Nikola Denies 'Fraud' Allegations, Threatens Legal Action Against Short-Sellers
thedrive.com
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I listened to the CEO talk for an hour about their dedicated route hydrogen business model for trucking, and it actually seems like a good idea. The thesis is that 25% of trucks drive back and forth on the same route for their entire lifetime, so you pick the busiest route, build a hydrogen station on it, and sell a bunch of trucks to use it at capacity.
This avoids the chicken and egg problem of building thousands of stations everywhere before you can sell your first vehicle.
I don't know anything about the industry, and I wouldn't trust their ability to execute, but the plan itself seems sensible. As the renewable grid share increases, there's going to be a bunch of excess capacity at times that can be used very cheaply, meaning the end to end efficiency of hydrogen may not be a deal breaker. Without a multiple of current battery energy density, long range BEV trucking will be tough.
Then there's the Badger/GM partnership. They got Iveco to make their trucks, and now they're getting GM to make their pickup. It makes me wonder if their strategy is going to be permanently outsource manufacturing and try to be a Pepsi to Tesla's Coke, partnering with traditional manufacturers which are able to build vehicles technically, but lack the modern sexiness of the new crop of BEV car makers.
But if they do pull any of this off, it's going to go down as one of the greatest fake it til you make it examples in modern history. They probably did bullshit their way in to this market cap - I wouldn't be surprised if every word of the short seller report is true. But the market cap does opens doors.
Those are all big ifs. As far as I can tell, Nikola is bringing nothing to the table but hot air. No breakthrough in hydrogen production nor batteries nor engines, nothing that existing car makers do not already have.
Nothing is ever going to seem reasonable so long as we keep comically underpaying for gas at the pump.
An apples to apples comparison to BEV is storing that power in stationary batteries and then charging vehicle batteries from those.
I don't know if hydrogen wins that match up, but I don't think it's clear that it doesn't.
Until then, having a system that end to end is only half as efficient is crazy.
And if in the 10-20 years electricity is actually that cheap, in the years we will have batteries that are WAY better then what we have now and the single advantage of hydrogen will have been reduced by a huge amount.
From all the research on batteries I have done this is complete nonsense. Its the opposite actually, the amount of research and commercial opportunity is exploding.
You now have many university, governments and commercial all investing in batteries. And its not just startups, but its massive investment by starups and large companies.
There is the Battery 500 consortium that is lots of universities working together and some of those labs are commercially sponsors by Tesla and so on. They are focused on doubling the density with amazing lifetime and safer. This is mostly incremental work.
There is the Li-Sulfer program that the DoD has, its specifically at super high density that is another huge effort.
You have large scale improvements moving into current Lithium Ion, Single Cristal Cathodes, Dry Battery Electrode Technology, Tabless Cells, Lithium Doping, synthetic graphite anodes, silicon anodes are in the early stages of development. I could go on.
But on every level from incremental engineering and production improvements all the way to breakthrew chemistry is being worked on massively.
The amount of work on batteries is probably 100x or maybe 1000x higher then on fuel cells.
Scientists are making the mistake of chasing hype, not practical gains in energy storage. Fuel cells are on the "S" part of the cost reduction curve. Despite the difference in funding, we will see extremely fast forward movement in fuel cell technology due to this.
If you look at cost and performance you will see massive improvements year over year. Those improvements will continue.
> Scientists are making the mistake of chasing hype, not practical gains in energy storage.
Actually they are working together very tightly with industry. The Battery 500 consortium consists of research where many of them have a commercial partner and their research directly influences next generation batteries. You literally couldn't be more wrong.
For the Li-Sulfer they are targeting batteries for DoD and NASA that will be very useful and practical for lots of use-cases.
> Fuel cells are on the "S" part of the cost reduction curve. Despite the difference in funding, we will see extremely fast forward movement in fuel cell technology due to this.
Many technologies don't get adopted. I have not seen a falling cost curve anywhere in fuel cells. The fuel cell cars are still incredibly expensive, 100% not competitive and not getting rapidly cheaper. Fuel cells get pushed by China, Korea and Japan governments funds far, far more then any intrinsic cost curve that is happening in the market. Even after decades of constant investment by Japan, they have barley made a blip in the market and when they appear at all they are heavily subsidized all the way from research to the fuel stations.
