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Nikola Motor Receives Over 7,000 Preorders Worth Over $2.3 Billion For Its Electric Truck (electrek.co)
An anonymous reader writes: Last month, Nikola Motor unveiled the design of its first product -- an electric truck with a natural gas range extender called 'Nikola One.' The 'Nikola One' comes equipped with a massive 320 kWh battery pack that the company hopes can allow it to travel up to 1,200 miles with the natural gas range extender. Today, the company announced it has received over 7,000 pre-orders with deposits for the electric truck since its unveiling. CEO Trevor Milton says the pre-orders are worth over $2.3 billion. Milton said in a press release this morning: "Our technology is 10-15 years ahead of any other OEM in fuel efficiencies, MPG and emissions. We are the only OEM to have a near zero emission truck and still outperform diesel trucks running at 80,000 pounds. To have over 7,000 reservations totaling more than 2.3 billion dollars, with five months remaining until our unveiling ceremony, is unprecedented." Some other features of the truck include: 6x6 100% electric drive, zero idle, many times cleaner than diesel engines, half the fuel cost per mile compared to diesel, 3,700 FT. LBS Torque, 2,000 horsepower, one million miles fuel free, regenerative braking, and never plug-in feature as the turbine charges the batteries automatically while driving. This may sound familiar as the Tesla Model 3 received over 115,000 preorders worth $115 million in just 24 hours after its unveiling.
A rig hauling 80,000 lbs is going to have a constant power requirement of about 150HP to maintain 65MPH on flat, level ground. No help from aerodynamics or bearing drag. That's over 110kW, or about 3 hours on battery, or 190 miles. That means the remaining 1000 miles of range are going to come from fossil fuels. Hardly impressive.
2,000 Horsepower is nearly 1.5 MEGAWATTS. 250,000 watts per motor. Even if they were 90% efficient, that's still 25kW of heat to dissipate. So, I imagine the 2000 horsepower is only available for a very short time, if it's even real.
The math just seems to fantastical to be true.
It's a lot easier for a massive power plant to sequester it's CO2, instead of trying to capture the output of every tailpipe.
Plus, if new tech emerges and we replace fossil fuel plants (entirely or even just partially), that benefit is transferred to every electric car.
Their preorders are actually $1500 x 7000 = $10.5 million. If all of those translate to sales, then it would be the big $2.3 billion number. To date Tesla has over 373,000 preorders at $1000 apiece = $373 million. Tesla stands to make over $15.6 billion in revenue if all of those sales go through, assuming an average build is about $42,000 after options. I think it's still pretty impressive for Nikola, though, all things considered.
The claimed energy costs of /half/ over conventional diesel is huge. When your company does nothing but ship those costs will affect the bottom line pretty much like nothing else.
It reminds me of the advent of diesel-electric locomotives. They were so much cheaper to run that steam vanished virtually overnight. There were literally stories of steam locomotives rolling off production only to make a single trip directly to the scrap yards. (Said machines were contracted and commissioned years in advance)
If these trucks really do half the fuel cost, diesel will be gone in less than two years. And anyone who can't replace their fleet will simply be pushed out of business. (Anyone wonder why modern companies live and die based pretty much on their ability to secure credit?)
Worth every penny.
Lifetime fuel cost for vehicles like that is more than half a million dollars.
https://www1.eere.energy.gov/vehiclesandfuels/pdfs/truck_efficiency_paper_v2.pdf
According to the original post, these trucks have half the fuel cost of diesel.. So over the lifetime of the truck you'll save 150,000 dollars. Now imagine you own a large company with a fleet of thousands of these. It's easy to see while they're selling so well.
And that's just fuel cost. If there has been anything that the hybrid passenger car market has taught us it's that electric drive trains are crazy reliable and cheap to maintain. I'd be willing to bet they will save on maint too. Big diesel engines cost a lot just to keep on the road, and keep up to emissions spec. These new vehicles will have much less trouble with emissions.
From the article, the plan is to use a natural gas powered turbine as the means of electricity generation; it's designed to never plug-in to the grid to recharge. The economies of scale that might apply to power plant level CO2 sequestration do not apply here.
"Is not a sentence" is not a sentence. Well damn.
Nikola Tesla didn't have middle name.
The way the press release is worded is rather disingenuous. They call the gas turbine a "range extender", when in fact the turbine is the prime mover. If it weren't for the turbine, the truck would have a 100-200 mile range, and a tractor-trailor with that kind of range is basically as useful as tits on a fish.
What a load of marketing horse-hockey.
