This week on The Shameless Plug, Fiona and I sat down with my old friend Daniel Bleakley. You might know Daniel from his viral YouTube series Coal Miners Driving Teslas. If you haven’t seen it, the premise is as simple as it is brilliant: put coal miners in a Tesla, floor the accelerator, and watch the smiles spread. In a place where the “culture war” has been fiercest, EV joyrides have turned out to be better climate communication than a thousand op-eds.
Daniel’s story is compelling because it’s also Australia’s story. He grew up in Clermont in central Queensland, a town where rugby league, diesel, and coal were the lifeblood. His family ran a petrol station, his brother worked in the mines, and the local footy field was built with Rio Tinto money. And yet, after studying engineering, witnessing Germany’s early boom in rooftop solar, and reading Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers, Daniel made the long journey from fossil country to climate activist. He even once glued his hand to Siemens’ Melbourne office window in protest of their support for the Adani mine.
In recent years, Daniel has stepped into the role of entrepreneur, tackling trucking, one of the heaviest hitters in our emissions profile.
Here’s the stat that floored me when I first heard him say it: A single 64-tonne B-double driving 200,000km per year will burn $2 million worth of diesel in a decade.
That’s one truck. Multiply that by the 100,000+ heavy trucks on our roads and you start to see the absurdity of our dependence on imported oil. It’s not just an emissions story, it’s an economic story. We’re sending $160 million every day overseas to pay for transport fuel, while we sit on the best solar and wind resources in the world.
Daniel, along with his business partner (ex-Scania innovation head, Frederik Parson), is trying to flip that equation. Their vision is an electric trucking company that can deliver freight at the same cost as diesel, but powered by Australian sunshine. They’re betting on the megawatt charging standard, bi-directional trucks that can double as grid-scale batteries, and a freight system that is quieter, cleaner, and far more resilient.
As we talked, I couldn’t help but think about how circular this story is. Daniel’s parents still run that petrol station in Clermont, his brother still works in the mines, and yet Daniel is pointing the way to the next economy. He even discovered, through family research, that his great-grandfather helped found a company called British Electric Vehicles in 1916 - a little-known detour in history when electric trucks competed with petrol and even horses. For a moment, the world might have chosen differently.
We didn’t take that path in the 20th century, but maybe, with people like Daniel, we can take it now.
If you’ve ever wondered what it will take to shift the culture, the economics, and the politics of transport, this conversation is worth your time. It’s about coal miners, Teslas, hunger strikes, trucks the size of small buildings, and optimism.
Let me know what you think of the episode in the comments, or leave us a rating on your podcast app.
