'The proof is in the pulling'

TREVOR Milton, founder and CEO of Nikola Motors, partly silenced at least one of his doubters — me — with the launch of the fully electric Nikola One truck last week.

The self-described serial entrepreneur has been making big promises, each one sounding too good to be true, since he first announced his plan to build a zero-emission truck that he said would turn the United States’s transport industry on its head.

Initially, his electric trucks’ batteries were to have been recharged by a mini-turbine running on natural gas, but we have since been told that was all a strategic ruse to confuse competitors. Nikola Motors was, in fact, developing a hydrogen-powered truck with a range of at least 1 287 km and
electric motors on its axles that give the trucks over 2 700 Nm and 745 kW (1 000 hp).

These power figures are nearly double that of any other 6x6 truck sold around the world today, and, of course, using hydrogen as a power source to recharge electric batteries can, in theory, give the truck only pure water as its emission.

In practice, making industrial quantities of hydrogen requires making electricity twice, first using truck loads of coal to make the electricity needed to separate the tiny hydrogen atoms, and the second time to generate the current via a fuel cell to charge an electric vehicle’s batteries.

This means that the Nikola One truck’s exhaust pipes have just moved upstream to where the coal-fired plant emits its toxic gasses from giant smoke stacks. Which is why the legendary Nikola Tesla’s other admirer, Elon Musk of PayPal and Tesla Motors fame, dismisses hydrogen systems out of hand, preferring to generate electricity only once to recharge batteries, using his solar panels.

At the launch of his truck, Milton was as unperturbed by these realities as Toyota was before it announced last month that small electric cars are back on the agenda, after the Japanese giant admitting the range and recharging times of current lithium batteries systems are not that bad after all.

That, and the fact that hydrogen is the tiniest molecule on the Periodic Table of Elements and is therefore able to leak, slip or seep through any material, given enough time.

But several hydrogen-powered cars have shown fuel cells go further and faster than cars that have to recharge their lithium batteries for hours, and as Milton shares Musk’s vision for a world free of fossil fuel smog, it was an obvious choice.

His vision for a diesel-free future has inspired several thousands of orders, with deposits totalling over $3 billion already in Nikola Motors’ accounts.

Milton said at the launch of the Nikola trucks that his company plans to have hydrogen stations at over 800 sites across North America and parts of Canada. Work on the hydrogen stations only begins in a year’s time, in January 2018. The first opening date is scheduled late in 2019 — a few months before the first of Nikola’s 50 000 trucks are scheduled to roll off the assembly line.

Meanwhile, former doubters like me are now out with the jury, waiting for the first on-road test results of what Milton proudly described as “the most advanced semi-truck ever built”. For as we say in trucking, “the proof is in the pulling”.