TL;DR
The Tesla electric semi truck which needs no gas, has an autopilot, runs for 500 miles on a 30 min charge, blastproof windshield, luxury interiors and will go 0-60 in 5 seconds.
Elon Musk unveiled his latest project to the world at the Tesla press event – he rolled up to the stage in a Tesla electric semi-truck. Musk hinted at the semi in summer, and he’s been hyping it up on Twitter all week, assuring that the reveal would “blow your mind right out of your skull and into an alternate dimension.”
Tesla Semi Truck unveil to be webcast live on Thursday at 8pm! This will blow your mind clear out of your skull and into an alternate dimension. Just need to find my portal gun ...
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 12, 2017
The Tesla electric semi-truck is the latest addition to Musk’s vision for an electric-everything world, where homes, cars, and now trucks, are all powered by clean energy.
What is this electric truck?
For starters, it’s a semi-truck. Instead of a diesel tank & engine, it has a battery. It’s automatic with no combustion engine, so it should need less maintenance than a normal truck, theoretically.
“I have no idea how to drive a semi-truck and I can drive this thing,”
– Elon Musk.
Comparing it to your regular semi-trucks, Musk said: “We designed the Tesla semi to be more like a bullet”. The Tesla semi-truck has a 500-mile (800 km) range and can go from 0 to 60 MPH in 5 seconds, and 20 seconds while carrying a full load of 80,000 pounds. He did not reveal the truck’s price yet but claimed it would cost almost 20 percent less per mile than a standard diesel truck. The production of the truck will start in 2019.
What about the interiors & luxury of the truck?
As is with any kind of Tesla and their focus towards design, the interior of the truck is damn nice. The inner cab has a full standing room with the driver’s seat positioned in the center, which is supposed to provide better visibility flanked on both sides by touch screens that aid navigation and blind-spot monitoring.
“But if you’re going to make a product, make it beautiful. Even if it doesn’t affect sales, I want it to be beautiful,” he said when Rolling Stone magazine quoted the seating as being “a driver-comfort feature”.
But the truck’s interior isn’t only about driver’s comfort. The truck comes equipped with tracking functionalities useful to a fleet manager for monitoring, scheduling, and routing.
Tesla’s self-driving tech. Is it in there?
Of course. The truck obviously isn’t totally autonomous, but it includes Tesla’s Enhanced Autopilot system, which comes with automatic emergency braking and lane detection & departure warnings along with a couple of automated safety features – Exterior cameras to help reduce blind spots and object detection, sensors that detect instability and adjust wheels individually to prevent jackknifing.
“Jackknifing is impossible. But the worst nightmare is gone with this truck,” said Musk.
‘What about.. nuclear explosion proofing?’
Lord of all things Elon Musk boasted about the truck’s reliability and durability by guaranteeing that the Tesla electric semi-truck will not break down for a million miles. Better yet, it will anticipate its maintenance cycle and inform you beforehand. On top of that, he added: “the armored glass will even withstand the force from a thermonuclear explosion” while hailing the durability of the windshield.
Testing a tow hitch against standard truck glass vs. Tesla armor glass pic.twitter.com/UoDkBs6OUD
— Tesla (@Tesla) November 17, 2017
Will we see the Supercharger network expand?
Musk boasts that the semi will have a range of 500 miles after 30 mins of charging meaning that by the time the driver is done with his break, the truck will be ready to go. No waiting for the truck to charge.
But the biggest consumer question hanging over this launch announcement is how an entire fleet of thousands of new electric trucks would charge. This is considering Tesla currently has over 2,000 Supercharger stations across the country which currently has to support just the Model S, not a huge fleet of semi-trucks nationwide.
Thankfully, Tesla is currently working to expand its Supercharger network, so hopefully, there will be enough stations to accommodate the trucks by the time they roll out on the streets.
