Inside the Nikola One hydrogen-electric semi-truck
Inside the Nikola One hydrogen-electric semi-truck
8:04

Inside the Nikola One hydrogen-electric semi-truck

Cars
[MUSIC] Everyone, I am here with Trevor Milton, he is the CEO of Nikola Motor Company, and we're in a very very special truck, the Nikola one, America's first, or probably the world's first hydroelectric semi truck. Yeah, it's really the first electric truck in the whole world that can go more than 200 miles It's a full 1,200 miles up to 1,300 miles on a full range of hydrogen. So hydrogen's a zero emission fuel and it has no emissions whatsoever, the only byproduct is water. So how long have you been working on this, cuz this is a fully functioning truck right here that we're sitting in. Yeah. So how long have you guys have been working on this. [LAUGH] Years in secrecy, it's been very hard Some of the people who found out about us, so we're left with four or five months as we announce some of the big lead up to this stage event. But it took years and years to get here. This isn't just a push where there are a lot of vehicles, that the Angela just vehicles that don't actually function. This is a fully functioning vehicle which is really incredible [UNKNOWN] we can change out the Pretty much everything we want, all the temperatures. I mean, this is a fully functioning vehicle. It's not just pusher. That's what they call in the automotive world a vehicle that they just push and it doesn't move. All right, so let's go through some of these things. I mean, here I've got a 21 inch touchscreen. This one's actually not the 21. Okay. The 21 will actually encompass this entire area here- Okay. In production. So it'll be changed. Right now this is a 15 inch monitor here. Okay. And then it has dual 7 inch and a 10 inch up there. So this is a 15 and production will be a full 21 inch, and that will give the driver the ability to actually see all the different freight that's in the system. Okay. It's cool because the driver has the ability to access all wi-fi 4G over the air And it let's them actually get all the updates back from all the freight loads that are available within a city.It can give them the ETA and destinations of all of our stations and reroute them. I mean it's a full smart computer. Okay. It's pretty incredible. So I'm just like driving along and I'm like hey I got some space in my truck and I'm in L.A. I can go to this and see where can I pick up a load in Los Angles that's going to be It's gonna give me the most efficiency for my current route. Yeah. Essentially, our free system is gonna be brokers from all over the world being able to upload the freight indoor system, and drivers can see all the freights that's available on board built into the truck. From there, they can essentially see every one of the loads. They can rate them based on the highest pay to the lowest pay. They can also choose a beginning destination and an end destination, and from there the computer will run millions of calculations to tell them, here's the most valuable route from point a to point b. And it's really incredible, it should up the driver's pay from anywhere, more than 25%, up to 50% of what they're making right now. So will this system be installed in all of the trucks that should be coming online in 2020?>> Every one of them.>> Every one, so it all->> We'll be rolling out certain features more and more and obviously testing period and make sure everything is running really well. But the entire 21 its monitor which will take up this whole entire area and get rid of all the buttons. That essentially is, that will come into full production, yeah. Okay. Along with all the [INAUDIBLE] system as well. So, let's talk horse power numbers cuz I love high horse power. What are you guys pushing here? Is like an electrical locomotive. Imagine a locomotive. I grew up, my dad was managing the Union Pacific railroad when I was a kid So for me it was a natural thing cuz I grew up driving a local motors with the conductors. Like [UNKNOWN] [LAUGH] Yeah. It was awesome, I mean, I got to drive them whenever I wanted and it was really interesting cuz that's what got this idea in my head And that is we have an electric motor on every wheel.>>Okay.>>And by doing that we have to tone it down. The truck has capacity above over 3000hp.>>Yes! Let's do it!>>We can't do it.>>lll>>We have to tone it down. Essentially what we did is we software limited to about a 1000 hp.>>Okay.>>And right around, about, 2000 ft/lbs of torque. 