 And welcome to my Aloha Friday, Stan Energy Man here on Think Tech Hawaii. And we have a great guest today that I've been looking forward to having on the show for a long time. I'm really excited about what he's got going on the mainland and what he'd like to do here in Hawaii. But before we get started with our guest, I want to just throw out some thanks to the folks who put together the city's sustainability get together at the Blaisdale yesterday, to Mayor Caldwell and all the folks that put that together. It was a great event and I hope it turns into a good thing for our island here on Oahu to get us clean and green and sustainable. But today our guest is Trevor Milton from Nicola Motor Company. And I saw a press release and a video probably a few months ago. And I just got so jazzed. In the meantime, I went on his website and looked at what he's building. And that's what we're going to talk about today is big trucks, big, big trucks where hydrogen makes a lot of sense. So Trevor, welcome to the show. I'm so glad to have you on. I think you could thank you for joining us on Skype. I wish you were here in person, but maybe we'll get you out here in person too a little bit later. Yeah, for sure. Thanks for having me and be a lot of fun to be there in person as well next time for sure. And I know the weather's nice over there too, but it's better here. But start off, let's hear a little bit about how you got started with this pretty ambitious dream and and what background you have to kind of make this all come about. Yeah, so primarily pretty much Nicola Motor Company. We design and build electric semi trucks. So this would be Class A heavy duty semi trucks. Ever since I was a kid, my dad used to run and manage the Union Pacific railroad in Las Vegas, Nevada. So I grew up driving locomotives and I always wanted to build a locomotive semi truck. So ever since I was about six, seven, eight years old, I had the chance to be able to be in locomotives and see the power and performance of electric electric motors. And I knew that at that time that was kind of my dream. And so it took a long time, took about, you know, 30 years or 25 years to get to the point where we had that I had enough resources, enough experience and a background and technology had advanced enough for us to be able to build a fully electric zero emission semi truck that was not limited by a range like battery only is. So give us an idea of, you know, your system, the vehicle itself, because I understand it carries around 100 kilograms of hydrogen as a range of about 1200 miles. So give us those kind of statistics and tell us what's unique about your tractor trailer rig that's different than even a diesel rig, performance wise, comfort wise, driving wise. Yeah, across the board, I mean, it's better in every category. This is the first time in history electric vehicles have actually been able to surpass a diesel in every category. So when I say every category, that means cost, emissions, price and features. Every one of those, those are, that's the cost to drive. I mean, the cost of doing business and also the price of the truck. So across the board now, the electric drivetrain with hydrogen allows you to be more cost competitive than a diesel vehicle. And most importantly to us obviously is getting rid of all the pollutants and the emissions associated with diesel trucks as they're the worst. They essentially create more problems in the atmosphere and for the health than all the cars out there. I mean, the diesel trucks are the worst. So what we did is we, this truck primarily has a pretty big battery bank on it, but it's not like what you would see with a Tesla, like a Tesla car, the Tesla truck that Elon's talking about. This is about 240 to 300 kilowatt hours of lithium. So it's about two to three times the size of a Tesla car for the battery. But then it has a very large hydrogen fuel cell range extender on board. That hydrogen allows your truck to go from about 200 miles, which is battery only up to about 800 to 1200 miles depending on the terrain. So you can drive zero emission, more horsepower, more torque, nearly silent and go for more miles than a diesel can go for without stopping. So 800 to 1200 miles without any emissions, which is obviously was our goal. And I know that the actual cab design is, and I have an aviation background. So I looked at your cab design. It looks more like an aircraft cockpit than a regular truck. Yeah, it's all about a panoramic view for the driver. You know, driver turnover rate in America is the number one problem in trucking right now. They cannot keep drivers. So what we did is we came in and we decided we were going to build a truck that was not only gorgeous looking, but had an interior cab of 30% bigger than any other diesel while still maintaining the same height and width dimensions that are regulatory. So now inside the Nikola one truck, you can actually look inside of there and you got panoramic views all the way around you from essentially 180 degrees from your left to your right and allows you to see the road. You got better visibility of the road in the sky than any other diesel. And it looks very similar to a bullet train from the outside, but it looks like an airplane cockpit from the inside. So it's very, very similar to what you were just saying. And then you also augment it with some cameras on the outside as well and some sensors, correct? We do. It'll come out of the factory full level for autonomy. It'll be the only truck ever built in history with coming out of the factory ready for autonomy control. So this will be, you'll have more than a dozen cameras all the way around it, high definition cameras and more than a dozen radar and LIDAR all the way around as well. So that'll help you see it in bad weather. It can help you stop your truck. It can lane assist. It can prevent you from departing your lane and it can actually be fully autonomously driven as well. So that'll come straight