are custom made for the roughly 27,000 fire departments that battle thousands of fires each year. From 2012 to 2021, home fires alone took nearly 3,000 lives, caused more than 11,000 injuries and nearly $9 trillion in damage. Now, Pierce and the rest of the Oshkosh portfolio is electrifying - which is no mean feat, given the sheer size and weight of the vehicles Oshkosh makes. It also won a $3 billion contract to build the next generation USPS delivery truck. But this success is offsetting failure elsewhere - it recently lost a $9 billion defense contract that made up more than half of its annual defense revenues. And some say the defense business, which in total is about a quarter of Oshkosh’s sales, has to go.

Chapters:
00:00 — Introduction
01:40 — Building a firetruck
03:31 — The mothership
06:15 — Challenges
07:52 — An electrified future

Produced by: Robert Ferris
Edited by: Maria Chiu
Camera by: Colin Systma
Animation: Jason Reginato, Josh Kalven
Senior Managing Producer: Tala Hadavi

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Who Makes Money From America’s Firetrucks

[ryan]

I've had the opportunity to tour Pierce Manufacturing. The amount of engineering going into a modern firetruck is amazing.

[waynekarjala]

The portion of emissions caused by fire trucks is so miniscule it's insane to even discuss it.

[equarg]

I live near West Texas and there is a guy off the freeway who renovates, services, and sells used fire trucks.
Usually he can renovate trucks 18-15 years old.
He sells to smaller towns that have volunteer fire departments and smaller budgets.
Plus he does regular servicing like oil changes ext for local trucks from surrounding areas.

[D-xlxy]

Except for standing in front of a fire truck while talking about the company, this was only minimally about fire truck production

[jdrancho]

3:40 give credit where credit is due. The two gentlemen shown here are Otto Zachow and William August Besserdich, who in 1908 received a patent for the world's first automotive four-wheel drive system. The rest, as they say, is history.

[nadasurf]

There is a sheriff in Kentucky who just got arrested because he had a private company which was an ambulance company and it was the only one that got contracts in the county

[karthikshetty]

I love this series of CNBC, I came to know of so many unknown companies but great companies ❤

[mackpines]

I thought fire trucks were wild beasts.

“A solitary creature, the fire truck will sneak up on its prey.
The ambulances will have to wait their turn.”
😂😂😂

[mycp]

According to the EPA, the Oshkosh mail trucks only offer a 0.4 mpg fuel economy over the agency’s current trucks. The old mail trucks have been around for 30 years and don’t even have air conditioning. New gas-powered trucks would offer new amenities such as running air conditioning, they only average about 8.6 mpg. The industry standard for a gasoline-powered fleet vehicle is between 12 to 14 mpg.

[DeeDubious]

You can have an electric firetruck that can be driven around or respond to calls, but in order to pump the massive volumes of water required to put out most fires, you must switch to a diesel engine.

[bthsr]

Nice to see my state in the news for something not horrible.

[TurtleSauceGaming]

Me here missing when Mack made fire trucks. They were truly awesome. We had one back in the day that was an old garbage truck and you could pull a u turn on a 2 lane road with no reversing.

[JD-HatCreekCattleCo]

As a paramedic/firefighter I know a little about this issue. It’s a warm fuzzy feeling some have when electrifying. For a crash rescue vehicle it is much more feasible to electrify, the time and mileage on one of these vehicles is much less than on a busy urban or suburban piece of apparatus. The calculation must be considered regarding the amount of carbon used to mine the raw resources vs the amount of carbon saved with the use of the end product. Not one thing has been addressed in the conversation regarding the generation of electricity, the environmental impact of mining the raw material nor the problems disposing of the batteries and their toxic waste. Seems to me the positive in this equation seems to me is the knowledge gained in the process of innovation. As far as the net benefits of electrification….not ready for prime time.

[thecardczar]

Would love to see a feature length documentary on this, a very interesting business model!

[ytzpilot]

The only issue with electrification is during a disaster like an earthquake, hurricane, forest fire where the local electrical grid is offline for a long period of time

[ronblack]

firetrucks don't put on many daily miles. they are neighborhood based due to response times so they may drive 2 - 3 miles on a call maybe 5 . smaller towns may only have a few firestations so there they may drive more to a call. a typical station may get 2 - 10 calls a day and most of those are health related like heart attacks or car accidents with injuries. so they have a backup diesel in case they need to run the pumps for a long time at a fire., an easy application for electric vehicle.

[poohmaster]

Here In Savannah, we buy Sutphen pumpers and aerials here. We recently just got a Spartan Tiller, but I’m assuming it’s because Sutphen didn’t have a tiller out at the time of purchase.

[keithswindell]

Retired volunteer fire fighter - there are less expensive fire trucks than Pierce, but there are none better.

[gautambakliwal]

0:26 - $8.86 TRILLION IN LOSSES OVER 10 YEARS??? You can add the entire world’s fire losses and they’d probably still fall short. That seems plain wrong. The inflation adjusted number on US Fire Administration website is $148.6 Billion. Someone correct me if I am misinterpreting.

[odarkarto]

8x the cost of importing the equivalent specced foreign fire truck. Do fire trucks in the USA really need to each be custom built by hand? Why not build a standard model en masse? Shame the video didnt answer the question in thr title.