First Tesla Semi Rolls Off High-Volume Production Line
electrek.co
electrek.co
Tesla claims they will "ramp up" production to 50,000 units per year. When does the 100th unit roll off the line? Let's see some actuals. Tesla's volume and delivery time estimates do not have a good history of reliability. Volvo has 5,000 electric semitrucks on the road right now.
Tesla also announced that MDB Drayage is using Tesla tractors to haul container chassis around the Port of Los Angeles.[1] But the pictures show a Tesla tractor hauling an ordinary box semitrailer, not a container on a container chassis. The MDB Drayage is just a three-week test, too. Drayage is almost the ideal use.
[1] https://electrek.co/2026/04/29/tesla-semi-drayage-operator-m...
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/transportation/917167/elon-musk-tes...
IIRC they are right in the middle of pack.
I got really good mileage once. The charging station I chose was not working and I drove to a nearby station doing maybe 25 on city streets long after midnight. Instead of arriving with 1% I arrived with 4%.
Probably would have gotten better mileage if I ran red lights and made stop signs optional.
Pepe's Towing, the heavy towing company in LA with a very popular YouTube channel, has two questions for drivers whose trucks need to be recovered or uprighted - "What's your cargo?", and "How much does it weigh?". (Pepe's comments that most drivers who roll over a truck cannot answer either question, which has a lot to do with why they rolled over.)
Since cargo is enclosed on most semis, assuming identical trailers load doesn't really matter. Aging Wheels has a video on testing that in the silverado ev and got about 5%: https://www.youtu.be/UmKf8smvGsA
I friend told me a story of when he drove trucks in a previous life.
Once he had to drive a water tanker truck and someone ran a red light in front of him as he entered an intersection. He slammed on the brakes, but his water load sloshed. It would skid his truck forward into the intersection with each slosh. He avoided the accident, but just barely.
That is just plain wrong. There is a reason why all EV companies, including Tesla obsess over energy density, and it’s because load is one of the biggest factors that affects range.
Forget EVs, load also affects range for traditional Semis. Do you seriously think an empty semi and one with a shipping container on the tow, would both have the same range?
Energy density is energy per unit of volume. Every company obsesses over that because volume is the limiting factor for getting energy in a vehicle.
Energy specificity (energy by unit of weight) is only relevant to planes, no EV company gives much of a fuck about it. Would they like it if batteries were lighter? Absolutely. Would they take a heavier battery if it was denser? In a heartbeat.
> Forget EVs, load also affects range for traditional Semis.
There are major differences between a traditional prime mover and an electric one: electric motors don’t have the divergent torque/power curve of ICE, or the choked low end, and moving a load is kinetic energy which EVs can largely convert back into electricity instead of losing it entirely. So the inefficiencies related to getting the load moving largely go away.
Total energy spent on moving an object by a distance is still proportional to the mass of the object. So if you’re absolutely spending more energy hauling 10000lbs vs 100lbs.
The only point where the cargo is relatively immaterial to the range is when it is a very small percentage of the actual weight of the vehicle. But that doesn’t mean the vehicle is efficient. It’s just that now you’re spending more energy hauling the battery itself than the cargo. Energy density matters in semis because companies want to spend less money hauling the battery itself than the cargo to make it viable.
Rivian an electric car company admits that towing will reduce your range. There’s a reason for that. https://rivian.com/support/article/how-does-towing-affect-ra...
It is not. The energy spent to change momentum is proportional to mass. For mass to affect momentum you need a second order effect linking it to increased system losses e.g. a heavier plane needs more lift, which requires higher speeds, higher angle of attack, larger lifting surfaces, …, all of which increase drag, which is the primary way planes lose energy.
> Rivian an electric car company admits that towing will reduce your range. There’s a reason for that.
The reason is the increased resistances (air and rolling) from the trailer: https://youtu.be/UmKf8smvGsA
Sure to a commuter in stop and go traffic or city driving it might matter a bit but regen takes away the first order of magnitude.
Even climbing a hill is a bit of the same effect. To first order, you recover it on the back side of the hill coming down.
A Model 3 weighs less than a Ford 150.
So electric can only service 1/3 of semi, when truck stop is at full capacity.
I've only been to a cardlock station a few times but the pumps seem like regular pumps.
I just looked it up and apparently regular gas station pumps in Canada are limited to 38 L/min (10 US gal/min) but some cardlock stations can have larger pumps with a higher rate on them.
If a semi truck has two saddle tanks that's 200-300 gallons, but some trucks can apparently carry more? I'm not an expert on this, But I can reach out to a friend who owns a crane and trucking company if someone else doesn't chime in with a more detailed response.
So at 200-300 gallons and 10 gallons per minute it can take 20-30 minutes to fill a truck.
Though another way to think of filling up is miles per minute. At 10Gal/Min and 7MPG that's pumping 70 miles a minute into the tank.
an 80% charge in 30 minutes on a 500 mile range battery is ~13 Miles a minute so roughly 5x slower
There are faster (600 GPM or more) but those are specialized for loading boats, etc; the air can't escape the tank fast enough to use those on a truck.
Not quite as elegant as the new flash chargers that rival the Tesla truck chargers with megawatt speeds but interesting.
It's a 15 minute roll in / roll out kind of turn around.
The game's not over and the big transport operators (eg: Rio Tinto mine fleets moving a billion tonne per annum, etc) are still doing the R&D pipeline and trialling pilots.
It should get adoption from companies big enough to run their own fleets (such as the mining company mentioned) but it won't be a suitable method for a good percentage of the long haul trucks in the States.
