
Nikola board member defends company against fraud claims - samizdis
https://www.ft.com/content/e5aeb036-fc1a-49d2-970e-63b4879f1973
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samizdis
It turns out that Nikola isn't in the business of making vehicles:

> _In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr [Jeff] Ubben, who sits on
> Nikola’s board of directors, said the company and its founder Trevor Milton
> were misunderstood. He said Nikola could revolutionise transport and
> compared it to Apple. ...

“Nikola is a prototype shop,” Mr Ubben said. “You have the biggest company in
the world which is a prototype shop and it’s called Apple. That is what we are
doing. We are not trying to sell trucks, we are trying to sell hydrogen.”_

It seems odd, then, that the company bought land last year on which, er, to
build a truck factory ...

From Wikipedia -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Corporation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Corporation)

>In March 2019, Nikola acquired a 389-acre parcel in Coolidge, Arizona, for
US$23 million, with future state and local tax breaks. Nikola said in 2019
that they expected the truck factory to start construction in 2020, start
building trucks in 2021, and be able to build 35–50,000 trucks per year by
2023.[9]

Edited to add: I can't find a non-paywalled link to the article (but there is
always the archive.is option), but there is this along the same lines from
Bloomberg yesterday evening:

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-15/nikola-
di...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-15/nikola-director-
ubben-says-startup-skeptics-too-focused-on-past)

