Eric Little & Chace Barber

If one guy can call his electric-car company Tesla, why not call theirs Edison, a couple of Merritt entrepreneurs figured.   While the real-life Tesla and Edison, groundbreaking inventors, became fierce rivals, Edison Motors has a way to go before catching up with Elon Musk’s car company. But the journey has begun: Chace Barber and Eric Little are building hybrid electric logging trucks, backed up by diesel generators.  …What Edison Motors has come up with is a unique diesel-electric powertrain with a 6,000-pound generator.  …The reason the truck is particularly suited to logging, Barber added, is drivers head up the mountain electrically with empty truck beds and come back down full, the brakes regenerating the batteries all the way down.  “You use the stored potential energy to get to the top of the mountain and then turn that into kinetic energy on the way down. It works pretty slick.