Troubled electric truck maker Nikola files for bankruptcy
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24436721 ("Nikola: How to Parlay an Ocean of Lies into a Partnership with GM (hindenburgresearch.com)" (2020), 414 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24473231 ("Nikola admits prototype was rolling downhill in promotional video (arstechnica.com)" (2020), 248 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27996321 ("Grand jury indicts Trevor Milton, Nikola founder, on three counts of fraud (cnbc.com)" (2021), 509 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38685607 ("Nikola founder to be sentenced for federal fraud charges (cnbc.com)" (2023), 186 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11683508
To give HN credit, the overwhelming sentiment at the time is that this was a very suspicious and scammy endeavor already right at launch.
Wondering who I should expect to collapse in 2030.
That is, even though the stock will (and, in this case, did) eventually go to 0 with very little statistical probably of an alternative, there is enough volatility in the interim that stock market participants are just playing that volatility in the short term (i.e. trying to time the market, trying to not be "bag holders" in WSB parlance) even if everyone knows in the long term it's going to 0.
after that, it roses 300%
SMCI is also a target of hindenburg
https://hindenburgresearch.com/smci/
before this, I didn't even know that a company that couldn't be audited could still be listed.
However that still leaves $29.95 billion of the $30 billion valuation unexplained.
How many people who own stocks actually give a shit about the company they invest in (for about 5 seconds)?
Nikola did not build their own vehicles. They bought their vehicles from Iveco in Europe and made small modifications including putting their names on them.
Dozens!
https://www.youtube.com/@electrictrucker
German channel: https://www.youtube.com/@elektrotrucker
That's a wildly misleading way of wording that.
Iveco make trucks and vans and buses. Nikola bought some of them and rebadged them and tried to pass them off as their own revolutionary prototypes. There's a YouTuber driving the real thing, which is entirely unrelated to Nikola in any way.
are there Nikola trucks on the road right now?
Importantly, under their own power, and not going downhill.
A few other ding dongs, like GM, didn't do their due diligence and also fell for it.
They were buying their vehicles from Iveco in Europe. Putting their name on them and selling them at a loss here in the US. Making money by selling vehicles was never the goal with this company. Defrauding foolish investors was the primary money maker.
vid https://youtu.be/9eYLtPSf7PY?t=145
Seems quite a good idea to me - it's a different market to cars where no one wants to muck around with forklifts, whereas with trucks they use forklifts to load stuff anyway and people don't especially want to have to plug it in for hours to recharge.
Also you can charge the batteries while not installed using things like solar, whereas with built in batteries like on the Tesla semi you need a lot of grid power to supercharge.
It's easy to see through this showmanship when the product is a car. So why not when the product is software?
I think the reason that it's more prevalent with software is that it's easier to hand-wave away stuff, because you can say "well we're creating the market for this field". I don't fall for that stuff anymore, but I did when I was first starting in this field.
Genuinely asking.
Be sure that the fraud is obvious at the time of the post (and not in retrospect), is actively celebrated at the time.
Something, something [..] bulletproof Cybertruck [..]
You have a bunch of people who consider themselves "the smart money" who have been had, and if they pull out, that's an acknowledgment that perhaps they're not that smart.
Ah yes. The Nikola Gravity Drive™ has been a roaring success and is now powering millions of trucks worldwide. This bankruptcy is merely a blip in their continuing success.
I have no doubt it's entirely possible to make an electric truck, but you still have to spend a year in the trenches actually doing it and solving all the little design problems before you have something to show off.
Especially if you weren't previously making ICE trucks. Then you have to learn how to make a truck from scratch, instead of just the new electric parts. You can of course buy an ICE truck and convert it for your prototype, which I think is what Edison Motors did, but then you'll be showing off a rusty old truck that won't get any venture capital or journalist attention because it's nowhere near shiny enough.
The "pusher" truck was not supposed to be EV. It was supposed to be a Hydrogen truck. In reality it was neither.
That said, it's a pity to see this failure.
It certainly does not! (At least, not in any meaningful sense).
A) How do you store it?
Hydrogen does not compress to a liquid (except a cryogenic temperatures), meaning storage requires bulky, heavy and dangerous high pressure storage..... or cryo kit.
B) Where do you get the hydrogen from?
Electrolysis of water gives less hydrogen energy out than electrical energy you put in.... its more efficient to use the electrical energy directly. Currently we obtain hydrogen from natural gas, which itself is a finite resource (not to mention CO2 is emitted when extracting the hydrogen from gas).
