Nearly a Decade Later, the Electric Tesla Semi Is Here

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Tesla CEO Elon Musk has insisted investors think of his electric automaker as a robotics and autonomous vehicle company now. He’s targeted a $20 trillion valuation—nearly four times the value of market leader Nvidia—on that premise. But his Tesla team was in Sparks, Nevada, on Thursday to focus on, well, an electric vehicle: the long-awaited Tesla Semi.

The Semi concept first rolled onto a Tesla event stage in late 2017. Nearly a decade later, Tesla officially launched high-volume production at a livestreamed but invite-only event at the company’s factory. It targeted a niche audience: the cost-conscious people who manage large trucking fleets. A handful of them, all men, trooped across the stage to be thanked for their orders to a pulsing techno beat.

“It’s going to be, really, a driver’s truck. It's like a sports car in truck form.” Musk said in a pre-taped video played during the evening event. (Musk, for years the ringmaster at Tesla’s circus-like events, skipped his second vehicle debut in a row; he was attending a White House China State Dinner featuring President Xi Jinping.)

The long-range version of the Semi will travel an estimated 500 miles per charge, Lars Moravy, Tesla’s vice president of Vehicle Engineering, confirmed at the event—around the average number of miles traveled by US long-haul truckers each day. The standard version will get an estimated 325 miles per charge. Competitor EVs advertise ranges of 155 to 430 miles.

Electric Dreams

The Tesla Semi has its work cut out for it.

While electrics account for nearly 30 percent of heavy-duty truck sales in China, according to state media, they’ve had a slow start in the US, as manufacturers struggle to make the vehicles competitive with their traditional diesel-burning counterparts. Electric semis can cost two to three times more upfront. Right now, they’re not easy to charge because they require a countrywide network of specialized megawatt chargers that can fill large batteries in hours. Tesla’s website shows two such public chargers operating in the LA area. However, Dan Priestley, who leads Tesla’s Semi program, says the company plans to open 30 by the end of the year.

Plus, the Trump administration and the GOP—the same group Musk spent millions to get into the White House—cut billions in federal support for electric vehicles last year. The administration is also working to lower fuel economy standards for truck engines, which would have required manufacturers to hit aggressive climate goals. Heavy trucks alone account for some 7 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions.

And yet, it’s not a bad time to be an EV-maker. US diesel prices hit record highs this month as the Iran War continues to disrupt oil production and shipping in the Middle East; prices are up nearly double from this time last year. The truck “is going to make a ton of sense economically because the cost of electricity is much less than the cost of diesel, especially in these crazy times,” Musk said in his pre-taped address, nodding to the conflict launched by the administration he once worked for.

This week, an alliance of shippers including Microsoft and PepsiCo placed a record-setting order for 2,500 Tesla Semis, to be delivered starting this year and through the next 18 months. If those trucks reach customers, they would nearly double the number of heavy-duty electric trucks on US roads today.

The group selected Tesla trucks over competitors’ after “assessing price, performance, production capability, and service support,” Meena Bibra, a spokesperson for the nonprofit Smart Freight Centre, which was involved in the deal, told WIRED. If the carriers are accustomed to another truckmaker’s vehicles, or if other electric trucks better meet their needs, they may also choose to purchase electric trucks from Kenworth, Ride, and Volvo.

Pooling demand among many carriers allowed the electric automakers to bring down the prices of the new trucks, the group said.

Full Self-Driving (Supervised), Tesla’s driver assistance feature, will not yet be available on the Semi, though Musk said in his address that it would debut in “the very near future.” The feature’s predecessor technology, Enhanced Autopilot, was promised during the initial 2017 rollout.