With that said, I would think chargers should be fine for a lot of those trucks if the infrastructure builds out for them. The drivers are already taking breaks every few hours by regulation, so they can top off rather than going from empty to full.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTRHEtfdxOo
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlOxqhWbsk4
and at least one other battery swap prototype are all being actively piloted.
You can keep Tesla, cheer's.
Now you just need every gas station in the US to stock a bunch of swappable batteries for every semi brand. It's a great idea s long as you're not bound by any sort of realistic expectation.
Also, not the first industry that would rely on some level of standardisation.
It's a glitzy demo which has been attempted multiple times and has failed every time (to the surprise of nobody, Tesla was one of the early demo-ers, guess where that ended up?), NIO is still losing money hand over fist and survives only thanks to the CCP keeping it afloat.
> Also, not the first industry that would rely on some level of standardisation.
You'd need the standardisation first.
And making batteries field-replaceable with limited equipment means the battery modules need to be significantly more resilient, as well as more complex (not only do you need automatic disconnects for the electrics, but you also need to handle cooling), which translates to less capacity because you need room for all that, and it's harder to integrate structural support with the battery modules so the chassis also needs structural improvements there. The alternative is to automate the entire thing, which means even more complexity, and now the system needs to be aware of every vehicle involved.
The entire thing is a staggering amount of complexity to mostly lower capabilities.
So when a semi pulls into a truck stop, you swap that caboose cab with a fully charged one.
Or are you being critical that Tesla didn't enter the market first?
If it's the second point, are you accurately comparing the vehicles and their capabilities?
Tesla announced this thing a decade ago and they rolled one off of a theoretical line. Who cares?
There's nothing new here. There's no new information about this late-landing product. There's no story of huge guaranteed bookings, or new unexpected capabilities. It's a non-story.
As for your demand that I provide an accurate product comparison -- driver reviews routinely indicate that the 'driver at the center' seating position makes it harder for truckers to actually do their work, because they can't easily reach out their window to access terminals, perform document exchanges, etc.
So, I'll augment my position: not only is this a non-story... it's a non-story about a vehicle with a notable design flaw.
To say its NOT newsworthy betrays a bias against Tesla which I would assume has nothing to do with actual facts.
It is not newsworthy that BYD shipped another one. They do that every 15 minutes.
So not only do I repeat that this article is not newsworthy -- but your proposed article about the company making the most electric cars in the world shipping one would _also_ not be newsworthy.
There's no news here.
Self-driving is no longer the future of Tesla. That stock pump has largely run its course, and is being replaced by AI and the robot army.
Once SpaceX goes public, SpaceX will acquire Tesla (solving Musk's control issues with Tesla stock), and that'll be the end of Musk pretending to care about cars.
Tesla has some lofty goals but sometimes it feels like that story about the pottery class where the teacher offered to grade by weight alone.
The moral of that story is that churning out lots of something is a good way to learn what you are doing and get better at it.
50,000 vehicles per year capacity is a lot. Is there really demand for so many vehicles?.
>> This makes the Tesla Semi the lowest-priced Class 8 battery electric tractor on the market,
How much is the difference?. Critical details left out.
>> specs confirm a 500-mile range
Aren't there trucks with this range already?
>> "Tesla Semi as a Service" model is needed to eliminate the capital expenditure barrier entirely,
Good but how is this novel?
However manufacturers of euro models may not bother extending range given given the driving regulations: drivers can only drive 4.5h before a mandatory 45mn rest break, so as long as the truck does 400km[0] and can charge fast enough in 45mn to do that again afterwards[1] it’s probably going to do the job for long range trucking.
On the other hand, the eu allows electric semis to weigh 4 tonnes more than diesel, in the US it’s just 2000lbs and not every state has implemented that.
[0] 4.5h * 90kph
[1] assuming the fastest charge rates are 10~80, that means a 0-100 range of 580km to hit the sweet spot of 400km on 80~10, which matches Renault and Iveco, Volvo's FH Aero ER page talks about 20~80 which gets you to 670km
The "milestone that matters" is $/defect/volume. Until this factory has measurable volume and measurable costs for defects on that volume, it's not an actual factory.
Coming from Tesla, I'll believe it after they actually ship a high volume of those units.
There are Chinese vendors who sell more electric cars than Tesla.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/top-electric-vehicle-man...
For example the Toyota Corolla has sold 50 million, the Model Y, slightly over 2 million.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_automobil...
Nope.
Widely sold cars are the likes of e.g Toyota Corolla, VW Golf, Honda Civic, Ford Fiesta, Toyota Camry and Hilux. The other reply gives the link. The RAV4 isn't ones of these.
That said, I'm surprised that the RAV4 is that popular, in the year 2025.
I did not say that. Why do you think that I did say that? (I'm surprised that the RAV was #1 in 2023-24 too. I don't see many or even any around here. But even 3 years clearly isn't "all time").
(There are tons of RAVs as yellow taxis in NYC though. That's the only place that I've seen them swarm)
But it is a defensible claim, and apparently globally it's true, even if locally it is not.
But in order to do so, the claim has to be presented in a coherent way, otherwise you'll check something else, such as here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48005822
I interpreted the comment to mean that Tesla model Y is currently the most widely sold car in the world, not historically. model y is less than 10 years old.
i think it shows that tesla is actually able to ship cars at a high volume, which was the point of the thread.
I'll take that bet on price and range. And I'd bet it'll have lower cost of ownership than diesel.
Feels like a dumb design to me.
The Pepsi trials with this truck were a disaster, we’ll see if they fixed the numerous problems.