CONFIRMED
Nikola and the Electric Truck That Rolled Downhill
In June 2020, an electric-and-hydrogen truck company called Nikola went public, and within days its stock-market value briefly soared past that of Ford — the hundred-and-seventeen-year-old maker of millions of actual vehicles. Nikola, by contrast, had never sold a single truck, never produced one for a paying customer, and had essentially no revenue. What it had was a vision — zero-emission semi-trucks powered by batteries and hydrogen fuel cells that would clean up the heavily polluting world of long-haul freight — and a charismatic founder, Trevor Milton, who sold that vision with relentless, theatrical confidence. He named the company after Nikola Tesla (the electric-car company Tesla having taken the inventor's surname), positioned himself as the next Elon Musk, and made a stream of bold claims about trucks that worked, technology that was ready, and orders worth billions. The most famous demonstration of Nikola's prototype showed one of its trucks gliding smoothly along a road, apparently under its own power — proof, it seemed, that the vehicle was real and functional. It was not. The truck had no working powertrain; it had simply been towed to the top of a gentle hill and allowed to roll down under gravity, filmed so as to look as if it were driving. When a short-seller's report revealed this and a litany of other deceptions in September 2020, Nikola's story began to collapse. Trevor Milton was charged with fraud, and in 2023 he was convicted. This article tells the story of the truck that rolled downhill — a case study in how far hype, a green mission, and a confident founder could inflate a company built on claims that were not true.
