Poor ol’ Nikola can’t catch a break; earlier this year, it had to issue a recall for every single electric truck that it has built because it identified a coolant leak that caused the battery to burst into flames. Except, it turns out the problem wasn’t actually that simple. Now it’s going to take $61.8 million to replace the batteries in all of those recalled trucks.
See, Nikola did a little digging and realized that the batteries were plagued with issues that went well beyond the previously identified coolant issues, the company wrote in a blog post.
“Upon further investigation, it was determined that the compromise of the battery packs was not limited to only the coolant manifold. As a result, our team has decided to replace the Romeo packs on existing customer battery-electric trucks with an alternative solution,” it wrote. Nikola owns Romero Power; therefore, it takes on the entire cost of this recall itself.
Even though Nikola hasn’t exactly produced a ton of vehicles, those big truck batteries are pretty expensive, and it looks like it’ll cost the company $61.8 million to re-engineer, validate, and retrofit the trucks in question.
Alas! Nikola seems to be turning tack anyway, since it announced the delivery of its hydrogen-powered trucks two months ago. It has 277 orders from 35 customers already, all located in California. Here’s hoping the fuel cell EVs work a little bit more efficiently than the battery EVs the company first broke into the market with.