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When Elon Musk released his' Master Plan Part 2' for Tesla last year, he surprised a lot of people in the industry when he announced that the automaker will soon venture in the semi-truck business.
[...] Musk announced several new vehicle programs when he released his' Master Plan Part 2': a minibus, a pickup truck, and a semi truck. Those were added to the already known Model 3 and Model Y programs.
Since Tesla already has over 400,000 reservations for the Model 3, Musk is emphasizing that the automaker is focusing its resources on the vehicle before going into those new programs.
When questioned about Tesla losing its focus after the announcement that they are already working on the new vehicles last year, Musk said that "early development work" is not taking a lot of resources away from Model 3. Tooling and getting to production is where things get expensive.
Based on Musk's comment, we would expect Tesla Semi to still be in "early development work" as the company is still working on bringing the Model 3 to production in the coming months.
Source: https://electrek.co/2017/02/05/tesla-semi-electric-truck-elon-musk/
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 08 2017, @03:40AM
truck drivers simply aren't driving 1200 and more miles per day.
Depends on the driving model the drivers are using. Team drivers could probably easily do that. Typical long haul is 500-700 depending on the truck and laws. Before the rule changes it was not uncommon to see 1400+ hours on trucks per day.
Charging station locations are probably not a big issue. The problem will be getting the things charged in 4-8 hours to do another leg. Those lots fill up every night. Some of the big ones have 200+ trucks in one yard. The smaller ones have a couple to a few dozen. Another issue will be getting the amount of electricity this would take out to these place. Many are basically 'in the middle of nowhere' and have little to no infrastructure other than a few tanker trucks that swing by to fill up the tanks. This is not a 220v plug and call it a day. They will need some heavy duty plugs and switching stations to handle peak usage which funny enough would end up in the middle of the night.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday February 08 2017, @03:52AM
"Before the rule changes"
Exactly. I've mentioned a couple times that I drove truck, myself. I didn't exactly observe the hours of service rules, and often exceeded "legal" limits. But, today, the trucks are all computerized, and they tattle on you. If you're legal, you often get waved by the weigh stations. If you're over hours or speeding or whatever, you get the red light, go through the station, get ticketed and shut down. Onboard tattletales have put an end to most of the outlawry that I took for granted.
I think it safe to say that the majority of truck drivers today seldom drive more than 500 miles in a day - many of them drive considerably less. Local drivers may well drive more miles than over-the-road drivers today, because they aren't monitored so closely.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday February 08 2017, @03:53AM
"local drivers" for certain values of "local". It's surprising how the rules can be bent, sometimes.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday February 08 2017, @05:38AM
Good.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Wednesday February 08 2017, @09:34PM
Sounds like a perfect case for SMRs (small modular reactors, 2MWe-200MWe) combined with either RO (make freshwater), hydrogen-splitter, synfuel-producer or just plain charging swappable packs to eat the off-peak loads. Or maybe also low-cost-land place for datacentres.
Would however feel weird to see tank trucks going to the reststop to _pick_up_ fuel and fresh water and leave waste :)