Scandal-ridden Nikola — known for its electric semi-trucks

Scandal-scarred electric semi-truck maker Nikola — a pandemic darling once valued at $30 billion — filed for bankruptcy on Wednesday.

The company said it is seeking an auction and sale process of its assets, becoming the latest electric-vehicle maker to stumble after grappling with tepid demand, rapid cash burn and funding challenges.

“Like other companies in the electric vehicle industry, we have faced various market and macroeconomic factors that have impacted our ability to operate,” chief executive Steve Girsky said in a statement.

Electric car sales have been faltering in the US due to high costs and a lack of charging infrastructure.

Yet the bankruptcy filing is a particularly steep fall for Nikola, which was valued at more than industry giant Ford at its peak in 2020.

General Motors agreed to take an 11% stake in the EV maker for $2 billion in 2020.

But the following year, the trendy automaker agreed to pay the Securities and Exchange Commission a whopping $125 million to settle claims it had misled investors.

In December 2023, Milton was sentenced to four years in prison for defrauding investors.

The accusations of fraud were first unveiled by short seller Hindenburg Research, which most recently accused Carvana of being a “father-son accounting grift for the ages.”

Electric cars are a niche market that makes sense in some market niches.

Tesla has done a great job developing a car that is workable for those who want one.

Hybrid even make some sense.

But electric semis are stupid and the hydrogen economy is a Utopian dream that will have to wait until fusion power is commercially available

I suspect that Lucid is about to become the next dead duck in the EV world. They are only selling 9000 cars a year and they are losing 800 million a year.

At least 12K miles per of home charged miles. That’s the threshold where getting an EV makes economic sense. That’s based on gas vs power prices in Alabama, and based on what car prices were 3 years ago when my wife’s gas crossover needed replacing anyway and I replaced it with an EV.

I don’t know about today’s car prices. Nor did my research involve cold weather reducing miles/kWh throughput (not talking about reduced range on trips, the home charged miles is when the gas savings happens).

For us the threshold is 8K miles per year of home charged miles, but that’s because most of our power comes from decentralized solar. You must do your homework on an EV and/or solar.

3.5 miles / kWh. That’s the magic number that took forever to find. The question of how much gas savings vs increasing your power bill comes down to how many miles your realistically get for every kWh you add to your bill. I regularly get 3.9 miles per kWh, but that’s from the DC battery. Reduce that by 10% for loss while converting AC power to DC power while home charging and it comes out to 3.5 miles/kWh. Forget the most talked about numbers like range and time it takes to charge, at least when deciding if the gas savings is worth it. That 3.5 is for a crossover shape (read: less efficient than a sudan) in mostly warm weather (read: more efficient than running your heat in the cold north).

I supposed when one is very comfortably retired it is fun to fine-tune your financials to make it OK to purchase unusual toys and the infrastructure needed to manage them (EVs, solar, etc).

For me I want the wife and I to have a dependable ICE (well known technology) that won't have it or her bothering me about our transportation. I also want the transportation to have some trade-in value after using it for several years and not need a $15,000 battery every 3-4 years. I mean ... really?

In fairness I wouldn't buy an ICE vehicle that had an engine that was prone to self-destruction every few thousand miles (see GMs latest V8s).

Again, do the math before getting an EV and/or solar.

For us, I now pay three energy bills: a small power bill + car payment + a loan (with a low fixed interest) I took out to do energy home improvements (insulation, replace two gas appliances with high efficiency electric ones, install a small solar system for a year then like it enough to upgrade it the year I bought the EV).

The EV is a 4-year loan (car purchase, not a lease), in which case after that I'll have just the low power bill + loan payment. My energy budget now is what it was in year 2019 (the last Trump year before covid, so the last normal energy year) when I was instead paying a normal power bill + normal natural gas bill + a lot of gasoline cost (gas prices weren't higher, but we drive a lot). So count it as my energy project having made the past few years of stupid energy price inflation not hitting my budget.

Will Trump bring energy costs down? I'm hoping so. Even with that, I'll own the EV outright next year and will be down to just the small power bill + loan payment. So even if Trump brings energy costs way down, I'm still better off paying the loan payment to not have otherwise higher power bill + natural gas bill + gasoline costs (if hadn't had done the energy project). But again, you must do your homework before doing what I did. You might not be in a good situation to do this (i.e. good climate for solar, drive enough miles for the gas savings of an EV, home a lot for using power during the day when the sun is out, including charging the EV usually in the day, etc.)

Will I replace the EV battery at the recommended 10 years? It depends. Will we still use it for most of our long trips? By then my old gas pickup might need replacing anyway, so we might have a newer vehicle than the EV for long trips. Thus, we'll have no need to make the EV have a long enough range for trips, just using it mainly for local driving. (No need to replace the battery.) Or perhaps my old gas pickup will still be good for what it does for us (after all we don't drive it nearly as much now). And perhaps replacing the EV battery will be cheaper than it is now. I dunno. For now I assumed it'll be about $17K on the 10-year anniversary of owning the EV (adjusting for a 3% inflation rate, which is low, but it's the same inflation rate I use to calculate rising energy costs to give me a pessimistic outlook). Again, the gas savings of an EV is the local driving done with home charged miles. Last year we drove the EV 26K miles, with 16K of those being home charged miles. The home charged miles don't require a long range, thus I may not replace the EV battery if its purpose is to keep getting the gas and oil change savings of home charged miles.

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