[blakeyrat]

The technology is legit, there's nothing preventing a company from building a truck like this. There's a few things that bug me:

1) Why natural gas to run the turbine and not, say, diesel? It seems natural to run the truck on diesel, if nothing else so the driver can hang out with his friends and show it off at the local truck stop.

2) There's only renders, no photos. They haven't actually built one yet? At least that high-efficiency truck Wal-Mart was/is testing, they actually built the thing before they started crowing about it.,

[URSpider94]

America is swimming in natural gas -- we are a net exporter. Natural gas requires nearly no refinement, and is locally produced, so the additional energy required to make it available to customers is much smaller. It also produces less CO2 per unit of energy than most other fossil fuels, since it has a very high ratio of hydrogen to carbon. When it burns, you get 2 water molecules and 1 CO2, vs say decane where you get 11 water molecules and 10 CO2.

[drone]

The answer to #1 provides some insight as to what might make this play a little more interesting. Reading into the truck page, check out this gem:

"At Nikola Motor Company, we’ve decided to invest in American energy. Nikola owns the rights to its own natural gas wells along with the Nikola One fleet that transports the natural gas from the wells to the stations. With 7 wells on a single property, Nikola can pump out millions of gallons of clean natural gas each day. Nikola plans on having more than 5 well sites for redundancy throughout the United States. Complete vertical integration removes market uncertainties and allows Nikola Motor to control its own prices and keep them that way for Nikola customers. Nikola bypasses all the gas companies, liquifies the gas on site, then delivers it to the station through its fleet of electric trucks."

The trucks appear, in part, to be a method of arbitraging future LNG prices which have been going down, and can be expected to continue to fall for the foreseeable future as more and more wells keep coming on line.

[nradov]

In the US right now natural gas is slightly cheaper per mile than diesel. Existing truck manufacturers have already started offering NG fuel vehicles.

[blakeyrat]

I wasn't aware of that.

I have no problem with making use of natural gas reserves, I just figured a diesel option would make adoption easier on truck drivers.

[cachvico]

TIL about the high efficiency truck revolution