> Many technologies don't get adopted. I have not seen a falling cost curve anywhere in fuel cells. The fuel cell cars are still incredibly expensive, 100% not competitive and not getting rapidly cheaper. Fuel cells get pushed by China, Korea and Japan governments funds far, far more then any intrinsic cost curve that is happening in the market. Even after decades of constant investment by Japan, they have barley made a blip in the market and when they appear at all they are heavily subsidized all the way from research to the fuel stations.
You suffer from the "not paying attention" disease. In the last few years, the biggest story in cleantech is the rapid reduction in fuel cell, hydrogen production, distribution and storage costs. Basically everything you said is obsolete already.
At the very least they are getting an aesthetically pleasing exterior design and a ready email list of potential buyers. And GM is capable of filling any vaporware gaps.
I share your opinion on the hydrogen semi truck though.
>At the very least they are getting an aesthetically pleasing exterior design and a ready email list of potential buyers.
Is a pickup truck exterior design and a customer list worth the 3 billion in market cap that GM lost since the news broke?
GM may not take a monetary damage from dealing with Nikola, but they will still suffer a reputation damage. If and when Nikola folds, GM's management will be seen as hilariously incompetent for not doing the proper due diligence, and the market will price that in accordingly.
GM closed last week at $30.00.
GM closed this week at $30.46.
In between those two times, the $NKLA deal was announced on Tuesday and GM shot up a bit. Then Hindenburg published and GM sank to only a small gain on the week.
You can’t have GM take the $3B W on the $NKLA news and then complain about the $3B loss that is paired with it when the details are better understood.
If a company approached you and offered to give you $2B in shares, $0.7B in capex, and a book of cost-plus orders that uses your technology, how much due diligence is required/appropriate? “GM takes $2B stake in $NKLA” usually means they brought money to the table. In this case, it literally means they were given it and agreed to take it.
Or maybe giving the GM stake was just another smoke and mirrors bit on Nikola's part so they could claim a high profile "investor".
Wish the SEC would do their job before the Milton guy hides all his money.
Tesla did a great job of this in its earliest years on far less funding than Nikola has now. They took existing cars (Lotus Elises) and all they had to do was put in batteries and electric engines. You have to walk before you can run, which Tesla did and Nikola seems to be failing to do. Jumping straight to building an entire truck is lunacy.
1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeanbaptiste/2018/09/18/elon-mu...
That was probably invaluable, because their next cars kind of looked like boring sedans yet the image persisted
A major CEO literally told the SEC to suck his genitalia on Twitter to an audience of millions. The same CEO is going to trial for fraud later this year. This same CEO has committed fraud on Twitter faking a take-public offer that never existed - a separate incident fraud incident from the trial. The SEC's response? A slap on the wrist and silence. Imagine those same actions just 10 years ago. That CEO's career would be over and they would never be allowed to be an officer in a public company ever again. I could go on about this one CEO, but maybe the guy is just untouchable so let's go elsewhere.
This is the same SEC that had no issues with Kodak almost performing the first Initial Bankruptcy Offering in history and has yet to move a finger on the incredibly suspicious options packages that board members received days before the government announced a multi-million interest in the company.
This is the same SEC that is absolutely blind to obvious Chinese frauds listed on the US market: GSX, IQ, TAL, etc. These companies are faking numbers and their activity is extremely obvious to anyone that looks with even an iota of skepticism. The SEC could assign an intern to look into these companies and gather enough evidence in a week. Many short sellers have even neatly packaged all the evidence and submitted it to the SEC and heard back nothing.
My point here is that people need to realise that the market is the wild west right now. The sheriff is gone and unless the media piles on something, the market just won't react.
Theranos is Theranos b/c they falsified test results. If no test results had been falsified, Theranos would have just been "another" failed startup, and Holmes would have been given another chance with more VC money to try again with a fresh idea.
MagicLeap is a perfect example of what Nikola will probably end up as. Raising tons of money to do something new, and dropping the ball on it. I remember reading an early article on Magic Leap about how they figured out how to make something float in mid air, no one is calling on the SEC to investigate them... MagicLeap did some really interesting things, just nothing that consumers can actually use (YET!)