out of the factory. So that would appeal not just to the drivers but to the vehicles around the drivers. I was driving from Las Vegas to Phoenix not last year sometime and it was pretty early in the morning. It was about 4.30 in the morning. I was trying to get there before a meeting and I had a flatbed trailer almost roll his back wheels over me trying to change lanes and he just never looked and your your system would would stop any of that stuff from happening. So it's actually improving the safety all around for the people around your trucks and and the drivers themselves. Yeah, safety was a big aspect of our truck. I mean with our with our electric motors on every wheel, much like a locomotive, we can stop faster than a diesel. We can also prevent the truck from moving if there's a car in the way and with the camera and radar and LiDAR systems. You can do that and right now if a driver doesn't see it, he'll just either run you over or run you off the road or you'll have to hit your brakes because you know you went through that. That was your experience. I had to buy I just missed his back tires and I had the back of his trailer go over my hood because I slammed on the brakes so hard. So fortunate for me, they I just tapped them a couple times hard and didn't lock up but I'm there with you. And also your cab also has a lot of great comfort features for you know these drivers are on the road a long time. They got to rest up and eat and things like that. So what are the things in the rest of the cab behind the driver? Yeah, you've got the only truck coming out on the market with a full size commercial like residential refrigerator and microwave. So the number one cost of drivers right now besides steel is their food. So they've all asked for larger fridges and in the other trucks, there's just no room in diesels. So we are able to give them a full size 12 cubic refrigerator and microwave and freezer and that allows them to take food on the road for up to one to two weeks and I have to not have to buy expensive food on the road. So that's one advantage and then obviously the most important thing when you think about that the interior comfort of a truck is that is the sleeping situations and our bed is full size bed. It's 12 inches wider than any other production bed on the market. So it's all about driver comfort, the ability to to recruit drivers to drive and once they drive our truck, they'll never be able to go back to a diesel. Yeah, we didn't bring any graphics or anything on this end, but I know folks can go to your website. In fact, if you just Google Nicola one, you can find the that a lot of the material that you folks have out for advertising and and videos and things like that for folks to look at it. But it is a beautiful truck performs really well and it's a real truck. It's not it's not some facade, you know, thing you push around with a forklift or something. It's a real truck that people have climbed inside and it moves around. So you've got the real thing and it looks great and has great performance and great potential. Like you say, everything that you're looking for from price to safety, it's it's there and it's it looks like it's it's well worth companies taking seriously just to integrate into their businesses, particularly over there on the continental US where long haul trucking is such a huge part of our our nation's infrastructure. Yeah, it's it's it's all about price to the bottom line and the fact that it's zero emissions. I mean, when a company goes to buy a truck, they care about two things. What kind of impact is it going to have on the environment? Also, what's the cost? Because they can't increase their cost and help the environment because it would put about a business. So that's why this truck is so exciting because these companies can come into a zero emission truck and still cut their cost by twenty five to thirty percent compared to a diesel every month. So that's those savings are absolutely massive in the industry. They've never been seen that big before. So this is a pretty big a really fun thing to see happen. Yeah, especially for fleets that are changing now because now you have tier four emission controls on diesels. That's going to drive the price up even on your hardware. And again, if you're just band-aiding the pollution piece. So, you know, you've got the great process there. Can you tell us a little bit about the infrastructure that goes along with your trucks here in Hawaii? We actually have a direct connect to Toyota Japan and the local Toyota dealers actually have some rise on Island, but they had to build their own station because we so we call it bringing the chicken and the egg. You guys are doing something similar with your system, correct? Yeah, so what we do is we actually come in and provide the hydrogen station. And when someone buys their truck, they pay nothing for fuel that hydrogen for a full million miles. So their overall cost per month when everything is factored in is about 25 to 30% savings compared to a diesel. And we provide the hydrogen station. So for instance, I think you guys are out on a lot of my father's house in Maui. So if we came over to Hawaii, what we would do is we put up putting hydrogen station on all the main islands out there and allow the trucks to actually fill up there and then they can deliver goods all over the island and not create any pollution whatsoever. And that's the great thing about hydrogen is we can use all the excess energy at night time from like wind and solar throughout the day and other forms. And we can create the hydrogen and all it is is just electricity and water creating hydrogen. So there's no byproduct. It's an indefinite use of energy that never goes away as long as you have sunlight to create the sun or wind to create the energy. So was I dreaming or was that an offer to put our first station over here? It's what we're going to do is it's all based upon the trucks that we have on order. So you bet