With less than a week to go until the Tesla Semi Truck event, Elon Musk dropped a bombshell tweet stating that the truck will “blow your mind clear out of your skull and into an alternate dimension.”
That’s clearly exaggeration, but with the Model 3 production ramp over the first few months so drastically low, the Tesla Semi Truck event is an opportunity for Tesla to show off what it has been working on in parallel to its move into the passenger vehicle space.
Tesla Semi has the potential to not only disrupt the entire trucking industry with a lower total cost of ownership electric vehicle that paves the way for electric transportation — it also represents an entirely new market for the automaker, a move beyond passenger vehicles.
Since Tesla’s announcement of its fully electric semi truck, Nikola Motors has unveiled its hydrogen fuel cell electric semi truck prototype, which it plans to deploy along with a network of free-to-fill hydrogen fueling stations across the United States.
In parallel, longtime semi truck engine manufacturer Cummins revealed a fully electric Class 7 semi truck that officially kicked off the electrification of semi trucks.
As Tesla has said all along, its vision is not to be the leader in every segment it sells in, but rather, to catalyze and accelerate the transition to electrified transportation. These early moves seem to show that its tactics are working.
Tesla Semi truck unveil & test ride tentatively scheduled for Oct 26th in Hawthorne. Worth seeing this beast in person. It’s unreal.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 13, 2017
Tweets from Elon chock full of breaking company news, new product announcements and official feature timelines are the norm for Tesla with the Tesla Semi Truck event date first being shared on Twitter by Elon back in September.
The date was subsequently pushed back to November due to Tesla’s need to eliminate Model 3 production bottlenecks and its philanthropic efforts to restore power to Puerto Rico.
Elon has hyped up the Tesla Semi Truck for months now, teasing on a quarterly earnings call that he had driven the prototype around the parking lot.
Tesla Semi truck unveil & test ride tentatively scheduled for Oct 26th in Hawthorne. Worth seeing this beast in person. It’s unreal.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 13, 2017
Regardless of whether or not the parking lot at the Tesla Fremont Factory will now be under 24/7 surveillance by unmanned drone cameras, it is clear that Elon is excited about the Tesla Semi Truck and eager to share it with the general public.
To date, only a teaser of the front profile has been shared, and even that could be subject to change.
Elon has really made what feels like an emotional push for the Tesla Semi Truck in his tweets, and I for one am excited to see and hear what the team has been working on under Jerome Guillen’s leadership for so long now, especially with so many questions:
Will it be capable of autonomous driving?
Will it integrate with hyperloop and the work that Elon’s doing with The Boring Company?
What will the range be?
What will the cost be?
When will it be available?
So many questions, so little time. In less than 1 week, we will have the skinny on the Tesla Semi Truck and I can’t wait.
Source: CleanTechnica. Reproduced with permission.
