Why Is This EV-Maker Giving up on Electric Trucks?

Jason Williams

Posted August 11, 2023

Very recently, an announcement by battery electric truck-maker Nikola went relatively unnoticed by the majority of the investing world…

But we didn’t miss it (or the hidden message behind it) here at Wealth Daily.

You see, Nikola, famous for supposedly bringing about the transition from diesel big rigs to battery-powered trucks, is taking a HUGE step backward from its EV aspirations.

Special Order Only

Initially, its entire focus was BEV (or battery electric vehicle) semi trucks. It was going to completely disrupt the industry by giving truckers a new choice.

The thing is that the company never thought to ask truckers if they wanted battery-powered trucks.

And apparently, none of them really do. Since becoming a public company back in 2020, Nikola has sold a whopping 258 vehicles.

That’s less than 100 per year and a far cry from the projections the company’s management presented to woo public investors.

And now, according to its most recent press release, since it’s having so much trouble selling the trucks it’s already made, the company is no longer making them in advance.

As of a few weeks ago, if you want a BEV truck from Nikola, you have to place a special order.

Until then, the company refuses to make another battery-powered vehicle.

The main reason is that nobody wants them. And the secondary reasons are the reasons that nobody wants them…

The Right Wrong Stuff

First of all, they’re incredibly inefficient.

You see, in order to extend the range of a heavy vehicle like a truck, you need to add a whole lot of batteries.

And batteries are really heavy. So the more you add, the more weight the truck has to pull before you even add any cargo.

So there has to be a balance between range and capacity. And that means the best electric semi on the road will get about 500 miles per fully charged battery.

Then it’ll have to pull over for an hour or so and recharge (likely at a truck stop in the middle of nowhere with diesel generators powering the chargers).

To put that into perspective, a diesel-powered rig with only one tank can go as much as 1,000 miles before needing to refuel, a process that takes, at most, a few minutes before you can be back on the road.

But the inefficiency isn’t the only thing keeping truckers out of these cabs. They’re also deadly…

Every year, there are well over 100,000 accidents involving big-rig trucks. In 2020, nearly 5,000 of them were fatal.

And that number will only climb if we start replacing those diesel rigs with EVs, because while diesel fuel will burn after it’s spilled, it doesn’t just explode while it’s in the tank unless you expose it to flame.

The lithium batteries used to power the BEV trucks, however, will explode if the lithium inside them is exposed to oxygen.

And Nikola knows this very well. It’s had several trucks catch fire due to flaws in their batteries.

One of them even reignited after fire and rescue crews thought they’d extinguished the inferno. And these trucks weren’t even in use yet…

nikola fire

They were some of the many sitting at Nikola’s headquarters waiting for a buyer.

So Nikola, THE electric truck company, is throwing in the towel on electric trucks.

Sure, you can still special-order one if you really want it. And some companies are going that route.

But from here on out, Nikola is hanging its hopes on a completely different power source…

One I’ve dubbed “Blue Gas.”

The Perfect Fuel

I call it that because when you use blue gas to power a vehicle (any vehicle), the only byproducts it produces are water clean enough to drink and oxygen.

And I’m convinced it’s going to dominate the heavy-duty trucking industry because it’s basically the perfect fuel.

It doesn't add any carbon emissions to the atmosphere. In fact, it doesn't add any pollutants at all.

And yet it can provide three times more power than traditional diesel fuel.

That means truckers don’t have to stop for an hour every few hours to recharge their batteries…

In fact, they can go even farther before a fill-up than they could with fossil fueled trucks.

And when they do have to pull in for a refill, it takes a matter of minutes to top off the tank and get back on the road.

Now, I’m not the only one to pick up on this advantage over both diesel and batteries.

Obviously, Nikola finally figured it out (albeit after wasting hundreds of billions of investor dollars on BEV trucks).

The U.S. government has it figured out too…

In fact, the (perhaps inappropriately named) Inflation Reduction Act is jam-packed with incentives to expand our domestic blue gas market

There’s the Advanced Energy Project Credit, worth $10 BILLION.

There’s the Alternative Fuel Refueling Property Credit, worth $100,000 per property.

The Qualified Commercial Clean Vehicles Credit is worth $40,000 per vehicle.

There’s even a specific Blue Gas Production Credit worth up to $3 per kilogram of blue gas produced for as long as a decade.

And there’s no cap on that last one, so it could literally generate an infinite amount of money for companies helping advance blue gas.

There are hundreds of billions of dollars (perhaps even trillions) floating around out there, looking for a home.

And I’m convinced that the company that pioneered this revolutionary new fuel is going to be in line to collect the lion’s share of them.

“Long-Haul” Profits

That’s why I’ve put together a full presentation on the opportunity, the technology, the benefits, and the company behind all of it.

And that’s why I want to give you free access to it today. I’m certain that we’ve identified the heavy-duty power source that will finally replace diesel fuel.

There’s no doubt in my mind that it’ll be blue gas leading the charge in this energy transition.

And I want you to be set up to profit from it as this industry grows and matures.

So take a little time to learn all about blue gas, the company that discovered it, and the profits you could be making right now.

Then get yourself invested and start making those profits.

To your wealth,

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Jason Williams

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After graduating Cum Laude in finance and economics, Jason designed and analyzed complex projects for the U.S. Army. He made the jump to the private sector as an investment banking analyst at Morgan Stanley, where he eventually led his own team responsible for billions of dollars in daily trading. Jason left Wall Street to found his own investment office and now shares the strategies he used and the network he built with you. Jason is the founder of Main Street Ventures, a pre-IPO investment newsletter; the founder of Future Giants, a nano cap investing service; and authors The Wealth Advisory income stock newsletter. He is also the managing editor of Wealth Daily. To learn more about Jason, click here.

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