Watch Out Tesla Semi Truck - The Nikola Tre FCEV Runs On Hydrogen AND I Drive it!

the future is here or is it this is why I'm right here in Coolidge Arizona to test drive a brand new all-new Nikola fuel cell electric semi truck in this video I'm gonna take this truck on a short drive I'm gonna show you the interface how it works all of the gauges and tell you all the specifications for this brand new truck can it actually work for 500 Mile trips with a giant trailer let's figure this out together [Music] Ryan could you please introduce yourself for the audience my name is Ryan Barnhart I am Nicole test track coordinator here at Nicola in Coolidge Arizona Sweet and we are in VIN number two correct because you've begun production on your hydrogen fuel cell electric semi truck yes correct and this is what I'm driving yes yep Yep this is pretty exciting it really is okay so in technology and the speed at which that this company's been developing is is it's really exciting this truck is equipped with air brakes obviously yeah because not just electric motor and batteries and fuel cell and a lot of complicated things and I can see my PSI so yeah there's two systems still primary and secondary yeah and so sustainable like our air suspension too as well so we have the pneumatic system that and it's very similar to like your conventionals let me just show that really quick so here is my Dash this is a pretty large screen a very large digital display yep um here's my air pressures you know 147 PSI I also have some battery and Fuel Cell temperature yep so similar to kind of like a temperature gauge on your normal passenger vehicles right where you have your your temperature for say your transmission or your temperature for your engine right engine oil temperature that's what we're trying to offer the drivers here so if they're stressing the vehicle out you can actually watch your high voltage battery temperatures and so you're monitoring that you have that gauge to let you know if you're starting to get kind of hot it changes colors and the fuel cell right it's just like any other normal vehicle as you start to stress it out when you have a low and you're pulling up a hill something like that you're going to watch those temperatures fluctuate and increase this just gives the driver more information to know how to adjust if they need to that's very important I think all truck drivers love information right because you're you know combined weight 82 000 pounds potentially correct and you want to have as much information as possible so let's get going okay so I can release my brake right so with their foot on the brake yeah you're gonna press a yellow hold that down for a second wait for those lights to go off then you're going to pull the red one hold that one for five seconds wait for those lights to go off so what we're doing here is we're telling the truck that we don't have a trailer we're gonna actually put the truck into bobtail mode so you hear the audible tone we now have that little Banner that comes up on the left side of our instrument panel saying hey bump down bobtail right so this way let's say a driver accidentally does that when they have a trailer on saying hey are you sure you want to be in boxing mode yes I am perfect okay now we're just gonna hit the D button hold it down for a split second we're going to look in the bottom right of our history panel it's going to show us that one now in D and drive and then just move the foot from the brake press the accelerator pedal and I also notice there's also a driver assistance Technologies I noticed there's a little blind spot monitor right yep we have our we have our blind spot detectors that are active we have our active Lane uh assist so as not a sensor but it's more of a uh acknowledgment so as you start to Veer into Lane it's going to let you know that hey yeah you're too far to left or you're too far to the right if you look at that blue bar there that's going to be our following distance for adaptive cruise control and so as the driver is getting up and operational and they're following their truck they can set up their speed they can set up their following distance all right so we all know that electric vehicles have a lot of horsepower and a lot of torque potential and they're effortless to accelerate and it's true here as well this Central axle in the back is the drive axle or e-axle because the electric motor is sitting basically in the middle there are actually two Motors uh they work either together or you know one is maybe applying a little bit more power than the other if there's a traction situation that you're trying to manage traction control and stability there's also a button to engage basically a differential lock which is a software way of synchronizing the motors and actually putting power equally to both axles so you have that ability as well this is just a tag axle but total horsepower is around 600 plus so this is very similar to a current powerful diesel tractor semi-trailer and well we'll have to tow a trailer with this to really find out how much torque or how much speed this can gain and how far it can go but here's some other numbers for this fuel cell orientation there are two lithium ion batteries here in the center between the frame rails for Combined about 164 kilowatt hours of energy that doesn't sound like a lot because it's not supposed to be that battery capacity is basically a buffer because the fuel cell takes the hydrogen converts it to electricity exhausts a little bit of water provides electricity for the batteries and then batteries can drive the motor to push the vehicle onwards of course there's also regenerative braking the motor can put the energy back into the battery so the battery is smallish for this type of vehicle but this holds 70 kilograms of hydrogen it doesn't sound like a lot but that's 70 kilograms can provide electricity to push the strut with maximum load for about 500 miles they say so right now we're not moving very fast you know that was about 20 miles an hour to a little bit lower speed so is region braking still kind of engaged no right now