May 1, 2019 Vol. 16 No. 9

So much to report on the electric truck front. I haven’t seen anything dominate the news since the days of impending new emissions standards two decades ago. Talk about momentum! The irony is that battery-powered trucks are presently a tiny part of the market and will be for quite some time to come, and even then, their penetration will be largely restricted to local and last-mile-delivery applications. There’s a huge amount of work to be done on infrastructure, and like the trucks themselves, that won’t come cheap.

Longer regional hauls and then true long-distance work by electric rigs will indeed be possible eventually, but don’t hold your breath. The Tesla Semi’s production has been delayed another year, for example. Once planned for this year, the target is now 2020.

My money is still on Nikola in the long run, though it won’t be producing trucks in any quantity until 2021 and the requisite infrastructure is in its infancy. The hydrogen fuel cell idea is an inherently good one, however, offering serious range and refill times not unlike diesel, and the planned infrastructure roll-out is being pursued deliberately and logically. The company has serious supplier partners like Bosch, WABCO, Meritor, Mahle, and Norwegian hydrogen-plant maker Nel ASA, not to mention an 800-truck order commitment from Anheuser-Busch. And Ryder to manage all maintenance.

By 2028, Nikola is planning on having more than 700 Nel-built hydrogen stations across the U.S. and Canada. The first 14 stations will be up and running by 2021, we’re promised.

Give these guys credit, they’re really pioneering hydrogen-electric renewable technology. With a range of between 500 and 1200 miles and refill time within 20 minutes, Nikola trucks will be in fleets beginning in 2020 and in full production by 2021, the company says. Last I knew, it had about US$11 billion in pre-order reservations.

And they’ll build you a battery-electric truck for regional distribution too, not incidentally.

INSIGHTS INTO NIKOLA’S APPROACH can be found in a useful article by my friend and colleague Jim Park, who works for both HDT and Today’s Trucking magazines. In a one-on-one Q&A interview with Trevor Milton (see the full article here) at the Nikola World event in Arizona two weeks ago, much was explained. Like where the electricity comes from to produce hydrogen at the proposed network of fuelling stations across the continent.

Park: You’ve committed to using electricity produced by wind, solar, and other renewable sources. You obviously can’t have huge solar farms at every truck stop. How are you going to execute that?