Its basically a very large complex system with solar, hydrogen production, huge hydrogen storage and pumps with sufficient scale to fuel 10-100s of trucks a day. Where will Nikola get the expertise to build such a complex system fuel station system? A company that has basically 0 engineering credibility, is gone set up station like that because that is something that doesn't exist? Hydrogen is difficult enough to deal with for rocket companies, but Nikola is just gone manage all that.
To finance such a station you need lots of threw-put, and to have access electricity to fuel 10-100s of trucks every day seem unlikely to me. While access energy might exist on the grid in general, seems to me that enough incredibly cheap electricity right where you need it to fuel 100s of trucks a day is highly unlikely in the near or mid term future at least.
If Nikola really want to claim this system is cheaper overall, I would really like to see their numbers on how they get there. Sadly I suspect Nikola has never calculated those numbers with realistic expectation.
Energy density in batteries is rapidly increasing, even with current technology large parts of the trucking market can be addressed already. Some part of the longer running routes might just be divided into multi-hop routes. So you are really addressing a shrinking market segment and one that is shrinking because batteries are improving.
I see more problems then solutions.
don't you mean throughput?
Last mile will have to be trucks, of course. But those short routes are both more variable and shorter, making them easier targets for electrification. It’s the long haul stuff that’s the low hanging fruit here.
0: https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/114th-congress-2015-... page 2.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tortoiseinvest/2016/05/13/trans...
* Trains have worse geometric constraints: you need larger curves, straighter tracks, longer acceleration/deceleration paths, and lesser grade. It's much harder to add track where none exists already.
* For efficiency reasons, trains want to be really long, so trains aren't dispatched until they're long enough to be worth doing so. Consequently, trains tend to be used only when either the source produces craptons of goods (ports, mines) or when there's no issue letting the goods sit around for a long while before a train picks them up (grains).
Large established companies partnered with Theranos too. The reason being those companies want the hype of the startup brand, and there are limited downsides to them if the startup fails.
On the other-hand, frauds brought down by journalists and short-sellers are abundant.
In my experience, CEOs (in this case, the board Chairman) whining about traders is a huge red flag. What do they care what a bunch of people are doing with their ownership in the company? It's irrelevant to the day-to-day operations of the company, but certainly harms the narrative.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-volkswagen-idUSTRE49R3I92...
Well, maybe the Nikola thing will have people asking questions and holding Tesla to the same standard.
We know, from depositions in the Solar City law suit, that the solar shingle reveal was faked and non-functional. The shingles didn't exist in that form then, and still don't (they buy panels from China, the factory in Buffalo isn't doing anything). The battery swap demo was also likely faked, as was the "Paint it Black" self-driving video from 2016 (demonstrating self-driving capabilities Tesla still doesn't have in the real world, today). Those are off the top of my head.
How many years now has Tesla claimed that full autonomous driving will be ready by the end of the year? They sell a lot of that “software” which to me appears to be vapor ware and they claim the price will rise when the tech is GA’d so you should buy now. It just seems suspicious to me.
Even the giga-factories don’t look anything like the designs they promoted. They look like, well every other car factory.
I get that they don’t advertise so they smartly generate hype in other ways.
Wasn’t Audi the first company to sell a level 3 car?
They're worse. Please, identify a modern car factory that builds cars in a tent.
(Or maybe... just maybe... the construction method of your factory walls doesn’t actually matter so much?)
It turns out there's a reason factories look the way they do.
Much better to design the production process first and then fit a building around it than to try and fit the production process into a pre-designed building that's made too look pretty.
What do you base this off of? What "magic" production processes are Tesla utilizing that other OEMs are not? Aren't EVs far simpler to assemble? Tesla are building some of the lowest-rated cars out there in terms of fit and finish. Why do you believe they are doing anything from that end "better" than other manufacturers?
Any evidence for that? That a hell of an accusation.
Since literally the Roaster Tesla offered test rides on all of these vehicles. The Roadster 2, Cybertruck and so on all were driving around costumers all night. They were fully functional. The Tesla Semi is regularly transporting things between California and Nevada.
Now can we prove that the prototype Cybertruck could do the most hardcore rally in the world? No, but calling them non-function is just laying unless you have evidence to back it up.
> How many years now has Tesla claimed that full autonomous driving will be ready by the end of the year?
Elon is overconfident about AI, everybody knows that. If you don't believe it, don't buy it. Also the revenue they get from FSD is not actually realized unless they deliver on the features.
