Bosch on Wednesday introduced a $200 million funding to construct hydrogen fuel-cell stacks for Class 8 semi vans at its Anderson, South Carolina, facility.
Manufacturing is scheduled to begin in 2026, and work has already begun on upgrades that embody including an estimated 147,000 sq. ft of ground house for fuel-cell manufacturing and associated operations, Bosch mentioned in a press launch.
Nikola Tre
Bosch is an investor in Nikola, and the once-troubled fuel-cell car firm plans to make use of its fuel-cell tech. The Nikola Tre semi lately accomplished a testing program with Anheuser-Busch in California, through which prototype vans logged over 12,000 miles and hauled two million kilos of freight, the discharge famous, including that Nikola is continuous pilot testing with Whole Transportation Companies Inc.
Nikola plans to assemble manufacturing variations of the Tre at its personal Arizona manufacturing facility, but it surely’s additionally contracting with truck maker IVECO to have automobiles assembled at that agency’s German manufacturing facility. Nikola had been favoring Normal Motors because the provider for hydrogen fuel-cell {hardware} in North America, with Bosch for Europe. GM had additionally been slated to construct Nikola’s Badger fuel-cell pickup.
Nikola Badger
That every one modified when founder Trevor Milton was charged with securities fraud, and a broad memorandum of understanding between the businesses was changed by a much more restricted partnership.
Though gasoline cells are shifting to vans, quite than passenger automobiles, Bosch may present U.S.-built gasoline cells to different truckmakers. It added gasoline cells to its portfolio as a part of a broad shift within the shadow of the VW diesel scandal that concerned the provider’s complicity in emissions “defeat units,” and now plans to speculate $1 billion in fuel-cell tech by 2024.
