Tesla Rival Nikola announce it’s hydrogen-electric truck, the Nikola One

Nikola One

Nikola One truck

The Nikola Motor company has erupted suddenly like a volcano and is poised to take on electric car giant Tesla. It plans to release an electric truck, the Nikola One truck. One thing I find very funny is the fact that the name of the company is also shared by the name of it’s rival Tesla.

Nikola Tesla’s name was used.  Since Elon Musk’s company has the rights to the Tesla name. This new startup company has decided to make use of his first name Nikola.

Now that sentiment is not the only thing I find interesting about this company. The rival startup company Nikola Motor has come up a new concept of purifying the air with their new fleet of trucks set to debut next year 2019.

Nikola One would use natural gas-powered turbines to generate electricity to power the truck.This means that while it is an electric truck, the electricity will be generated using Hydrogen cells.

Nikola One

Twitter announcement

According to a Tweet posted on the company’s official Twitter handle, it says

Why do we like hydrogen so much? The Nikola fleet will be one of the largest air purifiers in America one day. Imagine 500,000 Nikola trucks driving in cities across America sucking in dirty air and emitting nothing but clean water. #emissionsgameover#dieselisdead

— Nikola Motor Company (@nikolamotor)

The company (Nikola Motor company) still plans to produce a natural-gas version of the Nikola One. However, it will be sold only in countries where hydrogen fueling stations are not available and easily accessible.

The startup company believes the truck will be able to compete favorable in the market with the Tesla Semi. However, it is important to note that a Nikola truck would have two 120 kW systems, which should provide its trucks with a considerable degree of power.

Nikola One

While Tesla cars and trucks will depend on rechargeable batteries to power their vehicles. Nikola trucks will also use electricity. However it will be generated by the Hydrogen turbine by sucking air from the atmosphere.

Words cannot describe how innovative this system really is. The company plans to start the project from the United states first.  Then it will expand to other parts of the world. It will build 50 hydrogen stations, with a goal of having its entire fueling network operational by 2020.

The Nikola Motor company has already started luring it’s customers by offering 100,000 gallons of free natural gas to the first 5,000 customers who placed reservations for the truck.

Nikola One truck

Nikola One

The company claims that the same range of 1,200 miles between fill-ups for its hydrogen powertrain is also the same for natural gas.

Six electric motors powers the Nikola One . Good for a combined 2,000 horsepower and 3,700 pound-feet of torque. The truck can be recharged by plugging in with it’s 320-kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery pack. However, it is not going to be it’s main source of energy.

For such a young, start-up company this task seems to be very huge and enormous. This is because Hydrogen stations today are considerably more expensive to construct than petrol and diesel fueling stations or electric-car charging sites.

The company will have no choice than to construct it’s own Hydrogen fueling stations. Nikola faces the same uphill battle as any other startup attempting to break into the vehicle market.  When the prototype of the Nikola One is unveiled by December, we’ll see how the company plans to overcome it’s obstacles.

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