Electrifying a commercial fleet means six things arriving at once: the trucks, the power, the land, the capital, the carbon and the data. Each has its own owner and its own timeline, and the power alone can take years to arrive. Diesel took a single signature. Most companies in this market sell one of the six and leave the fleet to assemble the rest. Zeem operates where they meet.
Zeem proved the model at its own depot near LAX, the busiest fleet EV charging depot in the United States on measured volume. It has run there since 2021, with 97%+ uptime across more than 400,000 measured charging sessions, and the depot runs at a profit. Doing the same for major fleets, in their own yards, on dates they sign for, is a different discipline. It comes down to two things: trucks that pay off across their whole life, and power that arrives on time and runs every morning. Zeem has now put a senior leader on each.
Al Barner becomes Senior Vice President of Fleet and Asset Management, taking the trucks, the terms behind them and the economics that have to hold up for a customer across the life of the assets. He brings nearly 30 years in commercial transportation, including 14 years at Fleet Advantage and more than a decade at Ryder System, and has advised Zeem since 2024. That background is the point. He knows how a traditional full-service fleet arrangement works and what a fleet expects from it, and he knows what changes when the trucks are electric and the power becomes part of the deal. Making those economics hold for the life of the assets is a trade, and Al has practiced it for three decades. He is a Certified Transportation Professional.
“This industry is still describing in the future tense what Paul has been running for five years. I have spent my career on what a truck actually costs a fleet over its life. Electric changes every input in that math, and fleets are making those decisions now with far less history to go on than they are used to. That is the work I came here to do.”
Rick Eckert became Senior Vice President of Infrastructure and Operations in July. He joined Zeem the month the Los Angeles depot opened and has run the depot network since, so the operating knowledge from that first site never left the company. He brings more than two decades in medium- and heavy-duty vehicles, across alternative fuel and electric operations, manufacturing and infrastructure development. Zeem’s own depots are still central, and they are no longer the whole of it. With MyGrid, the power and the operation go to the customer’s yard: the site, the project, the schedule, the utility, the permits, the funding applications, and then running what gets built, to whatever extent the fleet wants it run. Rick moved up because the job moved underneath him. Designing, permitting, energizing and running one site is not the same job as doing all of it in many places, on dates customers have already signed for, and that is the business he now owns as Zeem expands on both coasts.
“The trucks get the attention. What decides whether a fleet actually electrifies is whether the power is there, whether the yard is permitted, and whether somebody is in that yard every morning making sure the trucks leave. That is what my team does, and now we do it at more sites.”
Roger Alvarez stepped up to Vice President of Depot Operations this year, accountable for daily operations across Zeem’s depot network, where every truck has to leave charged, in the right order, on time. He joined Zeem in 2024 from Bus Sales, where as Director of EV Technology and Support he ran EV and EVSE deployment and service across California, Texas and Hawaii.
Olivier Roubi joined in September as Vice President of Business Development after twenty-five years in automotive and commercial fleet management across the United States and Europe, most recently at Orange EV and before that at Element Fleet and Arval. David Nadsady joins as Vice President of Marketing from lifecycle economics in capital-intensive infrastructure, most recently hyperscale data centers, where the same shift ran ahead of this one. Both industries run on power and long-lived capital assets, and as the grid decarbonizes, attention shifts to the carbon built into the assets themselves. For fleets, that means the embodied carbon in the trucks and the charging infrastructure.
“We pioneered shared charging and we were the first ones out there. What I still see in this industry is people stick-building a house when they could be modular building. A lot of fleets start out believing they can put this together themselves. Then they find out they can do it once. Doing it at scale, on a schedule, is a different business, and it is the one we are in. I have watched Al walk into customer meetings for two years and the respect in that room is already there. Rick has run our yards since the day the first one opened, and he is now taking that operation into our customers' yards as well as our own.”