> Even the giga-factories don’t look anything like the designs they promoted. They look like, well every other car factory.
Elon has admired that he was wrong how easy it was to speed up production on Model 3. He took the blame for that mistake and since then they have worked and improved their production capability.
That is not a costumer features, and the reality is for no other company would you ever even get that information. For other car companies they release a press conference 'car delayed 6 month' not telling you why.
Their solar shingles are where?
The semi was to be in production 2 years ago. There are serious doubts it’s even viable for long haul.
The battery swap demo has never materialized and there’s doubt it is feasible.
They continue to show photos of a sleek, modern giga-factory with solar panel roofs. Meanwhile their factories look like any other car factory.
Their self driving tech has some cool demos of what the computer “sees” but there’s no evidence it’s close to being available or that it’s any better than where other companies like GM are with the tech.
I’m not trying to dump on Tesla - they’ve done a lot to push the industry forward. I’m just saying I think they generate a lot of hype but don’t deliver and they may have people confused on where they really are.
First of all, even if the glass broke. The window still worked. If it was a normal truck, the ball would have gone straight inside and killed the driver.
Its called a prototype for a reason and they have demonstrated the technology and multiple experts confirmed that this is in fact a viable technology.
> The battery swap demo has never materialized and there’s doubt it is feasible.
No there isn't. They had a working system, they demonstrated it and it was in open beta. And again, NIO has this working in China. Its literally just undoing 4 screws and let the battery fall out. I really don't understand why you feel the need to come of with a conspiracy theory on this.
The fact of the matter is that its a system that is simply not needed for 99.9% of situations and makes no operational sense for Tesla.
It is technologically clearly feasible but it operational impractical.
> They continue to show photos of a sleek, modern giga-factory with solar panel roofs. Meanwhile their factories look like any other car factory.
They are car factories? And they are modern looking. I don't understand what your problem is. They are very modern factories if you actually study what goes on in them. You just want them to put more solar cells on them? Is that your issue?
I really don't get what you complain about. The factories they build are being built very fast, and the have very good ROI if you look at their operational leverage. So they do exactly what Tesla says they do.
> Their self driving tech has some cool demos of what the computer “sees” but there’s no evidence it’s close to being available or that it’s any better than where other companies like GM are with the tech.
If you actually believe GM is just as far as Tesla then you haven't use those systems. They are clearly not.
> I’m not trying to dump on Tesla - they’ve done a lot to push the industry forward. I’m just saying I think they generate a lot of hype but don’t deliver and they may have people confused on where they really are.
It seem like you are nip-picking everything Tesla ever did wrong or not perfect and add some conspiracy stuff on top and ignoring everything they have delivered on.
That they delivered the Model Y early with excellent margin and low additional CapX. That they build up Giga Shanghai as fast as they did within a month are gone deliver Model Y from there. That they have managed to be profitable while they are still scaling and building factories like crazy. That they survived Covid with flying colors.
You don't think disconnecting the whole undercarriage of the car and replacing a very heavy battery is difficult to do in under a minute?
>open to select members of the public.
Bingo.
But, as I said, I don't know if it was faked. I just believe it was.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1Ld5WByT34
Its really not very difficult. The battery is designed to drop right out if you unscrew the bolts. This system is open to the public.
Tesla just realized it didn't really make sense as its very expensive and super-charging is fast enough for nearly all situations.
Tesla cars now no longer allow battery swap as they added an additional protection layer under the car.
I suspect the battery swap idea was a response to the criticism about charge times. Since most Tesla users at that time used either free supercharger stations or charged at home, the appeal of for-fee battery swaps was likely limited.
I can see why people are skeptical of the demo and think the limited trial, which didn't showcase what was demoed, isn't particularly persuasive.
I just don't see it as being deceptive in the way rolling a truck down a hill and suggesting it's operational is. Or at the very least, we're missing the smoking gun. Perhaps it is and someone who worked at Tesla or the blogger who posted about going to the station will come out and admit it was a big fake-eroo.
Finding the hill they pushed the truck down is pretty damning IMO in a way suspicions about Tesla's tech demo aren't.
Personally, I think the DOJ should get more involved in technology pre-sales and prosecute more aggressively. Pre-selling products you can't produce should be considered fraud.
