He recruited a friend who lived in Utah to drive out to the road, stop at the top of a hill and put his Honda Pilot in neutral. So I was thinking, well, how steep is 3%?īen Foldy: Paul says he knew a 3% decline meant the road could appear level to the naked eye, but he wondered if it was steep enough that an unpowered truck would roll down it? To answer this question, Paul, ever the engineer, designed a simple experiment. Paul Lackey: I went to the terrain feature on Google Maps and found that it had a 3% grade for three miles. I was convinced this had to be the road.īen Foldy: Paul kept clicking around Google Maps, seeing what else he could learn about this road. As I was going down this road, I was getting more and more excited because the mountains were lining up and everything looked right.
Paul Lackey: I started going up frame by frame. Paul says he started essentially driving down the road using the Google Street View feature, comparing it to the video. Paul Lackey: I just started looking at roads, looking for a long road, and there was this one really long straight road that almost immediately stood out.īen Foldy: That stretch that caught Paul's eye, it's called the Mormon Trail Road. Paul Lackey: I got out Google Maps and started looking at the video, all the different angles, seeing where the mountains were, and I got a sense of where it had to be.īen Foldy: Paul says he quickly narrowed the options down to the western side of Salt Lake Valley. If he was right that Nikola hadn't gotten the truck fully operational, he figured Nikola would've shot the video close to home. That was where Paul had worked on the truck and where he had last seen it, right before the Nikola One reveal in 2016. Paul Lackey: I sent a message to my friend saying, "Okay, how did they do the Nikola in Motion video?" And he said, "Well, what I heard was that they took it to the top of a hill and rolled it down." That hadn't occurred to me at all, but it completely made sense the second he said that, and so I resolved to find out where they had done this.īen Foldy: Paul says the first place he looked was around Salt Lake City. But that was a lot of work, and that's the end of what I thought about that.īen Foldy: But in August of 2020, after his frustration with Trevor grew to the point that he launched the Nikola Insider Twitter account, Paul returned to this mystery. Paul Lackey: I hadn't talked to anybody from there for almost a year, and so I texted my friend and asked, "Hey, did you get this truck up and running?" He said, "No, it hasn't been touched since the show." I was like, okay, that must have been green screen. He had wondered what had gone on inside Nikola in the months after he'd left. It showed the truck traveling at a high rate of speed down what appeared to be a flat road.īen Foldy: Paul says he was perplexed because the last time he'd seen the truck, it was an unfinished prototype that couldn't be driven. The gleaming white truck seemed to be barreling down the two land road surrounded by sage brush and Rocky Mountains. Paul Lackey: My first thought was, did they get that thing working?īen Foldy: In the video, it sure looked like they did. We mentioned this moment in episode three.
The tweet read "Behold, the Nikola One in motion." It showed the truck cruising down a desert highway. It was a video posted on the Nikola Company Twitter account back in January of 2018. How did it make a truck that couldn't drive zoom down a highway? That mystery had long puzzled Paul Lackey, the engineer from Oregon who helped build that truck, Nikola's first prototype, the Nikola One.Ībout a year after the big unveiling of that truck, Paul saw a video that he says left him bewildered. A detail that meant solving one of Nikola's biggest mysteries.
I'm going to start this episode with what became the most explosive detail in the Hindenburg report. Nikola said after Trevor's conviction that it was pleased to move on and focus on executing its business strategy. They haven't answered any of our questions for this podcast. We should note, after his conviction in October on Federal fraud charges, both Trevor and his lawyers have pledged to keep fighting. This episode tells a story of that report's release and the strange events that followed, including a confrontation involving secret recordings and private eyes. Could it convince the market that Trevor Milton was a liar? The team was preparing to put its research on the line. In the last episode, the Hindenburg team was almost done crafting its report on Nikola. This version may not be in its final form and may be updated.īen Foldy: From the Wall Street Journal, this is Bad Bets. This transcript was prepared by a transcription service.
0 kommentar(er)
