Nikola Badger Prototype Reportedly Ripped off Ford F-150 Raptor
The failed Nikola Badger project even fooled General Motors, which held a $2 billion dollar stake in the company.
Many will undoubtedly remember the Nikola Badger, a failed all-electric/hydrogen fuel cell pickup that appeared during the great EV pickup race not too terribly long ago. Out of that fray, the only proposed product that’s actually being produced by a non-legacy automaker at the moment is the Rivian R1T, but Nikola managed to swindle inventors – including GM, which acquired a $2 billion dollar stake in the company and was going to produce the Badger for it. Now that Nikola CEO Trevor Milton is standing trial for his alleged crimes, a pretty interesting tidbit arose in court this week – that the Nikola Badger prototype used Ford F-150 Raptor parts in its construction, according to Bloomberg.
Apparently, this all happened because Milton was trying to rush the development process of the Nikola Badger in an effort to not only secure funds from investors, but also so that he could begin taking reservations for the truck. True to form, the company began taking $5,000 deposits for that privilege in June 2020, before it even had a working prototype or a place to manufacture the production model.
At the same time Milton was claiming that the Nikola Badger would steal the sales crown from the Ford F-150, his team was pirating parts from one to piece together a prototype, along with parts from its own power sports vehicle, also an unfinished prototype that it was working on. This was done in an effort to speed up the process after Milton imposed a deadline on the team that made it impossible to develop those parts from scratch.
These claims aren’t just heresy, apparently, as text messages exchanged between design lead Brendan Babiarz and project lead Michael Erickson paint a picture of someone who wasn’t really interested in ever producing a real vehicle. “I told Trevor on Thursday we are at least 6-8 weeks from any tooling starting,” Babiarz told Erickson in one message. “I know,” Erickson responded. “Haha Trevor doesn’t let facts or details get in the way of a good story.”
Milton is currently facing a host of wire fraud and securities charges after he reportedly presented non-running vehicles as viable products and lied about the technology and partnerships Nikola had with other companies, which could land him up to 25 years in prison if convicted. As for the Badger, well, it obviously never made it to production, and those that plunked down a deposit on one or who invested in the company in general have learned a hard lesson about ambitious upstart EV makers.
Photos: Nikola
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