it's off so if you look at the right side of the speedometer you'll see where it says off yeah if you take the little handle over here on the right side and you slide it toward you you see it says level one you can bring it down and you can slowly increase it all the way up to level six okay well let me go like level three kind of in the middle I'm going to accelerate here you can feel just how quickly it gets up to speed it's not something you would expect from a Class A vehicle right and now let me increase my region braking so it's basically also like one pedal driving it's not in a way yeah it's it's kind of giving us that ability to say I can conserve my foundational breaks right and so in those type of scenarios we want to lean more on the region because again we're reclaiming some of that energy we're building up our high voltage SOC and then we're not stressing out our foundational brains as much and then there's also an indication of my total energy right so we actually have our high voltage level right so if you look to the left of the speedometer that's telling us our high voltage battery system is at this right that's kind of like our Reserve or our high voltage and we also have our hydrogen level two as well so if you click on the little molecule on the 17 inch screen top left corner there that'll tell us how much hydrogen we have in the truck too as well so 37 hydrogen capacity and it says about 156 miles of range is that based on the current driving style is it kind of learning yeah because this is not a normal driving style I mean this is like a city City situation right well yeah especially with all the pedestrians walking around jumping on the curbs yeah it actually is like a city situation but I mean if we were on the highway you know we're just constant speed steady state speed with the load I mean then we'll it will recalculate it'll kind of learn as well as far as you know what what we're doing so this is what it's like to get into the new Nikola fuel cell electric truck as you just saw this is kind of a manual operation I could move the seat back or forward very easy there's a little lever it's pretty standard then there's a button on the floor I don't know if you could see this kind of rubberized button I can push that and I can actually move the steering wheel just to make it just the way I like it and of course you could drive this truck traditionally kind of in this almost like a bus fashion right you could tilt it forward towards you and drive it a little bit like a like a regular pickup truck or a car so you have all those options there's a very large digital display it's almost like an iPad here in front of me and there's almost like a television sized all right computer monitor size screen right here to the right and let me show you all the features and what they do so on the left side we have our truck settings and so if you look here we have the nice little animation right so this little button here that looks kind of like the fueling nozzle so when we go to actually fuel hydrogen we're going to hit that and it's going to actually set the truck up so it opens up the fuel door so then we can actually fuel with our hydrogen if we look at the little weight right here that's going to let us know how much weight is on our axle so then when we go to get a trailer you'll see the numbers increase so the driver has an idea of how much weight is actually on the axle and how much does this tractor just by itself weigh about 26 000 pounds about 26. and how do you know the weight is there like a little uh height sensor or yeah our electronically controlled air suspension actually it has the sensors in it and so we have our height sensors and then the pressure in the bags that are actually giving readings to our our control unit that's going to then display it over here so it gives you a really good idea about that yes okay great and then over here so for our drivers that are going to do their pre-trip inspections they can hit this little light button with the check it's going to activate all the lights on the truck and the reverse buzzer so they can get out and they can just do a quick walk around right they don't need to come over and hit the hazard button and then hit the turn signals and then check the brake and all that stuff they hit that it activates all them and then they're gonna actually just be able to walk around so again we're just trying to make it a little bit more efficient there we have our different cameras front camera rear camera if we hit the air conditioning so if we hit our temperature setting we actually have all of our HVAC controls here and so we can adjust those there our fan speeds here all our vents there if you want to turn the AC off on or off that's right there to be coming to our settings this is where the cooler parts are for me I like these because this is actually giving us information about the truck right so this is telling us what software version we're on we're doing a lot of the software updates over the air and so as the driver's driving the truck they might see a little blue cloud pop up over here right that's telling them that hey software is getting pushed down into the truck as they come over here when the truck is now static you'll see an update button highlight and then you can push that and then it updates the truck to whatever necessary levels it needs to be at down here we have our tire pressure so this way you have your tire pressures getting checked right there just give us like okay and so the drivers can go through real quick and this way instead of going out and kicking it and punching it they can just come right here and say hey here's an active display oh my pressures arrived so this way I know I'm good to go onto the road it's very important because if one like an inner is at a different pressure than an outer yep you could have big problems yeah right absolutely yeah we come to our settings over here you can see the traction control we talked about earlier you can actually turn it off if you need to right so if you're in a gravel lot or something along the lines and you need to be