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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.
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.
Parent is talking about highway driving....65MPH. Regen braking doesn't help you if you don't need to stop. And honestly, not stopping is going to be more efficient than even the most efficient regenerative brakes.
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.
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.
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.