Tesla claims they will "ramp up" production to 50,000 units per year. When does the 100th unit roll off the line? Let's see some actuals. Tesla's volume and delivery time estimates do not have a good history of reliability. Volvo has 5,000 electric semitrucks on the road right now.
Tesla also announced that MDB Drayage is using Tesla tractors to haul container chassis around the Port of Los Angeles.[1] But the pictures show a Tesla tractor hauling an ordinary box semitrailer, not a container on a container chassis. The MDB Drayage is just a three-week test, too. Drayage is almost the ideal use.
Pepe's Towing, the heavy towing company in LA with a very popular YouTube channel, has two questions for drivers whose trucks need to be recovered or uprighted - "What's your cargo?", and "How much does it weigh?". (Pepe's comments that most drivers who roll over a truck cannot answer either question, which has a lot to do with why they rolled over.)
Since cargo is enclosed on most semis, assuming identical trailers load doesn't really matter. Aging Wheels has a video on testing that in the silverado ev and got about 5%: https://www.youtu.be/UmKf8smvGsA
That is just plain wrong. There is a reason why all EV companies, including Tesla obsess over energy density, and it’s because load is one of the biggest factors that affects range.
Forget EVs, load also affects range for traditional Semis. Do you seriously think an empty semi and one with a shipping container on the tow, would both have the same range?
> That is just plain wrong. There is a reason why all EV companies, including Tesla obsess over energy density, and it’s because load is one of the biggest factors that affects range.
Energy density is energy per unit of volume. Every company obsesses over that because volume is the limiting factor for getting energy in a vehicle.
Energy specificity (energy by unit of weight) is only relevant to planes, no EV company gives much of a fuck about it. Would they like it if batteries were lighter? Absolutely. Would they take a heavier battery if it was denser? In a heartbeat.
> Forget EVs, load also affects range for traditional Semis.
There are major differences between a traditional prime mover and an electric one: electric motors don’t have the divergent torque/power curve of ICE, or the choked low end, and moving a load is kinetic energy which EVs can largely convert back into electricity instead of losing it entirely. So the inefficiencies related to getting the load moving largely go away.
Well arguing load isn’t a factor and the real limitation is the volume is still wrong. EVs aren’t infinite in size and real world constraints exist. At the end of the day, your semi cannot be 90% battery and ferry only a pallet of chips.
Total energy spent on moving an object by a distance is still proportional to the mass of the object. So if you’re absolutely spending more energy hauling 10000lbs vs 100lbs.
The only point where the cargo is relatively immaterial to the range is when it is a very small percentage of the actual weight of the vehicle. But that doesn’t mean the vehicle is efficient. It’s just that now you’re spending more energy hauling the battery itself than the cargo. Energy density matters in semis because companies want to spend less money hauling the battery itself than the cargo to make it viable.
Being a two-time Tesla owner for 8 years, at this point, there is no claim Tesla can possibly make that I would ever believe. Their (and Elon’s) track record on countless claims have been wildly misleading at best or completely false at worst.
Trucking seems like an industry where exaggerating the range will lead to contracts being cancelled and companies being sued. I'm assuming that a Tesla Semi can't just stop off at the nearest Supercharger.
I hope so. Regardless of who does it, generations of children in Los Angeles growing up in the corridors of the 5,10,110,210,405,605,710 freeways have asthma, likely caused from the soot of diesel trucks.
Edit, couldn't leave out the worst experience in the US, i405.
Born in 1975 in LA and have asthma. I suppose I'm pretty smart compared to most, but I do wonder if they had removed leaded gasoline earlier if I would have had a few more IQ points. So, yes, please do root for electric transportation!
For semis this is irrelevant, as the GVWR is pretty much the same so EV mostly means you get limited on payload weight: in the US the feds increase GVWR limit by 2000 lbs (from 80k to 82k) for EV semis, but not every state has legalised that, and it's barely noticeable (EU has a much more aggressive bye, from 40 to 44 tonnes).
My father who owns an electric car (I don't) told me that the increased torque eats away the tires much faster. Not sure how connected to the reality that is.
A 30 minute charge means each charger can service a maximum of 48 tractors per day, and realistically probably less than that. I wonder how many trucks fill at a typical diesel filling station per day.
Have you seen the demo's of "truck pack" batteries being removed from prime mover, transferred to charge station, replaced with already charged truck pack, all done with a mini fork lift?