able to get some momentum of then the traction control might be a little bit too aggressive you can actually turn that off okay let's say you're going through like San Francisco and you need some Hill holes right so you're getting stuck on these Hills all the time yeah you can activate the little hold so that when you come to a stop when you let off the brake you don't just roll back like a manual it'll hold the brakes for you until you can get your foot over to accelerator and start building some momentum there so you can turn that on and off there here's our diff lock you can adjust that automatic brakes so let's say you're running low on hydrogen right but you have 90 high voltage and you say okay I'm too far away from the hydrogen filling side you can switch over to EV mode and you can drive in EV mode for an extended period of time and you're not using your hydrogen how much capacity is that like over 700 kilowatt hours or but it's going to be dependent upon how many how much SOC you have okay so as you're driving along right you're using that that battery SOC to continue moving so it kind of depends on what the locals at where you're at there let's say the technician needs to tilt the cab or you need to look for thermal fluid you're going to access that here set the vehicle up and then you can tilt the cab but there's an option there here's our sunroof that we talked about earlier we can actually pop the hatch open and so let's say you don't want the windows open but you want a little bit of airflow you can actually vent that open and so you get a little bit more airflow there too or wiper settings and stuff there we get into our settings or our systems and so let's say you're on the northern border you're going between Canada and the US you can switch between us and Metric there I tend to choose a 24-hour clock that's just my personal setting and then you have some of your other brightness and audio settings in here and so it's very streamlined right you have the two sides and then five setting menus and so it's navigation as well yeah yeah and the map navigation as well here yep and then this is where your your radio and your your Bluetooth would be so if you want to connect your phone you can go through that you have your fm and then like you said the state of charge of hydrogen and of course the phone integration yeah so if you want to make your phone yeah stuff like that yeah and what is the total range I I saw some information about 500 Miles yeah is that fully loaded up to 500 Miles correct fully loaded full gross combined weights on a few on a full fuel cell yes yeah with 100 fuel hydrogen capacity one of my favorite things is how easy it is yeah there is almost no effort right yeah and so you're actually like kind of one-handed as you go through some of these things and I love that because it makes the Driving Experience better right because you can focus more on what's going on yeah Less on ah this truck is it's fighting me oh I'm in this turn this is a little bit harder and stuff like that and so I love that and that's one of those things that again as the drivers are driving it they're experiencing that and they can actually focus on what's happening more and not so much on oh the truck is doing this and the truck is doing that and I can focus on just getting my little car I need to go and I noticed when I was accelerating the traction control light is blinking a little bit is that because we're losing a little bit of traction so as you start to accelerate harder yeah the truck is gonna say okay hold on let's maintain accelerate maintain here so it's kind of like your abs too when you're going to slow down you want to make sure you maintain as much grip as possible so well also there's no weight of the trailer down on the axle yeah and that's part of with the power right we have with the electronic Motors the electric motors you have so much torque that you have to be mindful of that right we don't want to have drivers doing burnouts and things like that trying to conserve those tires and so putting in those safety features like traction control is going to help them conserve that and help the driver stay safe in maintain control over the vehicle and this is only two wheel drive right there's one one axle is power yes it's one yeah one driver one axle power yeah so it'd be a six by two so there's two positions of drive that are going up yeah yeah this is a cab over style truck what does that mean that means the axle is basically underneath my seat not in front of me and there's no hood sticking out in front of me as well obviously so the visibility is quite good this is the only cab that currently Nikola is building actually they're partnered with iveco and they have many other partners that they work with on multiple components like the fuel cell the batteries the electric motor and more but as a trucker you want storage and this truck let me stand up for just a second yeah storage and actually I'm just about 6'3 and look I can fully stand up and there's there's shades for this sunroof here and this is a day cab which means it doesn't have a sleeping it doesn't have a sleeper cab so it's basically for shorter trips and they say 500 miles so it's really really a regional Hall type of truck let me sit down again and you have plenty of storage you have another compartment here and on the other side you have cab lights you have some blanks maybe you have some other features coming in the future you have pretty huge look at this sun visors you also have little side visor so they really thought about many many different many different aspects of it there's also a little track here along the top I believe for a curtain so obviously this cap can be used for multiple types of uses you could extend it in the future to make a sleeper cab so if you want to fully enclose this cab with a curtain you will probably be able to do that in the future just not quite yet recently Roman and Tommy bottom Ford Model T and 1915 and that little car truck had two horns this also has two horns main horn smaller Electric so it's just for different uses you know if you're