Nikola says the first truck to come off the assembly line at Coolidge, Arizina will be a battery-electric version of the Tre COE. A Fuel-cell version will follow about a year later. Photo: Nikola
Electric heavy-duty trucks – including a Euro-style high cabover for the North American market – could begin driving off the assembly line at Nikola’s new Coolidge, Arizona, manufacturing facility in as little as 12-14 months, albeit in hand-built, very limited numbers.
The first trucks to roll off the line will be battery-electric versions of the Tre, which is based on the newly minted Iveco S-Way European cabover tractor, unveiled in July 2019 in Madrid, Spain. It’s the successor to the long-running Stralis model.
Nikola Executive Chairman Trevor Milton said the company partnered with Italian truck-maker Iveco to gain the advantage of its manufacturing experience. The relationship will see Nikola’s battery-electric and hydrogen fuel cell technology sold in Europe in Iveco chassis under the Nikola badge.
“That was something we lacked at Nikola, and [Iveco] has 20-30 years of experience in building chassis,” Milton said. “We have a lot of experience, but we wanted people that have been in the field, people that are experts; chassis manufacturing experts, warranty service and maintenance experts, and we got that with Iveco.”
On the Fast Track to Electric-Truck Production
Nikola’s plan is to get one building up and running with very limited capacity while the rest of the facility is completed. That first phase should be complete next year. The second phase will be completed about 12 months following that, and then the third phase about 12 months later, sometime in 2023.
Capacity will ramp up gradually. By the time production hits its stride, the plant is expected to produce about 35,000 trucks per year on two shifts. Output will be a mix of battery-electric and fuel-cell electric trucks, in the Nikola Tre and Nikola Two models, with different versions for different applications.
“The total spending, when we’re done, will be around $600 million,” Nikola’s new CEO, Mark Russell, told HDT in an interview.
“In most construction projects of this size, it takes months to develop the engineering to be able to do this,” said Mark Duchesne, Nikola’s head of Global Manufacturing, in remarks made during the groundbreaking ceremony on July 23. “We are truly fast-tracking this to get going as fast as we possibly can. Trevor said we’ll have the buildings up in 12 months. I’m going to say today that I’m going to try to do much better than that. I’m going to try to build things up in six months and start building trucks here as soon as we possibly can, while we finish off the rest of the construction.”
In remarks prior to the groundbreaking ceremony, Milton said, “We will be the first OEM that we know of to hit the market with a 300-plus-miles, zero-emission semi-truck. We have five of them coming off the assembly line right now in Ulm, Germany. They’re being built in Germany, tested in Germany, validated in Germany, and they’re brought to America to be built here.”
Milton has said that battery-electric trucks, both Tre and Two, will emerge first, followed about a year later by the fuel-cell versions.
The plant is modeled on the Toyota concept, where any number of different models can be built on the same production line. Russell said they will be able to adapt the line to build fuel-cell as well as battery-electric trucks on cabover (Tre) or conventional (One and Two) platforms in different configurations for certain target markets.
Duchesne, Nikola’s head of Global Manufacturing, has 20 years of experience with Toyota, and Nikola’s production partner, Iveco, uses much the same approach at its plant in Madrid.
“Iveco produces a multitude of different vehicles on the same line at that facility,” Russell said. “To make that work, you need a certain level of standardization. We will have a base platform that’ll be global with variations on that base platform for each application.”
by Jim Park
Source: https://www.truckinginfo.com
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