Who is Nikola Motors?

Have you ever heard of a 11 BILLION DOLLAR company that does not sell anything? Well Nikola Motors went public on June 2 and the people decided that this company should have a market cap of 11 billion dollars, so who is Nikola Motors? Nikola Motors was started around 6 years ago in 2014 by founder Trevor Milton in Salt Lake City, Utah. Nikola began as a company focused on fully electric and Hydrogen fueled heavy duty commercial trucks, but now they have pivoted into the public market unveiling their fully electric pick-up truck, the Nikola Badger. On March 2020, Nikola merged with VectoIQ Acquisition Corporation, a company solely focused on merging with another company within the automotive technology market. Why did this merger make Nikola such a valuable company? Well, as luck would have it, VectorIQ is a company that was founded by an ex-GM executive named Steve Girsky. Between the merger and the expertise of this ex-GM Exec., this made Nikola a public company and shot its value sky-high.

Nikola claims that they have developed battery technology that would double the range of lithium batteries. They claim that their fully electric semi-truck would be able to run around 800 miles on a single charge and take about 15 minutes to fully re-charge the battery! Nikola claims that this battery will cut the cost by half of a lithium battery and that they plan to share the technology with other market competitors. On November 2019, Nikola and Anhauser-Busch partnered up to make the first zero-emissions delivery for AB Brewery. Nikola provided a hydrogen semi-truck for this delivery. They claim that they already have around $10 billion worth of truck orders. Anhauser-Busch is reported to have ordered 800 units from Nikola. On July 23, 2020, the company broke ground in Coolidge, AZ. on 430 acres of land to build a $600 million facility to begin production. Nikola plans to be putting out around 35,000 semi-trucks by 2022. Most recently Nikola began taking payments for their pickup truck, the Nikola Badger.

The Badger has become a world sensation joining the race for the EV pickup truck. As of right now, Ford, Tesla, Rivian, and most recently Chevy are among the other companies that are racing to produce a fully electric pickup truck. From all of the concepts the Nikola Badger has to be among my favorite. It has the looks of a rugged off-roading pickup. Nikola would be taking refundable deposits for the Badger on June 29. Nikola might seem like a nobody for the general public, but you quickly realize that they are not messing around when you begin to dig into what they are doing. This is definitely a company that we will keep an eye on, because if they pull this off then it might just become a new leader in the market. Thanks for reading, stay buzzed.

-Bear 07.28.2020

Photo credits: Nikola