Photo: Tesla
Could it be that after all the rejections, delays and false promises – one of Tesla’s most impressive products is hitting the road? According to the CEO of Tesla and technoking in his own right, Elon Musk, the answer is yes, and in less than two months we will see Tesla’s truck hitting the road.
640 km in half an hour charging
Unlike the Cybertruck, which is an electric van (which also has yet to hit the road), Tesla’s truck is a semi-trailer that, at least according to Musk, should be like a truck on steroids: even though it’s a 10-ton truck, it’s capable of going from 0 to 100 km “Q within 5 seconds and travel up to 800 km on a single charge. When drivers need to charge it, they can stop at Megachargers stations that will add 640 km of travel to it with a charge of only about half an hour. In addition, Musk promised the car a lifespan of 1.6 million kilometers .
The driver’s cabin is also unlike anything else. Photo: Tesla
Tesla’s semi-trailer truck is not a new product. It was first announced back in November 2017, when Musk, who is very well known for his creative timing when it comes to promises and announcements (and company acquisitions), announced that it would hit the road in 2019. For a long time, we heard nothing from Tesla about a truck that none of us might buy for his next trip to Eilat, but can definitely change the costs and speeds of transportation for quite a few companies – which may help provide better service and maybe even better prices, since the operating costs of such trucks is about half of the price of a diesel truck.
The last time we got any glimmer of hope for Tesla’s truck was in 2021, when Ramon Laguerta, CEO of PepsiCo, claimed that Tesla would deliver the first trucks to the company as early as the last quarter of the year. “We bought electric trucks from Tesla … and we expect to receive the first shipment of the trucks this quarter,” LaGuerta said in an interview with CNBC. The remarks were made after being asked if his company was considering purchasing rival Rivian’s trucks. Well, he may have been right about the last quarter of This year, but not the right year.
This time it’s final (maybe)
Image: Tesla
Musk Wrote On his Twitter account that he is “excited to announce the start of Tesla Semi Truck production with deliveries to PepsiCo on December 1st”. In addition, he noted that it is “super fun” to drive, and repeated the promise that it will reach a range of about 800 km on a single charge. The first Tesla trucks are manufactured in Nevada, near the Tesla Giga factory with a limited production rate of about 5 trucks per week. Later, Tesla plans to move to a faster production rate at the Giga plant in Texas. In total, PepsiCo ordered 100 trucks, with 15 of them expected to arrive at the central production plant in California, where a Megacharger station has already been installed. Is this time final and the residents of the United States will be able to see the Tesla truck on the road? We will know very soon.