The electrics are used for power transmission, and allowing the turbine to run at a speed conducive to high efficiency, in other words, it's a semi with an turbine-electric hybrid powertrain, and if it works as intended that's AWESOME. However, it is not in any conceivable way, a fuckin electric truck, so why not call it what it is; a fuckin cool hybrid truck. Excuse my trucker-ese.
Did anybody see this: Nikola Zero 520HP four-wheeler? Woohoo!!!!
Karma: Bad
Please don't spread falsehoods. Large gas turbines are vastly more efficient than piddling little ones.
GE LM-2500, 25,000 kW output, 227 g/kWh specific fuel consumption
Allison 250, 186 kW output, 468 g/kWh specific fuel consumption
There is no such disparity with, for example, diesel engines. In the same power range, specific fuel consumption is within around a 15-20% variance top to bottom.
Why? Obviously it is *better* to do that, but *even* if it were coal based, the ONE coal-based plant could have far better air cleaning capabilities than every single car on the road...
and as the energy production DOES get more green, all of the cars "magically" become greener too.
They're not the first company to do this (Smith has been doing it for ages), but the tech keeps converging. And pairing it with a range extender is a good idea, it's not as much of a cost or mass penalty (proportional to total hauled mass) in a freight truck as it is in a car, so you might as well retire any range anxiety. That said, 100-200 miles range is no slouch in and of itself. It depends on what sort of charge setup they provide, but it might fit well into a role shuttling goods around town where there's some delay on each end for charging - ports, factories, warehouses, etc.
And lest anyone think that you can't provide power that fast with detachable connectors... so long as you have a good enough feed, you can provide power fast enough to fry the batteries on that thing in seconds. AMP provides power to docked ships at up to 6600V and up to the ballpark of 8MW. Enough to fill one of those trucks' packs every 2 1/2 minutes, if they could actually take it. Technically you don't even need that big of a feed from the power plant, if you get a battery buffer.
Monkeywrench Ex Machina.
Unlike most of you I went to the Nikola Motors website.
While there is undoubtedly some hype here's what they said.
There are 2 electric motors on the front axle and it looks like 4 electric motors on the rear axles. The motors have 2 gear automatic transmissions. The truck has what they call torque vectoring which adjusts the wheel speed while turning or maneuvering. There is a 100 gallon CNG tank powering a nearly 400 kw turbine. The turbine if fuel agnostic running on diesel, gasoline or CNG. You can choose your fuel at the time of purchase. They claim the 100 gallon CNG tank is enough for 800 -1,200 miles depending on terrain and load. The turbine will run for 1 hour out of every 3-5 hours of pure electric driving. It of course had regenerative braking but there are also air powered disk brakes on all 6 wheels (of course they'd have to have an air system so they can hook up to the trailer brakes too). They claim the truck will stop in about half the distance of a normal diesel rig.
For the first 25,000 customers they are offering free fuel for the first million miles. They own the rights to some gas wells and are setting up 55 fueling stations around the country and Canada that are spaced close enough that you can easily make if from one to the next. You can lease the truck for $5,000/month and that includes free fuel, warranty and scheduled maintenance (I doubt tires are included) and at the end of the warranty period (72 months or 1 million miles whichever comes first) you can trade it in on a new one. They also say the Nikola-one is around 2,000 pounds lighter than the equivalent diesel tractor increasing the payload you can carry.
Lots more information at the website.
The Allison 250 (252 lbs) is aimed at primarily at single engine flight applications (eg: small aircraft and helicopters) and sacrifices efficiency for reliability and lower weight. While the GE LM-2500 (9400 lbs) is based on an aircraft engine, it is primarily designed for static duties and doesn't make the same sacrifices. With the most obvious difference being much greater weight and size allowing more efficient multi-stage compressors.
The LM2500 is considered best in class for efficiency. The latest version lowers the specific fuel economy further. (LM2500+G4 214 g/kW-hr)
I don't know where you get the Allison 250 figure from, but it's quite high. The worst I could find was for an early production 250-B17F with 399g/kW-hr, but more modern versions like the 250-C40 do 349g/kW-hr.
The 12kW Bladon Jets micro turbines will do 340g/kWh in a very compact footprint.
However comparing an Allison 250 with a GE LM-2500 is an apples to oranges comparison and says more about the variability of gas turbine designs than it does about scaling. The LHTEC CTS800-4N is another helicopter engine, and that has a SFC of 279g/kW-hr which is within 23% of the original LM2500, which is very close to your diesel variance. And I'm sure if I looked further I could find diesel engines outside that variance. Particularly since we're comparing engines with 2 orders of magnitude output power difference and very different applications.