Gary S. Winemaster on Building the Future of Clean-Powered Transportation

Gary S. Winemaster is the CEO of NEXIO Power, a leading provider of green-powered automotive vehicles, parts, and solutions. Before NEXIO, Gary founded and led Power Solutions International (PSI) for more than three decades, growing it into a globally recognized name in alternative fuel engine technology with nearly $500 million in product shipments and more than 1.5 million engines delivered to OEMs, including Navistar, Freightliner, Caterpillar, and Cummins. A Wharton graduate and two-time captain of the Penn varsity football team, Gary brings a rare combination of strategic foresight, technical depth, and operational discipline to the clean energy industry.

Q1: You've spent decades at the forefront of alternative fuel and clean energy technology. What first drew you into this space, and what keeps you committed to it now at NEXIO Power?

Honestly, it started as a business opportunity and turned into a conviction. When I was building Power Solutions International, the commercial engine world was almost entirely diesel and gasoline, and the conversations about cleaner fuels were treated as fringe. I saw it differently. The economics were going to shift, the regulations were going to tighten, and the customers running fleets were going to need real options that worked in the field, not just on paper.

What keeps me here now is that the work actually matters. Trucks and industrial equipment move the economy, and how they're powered has consequences that reach far beyond any one balance sheet. At NEXIO, we're building products that fleet operators can put to work on day one, and that's the part I find genuinely interesting. The technology has finally caught up to the ambition.

Q2: NEXIO Power focuses on green-powered trucks and chassis. For readers outside the industry, what does that mean in practical terms?

It means the vehicles do the same job, just without the emissions profile of traditional diesel. We're talking about the trucks and chassis that move freight, handle municipal work, and run industrial routes every single day. Same payload. Same uptime expectations. Different powertrain.

Q3: You ran Power Solutions International for more than 30 years and grew it from an early-stage operation into a company shipping nearly half a billion dollars in product. What was the hardest part of that journey, and what's the lesson you'd pass on to someone building today?

The hardest part was almost never the product. The technology problems were solvable because we had good engineers and a clear understanding of what the customer needed the engine to do. The harder problems were the human ones. Hiring the right people at the right stage of growth. Holding a culture together as the headcount climbed past 500, then past 1,000. Making sure the team in Illinois and the team in China and the team on a customer site in Texas were all rowing in the same direction.

The lesson I'd pass on is that strategy gets the credit and execution does the work. Anyone can sketch out a five-year plan on a whiteboard. Very few organizations can actually deliver against one over a sustained period, and the difference is almost always in the quality of the people you hire and how seriously you take their development. If you're building something today, spend more time on that than you think you need to. The product will follow.

Q4: Partnerships with OEMs like Navistar, Freightliner, Caterpillar, and Cummins were a major part of PSI's growth. What does it actually take to earn and keep that kind of relationship?

Reliability is the entire game. These companies are not looking for a vendor with a clever pitch. They're looking for a partner who is going to ship on time, hit spec, stand behind the product when something goes sideways, and still be in business in five years. You earn the first order by being competitive. You earn every order after that by being consistent.

Q5: The clean energy and alternative fuel space moves fast. Regulations change, technology shifts, customer expectations evolve. How do you make decisions when the ground keeps moving underneath you?

You separate the noise from the signal, and you do it on purpose. There's always going to be a new headline about a competing technology, a regulatory delay, a tax credit, a policy reversal. If you react to every one of those, you'll burn through capital and credibility before you ever get a product to market.

What I try to do, and what I push the team to do, is anchor decisions to the things that don't change very quickly. Fleet operators need vehicles that work in real conditions and pay back over a defined lifecycle. OEMs need suppliers who can scale and stay solvent. End customers want fewer emissions without giving up performance. Those fundamentals are stable even when the daily headlines aren't. Once you've identified what's actually durable in the market, the short-term volatility becomes a lot easier to filter, and you can place bigger, more confident bets on the trends that genuinely have legs.

Q6: You played varsity football at Penn and were named captain twice. Do you see a connection between that experience and the way you lead now?

A lot more than I expected when I was twenty. Football teaches you that the person next to you matters as much as the play being called. You can be the most talented player on the field and lose the game because the team isn't aligned. That stays with you.

Q7: Early in your career, you spent time in Luxembourg working with a global glass manufacturer and helped sell out the factory's full output. What did that experience teach you that you still use today?

Two things, and they've both held up for the rest of my career. The first was that markets behave differently depending on where you are, and assumptions you bring from one country can quietly sink you in another. You have to actually understand the buyer in front of you. Pricing dynamics, distribution norms, what counts as a relationship versus a transaction, all of it shifts when you cross a border. I learned to ask more questions and assume less.

The second was about pace. The team in Luxembourg moved quickly, made decisions cleanly, and didn't bury the work in process. That stuck with me. When you're trying to penetrate a new market or stand up a new product line, speed of execution often matters more than the elegance of the plan. You don't get points for being thorough if your competitor has already taken the shelf space. I came back to the U.S. with a much sharper sense of how international business actually works, and that perspective has shaped almost every major decision I've made since.

Q8: What's a common misconception about the clean energy transition in commercial transportation that you'd like to clear up?

That it's a single bet on a single technology. It isn't. The right answer for a long-haul tractor isn't the right answer for a forklift, and neither is the right answer for a refuse truck running stop-and-start routes in a dense city. Anyone telling you there's one winner doesn't actually work in the industry.

Q9: Looking at the next five to ten years in the commercial vehicle and industrial engine market, what are you watching most closely?

The intersection of policy and infrastructure, mostly. The technology side is moving faster than the conventional wisdom gives it credit for, and I'm confident the engineering will keep delivering. What's less certain is whether the infrastructure to support widespread adoption gets built out on a timeline that matches the demand. Charging networks, fueling stations for alternative fuels, grid capacity in industrial corridors all of that has to mature in parallel with the vehicles themselves.

I'm also watching how fleet economics evolve. The total cost of ownership conversation is shifting in favor of cleaner options faster than most people realize, and once that math crosses a clear threshold for major fleet operators, the adoption curve is going to look very different than it does today. The companies that have spent the last several years quietly building real capability, real partnerships, and real manufacturing depth are going to be the ones who benefit. The companies that have been telling a good story without the operational foundation underneath it are going to have a harder time. That sorting is already starting to happen.

Q10: If someone walked into your office tomorrow and asked you for one piece of advice about leadership, what would you tell them?

Hire people who are smarter than you and then actually listen to them. Most executives say it. Far fewer do it. The instinct when you're under pressure is to tighten the circle and trust your own read, and sometimes that's the right call. But over a career, the leaders who build something that lasts are almost always the ones who surrounded themselves with strong people and gave those people room to challenge the plan. That's the real job. The titles and the strategy decks come and go. Building a team that can win without you in the room is what separates a manager from a leader.