My name is Joe Callahan. I'm forty-one.

In 2012, I lost my job at a warehouse in Phoenix. I had a wife, a baby daughter and six hundred dollars in the bank.

I spent four thousand dollars I didn't have on a used white van with a hundred and ninety thousand miles on it. I painted Callahan Delivery on the side with a stencil. The paint ran in the heat.

Then I started delivering parcels. For anyone who'd pay me. Small shops. Online sellers. Pharmacies. Fourteen hours a day, six days a week.

Within a year, I had three vans. Within five years, fifty.

Today, Callahan Freight has nine hundred drivers and six hundred vans across Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico. If you've had a package delivered in Phoenix in the last five years, there's a good chance one of my drivers brought it.

And once a month, I still do a delivery shift myself. In the uniform. Same route as a new driver. It keeps me honest. It reminds me what the job feels like at a hundred and eight degrees.

That Saturday, I'd finished my shift early. Sterling Motors was on my way home.

My fleet manager, Rita, had a meeting booked there for Monday morning. We were about to buy our first electric vans.

A hundred and fifty of them.

I just wanted to see one up close first.