Chace Barber is a TikTok star with 770,000 followers and a mission to eat Elon Musk's lunch by beating the world's richest man to the punch with a useful, powerful electrified truck. It helps he's also a fourth-generation log hauler with deep roots in Canada's lumber country.
"My great grandfather did it," he said of the log hauling business. "He did it in his teens with a mule train" up in the rich forests of British Columbia, a Canadian province with twice the land area of California and only four million people.
These pristine woods provide the U.S. with about 80% of its softwood lumber. Canada in total provided more than eight billion dollars in lumber to the U.S. in 2020, according to Canadian government statistics. It's there in Merritt, British Columbia, where Barber's family roots lie, and where he's cooking up what could be the next chapter in one of the toughest trucking niches imaginable.
Barber started driving at 18 in Canada. "I’ve spent the majority of my time logging, but I also moved drilling rigs and did the ice roads" further up north, he said, in addition to some years over-the-road. Eventually, Barber started a small log-hauling fleet. He ran for seven years before shuttering to focus on electrification efforts. The experience running his fleet gave him a keen eye for what makes a good log hauler.
"At least in Canada, the way it works is most companies won't hire a guy if they have too much driving time on-highway" pulling a van, he said. "Logging is a totally unique set of skills, and there's things you learn at a mega carrier where you'd have to retrain a guy."
But therein lie some of the perks of the job as well. Log hauling can be hard on a driver and hard on a truck -- rather than "fighting boredom" and the fatigue of long hours over-the-road, Barber said he and fellow operators are "fighting pure adrenaline" rushes to maintain calm. "The way you drive a truck is so fundamentally different than on the highway. You're coming down a 30% grade with switchbacks in the snow."
One of the trucks in Barber's past fleet, hauling logs down a steep grade in winter time. This is not your average haul.Courtesy of Chace Barber