It's a 15 minute roll in / roll out kind of turn around.
The game's not over and the big transport operators (eg: Rio Tinto mine fleets moving a billion tonne per annum, etc) are still doing the R&D pipeline and trialling pilots.
This has been tried before for public use and failed for all of the obvious reasons.
It should get adoption from companies big enough to run their own fleets (such as the mining company mentioned) but it won't be a suitable method for a good percentage of the long haul trucks in the States.
With that said, I would think chargers should be fine for a lot of those trucks if the infrastructure builds out for them. The drivers are already taking breaks every few hours by regulation, so they can top off rather than going from empty to full.
> It's a 15 minute roll in / roll out kind of turn around.
Now you just need every gas station in the US to stock a bunch of swappable batteries for every semi brand. It's a great idea s long as you're not bound by any sort of realistic expectation.
It's a glitzy demo which has been attempted multiple times and has failed every time (to the surprise of nobody, Tesla was one of the early demo-ers, guess where that ended up?), NIO is still losing money hand over fist and survives only thanks to the CCP keeping it afloat.
> Also, not the first industry that would rely on some level of standardisation.
You'd need the standardisation first.
And making batteries field-replaceable with limited equipment means the battery modules need to be significantly more resilient, as well as more complex (not only do you need automatic disconnects for the electrics, but you also need to handle cooling), which translates to less capacity because you need room for all that, and it's harder to integrate structural support with the battery modules so the chassis also needs structural improvements there. The alternative is to automate the entire thing, which means even more complexity, and now the system needs to be aware of every vehicle involved.
The entire thing is a staggering amount of complexity to mostly lower capabilities.
I've seen Tesla's fake robots too. Maybe they can pay people who lost their jobs to DOGE to dress up in Spandex and dance like robots to replace the batteries.
But you can go 1500 miles on a full tank, so with electricity you have to account for three times as many vehicles as well (given the stated range is correct)
My first job was pumping gas at regular neighbour gas station and one day a semi rolled in because he was low on gas. He insisted that we use both diesel pumps on the pump so that it would take faster and it still took forever. I can't remember if he filled both side of his truck but if he did that would have required him to go around the island to get the other side tank.
I've only been to a cardlock station a few times but the pumps seem like regular pumps.
I just looked it up and apparently regular gas station pumps in Canada are limited to 38 L/min (10 US gal/min) but some cardlock stations can have larger pumps with a higher rate on them.
If a semi truck has two saddle tanks that's 200-300 gallons, but some trucks can apparently carry more? I'm not an expert on this, But I can reach out to a friend who owns a crane and trucking company if someone else doesn't chime in with a more detailed response.
So at 200-300 gallons and 10 gallons per minute it can take 20-30 minutes to fill a truck.
Truck stop pumps can do 30 GPM "on both sides" as they have two pumps connected to one bay.
There are faster (600 GPM or more) but those are specialized for loading boats, etc; the air can't escape the tank fast enough to use those on a truck.
I don't know about exact rates, but diesel pumps in banks intended for semis have a larger diameter nozzle that flows faster than the normal sized ones, yeah. They won't fit diesel cars/vans/light trucks.
Could they automate the "grab the charging cable and plug it in" part (as well as the "take the cable out and stow it away" part)? Trucks would then be able to just pull in, charge up and pull out quickly.
But that is the only manual step in the entire process. If a driverless truck could just pull into a charging station, automatically get topped up and be on its way without any manual intervention, that would be a game changer. One could operate such trucks basically 22hours/day, doubling the ROI.
But do they have Self Driving? A Semi with self-driving would be a game changer. I just got FSD v14.3.2 and it is quite impressive. I drove all over the Bay Area today (SF -> East Bay -> PA -> RWC -> back) and didn't have to touch the steering wheel practically at all.
They have ADAS systems. And Volvo is already working with Aurora which is doing live tests of actual self driving, similar to Waymo.
There's no news here.
Self-driving is no longer the future of Tesla. That stock pump has largely run its course, and is being replaced by AI and the robot army.
Once SpaceX goes public, SpaceX will acquire Tesla (solving Musk's control issues with Tesla stock), and that'll be the end of Musk pretending to care about cars.
