The Nikola One- a 100% Emission Free All Electric Class 8 Truck

[nationalize the fed]

Coming later this year

Nikola Motor Company Announces U.S. and Canadian Class 8 Trucks Will Be
Hydrogen Fuel Cell Powered and 100% Emission Free

SALT LAKE CITY. August 30, 2016-- Nikola (pronounced Neek-oh-la) Motor Company recently announced that it achieved zero emissions with its electric-powered drivetrain. At that time, details about how Nikola achieved zero emissions were kept confidential pending finalization of key supplier agreements.



Today, Nikola is announcing that the electric drivetrain used in the U.S. and Canadian markets will be powered by a custom-built hydrogen-electric 800V fuel cell. Nikola’s hydrogen class 8 trucks will be more powerful than any other production diesel truck on the road and have a range of over 1,200 miles between fill-ups. It will achieve nearly 20 MPG with zero emissions under full load,surpassing all the government mandates set forth for the next 10 years, including the EPA’s recently announced Phase 2 GHG standards.

“The desire to be 100% emission free in the U.S. and Canada is a critical piece of our long-term engineering and environmental efforts, not just in vehicle energy consumption, but also in how energy is produced. Nikola will produce hydrogen via zero emission solar farms built by Nikola Motor Company. These solar farms will produce over 100 megawatts each and will use electrolysis to create hydrogen from water. Even our manufacturing facilities will be run off of zero emission hydrogen energy,” said Trevor Milton, CEO, Nikola Motor Company.

“Nikola plans to have a nationwide network of over 50 hydrogen stations for customers to begin fueling by 2020. This will make Nikola Motor Company the first company in the world to be 100% emission-free from energy production to transportation to consumption. Say goodbye to the days of dirty diesels and after treatment in the heavy duty class 8 market,” added Milton.

More information will be announced about Nikola’s nationwide sales, service and warranty network in the coming weeks. Please see Nikola’s website for more information on the location of the future hydrogen stations. The CNG turbine version of the Nikola One will be available for other countries where hydrogen is not readily available.
https://nikolamotor.com/one

100% ZERO EMISSIONS
HYDROGEN POWERED
1,200 MILES RANGE
15 MINUTE REFILL TIME
NEVER PLUG IN
100% ELECTRIC DRIVE
THE END OF DIESEL ENGINES
1/2 THE OPERATING COST COMPARED TO DIESEL
2,000 FT. LBS TORQUE
1,000 HORSEPOWER
320 kWh BATTERY
1 MILLION MILES FREE* HYDROGEN FUEL
REGENERATIVE BRAKING
NO COMPETITION



Nikola: H2 is #1

[Warpy]

1. Spiffy design but the ground clearance sucks

I think they're going to want to change that just a bit. It's not a sports car for a mid life crisis, it's a truck that's going to have to cope with rough pavement, big speed bumps, and all sorts of junk on the roads.

[OKIsItJustMe]

12. According to the specs…

https://nikolamotor.com/one#specs
Ground Clearance TBD

[NickB79]

2. I didn't see anything stating they've actually built one yet

It sounds like they're just publishing what they HOPE to achieve, not what they have already achieved.

You could fill a warehouse with all the posts on EE about breakthrough tech that turned out to be vaporware put out by startups looking for investor money.

Time will tell, though.

[burfman]

3. It looks like a possible game changer.....cheaper to operate, cleaner and more torque

An amazing thing if all that they say is true.

However, it's still at least 3 years away if all goes according to plan...

From their web page:

We plan to begin delivering trucks in approximately 3-4 years based on our current timeline, which includes completing all U.S. department of transportation testing and regulation compliance. This could change, but we will keep everyone updated to the timeline. Due to high demand, the quicker you place a deposit, the faster you can get your Nikola One™. We anticipate for every 2,500 - 5,000 trucks sold, the wait will be an additional year out. Nikola™ could be booked up for 5-10 years at launch, so make sure you get your deposit and and be part of the included hydrogen fuel for 1,000,000 miles.

[NNadir]

4. Hydrogen will not be close to being "emissions free" in the lifetime of anyone...

...now living.

