— Florian Minderop (@fminderop) September 17, 2024 For example, we learn that the Tesla Semi fleet has already traveled 7.5 million miles and that a single truck has traveled 250,000 miles (400,000 km) over the last 1.5 years. Thanks to the resurgence of consumer electric vehicles, we already know that electric powertrains could deliver better performance in commercial trucks, but many still doubt that the batteries will have the energy capacity and longevity to make commercial electric trucking viable. This data should help convince more people. With the capacity to travel 1,700 km (1,000 miles) in a single day with virtually the same capacity of a diesel truck, Tesla is making the argument that a Tesla Semi can replace a diesel class 8 truck one-for-one. Priestley also claimed that Tesla is seeing 95% uptime with the trucks, which is important as downtime means losing money for trucking companies. The arguably most important information to come out of the presentation is that the current Tesla Semi fleet is proving an efficiency of 100 kWh to travel 100 km (62 miles): At 1.6 kWh per mile, this is a little better than the 1.7 kWh per mile that Tesla previously predicted. The engineer said that Tesla plans to deliver the electric trucks to more customers this year, but volume production is going to come with the new factory next year. The goal is to reach an annualized production capacity of 50,000 trucks in 2026. Electrek’s Take This is awesome. Again, Tesla Semi is the program I am most excited about at Tesla right now. Based on its history of delivering efficient electric vehicles in volume profitably, I think Tesla is the one to make commercial electric trucks happen at scale. There are already many competitors out there, but none are currently talking about 50,000 units per year, which would make a real impact on the industry, by 2026. If these numbers are accurate, I think it could actually work, Now, the bigger problem to solve is going to be the infrastructure as we are going to adapt truck stops to support megawatt charging at scale. It’s not an easy problem, but it is solvable and worth doing to decarbonize commercial transportation. If we couple that charging to cheap renewable energy, we have a winning solution. Add Electrek to your Google News feed.