you once we come into the the islands of Hawaii over there we're going to we'll be putting in stations at most of the the main Hawaii islands which we're really excited about. Okay. So I guess I better drum up some business for you. And I can as a state employee I can do that and not charge anything. So I'll do that and try and get some of those truck drivers and those owners getting these vehicles on the road out here because as you know Hawaii is very environmentally conscious. We have a high dependence on fossil fuel now and we haven't done as much as we should on the transportation side to reduce our footprint our fossil fuel footprint. So this would be a great step forward for us. You know, fleet vehicles are the way to really make a big impact and commercial fleet vehicles would be awesome. Yeah, even power production I mean the fact that we have hydrogen is one of the best ways to store energy because it has no life cycle to it so you can store it forever and decently. So a lot of the hotels and stuff we've actually had some of them call out reach out and ask us about could you get our hotel 100% off the grid to be zero emission. And that way if the storm blew in and blew down the power lines it wouldn't matter they're still off grid they're running off of zero emission hydrogen power and it's really incredible we're not trying to we're not trying to effect the power companies we're just trying to bring zero emission energy to people that want it. You're starting to sound just like me. We actually took delivery of two hydrogen fuel cell light cards from GTM Luxembourg yesterday and the state's going to own them and we're going to actually put them out there during events and things and let people see hydrogen power at work quiet clean only water coming out the exhaust to produce exterior lighting for events and we have two generators coming in from GTM as well probably in about another month and the gem vehicle we drove over here in a little little Polaris electric vehicle we have some students converting that putting in a fuel a range extender with a fuel cell this summer next month. That's cool. So what is the leasing kind of model that you're looking at? Pretty much what we do is we charge it per mile rate. So it's about it can range we're working on those pricing right now but it'll be about 30% less than a diesel per mile operate so what we're trying to do is build up a model where people can just pay per paper mile that they drive the truck and that way they're not worried about these payments every month it's just however many miles they drive they pay for and there's a certain minimum that they have to hit but other than that it's about 80,000 miles a year so as long as they hit those numbers and they're driving the truck you know sometimes then they'll be able to meet their meet their minimums and they're only paying for the miles that they use and it's a really great business plan about how we provide it for the drivers and also for us we're able to we're able to get customers into a long-term agreement with us for once they're with us they'll never want to leave so it's all about giving these really there's really nice equipment that would normally cost a lot more money at a reduced price below diesels and that's our that's our goal that's awesome we're going to take a quick break here and we'll be back in 60 seconds to spend some more time with Trevor and get a little bit more into detail on how his his system works and how it might apply here in Hawaii we make responsible decisions while we cheer on our heroes and toast their success elevate your match day experience if you drink never drive Aloha my name is Stephen Philip Katz I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist and I'm the host of Shrink Rap Hawaii where I talk to other shrinks did you ever want to get your head shrunk well this is the best place to come to pick one I've been doing this we must have 60 shows with a whole bunch of shrinks that you can look at I'm here on Tuesdays at 3 o'clock every other Tuesday I hope you are too Aloha hey welcome back to my lunch hour Stan Osterman Stan the energy man here coming to you from beautiful downtown Honolulu with Trevor Milton from Nicola Motor Company and we're talking about a really exciting upcoming business that he's got started and now maybe what it means to Hawaii so Trevor you know on the big island of Hawaii we actually have big trucks moving freight and stuff over a big island I mean we call the big island because it's a big island and it's a great opportunity I think for a model like yours when you talk about roughly an 80,000 mile minimum I think they could actually do that over there we're here on Oahu that might be a little sketchy I think the big island they could actually probably pull something like that off so do you have other partners I mean you know this is a big endeavor when you talk about building stations and building trucks you know what's your model look like that really gives you confidence you're going to make all this happen Yeah I mean really it's we've got probably the best partners in the world we have a partner called Meritor they're the number one suspension and differential manufacturer in the industry for heavy duty trucking we have a partner called Rider which handles all our cell service and warranty and then we have a lot of other partners you know enormous enormously talented partners that do software controls vehicle controls manufacturing fabrication and all the design work so we have a big team here but we also have a big team of partners that help us pull it off and the great thing about Hawaii is that you have you're already paying higher than higher premium prices on fuel than the mainland so even if someone is driving in a slightly less amount of miles what we do is we probably have a different slightly different increased price per mile out there in Hawaii it would still be 20 to 30% less than a diesel but it'd be slightly