RE: Earth to Rocky ? If by "Rocky" - you mean me - OK, I'll post a new comment.
I don't have any new news, beyond what has already been reported here, and by Dynacert's recent filing.
I can add that the dealer I work with has been disappointed by a great deal of push-back from truck fleets, who seem to hold a negative bias against this technology in general. It seems to me that many people, especially those posting all of the negative commentary on this board - assume that commercializing this product should be an "easy sell." I have to say that when I first learned about this product, it appeared that way to me as well. However, having worked directly with the people presenting this to truck operators and trucking companies - I've seen that it is anything but an easy-sell. Dynacert is trying to commercialize this through a dealer network. Dealers only make money on it, from the re-sale of this product. But there is a cost of time, money, and effort in engaging in the sales effort - and dealers spend their own time and resources into trying to gain sales traction with a product whose technology has been given a bad rap by the customer base at-large. There is a legacy of failure by several earlier startups that tried to commercialize this technology - and this leaves current fleet operators with a high level of skepticism. It's ashame, because I saw with my own eyes, that this system delivered a more than 17% improvement in fuel economy on a road test. But even that customer eventually decided not to place a fleet order. Why - I have no idea. Economically - it should be a no-brainer.
This is a tough nut to crack, because in spite of the fact that I've seen this product work extremely well with my own eyes - convincing a fleet manager to go to his management for a multi-million $ budget with which to purchase a fleet-wide installation of this is an extremely difficult, and long-sales-cycle game. It can take a year or more, to win the trust of a large fleet operator after conducting one or more performance validation trials over a period of months, just to win a purchase order.
By comparison, Dynacert only launched real production of their HG-1 in May of 2017, about 18 months ago. Since then, they have had to make a few design corrections, and the current product's design also is the result of a major revision which went into effect within the past 6 months. Bringing this new and improved design case and system back to customers who have already rejected the first version, is also time and resource consuming. For dealers to do this - costs them a lot of time and money - with no guarantee of any return on those efforts. Most dealers have other core busienss from which they pay their rent - so they must focus on busienss activity that actually provides a return on their capital employed.
To summarize my humble opinion - The HydraGEN product really has a tremendous opportunity to drive a paradigm shift within the trucking industry - in terms of their emissions and cost reduction initiatives, because it works. The problem is that the sales cycle is much longer than most people anticipated, and their "tweaks" to the product design essentially forced them to "re-launch" it -- restarting that sales cycle. If DynaCERT wants to succeed with this through a dealer sales model - they need to find a way to better support their dealer network's sales efforts, in order that the dealers themselves are not cannibalizing their core business's resources in order to gain traction with this product - which is such a hard-sell. On a positive note, the company plans to exhibit at a major truck industry exhibition in the US in late Spring - so if they play their cards right - they will involve their dealers in that exhibition as a means to drive sales order development through those dealers at that trade show.
It's my opinion, that if just two or three major fleet operators can finally be encouraged to conduct a meaningful validation trial (not one or two trucks - but an installation of 10 or 20 trucks) on the current product - and prove the economic value proposition to that operator -- thus leading to meaningful fleet orders - other fleet operators will follow suit. The unit really does reduce fuel consumption by a substantial magnitude - and based on the test my affiliated dealer conducted - it does indeed pay for itself in less than 10 months. That's a more than 78% return on capital employed for a fleet operator - a staggering value proposition.
Dynacert chose the model to try to develop sales through a dealer network - rather than direct through an in-house sales team (which would cost millions to support). So, what I think must be done is for the company to devleop an effective dealer-support system to drive sales. As of now, there don't seem to be any meaninful "first adopters" of the technology for a fleet-wide installation. Dealers who have already spent thousands of hours and tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in a sales effort resulting in no sales - have no choice but to drop back to a "wait and see what happens" mode - rather than continue to throw good money after bad. This results in a counterproductive situation. I could be wrong, but this in my view, is the immediate barrier to overcome at this point. It's my opinion therefore, that Dynacert must either offer more support to their dealers to drive sales, or make a decision and revert to an in-house model and hire a first-class field sales team to do it for them. There are pros and cons to either, and they cannot do both simultaneously - because these two models have conflicting interests. The latter model - to hire a global field sales team - I believe is far too costly for the company to pursue at this time given their "burn rate." They would need to hire at least a dozen or 15 highly experienced, and polished technical sales engineers across North America and Europe. This would cost them another $1 Million per quarter in operating expense which would drive them under within a few months. As such, in my humble opinon - their most effective course of action right now, is to collaborate more closely in partnership with their dealers in order to support a drive for meaningful fleet sales (JMHO). They may or may not be pursuing this approach -- I have no idea, but I do know that they have made some substantial improvements to the product to ensure reliability and reduce potential warranty costs over the longer term. That's all I know at this time.