The big and obvious difference between Tesla and Nikola is Tesla ships products and has been for years. Not only that, Tesla customers love the cars Tesla ships. Musk makes some exaggerated claims—and some truly egregious time line estimates—but usually ships. I tend to agree with you about the up-charge for FSD though. Definitely a bit of a shell game and moving goal-posts.
[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/luckin-coffee-to-be-delist...
I did follow the short campaign against Tesla closely from 2014-2018. And that project was vicious. I could easily see it toppling a less-financed company, or one where the quality of their engineering was less obvious. And trust me, although things might look black and white in retrospect, there was nothing obvious about Tesla's success in 2014. The indications were pretty clear if you followed it closely, but this reality was in very sharp contrast with the narrative. I believe it was a closer call than most would believe in reterospect.
Comparisons with Nikola nonwithstanding, I believe you're wrong about loud short sellers in general not being able to destroy the prospects of a company that would succeed in their absence.
Moreover, companies in that position are exactly those with the greatest profit potential for short sellers. Companies that are obviously going to succeed or already have aren't likely to decline in value in the near future. Companies that are obviously going to fail will have declined in value already.
The largest opportunity for short sellers is when there is that uncertainty, because then you have a company walking a tightrope and there are people willing to bet that they make it to the other side. The short sellers can take their money and then give the company a hard shove and hope that it makes them fall.
Provide an example of this happening.
Judging by many of these comments, I'm not sure some people here understand the mechanics of how selling shares short actually works. It does not, defacto, destroy any value in the company.
Another, perhaps ultimate, persuader of the value to markets/investors of short-selling would be Michael Lewis's book, The Big Short [2]. An often overlooked point about short-selling is that it is frequently done, and it was certainly so in this case, in demonstration of utter conviction that the masses are being duped; rather than as some calculated bet against a single company.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/amiyatoshpurnanandam/2020/01/13...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Short
[slight edit for grammar/readability]
There's a pretty good case that they were trying to do this to Tesla. We heard all these claims about how nobody was really buying their cars and so on, which turned out to be bullocks, but were being made at a time when they were in a precarious financing situation.
But the general problem with asking for examples is that nobody has the inside information necessary to verify them. I can point to any company that went bankrupt following negative media coverage at the behest of short sellers, but how is anybody supposed to prove whether or not they would have survived in the alternative?
> Judging by many of these comments, I'm not sure some people here understand the mechanics of how selling shares short actually works. It does not, defacto, destroy any value in the company.
Are you sure you know how short selling works? Short sellers borrow shares in the company and then sell them, which temporarily increases the supply of shares on the market and suppresses the price. If the company at that point issues new shares or wants to borrow money against the value of their stock, it costs them money, i.e. reduces access to capital or requires them to pay higher interest rates, which negatively impacts the business.
And that's just the result of the actual short selling, not including the reputational harm caused by false allegations (or over-hyped technically true allegations), which can reduce demand from not only investors but the business's customers.
You believe I'm wrong, but can't name a public company that had its prospects destroyed by a short-seller? I take issue with that.
>I did follow the short campaign against Tesla closely from 2014-2018. And that project was vicious.
What leads you to believe that this is a "done-deal", and that Tesla has "won"? There are still many open questions about this company.
Did you know that the Wirecard fraud went on for a decade, and even the German financial regulators were going after journalists and short-sellers to protect the company? And it was a huge fraud. Now that it's out in the open, it's a very interesting read:
https://www.ft.com/content/745e34a1-0ca7-432c-b062-950c20e41...
You can't prove a negative, and I was clear that I don't have the historic knowledge to provide good candidates for what you're asking. They certainly exist; sibling commenters have made some attempts. I made this comment because I didn't want your implied statement of "if you can't mention a specific name, you're wrong" to stand without providing a reasoned counter-argument.
How would this scenario play out for a non-fraud and non-zombie business? If a publicly-traded company is in such a precarious state that they need the large cash infusion of either debt or a secondary offering to remain in business, the conclusion is that the business is non-viable. Either they IPO'ed prematurely or the expected growth isn't materializing. The short-sellers are performing the broader market a service in this case.
Nikola lied about its trucks, and now plans to outsource all of its production to other CV manufacturers, or at the very best buy parts off the market and "integrate" them in house.
Since they don't have the killer tech or top engineers what's stopping the next charismatic founder from selling the same exact thing Nikola has (dreams and a couple wrenches and bolts) and eating their lunch?