1000 hp is double what another truck, for the most part, is running on the road. 2,000 horsepower's in line with about what most trucks get at peak. 2,000 torque you mean? Yeah, I'm sorry, 2,000 foot pounds of torque. The difference is is with an electric motor you have instant torque. Within milliseconds you're at full peak. So you don't have a torque curve. It's not like you have to rev that engine, get that red line in order to get that torque. It's throughout the entire thing. So after the gear reduction you're almost 100,000 foot pounds of torque. No way. That's what so cool, yeah. So, that was, propel this thing from zero to 16 like 30 second right? Under four road, yes. And. So, imagine 80,000 pounds on, you can hit that in 30 seconds. And then, what about stopping? I mean if I can accelerate that fast, can I stop that fast? You can, yeah cuz we have re-general breaking a lot of people would have driven electric cars. Right. Know the feeling. Essentially your electric motors go into reverse and it creates all the energy and dumps it right back in your batteries. Well by doing that you can blend that with the air disks and now you have two or three times the stopping power of just air disk brakes only. Okay, so this is a huge endeavor, right? I mean what makes you think that you can do this? Well we did it. Well you said this one, but you're predicting 50,000 trucks that you [UNKNOWN] want to be producing, that's a huge, huge endeavor. Where are your investors coming from? It's interesting, because I always tell people, to build something that can work, and to build an idea, to build a business plan, to build something that actually works is the hardest thing in the world. There's thousands of people out there. Really, really brilliant minds out there that run the best factories in the world. All it takes is one phone call from me, and a little bit more money and I got them on our team. So to pull it off, the rest of this is quite easy. It's gonna be hard to expand. It's gonna be hard to roll it out slowly cuz everyone wants it. We have to roll it out slow, make sure we do it right, safe. That one is actually the easiest part. I mean people think that's the hardest, it's really not. It's a lot of headaches, but there are people out there that are trained to do it. Unfortunately there's no one in this world trained to build a hydrogen electric truck. Right. I have. We have to do it. Right. So the hardest part is this, because there is no one. If there are people out there that could have done this, they would have done it. Peter Boldsen you know, the other brand you look at above all. No one has ever done this. They said it's impossible. So the key is you have to, very few people in the world that would dare to put their money on the line to build this, we did it. Now I just [UNKNOWN] hired the most brilliant minds in the world that, to pull of and manufacture. Right, right. So you have had a lot of, a lot of attention on this You said last night, $4 billion. Yep, we just passed $4 billion. Is that for your leases? Because your lease is $1500, sorry, to reserve your lease is $1500, so the power of math tells me that that 2.6 million reservations? No, no, no, no. Okay. So that's just a reservation, that's just to hold your spot, right? Right. So the average truck lease is between 5,000 and 7,000 a month. Okay, so the 4 billion includes the leases that you [CROSSTALK] Yeah, absolutely. Okay. [LAUGH] So the lease term, what we do is when we sell a truck on a lease term we get paid that money up front. Okay. So and then essentially a finance bank will pay us all that money up front and they keep a cut, right. So if you think about a 72 month term where you're running a million miles because we give full coverage on the truck for a whole million miles, the average lease over the period of that life will be say $500,000, somewhere around there. But the difference is, is if you were to run a diesel, your cost of ownership on the diesel including the fuel would be 4 to $500,000 more than that. Right, right. So you'll spend $500,000 more just on diesel at $2.50 a gallon right now, in today's world. Think about that, you're essentially getting the truck for free. People just don't understand it, the fuel is included in this truck, so you have no fuel costs whatsoever for the entire million miles. That's crazy So, and also people who drive like maybe a under a clarity or turn them right. They're able to go to the Nick life fuel station and emergency station. We have a, you know. 364 of this stations going up around the country both in the US and in Canada and any hydrogen vehicle can fill there. How long do you think those 364 stations will take to come online, all of them? It'll take years, years and years. Years or decades? No, it'll be less than a decade for sure. Yeah? But it'll be years, it'll probably be five to eight years to get them all online. By 2026? Probably somewhere around that range. All right. I mean, it's gonna be under ten years. You heard it here, folks Well, Trevor, thanks so much for joining me. Again, we're here at the Nikola Motor Company in Salt Lake City in the awesome Nikola One hydrogen-powered truck. Thanks guys. [MUSIC]

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