The overwhelming majority of it is made from dangerous natural gas, more than 98%

There is a huge truck fleet now operating on dangerous natural gas, and in the case of the garbage trucks of the Waste Management company, landfill gas which would otherwise leach into the atmosphere as a potent greenhouse gas.

When methane which is easier to store is not converted into hydrogen, a great deal of energy that would otherwise be lost in the transformation is not lost.

The "hydrogen vehicles" fantasy that's been running for several decades now is just silly and useless.

The only result is that carbon dioxide rates of increase have reached unbelievable levels never seen before.

Have a nice day today.

[kristopher]

5. The nuclear industry has been salivating over the inefficiency of hydrogen for decades.

It is a terribly inefficient and energy intensive storage process that would perfectly complement the way the nuclear industry strives to drive increased energy consumption.

[burfman]

6. They will be using solar power to generate their hydrogen

From their web site:

Nikola™ is in the process of developing multiple 100-megawatt solar farms to create hydrogen from electrolysis. Nikola™ will convert solar energy to hydrogen on-site using only energy and water, making it the only fuel that is zero emission from production to consumption. The hydrogen is then transported from the Nikola™ solar farms to Nikola™ hydrogen stations by a fleet of Nikola One™ trucks, running on zero-emission electric-hydrogen powertrains. The hydrogen is stored at Nikola™ stations in liquid form, and then dispensed into vehicles as compressed or liquid hydrogen. From energy creation to energy consumption, the entire process is 100% emissions free with Nikola™.

[NNadir]

7. Solar power is not, and never will be a significant form of energy.

We spent a trillion dollars on this planet in the last decade trying to make it a significant form of energy, and it doesn't produce even two of the 570 exajoules of energy humanity consumes each year.

The solar fantasy has proved useless at making electricity on a significant scale, and the idea that it can support the chemistry of motor fuels is laughable, particularly because of the second law of thermodynamics.

Electrolysis is a huge waster of energy.

About 2% of the world's energy supply is used to produce hydrogen to make ammonia without which the bulk of humanity would starve to death. More than 98% of that hydrogen is obtained from reformers running on dangerous fossil fuels, most often dangerous natural gas, but sometimes, particularly in China, on coal. If the solar industry - which has been useless at addressing climate change - was viable for making hydrogen, then we wouldn't be using dangerous fossil fuels for the same.

It isn't. It hasn't been. It won't be.

This is a fantasy; and an old and tired fantasy at that. I've been hearing this delusional crap about "solar powered" hydrogen vehichles my whole adult life; and I'm not young.

Have a nice day.

[burfman]

8. Solar power is actually becoming competitive in price now

NNadir,

One of my favorite charts from Wikipedia:

Which is from the page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source




Now for making the hydrogen gas for their trucks from the electricity generated by solar farms, go read the specs on their web site.


If it is true what they wrote up, we will see it happening in the next couple of years....


Burfman..........

[NNadir]

10. I've been hearing that one, about solar being "competitive" my whole adult life as well.

It's a whopper too.

It relies entirely on the selective attention that completely ignores that the entire solar industry is dependent on the availability of redundant systems.

If I need two or three houses to sleep in, depending on the weather and time of day, can I say that my living expenses are cheap if I only mention one of them?

Without dangerous natural gas, the solar industry is useless, and it is useless if the issue is the environment. It has done nothing, absolutely nothing to arrest the acceleration of climate change.

All the marketing in the world - all the repeating of the same lies year after year, decade after decade - will not change the fact that we raced over 400 ppm of carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere this year, and we're not looking back.

The solar industry is almost certainly not large enough to run all the servers on the planet dedicated to spreading the word on how great it is.

[burfman]

11. Nothing right now is a 100% fix

So right now you can have solar when the sun is shinning and wind power when it is blowing. So you can cut back on the amount of power that comes from burning fossil fuels. The point is that you are not burning as much fuel as would would without renewable energy being around. Economics still matter, if it is more economical to get your electricity from solar or wind than coal, it counts. Power plants are throttled up and down all the time depending on the total demand at the moment. Also it isn't like there is only one power plant providing power for you at the moment - they are tied together by all those somewhat ugly high voltage wire. Now if economical batteries are available - maybe in 5 to 10 years - you can add that to the mix and less fuel will need to be burned.......

