all right welcome to converter unknown episode number three this is our infancy of this uh of this podcast I’m going to welcome John and Mark to the table uh not all cats are stolen I have heard through the grapevine that you guys may have figured out a very special answer to converter theft prevention so Mark John why don’t you tell me what you guys stumbled upon and what you created well I go first I uh tell me about yourself in your background first I’ve got a uh a lifelong uh history in transportation um the last decade or so has been transportation telematics so combine the two um you have cab track but uh long story short I’d work for a family business of John’s which was sold back in 2001. and operated just short of a hundred thousand assets so uh pretty sizable North American company Trucking Truck Rental Truck Leasing sold that in 2001 and died ventured out of my own I’m a Serial entrepreneur um Mark and I go back about 35 years to a company called Rollins Trucking where the family business of mine Mark came up in it and uh

no colleague of ours does some Consulting a large insurance companies in San Diego we’re losing our butts on this cabinet for murder theft is there anything you can do or Noah so there wasn’t a whole lot of options out there and it still really aren’t but we got to work with Mark’s background in telematics and our background in transportation is a pretty unique solution so you guys tried to figure out how do we take this from something that’s but that’s like a say a strap or something that takes a lot of mechanic shop knowledge to accomplish under the car how do we add technology to it how do we add maybe maybe a warning system to it and and you guys have created what’s now known as cat track right awesome and easy to use Easy to install uh something that alerts the owner in real time via an app um the way it’s designed any abnormal rotation or a cut of the harness will activate a remotely mounted siren at 140 decibels in real time concurrent to a cell signal so you get a an app text alert SMS alert and you’re preventing

the theft in itself by a 140 decibel siren at the same time what’s more than that and we think that siren is going to be loud enough to deter a majority of the food so probably drop and run if they happen to make off with the cat itself throw it in the truck it’s tracked online because we have a smart device mounted on the catalytic converter so we track it in real time that will enable recovery of the customer’s cat and also law enforcement to find the chop chops so does the siren shut off after a period of time or is it does it just keep going until the user shuts off you can shut it off and we can apply timers to it as well today you’ve got to shut it off we want all the neighbors to hear it no that’s good that’s where I was going I wonder if you just keep it keep it annoying even if they cut it off is it still is it still annoying in the car right as they’re driving think about it you hear an alarm system at the grocery store what what is

your natural reaction is for my car yeah two points right yeah this is uh it’s a unique sound it’s it’s about three times as loud and that’s going to get the attention of everybody around not to mention the owner now knows that you’re under his car stealing his cat yeah so tell me about the insurance play because I think that the insurance side of it’s interesting right because the insurance companies are tired of dishing out thousands and thousands and let’s just go ahead and say millions and millions of dollars in claims how is Insurance how do you guys hope insurance is going to play into your guys’s product yeah well ensure it’s their largest Automotive claim these days uh catalytic converter theft okay so our development of this product really came about after a conversation with a large insurance so and we’re in discussions with five or six right now large ones small ones about uh rolling out or promoting the product to their policyholders and providing a discount on their premiums it’s uh as we’re figuring out how to roll that out through the through the agents or just marketing at local body

shops sort of how the mechanics of that rollout is going to work but it’s been very well received by the insurance industry as you can imagine I’ll add add to that too just a quick statistic State Farm just published uh an article they had spent 52 million dollars year-to-date through six months of this year and all of last year was 10 million just in cat just insurance claims yeah that’s an amazing statistic you got to think that they have droves of people trying to figure this out but it’s the capitalistic Market that came in yeah and figured it out but they have to want to do this right they have to want to offer their customers a discount for the right product and they’re going to want the data and that data is going to help your company and Company like converter reclaim know that if your product works that they can now offer those discounts um what’s the what’s the word I’m looking for I’m thinking about taking off of those discounts and not worry about whether they’re losing money on offering a 10 discount that’s right tracking device think about

it this way too as John mentioned I think mentioned the average claim being 3 800 bucks per cat due to back orders car rentals downtime whatnot um the insurance company themselves they are the customer if you have a call it a four thousand dollar plan and we sell you something for uh 500. we’ve just reduced your cost significantly yeah and all they need to do is identify those problem areas and be proactive yeah so when a customer buys a cat track device they are now in constant communication with their cat real time what what also comes with the purchase of the cat track device is there is it subscription based what does the customer have to look forward so there is data connectivity right there’s GPS uh it’s a smart device and so we include that in the the initial price so it comes with five years connectivity okay yeah so and it’ll chime it you’ll know on the app once it’s once the device is synced with the app where your unit is where your truck is or car with the app everything’s fine uh and then in the event a theft occurs

