The upcoming Tesla Semi will have up to 621 miles of range, Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk said Tuesday in an interview.
The boost in battery efficiency was made possible by leveraging Tesla’s new in-house battery tech. The Semi was originally advertised as having a range up to 500 miles.
“Getting a range of let’s say 500 km is, I think, quite easy, trivial to be frank, for a semi truck and this is assuming a truck that is pulling a load of 40 metric tons,” Musk said in the interview. “If you want, for long-range trucking, we think, easily 800 km, and we see a path over time to 1,000 km range for a heavy duty truck.”
Tesla has reportedly secured thousands of orders for the Semi. Many companies with giant fleets of heavy-duty trucks are waiting on delivery, including Walmart, UPS, PepsiCo, FedEx, and Anheuser-Busch, among others.
Musk said in a June note to employees that it’s time to go “all out” and move the Tesla Semi to “volume production.”
“It’s time to go all out and bring the Tesla Semi to volume production,” Musk said in a note. “It’s been in limited production so far, which has allowed us to improve many aspects of the design.”
The automaker said in its Q1 update that deliveries of the Semi will be pushed to 2021. When the vehicle was debuted in 2017, Tesla expected to deliver the Semi in 2019, then pushed to 2020, now to 2021.
Watch the full interview above.