higher than the mainland and so that way you may not be able to hit 80,000 miles in Hawaii but if someone hits 50,000 to 60,000 miles it can still make sense because you're already paying high premiums on diesel fuel so that's kind of the advantage Yeah, that's fair and we're kind of used to that kind of adjustment out here anyway so where do you plan to have your major factory doing the constructing the vehicles? Did you pick a location? Do you have a factory growing up yet? We do have a location picked we'll be announcing that in about three to five weeks from now it's a big announcement it's for the meantime we have a partner called Fitzgerald they're out of Tennessee and they built about 6,000 Peterbilt Glider trucks a year and this family as I've been in the truck assembly business for a long long time and they're going to help us build our first 5,000 trucks and that'll help us make sure that we can avoid the capital expenditure that's needed right up front to build a factory and be able to build the first 5,000 trucks and really help out the people that get these trucks and people's hands that have to wait 10 years to get them So are you feeling pretty confident? You've got a pretty good list of people that are interested and ready to step up? Yeah, we've already done over we did over $4 billion in pre-order structure after the first month and we're close to passing right now over $8 billion so our company is growing like crazy and I think within probably 3 to 5 years of order backlogs will be as big as any other OEM out there in the world so we've got orders coming in that these other guys can only dream of right now Great, well we can we'll definitely reach out to the industry here and help you out because Hawaii really wants to get moving in hydrogen in fact back in 2006 to 2008 the state had a major effort to move into a hydrogen economy and it's kind of languished and kind of falling off most people's radar except for mine of course and I think there's a lot of people out here though they're really excited about hydrogen as a energy storage and transportation fuel and we're trying to get people fired up because there's so much renewables out here as you mentioned this energy storage it's perfect there's a certain point where batteries just don't make sense and we can take all the excess energy off the grid I mean that's the advantage that we have that no one else has is whenever the grids got excess energy we can take it all from them and that's a feature no other company can do so batteries are a bad idea when it comes to trying to store energy because they have such a short life cycle our hydrogen lasts over 20 years so your life cycle is not every three, four, five years it's 20 years and we're not just balancing a grid we're actually taking all the excess energy so that grid can be really happy knowing that we're like this massive 30 to 50 megawatt buffer that can just take anything that they want to throw at us at any time throughout the 24 hours of the day we're trying to convince our local utility that that's a great reason to look at hydrogen they are looking we're hoping they get more excited at least a little bit more excited than they are right now we'll sit down and talk with them because now that we can bring the truck in the hydrogen station it's not just about building an expensive hydrogen station we actually are the ones paying for it so that's it the trucks did a really incredible program and I wanted to I want everyone to know about that then go to NikolaMotor.com in order to see that that's just singular, NikolaMotor.com but we also have another product that's called the Nikola Zero which is a a lot of people are familiar with the Polaris Razor which is like a four seater utility vehicle we've got an electric UTV that is absolutely incredible it's a four seater and it goes one to 200 miles on a charge and it's got over 500 horsepower and 500 foot-pounds of torque so you're taking the ability like it's got more power than a Ford F-150 you can torque, you can tow more but it's also completely zero emission and all electric and you can drive it around the island so we're going to try to get some of these built real fast and get them over there in the in the mayors and the you know did the hands of the different the mayors to see if they can help us get these permitted for the cities because rather than all these mustings being rented out by the car companies why not have these electric UTVs rented out that have the ability to be driven anywhere zero emission and that's really our goal is to try to get all the emissions off the islands and you can't do it unless you're unless you're creative and you know and are willing to permit vehicles that normally wouldn't be permitted on the road right I was going to say most of the time those vehicles are limited to low speed vehicle class which is 35 mile an hour zones and have a governor on them that keeps them down below 35 yeah so that's what we're trying to change we're trying to go into these these mayors and say look we can get rid of the emissions we have this UTV that's just like a car has stability has analog braking system has stability control has full autonomy control is safer than a car with exception of like the crash you know the crash testing you have to do which runs hundreds of millions of dollars and we're not going to spend that on a an inexpensive vehicle so our goal is to try to get the island off of emissions if you go to Lake Havasu, Arizona their entire city is run on UTVs now and they have less wrecks on UTVs than they had in cars so the key about this is it's all about getting rid of the emissions and we can do that with this electric UTV that doesn't need to be charged every day you can ride it 200 miles without having to charge it and this would be the four passenger version yep and you can have windshields on it you can have everything so if it's raining you can you know you have windshields you can have doors all