They have no working trucks or plans to begin production any time soon. And for a while their market cap was larger than Ford and GM.
Not saying they can't be successful, but Tesla they are not.
That’s suspicious.
As far as I remember, Matt Levine used to say, a company that sues short-sellers is most likely deep into securities fraud.
But I still think short selling is absurd and I don’t understand why we allow it. If you don’t think a company will do well then don’t buy their stocks. Simple as that. I don’t know why we allow seemingly infinite market gambling that benefits no one except the gamblers.
Journalists got to Theranos first, and short sellers got to Nikola first. With both in play, the odds of a timely exposé go up.
I knew several people who said what they were claiming was impossible but they didn't really have any interest in being the whistleblower.
It happens that the economic incentive arose from shorting, but could have just as easily come (less efficiently) from buying naked puts.
(Disclosure: I’m short $NKLA after Hindenburg published. I believe it’s more likely going to the teens [and possibly worse] in 2020 than sustainably into the mid-40s. If it holds $30+ through 2020, I’ll probably cover.)
1. I listened to Nikola founder Trevor's interview on Jason Calacanis's podcast, and was sold on the advantage of Hydrogen fuel cell over battery for long haul trucks. Such a huge market! And then Trevor said Nikola, a 400 people company, are also working on the an electric pickup called Badger to be more consumer facing. This makes no biz sense to me at all and I realized they are probably just chasing the trend.
2 At the time Nikola doing the first Earnings call ever, Trevor was on a 6-day vacation in the Bahamas, while bragging about having a $13 Million airplane. Trevor is no Elon. No matter how much you hate Elon, he works his butt off, and that gets my respect automatically.
3 I understand Nikola want to protect their trade secrets and go through SEC first, but in their press release [2] they have shown nothing to prove that Hindenburg Research's report is wrong.
[1] https://thisweekinstartups.com/e1090-nikola-founder-trevor-m...
[2] https://nikolamotor.com/press_releases/nikola-refutes-allega...
Them staying silent and sending info to the SEC is a big red flag, but to the lay investor it looks good, which is why they did it.
Nikola should focus on that, not trying to levitate the company's share price higher by jawboning.
The comparison to Theranos is apt in that the response of that company was to jawbone rather than ship.
This hysteria against short sellers in some circles is great for hiding fraud. Wirecard also comes to mind.
How about showing media outlets the truck going up that 3% grade from a cold start?
Or showing the solar panels on the company’s roof?
Many of the allegations would be trivial to disprove, if they are in fact false, and doing so seems unlikely to anger the SEC.
Can you really not differentiate the claims made by Nikola vs a manufacturer building a one-off concept car and parking it at a car show?
For me the Nikola video looks like a trailer, or like any typical over-hyped product launche for phones/laptops/gadgets. That it's a vehicle is almost irrelevant.
Also they claim in the youtube video's description that it's a 1000HP semi. And that seems like a very explicit claim. (So if it can't accelerate by itself, then where are those horsepowers. But as I tried to point out in a sibling comment, it's possible they can claim the engine is 1000HP but the fuel cells were not ready. On top of all that I'm very much interested in seeing this get to the courts and hear what they say about what constitutes fraud and what's just run of the mill hype.)
Lots of frauds are done this way - trying to pull the "well, we didn't exactly say what you think we did". It remains fraud.
so I guess it comes down to this, if they want to dispel issues then let one of their planned early adopters take one for a spin.
(Anyway, I'm not saying they are so honest, transparent, open as fuck, but this is like a trailer for a movie or game, it's a PR piece. It's less shady than the Tesla/SolarCity roof tile demo that Elon did. And I'm looking forward to the court case, because I have no time nor much context really for unwinding this, but I'm interested in what really constitutes fraud in these days when everything looks amazing, everything has a super emotional soundtrack, and of course everything is super over-hyped.)
Looks like they were installing ~200kWpp [0] in May 2020 over some of the parking lots [1]. Enough to charge a couple of Teslas.
[0] Looking at [1] I estimate a total of 560 (2x 150+130) solar panels, each 2x1m, which might be rated between 370 or 385 Wpp, delivering 207-216kWpp.
> We have 3.5 megawatts of solar up on the roof producing about 18 megawatts of energy a day in our headquarters...