Seriously, the sums don't add up and hydrogen is a looser however you look at it. The only people promoting it here are the natural gas industry who are looking to get money pushing the "hydrogen economy" vapourware.
This is literally all energy storage... Lithium-ion batteries lose about 10-20% during charging and another 5% during discharge.
How do you figure any energy storage medium would give you more than 100% of the energy you put into it?
Also electricity is available almost everywhere. Hydrogen is only available at a few specialized fueling stations.
But the comment I initially responded to said there's energy loss as though that's not the case with literally every type of energy storage.
And then there are the safety and performance issues. You need new infrastructure to store and transport hydrogen. You need special sensors to detect hydrogen leaks, as any odorant will damage fuel cells. Due to ideal gas law, refueling cools the nozzle. With a high duty cycle, the nozzle can freeze to the vehicle even in southern California. Most climates will need heating elements on the nozzle and/or vehicle to deal with this. Different fueling stations have different pressures, meaning that a 5,000psi fueling station can only fill a 10,000psi tank to 50% capacity. Fueling stations leak hydrogen, so they can't be in convenient locations like parking garages or homes.
Given these issues, I think for applications where batteries lack the required energy density, synthetic fuels are much more likely to win than hydrogen. Their safety issues are familiar to everyone and they can take advantage of existing infrastructure.
The problem is, there are applications that for the foreseeable future cannot be made to work on batteries - airplanes larger than bushcraft and large-scale maritime shipping (the large ocean liners carry upwards of a million gallons of fuel).
Assuming we want to convert these away from fossil fuels - which we have to! - there are only two renewable alternatives: biofuels, which carry serious ethical implications given world hunger and soil depletion, and synthfuels made from hydrogen and sequestered CO2 as base chemicals. The problem is, synthfuels are absurdly expensive because there is no hydrogen market yet so there isn't much happening in scaling up from lab-scale.
Pressure vessels are heavy, hydrogen is explosive, both of those are incompatible with aircraft.
You need to combine the hydrogen and CO2 into methane and from that into longer-chain liquid hydrocarbons, and that process is complex and energy-intensive even if you use microbes for the job.
On top of the storage problems, and the problems of the energy needed to create the hydrogen, you then have to have a massive hydrogen distribution network that's on par with the current gas distribution network. With battery EVs, it's just a matter of building chargers that connect to the existing power grid, with many (possibly most) EV owners charging at home.
As far as I'm concerned, anybody pushing for hydrogen fueled vehicles is simply falling for marketing bullshit. Producing a hydrogen-powered car would likely become cheaper than a BEV, but they'll never be better for the environment in the long run, and will never be cheaper to operate. It's always going to be cheaper to just put electricity directly into a battery rather than use it to create hydrogen, distribute it, and then pump it.
Batteries suck in energy density and weight and in some cases, that really matters. Battery electric planes are not even close to being feasible other than for very small in size and range planes. Hydrogen is at least feasible.
Is hydrogen more energy dense (in either energy per unit volume OR per unit weight) than traditional fuels?
It might be better than batteries, but I'd be surprised if it was any better than current fuels.
Chemically, yes. But in reality, very far from it.
The bulky high pressure cylinders needed to store the gas (unlike propane etc, it doesn't liquify) easily weigh an order of magnitude more than the mass of gas they contain.
It reuses all the existing infrastructure and requires no engine modifications.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADpsUhdIO4w a video by a pilot on SAF and why it just won't cut it.
> It certainly does not! (At least, not in any meaningful sense).
I was speaking to the use of hydrogen for ammonia production. When we experience grid imbalances from when there's too much solar or wind energy for the grid to absorb it would be nice to put it to use in that regard rather than dumping it.
I understand and do not contest the problems that working with hydrogen creates, it makes a lousy option for a battery.
I've also seen many Toyota Mirais on the road in California, but turns out their sales are poor nowadays.
Nikola did not really make anything. They bought trucks from Iveco in Europe and resold them here. They would sometimes customize a few things including putting their logo on the trucks.
Electrifying them has only upsides with the exception of road weight and range, but I'm repeatedly told that's not a problem for cars anymore.
Granted, the F150 lightning hasn't done well compared to Ford's expectations, which might say a lot about the reality of range concerns (especially when towing).