It's a gradual process to get ourselves off of the fossil fuel wagon......

[NNadir]

13. The amount of energy we get from wind and solar on this planet, this for...

...an expenditure of two trillion dollars in the last ten years is ridiculously trivial.

When you "throttle up and down" power plants, particularly coal plants, you lose energy by lowering efficiency.

Now, the solar and the wind industry combined, after half a century of cheering for them as if they were panaceas, and after a quarter of a century of throwing vast amounts of money at them, don't produce even 5 of the 570 exajoules of energy produced and used by humanity each year.

Moreover this junk will be lucky to last 20 years before becoming highly toxic landfill.

Nor is it really "renewable," inasmuch as it requires ever more rare exotic metals, like indium, gallium, and the toxic elements cadmium, selenium and tellurium.

Using 30 year old technology, much maligned by barely literate types in favor of the vastly expensive and useless so called "renewable energy" scheme, the nuclear industry produces close to 28 exajoules of primary energy each year. According to one of the world's most prominent climate scientists, writing in one of the world's most important scientific environmental journals, nuclear energy prevented the accumulation of 60 billion tons of carbon dioxide (about two years at current levels of indiscriminate dumping) and saved 1.8 million lives that otherwise would have been lost to air pollution.

Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power

While the tiresome and very dangerous fools who support this bizarre and unsustainable set of affairs prattle on about "economics" and "safety" with not even the remotest concept of either, seven million people die each year from air pollution.

Now, these same people prattle on mindlessly all the time about economics, pointing out how expensive it is to build this nuclear plant or that nuclear plant. Not one of them can or will explain however how thirty years ago, the world built 440 nuclear plants with relatively primitive technology and still managed to produce some of the cheapest electricity in the world. To them, what has already happened is impossible.

China, which is paying the environmental costs of the solar and wind industries, since most of the materials used in these industry are mined and processed there, builds nuclear plants right now with ease and at relatively inexpensive prices. Unlike the wind junk we're building right now, almost every nuclear plant built today will be serving humanity when today's newborns are grandparents.

If we built nuclear plants like we built those 30 years ago, and spent the two trillion squandered in the last ten years on solar and wind, we would not be racing toward the oblivion now rising before us. We would at a minimum be producing another 30 exajoules or more of sustainable energy, perhaps far more, as we trained, encouraged, and supported the engineers who would have built this infrastructure.

Would this infrastructure have been risk free or perfect? No. But it need not be risk free and perfect to be vastly superior to everything else. It only needs to be vastly superior to everything else, which, um, it is. The bizarre, frankly criminal notion has taken hold in our increasingly doomed civilization that unless nuclear energy, and only nuclear energy is perfect and without risk, then everything else would be allowed to kill at will. And that's precisely what is happening; everything else is killing at will and doing so at a vast scale.

How many people died from radiation at Fukushima again?

Instead of thinking clearly, we would rather prattle on about how wonderful it is that we are spending all this money, time, and enthusiasm on something that has not worked, is not working, and will not work.

And let's be clear. The solar and wind industry have not worked, they are not working, and they won't work. If any of these statements were untrue, we would not have set records in 2015 - although they are sure to be dwarfed in 2016 - for new accumulations of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But we are setting such records, and our piddling distractions are a huge part of the reason why.

Have a nice evening.

[kristopher]

9. Is there anywhere on the website giving the round trip energy penalty?

Last edited Wed Aug 31, 2016, 01:24 PM - Edit history (1)

That's the number to watch. Unless and until that number dramatically changes, hydrogen has a very limited future.
Its competition for the heavy lift market would be biodiesel. That this market hasn't been penetrated - at all by anyone - is due to the fact that carbon isn't priced into the equation. Once that happens (if the current economics of diesel replacement fuels stays roughly the same) I'm pretty sure that the algal biodiesel ranch will become a very common sight.