Nikola Corporation, a designer and manufacturer of heavy-duty commercial battery-electric vehicles (BEV), fuel-cell electric vehicles (FCEV) and energy infrastructure solutions, has been awarded an approximate $2-million grant from the US Department of Energy to advance research into autonomous refueling technologies for future hydrogen fueling stations.

Autonomous fueling is part of the industry’s effort to ensure fast, efficient, and safe fueling of a large onboard storage system to be less than 20 minutes for heavy-duty vehicles. This project is expected to address this goal by working to develop an autonomous fueling system that can rapidly refuel heavy-duty fuel-cell electric trucks, while minimizing labor and challenges relating to ergonomics and maintenance of equipment, as compared to an equivalent manual fueling process.

The grant is funded by the US Department of Energy’s Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) Transportation Office under the recently announced Hydrogen and Fuel Cells R&D FY2021 FOA.

Nikola is committed to designing and building hydrogen fueling stations, as well as helping to develop, test, and standardize fueling hardware to facilitate the widespread adoption of heavy-duty fuel-cell electric trucks.