It's not newsworthy. There are more than a dozen companies shipping electric semis in low quantities, and at least three who have been shipping and supporting them for years. Anybody who thinks this the Tesla Semi is notable should go learn about the existing market.
Tesla announced this thing a decade ago and they rolled one off of a theoretical line. Who cares?
There's nothing new here. There's no new information about this late-landing product. There's no story of huge guaranteed bookings, or new unexpected capabilities. It's a non-story.
As for your demand that I provide an accurate product comparison -- driver reviews routinely indicate that the 'driver at the center' seating position makes it harder for truckers to actually do their work, because they can't easily reach out their window to access terminals, perform document exchanges, etc.
So, I'll augment my position: not only is this a non-story... it's a non-story about a vehicle with a notable design flaw.
Of course its newsworthy if the company making the most electric cars in the world has setup a factory to produce semis and produced at least one after years of testing with actual customers that say they are very happy at seemingly very competitive pricing.
To say its NOT newsworthy betrays a bias against Tesla which I would assume has nothing to do with actual facts.
Indeed. Two ironies: I was just thinking about this with SpaceX getting all the practice with launches. Also, China being theoretically communist and the US theoretically capitalist, yet the US is the one with limited choice while China has so many brands.
Longuest I know of in Europe is Volvo’s claims of 700 on the new FH Aero ER. Renault and Iveco are at 600. And that would be at 90kph.
However manufacturers of euro models may not bother extending range given given the driving regulations: drivers can only drive 4.5h before a mandatory 45mn rest break, so as long as the truck does 400km[0] and can charge fast enough in 45mn to do that again afterwards[1] it’s probably going to do the job for long range trucking.
On the other hand, the eu allows electric semis to weigh 4 tonnes more than diesel, in the US it’s just 2000lbs and not every state has implemented that.
[0] 4.5h * 90kph
[1] assuming the fastest charge rates are 10~80, that means a 0-100 range of 580km to hit the sweet spot of 400km on 80~10, which matches Renault and Iveco, Volvo's FH Aero ER page talks about 20~80 which gets you to 670km
Uh...does Electrek.co not do basic math or understand how factories (and markets) are valued? This is waaaay too early to judge anything.
The "milestone that matters" is $/defect/volume. Until this factory has measurable volume and measurable costs for defects on that volume, it's not an actual factory.
Tesla is trying to escape launching the semi TEN YEARS after announcing it. Instead, they are attempting to launch a mere nine years after announcing it.
The Pepsi trials with this truck were a disaster, we’ll see if they fixed the numerous problems.
Whenever such claims were made, it was correctly pointed that Tesla makes very few models, so their sales per model may be higher than for other vendors even when the total number of sold cars is higher for their competitors, where the sales are distributed over many models.
There are Chinese vendors who sell more electric cars than Tesla.
> Toyota RAV4, the most widely sold car model in the world.
Nope.
Widely sold cars are the likes of e.g Toyota Corolla, VW Golf, Honda Civic, Ford Fiesta, Toyota Camry and Hilux. The other reply gives the link. The RAV4 isn't ones of these.
Nice.
Tesla claims they will "ramp up" production to 50,000 units per year. When does the 100th unit roll off the line? Let's see some actuals. Tesla's volume and delivery time estimates do not have a good history of reliability. Volvo has 5,000 electric semitrucks on the road right now.
Tesla also announced that MDB Drayage is using Tesla tractors to haul container chassis around the Port of Los Angeles.[1] But the pictures show a Tesla tractor hauling an ordinary box semitrailer, not a container on a container chassis. The MDB Drayage is just a three-week test, too. Drayage is almost the ideal use.
[1] https://electrek.co/2026/04/29/tesla-semi-drayage-operator-m...
The Tesla semi is the only truck with a 500 mile range. So it does have an advantage over other electric trucks for long-haul trucking.
My model 3 also “has” 350+ mile range. Barely goes 270 in the real world with conservative driving. Trucking needs a lot more.
"You're holding it wrong."
500 miles with what load?
Pepe's Towing, the heavy towing company in LA with a very popular YouTube channel, has two questions for drivers whose trucks need to be recovered or uprighted - "What's your cargo?", and "How much does it weigh?". (Pepe's comments that most drivers who roll over a truck cannot answer either question, which has a lot to do with why they rolled over.)
> 500 miles with what load?
