A Chat With Nikola’s Trevor Milton: Badgers, Tre And That Elusive Hydrogen Network

Nikola Motor Company founder Trevor Milton likes to talk, especially about his forward-looking truck company. Recently, I had a chance to interview him on Autoline After Hours along with Autoline.tv host John McElroy and Gary Vasilash of Autobeatonline.

Nikola has always thought big, making an entrance into the transportation space with plans for an electric and natural gas-powered semi truck. This morphed into a plan to use a hydrogen powertrain, along with a network of H2 refueling stations along the highways where these trucks - the cab-over Tre model in Europe and the semi-tractor Nikola One and Two models in the U.S - will be used.

Milton told us on Autoline that the estimated cost to build one of its hydrogen stations started at $40 million when they were first thinking things through, but now the estimates are down to around $15 million a piece. The stations will also only be built along routes that Nikola truck customers say they will need and use, so when those customers put in an order, Nikola will then talk to them about where to build the H2 stations.

"Whenever we sell a route, we sell them to hundreds of trucks," he said. "So we never build a station unless we have hundreds of trucks ready to go."

For every truck that Nikola sells, the company sets aside around $30,000 of the purchase price aside for station building, Milton said. "We make a million dollars of revenue, pretty much, over the life of that truck and we only pay $30,000 out, plus the energy for it, and it costs around a quarter million dollars to do that," he said. "So, total, over the life of it, our revenue is about a million dollars and our margins are many, many times higher than our competitors because we took all of the money away from the oil companies."

But Nikola isn't just about Class 8-style delivery vehicles, nor only hydrogen models. The company recently got some attention for its Badger concept, which will be available with an all-electric powertrain or with a fuel cell stack range extender. For both personal and large trucks, battery electric powertrains are best for regular drive routes under 300 miles, Milton said, but if you have a drive route that's longer, then hydrogen makes more sense.

"[The Badger will be] offered in a battery-electric version only for those people that don't need to go over 300 miles," he said. "For all those people that are going to pull trailers and go over 300 miles you, can add a fuel cell to it that'll give you another 300 miles."

Milton is a big fan of his own truck. "This thing is bad ass," he said. "It's the most amazing pickup truck I think anyone will ever see in their life. It does everything that people want it to do. It's a real pickup truck. It's made for real job sites, real construction jobs, real families driving around exactly like you're used to in, say, like a Chevy Colorado or like a Chevy Silverado or a Ford Raptor."

While this may sound good, the reality is that there is no nationwide hydrogen fueling station network available in the U.S. just yet. And Nikola hasn't given a timeline for when its stations will come online. Earlier this month, it has said that it will buy 85-megawatt alkaline electrolyzers from Nel ASA to build its first five stations.

Nikola is also going to work with someone - we don't know who - to build the Badger. Milton said there are three OEMs in the running to build it and that an announcement would be made "soon" about which company will actually build the thing. Milton said all of Nikola's hydrogen semi vehicles will be built in the U.S. for the U.S. market at some point, but first Nikola's European partner, Iveco, will build Nikola's semi trucks for two years while Nikola gets its U.S. production plant up and running. U.S. production will start around the end of 2022 or the start of 2023, he said.

You can watch our discussion in the embedded video above.