or starts to occur that’s when you get the uh the alert but we’ve included with about five years uh that’s awesome yeah have you guys had any piloted uh runs yet and yeah and can you tell me about those were they successful are they with police agencies are they with any any certain group of people you tried we we piloted predominantly with with private fleets who did have a problem we then got the attention um of uh various police police agencies who had sting operations um we participated in those as well as got feedback from them to help us this was built for the insurance industry by the users okay it’s kind of the easiest way to sum it up it’s also just to to add on to what John was saying and what you’d asked he not only is it GPS but there are some health features that come along with it um catalytic converters get hot because engines typically are blowing all their water correct they what they overheat typically because an engine is blowing oil blowing water yeah they clog up and then they overheat yeah so by us uh uh

telling you what the temp of the exhaust temp is we can tell you if you have engineering problems so there’s other bikes so if it’s over 1300 degrees you know you got a problem that’s right it shouldn’t be running over 13 1600 something like that interesting and how would you know that unless the car was running down the road turning orange yeah yeah you would hope their sensors detect it but you know at the end of the day yeah I wanted to touch on the police part of it I think that this this product that you guys have created can go a couple directions I want to tell you how I’d love to see it go and what what the law enforcement probably want to see in Insurance Agency is like I see it as a amazing deterrent device that Grandma can throw on hopefully one day right when it’s super um easy to put on I understand right now you do need to have it have it put on which you would have to do with a lot of the products out there but do law enforce enforcement agencies want you to sort

of catch somebody or are they hoping that you prevent that cat from being stolen in the first place right it’s two-sided I understand that yeah it’s funny that’s a hard question ultimately they had the thief rather not see anything affixed to that that cat and it’s stolen and it goes down the road and we track it and they catch catch the chop chops right so right you’re right so they uh they would prefer not to have the siren on their fake cars or pilots and things like that but ultimately uh you know a reduction in crime is a reduction in crime so that’s the name of the game I think the siren is probably go ahead yeah the feedback we got was uh in terms of deployment they wanted to do public Outreach programs similar to the steering wheel bar remember the club yep I remember that’s how they started uh at the base level and deploying those things and until they got some Traction in the marketplace um but as John mentioned uh they they weren’t they weren’t as interested in the one-off crime they were more interested in the guy

that had 50 of them in his backyard he’s got a bunch of people because they want to I mean you’re stopping the the crime ring or whatever’s going on and that’s what they’re they’re interested in right law enforcement yeah right but it’s both sides you guys have successfully uh you know got both sides of it you got the siren maybe you were talking about the ADT thing maybe you can put a sign that says protected by cat track and that will deter because they know what they’re about to come up against right yeah really cool yeah the cool thing about it too is is uh should somebody go in there and try and steal a cap with cat tractor pipe uh there’s there’s no way to disarm it under the vehicle it’s gonna go yeah you’re gonna know it immediately and the siren’s not going to shut up until the ownership right yeah that’s awesome guys yeah we’re excited so how many how long has it been deployed we’ve been in development for uh just short of two years we have uh about a thousand beta units out there and our launch date is

November so here we are here we are yeah no better day to launch it I love it okay made in the USA right so our supply chain issues have been minimized and uh we’re able to get as much product as we need and we’re ready to scale so are you for for all of our viewers are you’re not quite ready to go direct to Consumers that what I understand are you trying to are we trying to to contact dealers at the moment what’s Channel sales okay because I want people to know how to get a hold of you when we uh sure we get out yeah yeah we’ve targeted initially um private fleets right um and they’re the ones who you know get 12 to 20 of them stolen at a time out of their yard over and over again over and over again so this way they’ll be alerted when something’s going on with their truck and or with their car and the cat but also the siren will prevent their probably send the thief running so that prevents not just that cat from doing stolen but you know 15 20 however many

trucks they have on the yard yeah so it’s a pretty powerful value proposition for commercial Fleet operators and animals absolutely our intent is to go out to uh to Consumers sometime in the second quarter of next year they are about another six seven months we’ll be ready awesome however we we can we can be uh we can answer a lot of questions and and depending on the size of the fleet we can be contacted at cattracktech.com cat tracktech.com that’s right Mark and John thank you for showing up on our third episode of converter unknown not all cats are stolen we’re happy that there are people out there that are trying to find a solution to this because of course there is no 100 percent fits all and all be all solution to cat theft but I think this is on the right track no pun intended but uh yeah thank you for the opportunity yes thank you appreciate it thank you thank you appreciate it thank you guys