Since cargo is enclosed on most semis, assuming identical trailers load doesn't really matter. Aging Wheels has a video on testing that in the silverado ev and got about 5%: https://www.youtu.be/UmKf8smvGsA
500 miles with what weight?
Doesn't really matter, load is a really small factor in EV range.
> load is a really small factor in EV range.
That is just plain wrong. There is a reason why all EV companies, including Tesla obsess over energy density, and it’s because load is one of the biggest factors that affects range.
Forget EVs, load also affects range for traditional Semis. Do you seriously think an empty semi and one with a shipping container on the tow, would both have the same range?
> That is just plain wrong. There is a reason why all EV companies, including Tesla obsess over energy density, and it’s because load is one of the biggest factors that affects range.
Energy density is energy per unit of volume. Every company obsesses over that because volume is the limiting factor for getting energy in a vehicle.
Energy specificity (energy by unit of weight) is only relevant to planes, no EV company gives much of a fuck about it. Would they like it if batteries were lighter? Absolutely. Would they take a heavier battery if it was denser? In a heartbeat.
> Forget EVs, load also affects range for traditional Semis.
There are major differences between a traditional prime mover and an electric one: electric motors don’t have the divergent torque/power curve of ICE, or the choked low end, and moving a load is kinetic energy which EVs can largely convert back into electricity instead of losing it entirely. So the inefficiencies related to getting the load moving largely go away.
Well arguing load isn’t a factor and the real limitation is the volume is still wrong. EVs aren’t infinite in size and real world constraints exist. At the end of the day, your semi cannot be 90% battery and ferry only a pallet of chips.
Total energy spent on moving an object by a distance is still proportional to the mass of the object. So if you’re absolutely spending more energy hauling 10000lbs vs 100lbs.
The only point where the cargo is relatively immaterial to the range is when it is a very small percentage of the actual weight of the vehicle. But that doesn’t mean the vehicle is efficient. It’s just that now you’re spending more energy hauling the battery itself than the cargo. Energy density matters in semis because companies want to spend less money hauling the battery itself than the cargo to make it viable.
Rivian an electric car company admits that towing will reduce your range. There’s a reason for that. https://rivian.com/support/article/how-does-towing-affect-ra...
For a semi? That's seems absurd.
Tesla has a history of exaggerating the ranges of their vehicles to an extent that competitors do not.
Being a two-time Tesla owner for 8 years, at this point, there is no claim Tesla can possibly make that I would ever believe. Their (and Elon’s) track record on countless claims have been wildly misleading at best or completely false at worst.
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/transportation/917167/elon-musk-tes...
Trucking seems like an industry where exaggerating the range will lead to contracts being cancelled and companies being sued. I'm assuming that a Tesla Semi can't just stop off at the nearest Supercharger.
I've read that Semis need to use a "MegaCharger" ...
big branding fail not using "gigacharger"
Megacharger because they're a Megawatt of power. 1.2MW
Try ChargeMaxing, and hitting it with a hammer.
an acceptable alternative :chefs_kiss:
they haven't gotten on the road yet, so it remains to be seen
Got source for this?
IIRC they are right in the middle of pack.
Right there at the bottom of the page: https://www.tesla.com/semi
I hope so. Regardless of who does it, generations of children in Los Angeles growing up in the corridors of the 5,10,110,210,405,605,710 freeways have asthma, likely caused from the soot of diesel trucks. Edit, couldn't leave out the worst experience in the US, i405.
Born in 1975 in LA and have asthma. I suppose I'm pretty smart compared to most, but I do wonder if they had removed leaded gasoline earlier if I would have had a few more IQ points. So, yes, please do root for electric transportation!
You can't discount the dust from the tires either unfortunately
(which electric cars and trucks also reduce, because of regenerative braking)
Doesn't regenerative braking reduce brake dust, not tire dust?
Correct. And tire dust increases because electric vehicles are usually heavier
For semis this is irrelevant, as the GVWR is pretty much the same so EV mostly means you get limited on payload weight: in the US the feds increase GVWR limit by 2000 lbs (from 80k to 82k) for EV semis, but not every state has legalised that, and it's barely noticeable (EU has a much more aggressive bye, from 40 to 44 tonnes).
I doubt that's the case in America where gas-powered cars (/ trucks) are also huge and heavy.
A Model 3 weighs less than a Ford 150.