That they've installed 5% of that capacity a year later is not a defense to the fraudulent nature of that claim.
Milton’s last company was accused of not delivering on deal terms, and it seems as though that company BSed their way to an acquisition. Before that, he was involved in random low-tech businesses - at least one of which he seemingly lied to a partner about his profit off of.
The company’s name is so unoriginal that I wonder how anyone can take them seriously. It’s like an off-brand Tesla - just riding the association to trick people into parting with their money?
I mean the largest EV manufacturer is Tesla and they name their company Nikola?
It’s like years ago when public companies would rebrand as blockchain companies and see their stock soar.
It seems clear that they are right that the report is driven by "greed" and "short sale profit", and that the goal is drive down their stock price. The more important question, though, would seem to be whether the accusations are true. Are there any Nikola supporters here who can debunk any of the bullet points at the top of the Hindenburg report: https://hindenburgresearch.com/nikola/.
Conclusively refuting any of them would be useful, but the most important ones to me are the ones involving their demos. Did they lie to the public about the functionality of their vehicles at the time? Or did they merely mislead the public with language like "in motion" and "cruising" to describe a truck rolling down a natural incline? Does that distinction matter to you, or only as relates to potential SEC action?
(I'm currently holding some puts that I bought---slightly too late to be profitable yet---as a result of Hindenburg's report, making me effectively short NKLA)
Some suggestions, not that they're listening:
1) deliver one thing before promising the next
2) Use SOFCs, not PEMFCs. They're more stable, more efficient, longer lasting, higher power density, can use hydrocarbon fuels if necessary, produce heat at useful temperatures, and they're way cheaper. Their only disadvantage is their startup times, which is not a problem, and never has been, for long haul trucking.
3) Choose your competitors better. You have zero expertise in building trucks, but you have amassed expertise in building fuel cell power plants. Lucky you: trucking is nothing like cars...alternative powerplant manufacturers are extremely common upgrades when buying a truck. Instead of competing with Peterbilt, you should be competing with Cummins as a supplier for Peterbilt. And when you've pierced that market, you start going after Mitsubishi, Wartsila, Hyundai, Rolls Royce, and MAN.
https://www.ft.com/content/8a8a2396-6e97-4cfd-9f80-c5aaa2de3...
Sadly, I've not been able to find a non-paywalled version syndicated anywhere else. (Although it can be retrieved at archive.is)
Some interesting quotes from the article:
In this relentless barrage of hype, delivered in a disarmingly low-key manner, it is easy to forget the reality. Nikola has yet to put any vehicles into production. And, as its regulatory filings make clear, it has no orders at all for its fuel cell trucks, only non-binding reservations.
As for all the technological brilliance ... there is precious little to be seen. Nikola boasts a grand total of only 11 patents in the US, with another 55 applications pending.
And later:
Nikola faked a video of one of its trucks by making it look like the vehicle was driving under its own power when it was really only rolling downhill, according to Hindenburg’s report — a claim backed up by FT reporting this week.
“It was built to be a working prototype,” Mr Russell insists of the truck.
But did it actually work? His answer, after a long pause: “I wouldn’t comment on that.”
In its pay-off, the FT draws pointed comparisons with Theranos.
A good read, wherever the truth lies.
There's dozens of youtube garage tinkers who could slam some off the shelf parts into a random salvage chassis in under a week. Maybe they won't meet many performance targets but they'll at least be able to show something moving under its own power. The point is, making one electric or H2 vehicle is a very low bar now. Making one manufacturable, and a production line to do it, is the hard problem.
So why show a nonworking sham?
This dude IPOd a unicorn startup and is (for now) a billionaire by selling a vision of a manufacturing company with a non-working prototype that literally almost anyone with modest engineering skills could pull off.
The Founder has no engineering background (in fact no college degree), no experience in the vehicle industry, no brilliant engineers or killer patent on technology.
It smelled super fishy when they first IPO'd but I figured since all these VCs and vehicle manufacturers were partnering with them there must be something under the hood.
Now it seems like such a transparent fraud. How did so many people that should have known better get conned into this?
And also Nikola press release [2], which states:
"As Nikola pivoted to the next generation of trucks, it ultimately decided not to invest additional resources into completing the process to make the Nikola One drive on its own propulsion."
[1] https://electrek.co/2020/09/14/nikola-nkla-admits-faking-vid...
