- Tesla opened a 1.8 million-square-foot Semi factory in Sparks, Nevada, with stated capacity of 50,000 electric trucks a year and 3,000 jobs.
- The Class 8 Semi enters volume production seven years behind its initial 2019 schedule, after pandemic, supply-chain, and design delays.
- Customer orders include PepsiCo, DHL, the ZET SCALE coalition for 2,500 trucks, and Einride for 500 trucks.
- The most capable Semi is expected to travel 500 miles or more per charge and cost just shy of $300,000 before incentives, with shorter-range variants available.
- Tesla plans to bring Full Self-Driving to the Semi in the near future; CEO Elon Musk sees autonomous trucking as essential to address a driver shortage.
Quotes
“An autonomous Semi is actually going to be very important to address the shortage of truck drivers.”
“We fully admit we were wrong about the windows”
“We’re super excited to be deploying these into our own operations because it’s fulfilling the mission that we originally started out [with]”