And a mini cooper weighs less than a semi. The thread you are in is about Semis.
My father who owns an electric car (I don't) told me that the increased torque eats away the tires much faster. Not sure how connected to the reality that is.
Correct, but I would say that is user error. You don't HAVE to accelerate faster.
Increased forces from similar speeds but with more weight in cornering wears down tires more in electric cars. Less so the torque myths
A 30 minute charge means each charger can service a maximum of 48 tractors per day, and realistically probably less than that. I wonder how many trucks fill at a typical diesel filling station per day.
Have you seen the demo's of "truck pack" batteries being removed from prime mover, transferred to charge station, replaced with already charged truck pack, all done with a mini fork lift?
It's a 15 minute roll in / roll out kind of turn around.
The game's not over and the big transport operators (eg: Rio Tinto mine fleets moving a billion tonne per annum, etc) are still doing the R&D pipeline and trialling pilots.
This has been tried before for public use and failed for all of the obvious reasons.
It should get adoption from companies big enough to run their own fleets (such as the mining company mentioned) but it won't be a suitable method for a good percentage of the long haul trucks in the States.
With that said, I would think chargers should be fine for a lot of those trucks if the infrastructure builds out for them. The drivers are already taking breaks every few hours by regulation, so they can top off rather than going from empty to full.
> It's a 15 minute roll in / roll out kind of turn around.
Now you just need every gas station in the US to stock a bunch of swappable batteries for every semi brand. It's a great idea s long as you're not bound by any sort of realistic expectation.
It's a great idea, being put in practice, that's not bound by being limited to US parochial PoVs.
Also, not the first industry that would rely on some level of standardisation.
> It's a great idea, being put in practice
It's a glitzy demo which has been attempted multiple times and has failed every time (to the surprise of nobody, Tesla was one of the early demo-ers, guess where that ended up?), NIO is still losing money hand over fist and survives only thanks to the CCP keeping it afloat.
> Also, not the first industry that would rely on some level of standardisation.
You'd need the standardisation first.
And making batteries field-replaceable with limited equipment means the battery modules need to be significantly more resilient, as well as more complex (not only do you need automatic disconnects for the electrics, but you also need to handle cooling), which translates to less capacity because you need room for all that, and it's harder to integrate structural support with the battery modules so the chassis also needs structural improvements there. The alternative is to automate the entire thing, which means even more complexity, and now the system needs to be aware of every vehicle involved.
The entire thing is a staggering amount of complexity to mostly lower capabilities.
Have you seen the demo of what you can get with some wires and low friction traction options :P
I've seen Tesla's fake robots too. Maybe they can pay people who lost their jobs to DOGE to dress up in Spandex and dance like robots to replace the batteries.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsNc4nEX3c4
Meanwhile, in Oz (and middle earth NZ), where the boring companies actually bore km's of usable tunnel:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTRHEtfdxOo
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlOxqhWbsk4
and at least one other battery swap prototype are all being actively piloted.
You can keep Tesla, cheer's.
~10 min to fill diesel semi.
So electric can only service 1/3 of semi, when truck stop is at full capacity.
But you can go 1500 miles on a full tank, so with electricity you have to account for three times as many vehicles as well (given the stated range is correct)
My first job was pumping gas at regular neighbour gas station and one day a semi rolled in because he was low on gas. He insisted that we use both diesel pumps on the pump so that it would take faster and it still took forever. I can't remember if he filled both side of his truck but if he did that would have required him to go around the island to get the other side tank.
I've only been to a cardlock station a few times but the pumps seem like regular pumps.
I just looked it up and apparently regular gas station pumps in Canada are limited to 38 L/min (10 US gal/min) but some cardlock stations can have larger pumps with a higher rate on them.
If a semi truck has two saddle tanks that's 200-300 gallons, but some trucks can apparently carry more? I'm not an expert on this, But I can reach out to a friend who owns a crane and trucking company if someone else doesn't chime in with a more detailed response.
So at 200-300 gallons and 10 gallons per minute it can take 20-30 minutes to fill a truck.
Truck stop pumps can do 30 GPM "on both sides" as they have two pumps connected to one bay.
There are faster (600 GPM or more) but those are specialized for loading boats, etc; the air can't escape the tank fast enough to use those on a truck.
stats vary. seems ~250 is common (2x 125 gals) and long haul ranges up to 2,000 miles.
