Tesla Will Reveal Its Electric Semi Truck in September (techcrunch.com)

From a report: Elon Musk just let us know when we'll get a look at the electric semi truck that he's teased in the past: The Tesla transport vehicle will be revealed in September, the CEO said on Twitter on Thursday, noting that the team has "done an amazing job" and that the vehicle is "seriously next level." Plans at Tesla for an electric semi truck have been in the works for a while now: The vehicle was first mentioned back in July of 2016, when Musk revealed part 2 of his fabled "master plan" for his electric vehicle company. The Tesla Semi, as Musk called it, is designed to help reduce the cost of cargo transportation, and improve safety for drivers, according to the CEO at the time.

Comments

Driverless

[bluefoxlucid]

It has to have the capacity for a driverless upgrade out of the gate or it's going to be an expensive, outdated piece of awkward shit. That's where we are now: an electric lorry would be awesome, but we're seriously waiting for a driverless lorry in 2020. Promise an upgrade to driverless at significantly less than the full cost of the vehicle and close to the cost difference between it and a driverless model of equal specification when the tech becomes available and you're good to go; require replacing a probably 5,000,000 mile vehicle 500,000 miles into its lifespan to get the driverless tech (bigger than electric tech) and you're getting nothing.

Nothing says...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing says long haul trucking like a vehicle with a 200 mile range and a 6 hour recharge time.

Re:Nothing says...

[steveha]

Nothing says long haul trucking like a vehicle with a 200 mile range and a 6 hour recharge time.

I guarantee you that this thing is going to have a fast-swap battery pack.

The Model S already has a battery pack that can be swapped in about 90 seconds by a computer-controlled machine. It turned out that very few Model S owners wanted to pay for the fast battery swap service; the Supercharger service is adequate to most people's needs. (By the way, the Supercharger is much faster than your suggested 6 hours of charge time, for existing cars at least.)

So if range and charging time is an issue, companies will have the option of buying extra batteries and setting up battery-swap hubs at key locations on long haul routes. Or Tesla will do it like they tried for the Model S.

And hey what do you know, Tesla is investing heavily in a battery "gigafactory" and is going to bring the cost of batteries down as much as possible, as soon as possible.

So your joke was amusing but you have not actually identified a real problem. It's almost like Tesla knows what it's doing.