The electric carmaker Tesla plans to unveil an electric semi truck Thursday at 8 pm Pacific/11 pm Eastern time at its design studio in Hawthorne, California. The reveal will be live-streamed on the company’s website.
CEO Elon Musk hyped the event in a bombastic tweet earlier this week:
We don’t know a whole lot about the truck yet, but it is clearly a major departure from Tesla’s core consumer-oriented cars like the Model S and the Model X, which are high-end electric daily drivers that compete with luxury cars.
The new vehicle will be a fully electric Class 8 truck, a category for vehicles that weigh more than 33,000 pounds, including tractor-trailer rigs that form the backbone of commercial road freight. The Tesla version is expected to have a range of 300 miles and will likely feature self-driving capabilities.
Tesla’s first foray into commercial vehicles puts it into competition with a different cadre of manufacturers — truck makers, rather than carmakers. It will also create a new suite of challenges for Tesla to deliver on performance in this category. And marketing trucks is quite different from marketing luxury cars.
The company has revealed few details about the truck’s price, performance, and charging speed and the infrastructure needed to support an interstate electric truck fleet. We may get answers to these questions tonight.
Pretty sure we already saw it, can you just tweet some specs or something ahead of time due to delayspleeeease
But it’s already clear that the truck’s self-driving capabilities herald a massive change coming in the economy. The White House Council of Economic Advisers in a report last year found that vehicle automation could threaten 2.1 million to 3.3 million jobs.
Electric trucks like Tesla’s could also have big implications for the environment.
Commercial vehicles, particularly trucks, are a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. According to the US Department of Energy, Class 8 trucks transport 80 percent of all goods in the United States and account for 22 percent of total energy use in transportation, burning through 28 billion gallons of fuel each year across 2.5 million trucks, each one racking up 66,000 miles annually on the odometer.
Around the world, these trucks account for 7 percent of greenhouse gas emissions and guzzle 17 million barrels of oil per day, with demand growing by 1.9 percent per year, according to the International Energy Agency.
Musk has dropped hints about the truck throughout the year, along with hyperbolic claims that “[i]t can transform into a robot, fight aliens and make one hell of a latte.”
But the launch has been delayed by a few months.
Musk attributed the delays to production issues with the Model 3 electric car as well as the company’s diversion of resources to help restore power in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria struck two months ago.
Much of the work on reducing the environmental impact of trucks has focused on getting existing manufacturers to make them more efficient and pollute less, but if they go all electric, pollution will drop to zero. Battery technology has only recently caught on to the needs of the commercial transport industry, and fleet vehicles could provide automakers a more robust business case. This could could be an advantage for electric-first manufacturers like Tesla.
Vox’s David Roberts recently made a similar point about electrifying buses. Though we don’t have any information about the price for Tesla’s new truck, it, like electric buses, may have a higher upfront price than its diesel competitors with savings distributed across its life cycle in avoided fuel costs.
Other manufacturers are not sitting idle. Nikola Motor Company now offers a fuel cell-powered truck. The diesel engine manufacturer Cummins revealed an electric Class 7 truck in August. And the Canadian retailer Loblaw Companies Limited launched its own electric Class 8 truck last week.
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