Quote:
Originally Posted by Galane
This R&D is all fine etc, but if you can't come up with a truck using it all that will sell at a price that will make the payback come in at no longer time than a current conventional truck, nobody is going to buy them because they won't see any savings, unless the price of diesel goes crazy high.
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When I initially started this project in 2014, I had envisioned my company becoming a niche OEM, building 5, 10, 25, or maybe 50 hyper fuel mileage Class 8 trucks per year for various enlightened customers.
The heavy duty truck industry has completely changed since then.
There is now Tesla, Nikola, platooning, autonomous vehicles, Amazon, and billions of dollars of venture capital have arrived. Smart people have figured out what was obvious to me for almost four decades. That big trucks get so poor fuel mileage and run so many miles, one can save a ton of dough by doing things differently.
So this will be the last truck that I build. But I have other cool projects in mind after we run the StarShip all around the country in 2018.