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Blog Musk Says Tesla Semi to Have Over 600 Miles of Range

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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.

 
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Reactions: SmartElectric
Where do you think they have been charging them...they may have to uncouple for an unforeseen charge. Google Tesla Semi spotted charging at supercharger.

They’ll dump those trucks in a heartbeat and move on.
I was hoping elon would stick with conservative numbers rather than trying to squeeze every mile into the advertised range, like he does with current models.

Unfortunately you’re right, companies will not appreciate being advertised unrealistic range numbers. We’re talking about a very serious and expensive problem if trucks are running out of range sooner than advertised.
Semis can’t just stop at one of the current superchargers and charge up, it means a tow truck will be required, freight that’s going to be late and as someone who’s in the business, if you’re late with freight that’s refrigerated its PITA. There’s a reason mega carriers have yet to really place any orders.
 
That’s exactly what I have planned for the Tesla semis. Our trailers/containers arrive at Stockton CA, about 50 miles from our yard. The truck leaves our yard, heads to Stockton and then back to the yard where it’s swapped for another trailer destined for a customer in the Bay Area about another 80 miles.
Daily total miles usually stay below 300.

if the truck meets the range specs it would be perfect.

Another detail we need to learn before purchasing is what type of charging equipment will need to be installed. There’s no way we’re buying a truck if we need to install an expensive charging station. The truck is already going to cost about 40k more to purchase than a Volvo, if we need to drop another 10-20k for charging then it’s a no go.

I doubt that charging is going to be cheap for these trucks. In your scenario of needing to charge overnight with a daily usage of 300 miles which means if we assume 2kwh per mile that would mean you need to charge 600kwh overnight. So if we assume 12 hours of charging available that would mean 50kwh of charging per hour required. It will be interesting to see what the onboard charger on the semi-will be. However normally in order to get this much charging capability you would need a direct DC Charging system. Like for example a Tesla Urban Supercharger. However maybe Tesla will have a 50kw or higher on board charger for the Semi.