that is it's a really amazing little unit you can see it on NikolaMotor.com as well okay do you have an estimated price on that yet? it's going to range in your from about $30,000 to $45,000 so pretty inexpensive but it's got a stereo system built in it's got it's all waterproof it's mud proof you can spray it with a pressure washer it's got full touch screens in it so it's pretty much like driving $180,000 Tesla you know for essentially $35,000 or $40,000 okay all right that'd be fun I'd like to check out the road to Hana on one of these things I'm bringing mine over soon and hopefully I don't get in too much trouble are you going to be in the island sometime soon? we're going to hopefully get out there near the end of this year so when I do I will let you know before the end of this year and we're going to bring it over and we're going to try to shoot some video on the road to Hana so obviously that's Maui because that's where we have our house not that we don't love Oahu and the big islands and the others it's just I have a personal tie to Maui so in a house there in Haiku so we'd love to we'd love to have you over there and actually be able to take that road with us to the road to Hana with us great well if we can talk to Mayor Caldwell and let me drive one around Honolulu I might buy one of your things just to drive around here let's get them on because once they realize that these are safer and better and more fun and more environmental friendly than the gasoline versions there's no reason to have those gasoline cars on the island anymore got it but I can't afford a Tesla so I need something that's a little more my speed yeah and it's more economical I mean it's only I mean that's a pretty inexpensive unit you know if you think about in fact it has 107 kilowatt hours of lithium so that's bigger it's got more power in it energy density than the 160 or $80,000 Tesla has and you're buying it for one quarter of the price exactly like we built some we built some class I believe it's class six size vehicles F550 and a little bit bigger in our shop for the Air Force and we normally only have less than 30 kilowatt hours worth of lithium batteries on our vehicle so that's a pretty good hunk of batteries for a these are awesome and I think it's got 20 inches of suspension travel it's got four wheel drive it's got a a jail audio system built into it all waterproof I mean this thing is the funnest thing you've ever driven in your life and once you go to one you won't even want to get in your car anymore because they're so fun to drive you just can't ever get an experience like that ever again it sounds like a Humvee electric Humvee much yeah like a miniature Humvee electric Humvee it's very it's a small unit I mean it's a four seater and it's a it's a utility vehicle so you can go to NikolaMotor.com and look at it and it's we got a new version coming out in two months that we spent the last year and a year and a half working on we'll be announcing all the new pictures and renderings and drawings in the and the full real life version here in the next two months for the public to see it actually in operating in real world scenarios and when will they be available to purchase we're taking pre-orders right now so you go on NikolaMotor.com and actually pre-order them for 750 bucks and that will be applied towards your purchase price or it can be refunded there's no limitation on it we don't even spend the money it just sits there in the account we don't touch it and you can you can go on there right now and reserve it so you don't have to wait years to get it once we come out sometime next year we'll have them available for the public okay well I'm gonna have to do that in fact as soon as I get back from this gig I'm gonna go check your website maybe put some money down on one of those that sounds like fun they're one of them they're an incredible machine and you can tow with them too it's just crazy what you can do like nothing you've ever experienced so that's the greatest thing about NikolaMotor Company is we've got hundreds of millions of dollars in development on the semi-truck and then we're able to take that money and put it into the UTV because if we didn't have all that development into the semi-truck there's no way we could ever afford to develop a utility vehicle like that because you would never make your money back so that's the advantage we have here at Nikola is the ability to take all that technology and bring it over to the UTV great well I tell you what we got about 30 seconds left and I'd like to leave it all up to you to just tell us what you'd like to tell us as we close out here today I think that you know we all have a responsibility in this life to not just leave this place better than the way that we found it but also in an economical situation better than we found it and a lot of people don't correlate the two they think that you know it's all about just the environment it's not just about the environment but we need money in order to develop things like this so the great thing about this technology in this company is is that we're saving people money and we're eliminating all the emissions so the first time in history we're able to do both and leave this planet in this place a better place for our kids not just environmentally but economically as well and that's a lifelong dream of mine we've been able to start to begin to realize great well thanks Tremor I really appreciate you being on today and obviously we're gonna have to have you back when we can do some more stuff when you come over to visit Maui so we're looking forward to that thanks so much we'll do the next show live here from Honolulu maybe we'll do it from Maui maybe I'll go over there and we'll both Skype it in from there sounds good it sounds like a lot of fun okay Tremor thanks again thanks guys take care see you again later this year Aloha and thanks for joining us with Stanley Entery Man this week we'll see you next Friday Aloha