Tesla last week delivered Tesla’s first semi-electric tractors for launch customer, PepsiCo. Two years have passed since the first pre-series prototype and another three years since series production. The Semi was Tesla’s first new product since early 2020, when Model Y cars rolled off the company’s assembly line.
The Tesla founder personally drove a tractor to a presentation in Reno, Nevada, where the assembly plant is located. “We don’t make slow cars at Tesla,” he said. — [Без груза] he is an elephant with the grace of a panther”.
The Semi is three times more powerful than any existing diesel truck, uses one kilowatt-hour per kilometer and can accelerate to 100 km/h in 20 seconds, Musk says. Autonomy without recharging the previous version with a battery with an estimated capacity of 1000 kilowatt hours – 800km with a gross weight with a trailer of 37 tons. Full autopilot is not connected yet.
Recharging up to 70% (but only through special stations) takes 30 minutes and costs 2.5 times less than diesel per kilometre. During the first three years of ownership, fuel economy is expected to reach $200,000.
Neither the horsepower nor the actual price of the tractor is known. However, the first customers, in 2017, “frozen” the upfront payment of $ 20,000, they can count on $ 180,000 for the previous version. Subsequent deliveries promise to be significantly more expensive.
Musk plans to achieve annual production of 50 thousand tractors per year by 2024. These plans do not seem very feasible, but we can finally talk about the very concept of a mainstream electric tractor in a commercial sense, but only thanks to the energy crisis.
The Semi, like electric vehicles in general, doesn’t solve the problem of the low energy density of modern batteries. Therefore, with less mileage at a “gas station”, the electric tractor is always forced to carry only the “weight of an adult elephant” with it: six tons of battery instead of half a ton of diesel fuel, alerts Bloomberg profile columnist. This means that long-distance electric traction would have to lose both in the mass of the transported load (taking into account the restriction on the total weight of the road train), and in mileage and duration of refueling.
But it looks like Musk will have the last laugh. The point is the price of fuel, which has doubled in the last five years, and this is what has allowed Tesla Semi to find a small commercial niche: to transport bulky, light and cheap goods over short distances, but at the lowest price for kilometer. Namely, packaged Frito-Lays chips from a factory in California. Of course, the $15.4 million state grant for clean logistics didn’t interfere, nor did the $40,000 federal tax credit per truck.
“Musk may have managed to repeat the trick with the very first Roadster electric car,” writes Bloomberg. “While everyone else in the industry was trying to make a competitive electric car for the mass market, Tesla entered the no-cost luxury segment, where price didn’t matter. Now, as the trucking industry searches for a new workhorse, Tesla will bite into another segment and begin reshaping the market.”
