Tesla is going to present this Thursday, December 1, the several times delayed “Semi”, a heavy 18-wheel vehicle that in the years of announcements and cancellations has received criticism from those who understand that electric trucks will fail in a market that needs them to cargo transport have a range of more than a thousand kilometers.
Semi, Tesla’s first vehicle in the electric truck market, comes up for sale thanks to a more than succulent state subsidy ($40,000 per unit) that the Joe Biden administration provided for “green” commercial vehicles .
The presentation will take place at the Tesla battery factory in the state of Nevada.
There the sale price, maximum load, autonomy and battery recharge speed will be known.
Semi, the Tesla truck is ready
Semi sees the light of day in December 2022, well after initial projections.
Musk initially said Tesla’s electric trucks would be produced in 2019, but there were delays due to battery problems and then the pandemic hit.
Regarding the price, the latest data corresponds to 2017, when Musk said that the Semi that has a range of 805 km and that it would have a sale value of 180 thousand dollars.
But the price that Musk says at the beginning of a project is not a reference.
When he introduced the Model 3 electric sedan to the market, the mogul – now also the owner of Twitter – said it would sell for $35,000, but the cheapest one costs $47,000.
Musk also said the Semi would “most likely” be the first Tesla vehicle to have autonomous driving. However, last month, he confirmed that Tesla’s trucks were not ready to stop being operated by humans.
Regarding production capacity, Robyn Denholm, president of Tesla, said in October that they expect to manufacture 100 Semis in 2022.
A few days earlier, Musk announced that the food and beverage giant, the American PepsiCo, will receive the first Semis, something that would take place this week, after the official presentation in Nevada.
In the electric truck market, Tesla is not the first to come, as it was in sedans.
Rivals like Daimler, Volvo, Nikola and Renault Trucks already have models available.
In addition to PepsiCo’s initial order of 100 units, other companies have placed reservations for the Semi, including UPS, Walmart of Canada and Sysco.
In 2017, brewery group AB Inbev said it had ordered 40 trucks as part of its strategy to reduce the company’s carbon emissions by 30 percent by 2025.
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