[2] https://nikolamotor.com/press_releases/nikola-sets-the-recor...
Insiders taking millions out of the company.
Lied about major IP developments and ownership (Hydrogen, Fuel Cells, parts)
This is insane, and I can't believe that GM would go near this toxic pile of garbage, it's utterly shameful and makes GM execs look completely stupid and incompetent.
GM is getting an 'inspired truck idea' - how hard would it be to create a little independant division and hire some freaking designers and inspire people a little bit? Which would be good for their whole company?
Nikola looks like fraud, but they're just a scammers, in a way it makes GM look worse.
PS Email me if you are interested in building a hydrogen powered flying vehicle.
Pay somebody else to set up the fuel station, do the repairs and so on. The costumer service you outsource to India.
You don't even need more then 1 employ, you can chill while that employ does all the outsourcing.
I'm sure that company would be bigger then Apple soon. I mean no labor cost, no capx and a huge market. What a genius move.
The truck is vaporware and Nikola has no experience actually making or doing anything.
So bringing anything in on time and anywhere near cost is going to be a challenge.
"PS Email me if you are interested in building a hydrogen powered flying vehicle." - that's such an HN thing to write!
That's the nature of the game when you're trying to sell shares. It's on you to prove you are a real company. The SEC requirements are because prior to them companies lied all the damn time and got away with it
There are a lot of electric car manufacturers putting in real work such as Bollinger Motors.
Looking at various sources such as
https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1127660_battery-electri...
I just don't see the case for hydrogen over battery? It surely can cost less, but I see battery pricing dropping every year. In the 20 year timeframe, is hydrogen still a big win over batteries? Is there something fundamental about the technology that makes storing hydrogen better than batteries?
Hydrogen is not just cheaper than batteries, but fundamentally cheaper in a way that batteries can never match. For instance, underground storage is at the cents per kWh of storage. So batteries can never get there. In 20 years, I suspect FCEVs will have taken over, with BEVs mostly abandoned as being too expensive to justify their existence in most circumstances.
a) What stops the fundamentals of batteries from also continuing to get cheaper? Current batteries are using less of some expensive metals, is there some kind of law that is going to make us hit a wall at current battery pricing? I don't see this yet, nor have I seen research papers, but I may have just missed them?
b) The way I understand it, is the cost of creating the Hydrogen is the expensive part now. Is there proof that it will be cheaper with time, and that the end state of producing hydrogen is cheaper than the end state of producing batteries?
Hydrogen is likely to be cost of green energy plus some additional cost factor. So if solar is $0.02/kWh, then hydrogen will be maybe 2x that in the very long run. Everything points to hydrogen eventually getting to around $1/kg, or cheaper than just about any other kind of fuel.
https://about.bnef.com/blog/behind-scenes-take-lithium-ion-b...
What if there is a different battery technology (not Hydrogen) that allows another half or more fall? Could still be a long ways to go..
So you'd invest in Elizabeth Holme's next bio-tech startup?
Second chances are for people who make mistakes, not for people who engage in fraud and deception. If you give me the shaft consciously and knowingly, it's a long road to get my trust back.
I watched some videos of Trevor Milton. He has ZERO signs he is faking
HOWEVER
A) Just because someone's body language and presentation is PERFECT doesn't mean they are telling the truth. They might have convinced themselves of the lie
B) The Truck Video is SUPER DODGY. It's shot from an angle that makes it impossible to tell what the incline angle is. It could VERY easily be just a truck with no engine rolling down a slight incline
C) The walkthroughs etc. Trevor Milton does are SUPER DODGY.
Elon Musk with Tesla talks about crazy things that might never happen (Full Auto Pilot Level 5 Driving) but half of the crazy stuff he DELIVERS
Trevor Milton seems to be just as good as Musk at promising things, but so far has not delivered anything
*
On the one hand, it would be great if Nikola delivers a great truck
Competition for Tesla
Death to these parasitic short sellers
ON THE OTHER HAND
Don't see what exactly is the VALUE Nikola is providing. GM is building everything. So is Nikola's contribution selling a great story ???
It's like Musk's ability to sell stories, but lacking Musk's abilities to
A) get subsidies from the government B) actually deliver products
Trevor Milton and Nikola are getting money from the stock market. That comes with a lot of dangers which government contracts and subsidies do not