on a highway you can use this main horn if you're in the city and if you need to alert somebody of your presence if this truck is really too quiet then you can use this horn but I did notice that the fan for the cooling system of the fuel cell is an electric fan it spins up pretty heavily and you could hear it when it's on you can hear it from a long ways away I know I've also done videos about using cameras for side mirrors but still here in the US we have regulations for Mirror size and that you're actually supposed to have side mirrors and this truck doesn't disappoint my goodness there's so much Vision here I love how the convex Mirror Works I can see my axle below me and how it turns and of course down the side of my vehicle on both sides there's a lot of software integration with this truck as well so this is my air brake system release and my trailer brake system and I can run in bobtail mode like I've been doing with Ryan and it's all integrated into the system there's certain modes and also a way to kind of simplify some of these features and this is my transmission in uh switch right here neutral Drive In Reverse my start and stop is right here so it really feels like uh like any pickup truck or any modern car this is what I was talking about they have sensors here on the side of the truck to help with blind spot monitoring this truck is also equipped with Lane departure warning system and also accident avoiding in the front accident braking system and cameras so this truck has a lot of technology to help the driver but at least right now not replacing the driver I'm in the front here you may hear the fan it's slowed down a lot but this has a large Grill area so what they've done with this iteration of the truck for the fuel cell they move the front of it a little bit forward to make way for this large radiator to exchange all the heat but by doing that they also made it a little bit more aerodynamic by elongating the front just a little bit so it's a little bit more efficient more aerodynamic now and allows a lot of airflow through the system it's still a big truck moving a lot of weight so so if you thought a semi truck like this would be a fully closed front with no radiators that's not the case yeah and right now you have one cap configuration this is the cab yep that's currently it's both right Ben and fuel cell would have the same exact cab interior and even when you look at the screens they're relatively the same the main big difference is going to be having your hydrogen versus your battery SOC right so one of the nice things is let's say a fleet has both vehicles and a driver has to switch between the two say you know for their first loads they're running into a city and they're going to use their their full battery electric vehicle and then the next one they're actually gonna go Hub to HUB and they need to drive the fuel cell when they get in and look at screens everything's here they're going to be the same so this way there's less of that learning curve right less of that transition in between the two they don't have to translate between it's like oh which one am I in again they're going to get in they're gonna look at it and be like oh yeah it's the same displays so getting in starting it up operating it it's all the same all right so now I go into neutral correct all you gotta do is pull the yellow okay that puts the truck back into neutral sets the parking brakes and it's as simple as that so it's just like one operation like not multiple operations you're trying to make it more efficient right exactly right that's not decreasing that learning curve so as the drivers get into it even if they're a conventional driver and they haven't driven a truck for a while you get in just as much more like a passenger get in setting yourself up start the truck release the brakes hit drive and you're gone and we're hearing a fan right is that because I was getting on it a little bit yeah so that's our thermal system right as your battery levels start to go up and you feel so levels go up because as the ambient temperature starts to increase those thermal systems are gonna come in and out right just like a normal passenger vehicle or a normal Truck those thermal systems are there to protect your powertrain awesome I appreciate your uh overview and those uh really good driving experience I appreciate that I appreciate for your time thanks I have driven several electrified semi trucks already in limited fashion and I can tell you some of those trucks were prototypes and they seemed like they had certain things that were not quite finished this particular one they're already selling these so they better be finished and I can tell you right here right now that it feels like a full package everything works like it should the steering adjust the seat adjusts there is no extra noises yes the fan is pretty noisy that's the cooling fan for the fuel cell but other than that it's a seamless drive it's really easy to operate so I'm really really surprised by that and also pleased but this is not a full review because I did not pull a trailer I did not go long distance all of those things are still coming so come back to alltfl.com for a lot more real world truck testing including the new Nikola fuel cell electric semi truck because I want to do a range test with a trailer I want to compare it to a diesel tractor I want to do the eye Gauntlet World toughest Towing test and that is still to come thanks for joining me I'll see you next time

Channel: The Fast Lane Truck

Views: 125,461

Keywords: TFLtruck, nikola, hydrogen, nikola motors, nikola tre hydrogen, nikola tre, nikola tre bev, nikola tre fcev, hydrogen trucks, hydrogen fuel cell, nikola semi, nikola trucks, nikola tre interior, nikola tre bev truck, hydrogen economy, nikola tesla, nikola energy, nikola corporation, tre bev, nikola manufacturing, #hydrogen, hydrogen vehicles, hydrogen companies, hydrogen stocks, hyla, wall street, first drive, review, fuel cell ev, fuel cell, tesla semi, electric semi

Id: Gpm8SNYw0yg

Length: 22min 42sec (1362 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 04 2023