It has been revealed that Nikola founder Trevor Milton announced that the company’s planned hydrogen pickup truck would have a drinking fountain inside without consulting the carmaker’s engineers.
Milton was recently indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice and prosecutors have revealed that when he said the Badger would produce “nice cold, clean, pure drinking water” in a tweet in June 2020, he didn’t even know if something like this was possible. He also claimed the Badger would create its own windshield washer fluid.
Prosecutors allege that several days after making this tweet, Milton jumped online to see if it was even possible to create a drinking fountain in a hydrogen vehicle, searching ‘can you drink water from a fuel cell?’ on the internet.
Read More: Nikola Founder Trevor Milton Indicted For Fraud By U.S. Department Of Justice
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission reports that Nikola employees were caught off guard by Milton’s announcement, Auto News reports.
“When informed of the tweets, one engineer questioned whether ‘this [is] a joke,’ a marketing employee wrote this his ‘head is fuzzy,’ and a designer texted, ‘[u]hhhhh what,’ the SEC wrote.
The Department of Justice claims that from November 2019 to September 2020, Milton schemed to defraud investors into buying shares of the company and did so through misleading statements about the company’s products, technology, and future sales potential. At the peak value of Nikola’s shares, Milton was one of the top 100 wealthiest individuals on earth. Nikola’s value also briefly surpassed that of Ford and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles on the back of claims that it had secured over $10 billion in pre-orders.
