[throwaway2037]

Why do you think "Semi is DoA"? The current offering for heavy haul electric trucks is tiny (very few competitors), but the addressable market is huge. I think there is a good chance we will be surprised by its success. Even if you dislike the wild hype around Elon Musk (I don't care for it), it is hard to disagree that he has built an incredible EV company. The products they produce are excellent (minus the Cybertruck, too early to say for Cybercab), both from a hardware and software perspective. I think they can do the same for heavy haul electric trucks. The economics of diesel vs electric for heavy haul trucks is a no-brainer. Diesel is much more expensive per kilometer compared to electricity. And maintenance is much cheaper for electric vehicles.

Before finishing this reply, I checked for recent news about the Tesla Semi. I learned that they have a new separate factory (1.7m sq feet!) that has started production and has capacity to produce 50,000 Semis annually. It is next door to the original Gigafactory.

[tsimionescu]

> Why do you think "Semi is DoA"?

They started producing and selling the Semi in 2022 (after its unveiling in 2017, when they started taking pre-orders) and from everything I've dug up with a bit of Googling it seems they have shipped fewer than 200 trucks by 2025.

We'll see if this new 50k per year factory will actually have customers to ship to, but I wouldn't hold my breath given the current track record.

> The economics of diesel vs electric for heavy haul trucks is a no-brainer. Diesel is much more expensive per kilometer compared to electricity.

The economics you need to look at are dollars/hour/kg delivered. If the battery is too heavy or the charge time too long, the economics turn out much worse. We'll see once real world experiences start being published what it actually does.

[throwaway2037]

No, the early units from 2022 were essentially beta testing for both Tesla and their early customers (Pepsi, etc.). Wiki says: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Semi

    > Volume production of the Semi started on April 29, 2026.

Note volume in that statement.

You wrote: "If the battery is too heavy". The 2026 version of Tesla Semi is 450kg lighter than 2022 model because they switched the internal voltage from 12W to 48W, which reduces required wire gauges.

You wrote: "The economics you need to look at are dollars/hour/kg delivered." The original idea for a heavy haul electric truck came from within Tesla. Senior execs wanted to know how they could reduce transport costs for parts manufactured in Fremont, Calif to the Gigafactory in Reno, Nevada. They were using heavy haul diesel trucks to move these parts.

    > the charge time too long

PepsiCo has been driving Tesla Semis since 2022. They have multiple "megachargers" installed on both ends (factory and various warehouses). Google tells me: "allowing the trucks to recharge to roughly 70-80% capacity in about 30 to 45 minutes." That is plenty fast for a truck that needs to load/unload. Tesla recently released a video of a 1.2MW charge session. See: https://x.com/tesla_semi/status/2006431772360474841

[tsimionescu]

Everything that has actually happened so far with the Semi is that it didn't work as advertised and was deeply unpopular. As ever, the future that Tesla paints is extremely rosy, and suggests we should disregard what has happened so far. There is nothing whatsoever to indicate that Semi will actually work to the extent advertised and actually be desired by anyone - especially in the current anti-green climate in the USA, with no subsidies for electrification of the kind Pepsi used to buy the tiny pilot program.

Note that they never announced that the original run of the Semi would be just tiny. When they unveiled it in 2022, they explicitly said that this was the production version, as opposed to the 2017 concept. They even had a few more (still small 100-200 count) contracts where they kept delaying because they couldn't deliver enough - again suggesting that they were having problems, not intentionally running a pilot program.

[throwaway2037]

     > Everything that has actually happened so far with the Semi is that it didn't work as advertised and was deeply unpopular.

I hate asking this question: "Sources?" If this was true, why does PepsiCo/Frito Lay continue to use Tesla Semi heavy haul electic trucks?

    > no subsidies for electrification

This is factually incorrect. California has a massive subsidy programme for electric trucks -- as I understand, the highest/largest for any state in the United States.

[tsimionescu]

They are operating 100 trucks that they bought with subsidy money - out of probably 10k trucks or more that they use in the USA. I'm not claiming the Semi is completely non-functional, it's obviously a real working vehicle. But this doesn't prove in any way that the Semi is actually as cheap and reliable as it was advertised as - if it were, why didn't Pepsi order far, far more?

[omgwtfbyobbq]

It's likely not true.

We're certainly not as far along with the electrification of heavy duty trucks as we are with light duty cars, but the Semi seems fairly popular where it's suitable.

https://x.com/Tesla/status/1598490490613432321

[tsimionescu]

> but the Semi seems fairly popular where it's suitable.

What are you basing this on? Again, they have sold 200 trucks in 4 years. There are some hundreds of thousands of trucks being used in the USA alone. Tesla themselves are claiming they are going to produce (and presumably try to sell) 50k trucks per year. So, by any possible measure so far, Semi has basically 0 adoption. Maybe this is strictly based on production issues and there is huge un serviced demand - I admit this is a possibility, theoretically. But I don't see any reason to actually believe it, and certainly neither the current sales, nor the link you provided, in any way show that this demand will materialize. We'll see soon enough, I guess.