With the number of companies (from Tesla to Chevrolet) with large volumes actual EVs sold and on the road, I don't see how Nikola has a head start?
"Yes, it's less performant, but it has {insert special, unmeasurable and/or unproven magic here}."
Unmeasurable? Like, you would have had to run an actual editing, encoding, rendering, or simulation task to measure it, but you only had the skills to read how many GHz were on the box, so you personally were unable to measure it? I suppose I'd have to hand you that one.
How well did the "clock speed is all that matters" rhetoric age over the last decade? When was the last time that Intel's claimed perf boost wasn't IPC driven?
My favorite part of this story is fifteen years later, when Intel's CEO says:
We have to deliver better products to the PC ecosystem than
any possible thing that a lifestyle company
in Cupertino makes
There's only one real Achilles heel of EV tech and it's a big one—the limited supply (and the consequent high price) of batteries. If there was an unlimited supply of battery cells at a low price, EVs would be generally superior to comparable ICE vehicles in core objective metrics.
There are numerous secondary limitations of EVs, such as the availability of charging facilities where they are needed. But this class of problem is directly aligned with uptake. They solve themselves as more EVs are adopted and market share increases.
How much would a Tesla with only prototype Semis and a factory under construction be valued at? About $5 BB actually sounds quite right, maybe even undervalued depending on cultist zealotry and SEC enforcement levels.
See, this level of misinformation is a big reason the company even exists yet.
Tesla has been selling EVs for years now, and has prototyped their own trucks based on their own existing drivetrain, battery pack IP, software.
What Nikola has, when we remove the fraudulent claims, is a prototype built by Iveco, with zero substantial IP from Nikola.
To say Nikola is at the same stage of Tesla is not even wrong. They've never built a working truck in their entire existence. Their "stage" is at a super position from nothing to infinity, as long as you don't look, and no one has ever been allowed to look, at the risk of getting a dead cat.