MULN stock declines on Friday despite lower trading volume
- Mullen stock falls sharply at end of week.
- Volume is tapering off for MULN over past 10 sessions.
- Mullen to hold event in Mississippi for first production of Mullen Three.
- Bollinger Motors is also releasing its B4 cab chassis.
Mullen Automotive (MULN) stock is selling off by 6% on Friday, despite a generally advancing market. The NASDAQ, S&P 500 and Dow Jones are all up between 0.2% and 0.3% starting the final session of the week.
MULN is set to render its least volatile week in three months if Friday is a low-volume, consolidating session. MULN stock has dropped 4.2% this week through Thursday, which would be its calmest week since mid-April.
One of the most popular penny stocks among traders, MULN typically trades directionally at least 10% over the course of a week and often more than 20%. Barchart.com, for instance, estimates the MULN beta at 2.17, meaning that it is more than twice as volatile as the overall market.
Though the week has not finished yet, volume thus far is below the past five weeks. Trading volume has been tapering off since the first full week of July.
Mullen stock news: EV semi truck cabs rule the summer
On Thursday, Mullen announced a date for a launch event held to celebrate the unveiling of its Mullen Three cab chassis electric semi truck. The event will be held on August 24 and will feature factory tours, executive presentations and vehicle demonstrations.
The event will take place at Mullen’s 120,000-square-foot Tunica, Mississippi plant, where it builds both the Mullen Three and its Mullen One electric delivery van.
“We are now in the final stages of vehicle production readiness and look forward to customer deliveries,” said CEO David Michery. “We are excited to open up the Tunica assembly plant for tours and vehicle demonstrations.”
The Mullen Three is a class 3 commercial vehicle that comes with an 11,000 gross vehicle weight rating and 130 miles of battery range. This truck can pull bodies up to 14 feet long that weigh over 5,800 lbs. The semi features a tight turning diameter of 38 feet.
Additionally, on Thursday, Mullen’s majority-owned subsidiary Bollinger Motors announced that it had begun pilot production of its class 4 electric chassis cab. The vehicle would compete with the Mullen Three but beats it on most metrics. The B4, as it’s called, can carry a payload of 7,080 lbs and has a battery range of 185 miles.
Bollinger Motors will complete the first five vehicles by the end of August and a total of 20 units by the end of the third quarter. The company is building these vehicles in partnership with Roush Industries at its plant in Livonia, Michigan.
Bollinger B4 Chassis Cab
EV stocks FAQs
Electric vehicles or EVs are automobiles that use rechargable batteries and electric motors to accelerate rather than internal combustion engines (ICEs). They have been around for more that 100 years, but battery technology research & development was meager for much of the 20th century. Lithium-ion battery technology became advanced enough to produce EVs at scale in the late 1990s and 2000s, and sales have been steadily increasing since then Tesla’s Roadster was unveiled in 2008. EVs are viewed as a means of reducing carbon emissions since battery electric vehicles (BEVs) themselves produce zero emissions. Other vehicles called plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) utilize both battery electric power and ICEs as a backup.
EVs are growing from a small base, but they rose from 9% of global new auto sales in 2021 to 14% of the total in 2022. This was a 65% YoY growth rate, and the industry delivered 10.2 million EVs worldwide in 2022. Projections show this number climbing above 16 million in 2023. Across the world, market shares differ greatly among nations. Nearly 88% of Norwegian new car sales in 2022 were EVs. On the other hand, the United States, where much of the modern innovation in EVs was forged, had less than 8% of new vehicle sales go to EVs in 2022. The largest EV market in the world, China, saw 30% of the market go to EVs that year.
We know you’re thinking Elon Musk, but he’s probably more like the father of the mass-market, contemporary EV. All the way back in 1827, a Hungarian priest named Anyos Jedlik invented the electric motor and used it the following year to power a vehicle of sorts. French scientist Gaston Planté invented the lead-acid battery in 1859, and German engineer Andreas Flocken built the first true electric car for the public in 1888. EVs made up about 38% of all vehicles sold in the US around 1900. They began losing market share rapidly after 1910 when gasoline-powered vehicles grew much more affordable. They largely died off until new research programs in the 1990s led to gradual private sector investment in the 2000s.
China’s BYD is by far the largest manufacturer of EVs in the world. In 2022 it sold 1.8 million EVs and in the second half of the year made up 20% of the global market. The asterisk given to BYD is that the vast majority of these vehicles are hybrids. Tesla’s 12% market share is often treated as more significant than BYD, because it only sells BEVs and is the most famous EV brand in the world. Volkswagen, BMW and Wuling then round out the top five. As a new sector with heavy investment though, many startups have flooded the market. These include China’s Nio, Li Auto and Xpeng; a Swedish-Chinese manufacturer called Polestar; and Lucid and Rivian from the US.