See Why the Semi May Be Tesla's Most Important Vehicle

Speaker 1: Forget the cyber truck. Tesla's most important truck is its semi truck. Here's what it does and why I'm so excited about it. Speaker 1: Right off the bat, you can tell something's going on here. The semi looks really sleek, slick aerodynamic, as Tesla likes to say, more like a bullet than a barn wall. That's a pretty good comparison to most other big [00:00:30] rigs. In fact, this truck is the most slick looking, I think, in production, almost approaching the incredible look of the experimental shell. Starship, have you seen that thing? Interestingly, the wheels are really ordinary. I bet there's some regulation going on there that requires that inside the amazing styling continues. Look at the cabin. The seat is in the middle, not on the left, not on the right. Look at the amazing view you get from that enormous amount of glass and the positioning of that driver's seat. It's [00:01:00] almost like you're hovering out over the nose of the truck as opposed to being positioned behind it. Flanking the driver are in classic Tesla fashion, two 15 inch touchscreens, and really very few knobs or buttons and no hardwired gauges. Speaker 1: You do have a couple of those rolly scrolly things on the steering wheel, but this is classic Tesla stuff. I wonder how much real truck drivers will really dig that. By the way, the cab is tall enough to stand in. Part of that because of its electric architecture, [00:01:30] I'm pretty sure, and I don't think there is a software defined CB radio. They may get some gripes about that. Okay, some nuts and bolts. Tesla says they have now completed a 500 mile run on one of the high trim trucks or the high equipment trucks that will be more like $180,000. We understand that's how you get the 500 mile range. $150,000 model is expected with an expected range of only 300 miles, but that's not bad. Still impressive [00:02:00] compared to Volvo's electric. Vnr with 275 miles. Freightliners e Cascadia with 230 miles of range and pretty close to the Nicola Tray semi, which is all electric, 330 miles of range. Speaker 1: Top end on that. And by the way, that 500 mile range is pretty handy. For another reason. That's about eight hours of driving, which is where a commercial driver is supposed to stop and take at least a 30 minute break. Hmm, might be time to charge. That charge can go from almost flat to [00:02:30] 70% in 30 minutes, but not at your neighborhood. Super charger truck won't fit in there, right? Instead, Tesla's gonna be building a network of mega chargers. Now, I doubt they're gonna build these and operate them the way they do with supercharges. These bigger charge stations with more juice and big lanes may likely be built in partnership with the fleet operators on whose land they would likely be. And Mega Chargers won't just have big lanes for big trucks and more voltage for big batteries. They'll also have [00:03:00] a lot of their own batteries. Speaker 1: These will be used to store renewables like solar and wind, but if they grab it when it's around, they can put that into trucks and or use it to buffer the load of big rigs charging on the local grid. Now, all that juice is going to feed three motors, but usually just one. Tesla says their truck will normally run on one motor, a cruising motor that sits on its own axle, and there are two other motors on another axle that are basically used only for intermittent acceleration needs. [00:03:30] But most of the time at steady state, this big guy is cruising along on a motor that Elon Musk says you could tuck up under your arm. Now, we don't have any horsepower or torque numbers, but Tesla does say a fully loaded semi with its full allowable load, 82,000 pounds all in can go from zero to 60 in 20 seconds. Before you laugh at that, think about the amount of weight that it's moving to 60 in 20 seconds and the whole thing's the size of a house. A better illustration is to watch this thing blow by a [00:04:00] conventional semi on a 6% grade, like the other truck is tied to a post. Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it, it drives like a, like, it's like driving a, you know, a Tesla, literally <laugh> Speaker 1: Going forward. The trucks are in limited production out of a small assembly line in Nevada. The big line's gonna be built at the Gigafactory in Texas. A few models, we don't know how many have gone out to PepsiCo, so they'll be in Pepsi and Frito Lay delivery, doing a few deliveries here and there. You're not gonna see these [00:04:30] commonly on the market or on the road next to you, I wouldn't think until 2024. And the pricing I mentioned is speculative, but I'm excited about these trucks as a really smart way to go electric for four major reasons. First of all, range anxiety will not really be a thing because commercial trucks run pre-planned routes. Secondly, big rigs have high utilization. They don't sit all day like our cars. They work all day. So whatever the amount is to buy into one of these and perhaps build mega chargers on your site is gonna [00:05:00] get earned back so much faster than with our passenger cars that basically rot in the sun their whole life. Speaker 1: Then there's the big environmental win. Tesla says only about 1% of the vehicles on the road in the US are big trucks. However, they account for in their estimate 20% of all emissions and 36% of particulate emissions. Those are huge numbers to work down with great leverage for every truck that is swapped out for a new electric, semi little known. [00:05:30] But in the recent new federal guidelines for electric car incentives, there's a $40,000 credit for the really big trucks when they're electric, and it comes with fewer strings attached than when you get the $7,500 credit for a personal car. And the other shoe left to drop is who will be the first Tesla Holick, who shells out to buy one of these semis for their own use and to convert it into a really slick RV motor. One did a rendering of what that might look like, and it looks pretty [00:06:00] good to me. You know, someone's working on that.