Though another way to think of filling up is miles per minute. At 10Gal/Min and 7MPG that's pumping 70 miles a minute into the tank.
an 80% charge in 30 minutes on a 500 mile range battery is ~13 Miles a minute so roughly 5x slower
I don't know about exact rates, but diesel pumps in banks intended for semis have a larger diameter nozzle that flows faster than the normal sized ones, yeah. They won't fit diesel cars/vans/light trucks.
Some Chinese EVs have charge ports on both sides and can be charged faster by using both at the same time.
Not quite as elegant as the new flash chargers that rival the Tesla truck chargers with megawatt speeds but interesting.
Seems like about 10 minutes, and a single pump averages around 100 a day (although guessing that second one could have some serious rounding)
Could they automate the "grab the charging cable and plug it in" part (as well as the "take the cable out and stow it away" part)? Trucks would then be able to just pull in, charge up and pull out quickly.
Automating the part that takes 1 minute is not really going to make a difference when the charging takes 29 more.
But that is the only manual step in the entire process. If a driverless truck could just pull into a charging station, automatically get topped up and be on its way without any manual intervention, that would be a game changer. One could operate such trucks basically 22hours/day, doubling the ROI.
I think we should do is have a second trailer that basically functions as the primary battery pack. The tractor's pack is back up or range extension
So when a semi pulls into a truck stop, you swap that caboose cab with a fully charged one.
so you have massive batteries just sitting on chargers waiting for the next truck to come by? seems expensive
meanwhile Freightliner, Volvo, and BYD already have active fleets.
In Europe I’m pretty sure every brand has e trucks: Mercedes, daf, Renault, Scania, …
But do they have Self Driving? A Semi with self-driving would be a game changer. I just got FSD v14.3.2 and it is quite impressive. I drove all over the Bay Area today (SF -> East Bay -> PA -> RWC -> back) and didn't have to touch the steering wheel practically at all.
They have ADAS systems. And Volvo is already working with Aurora which is doing live tests of actual self driving, similar to Waymo.
There's no news here.
Self-driving is no longer the future of Tesla. That stock pump has largely run its course, and is being replaced by AI and the robot army.
Once SpaceX goes public, SpaceX will acquire Tesla (solving Musk's control issues with Tesla stock), and that'll be the end of Musk pretending to care about cars.
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I don't understand the point you're making, are you saying that because there are already electric semi's on the market, Tesla shouldn't compete?
Or are you being critical that Tesla didn't enter the market first?
If it's the second point, are you accurately comparing the vehicles and their capabilities?
It's not newsworthy. There are more than a dozen companies shipping electric semis in low quantities, and at least three who have been shipping and supporting them for years. Anybody who thinks this the Tesla Semi is notable should go learn about the existing market.
Tesla announced this thing a decade ago and they rolled one off of a theoretical line. Who cares?
There's nothing new here. There's no new information about this late-landing product. There's no story of huge guaranteed bookings, or new unexpected capabilities. It's a non-story.
As for your demand that I provide an accurate product comparison -- driver reviews routinely indicate that the 'driver at the center' seating position makes it harder for truckers to actually do their work, because they can't easily reach out their window to access terminals, perform document exchanges, etc.
So, I'll augment my position: not only is this a non-story... it's a non-story about a vehicle with a notable design flaw.
Of course its newsworthy if the company making the most electric cars in the world has setup a factory to produce semis and produced at least one after years of testing with actual customers that say they are very happy at seemingly very competitive pricing.
To say its NOT newsworthy betrays a bias against Tesla which I would assume has nothing to do with actual facts.
I agree that this is mildly interesting. But wanted to say BYD produces the most electric cars.
The Chinese EV truck market is already bigger than the entire US truck market.
Tesla has some lofty goals but sometimes it feels like that story about the pottery class where the teacher offered to grade by weight alone.
The moral of that story is that churning out lots of something is a good way to learn what you are doing and get better at it.
Indeed. Two ironies: I was just thinking about this with SpaceX getting all the practice with launches. Also, China being theoretically communist and the US theoretically capitalist, yet the US is the one with limited choice while China has so many brands.
<This is not a Tesla bashing note. Genuine information questions >
50,000 vehicles per year capacity is a lot. Is there really demand for so many vehicles?.
>> This makes the Tesla Semi the lowest-priced Class 8 battery electric tractor on the market,
How much is the difference?. Critical details left out.
>> specs confirm a 500-mile range
Aren't there trucks with this range already?
>> "Tesla Semi as a Service" model is needed to eliminate the capital expenditure barrier entirely,
Good but how is this novel?
Longuest I know of in Europe is Volvo’s claims of 700 on the new FH Aero ER. Renault and Iveco are at 600. And that would be at 90kph.
However manufacturers of euro models may not bother extending range given given the driving regulations: drivers can only drive 4.5h before a mandatory 45mn rest break, so as long as the truck does 400km[0] and can charge fast enough in 45mn to do that again afterwards[1] it’s probably going to do the job for long range trucking.
On the other hand, the eu allows electric semis to weigh 4 tonnes more than diesel, in the US it’s just 2000lbs and not every state has implemented that.
[0] 4.5h * 90kph
[1] assuming the fastest charge rates are 10~80, that means a 0-100 range of 580km to hit the sweet spot of 400km on 80~10, which matches Renault and Iveco, Volvo's FH Aero ER page talks about 20~80 which gets you to 670km
Yeah, EU regulations for truck drivers definitely make the switch from diesel to EV easier than in the US.
At least the Mercedes-Benz eActros a6000 has only 500 km range.
as we know from tesla none of these claims will actually come to fruition once these reach customers
Doesn't this need a 2019 added to the headline?
Uh...does Electrek.co not do basic math or understand how factories (and markets) are valued? This is waaaay too early to judge anything.
The "milestone that matters" is $/defect/volume. Until this factory has measurable volume and measurable costs for defects on that volume, it's not an actual factory.
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Tesla is trying to escape launching the semi TEN YEARS after announcing it. Instead, they are attempting to launch a mere nine years after announcing it.
The Pepsi trials with this truck were a disaster, we’ll see if they fixed the numerous problems.
Can you provide more detail on the Pepsi trials? I haven't read anything about it
With the Frito Lay trials there were numerous cases of the Tesla trucks dying and needing to be towed by ICE trucks.
That’s why it is called a trial
"High volume"?
Coming from Tesla, I'll believe it after they actually ship a high volume of those units.
Bonus points if the body panels don't fall off and it can drive through a puddle
>0 is a high volume for something that was supposed to start rolling off the production line back in 2019....
Usually I'd say better late than never, but you have to wonder why anyone would buy anything from tesla because of the promises and delays...
Personally I'm surprised there's enough such people to keep the share price where it is and not shift one or two decimal places.
The Model Y is neck-and-neck with the Toyota RAV4 as the most widely sold car model in the world.
I am not convinced this is true. But perhaps you are using different criteria than this source.
For example the Toyota Corolla has sold 50 million, the Model Y, slightly over 2 million.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_automobil...
The Corolla has been on sale since 1966. The Model Y has only been on sale since 2020. Annually, the Model Y outsells the Corolla. https://www.accio.com/business/corolla-best-selling-car-in-t...
Whenever such claims were made, it was correctly pointed that Tesla makes very few models, so their sales per model may be higher than for other vendors even when the total number of sold cars is higher for their competitors, where the sales are distributed over many models.
There are Chinese vendors who sell more electric cars than Tesla.
Which ones ?
I don't believe you. Can we have some numbers?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/239229/most-sold-car-mod...
Okay, sure, for one year. But "for year 2025" was not a qualification the grandparent poster made.
It’s been three years in a row: https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/tesla-mode...
> Toyota RAV4, the most widely sold car model in the world.
Nope.
Widely sold cars are the likes of e.g Toyota Corolla, VW Golf, Honda Civic, Ford Fiesta, Toyota Camry and Hilux. The other reply gives the link. The RAV4 isn't ones of these.
Out of those, only the Camry and the Corolla even make the top 10: https://www.statista.com/statistics/239229/most-sold-car-mod...
I am willing to bet this semi underperforms in all relevant categories. Just like the rest of their overpriced consumer products.
I wonder how truckers are going to like having to get up and walk over to the door to talk to gate security or hand over paperwork.
Feels like a dumb design to me.
> Tesla enters high-volume production with a meaningful lead on price and range.
I'll take that bet on price and range. And I'd bet it'll have lower cost of ownership than diesel.
i'll take that bet