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Tesla Unveils 500-Mile Range Semi Truck, 620-Mile Range Roadster 2.0
Rei writes: During a live reveal on Thursday, Tesla unveiled its new electric Class 8 Heavy Duty vehicle. As most people familiar with Tesla products would expect, the day cab truck features staggeringly fast acceleration for a vehicle of its size. It can accelerate 0-60 in 5 seconds without a trailer and 20 seconds with a 40-ton gross weight while being able to pull its maximum payload up a 5-degree grade at 65mph (versus a typical maximum of 45mph). The 500-mile range is for the vehicle at full load and highway speeds (80% of U.S. freight routes are 250 miles or less). Tesla also boasts a million mile no-breakdown guarantee; even losing two of its four motors it can out-accelerate a typical diesel truck. The total cost per mile is pegged at 83% of operating a diesel, but when convoying is utilized -- where multiple trucks mirror the action of a lead truck -- the costs drop to 57%, a price cheaper than rail. Tesla went a step further and stole the show from their own event by having the first prototype of the new Tesla Roadster drive out of the back of the truck. With the base model alone boasting a 620 mile range on a 200kWh battery pack with 10kN torque, providing a 1.9 second 0-60, 4.2 second 0-100, and 8.9 second quarter mile, the 2+2-seating convertible will easily be the fastest-accelerating production car in the world. Top speed is not disclosed, but said to be "at least 250mph." The vehicle's release date, however, is not scheduled until 2020.
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It's fueled by millennials? Do they have a big furnace in the basement or something?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Apparently they didn't get of the naggers since you keep bitching about them. =P
I watched the 'reveal party' stream from some a-hole on YouTube. It was a really crappy video shot by some a-hole with their smart phone with the quality settings real low, so it was hard to really hear what Muck was saying. But one thing I did see was that this hunk of shit takes about 7.2 MegaWatt hours per-charge. That's an INSANE amount of power just to keep one of these rigs running. By comparison your average US house hold uses about 897 kilowatt hours a month for all of their electrify needs.
Also as a second real serious complaint... who the FUCK said that ANYONE wants a semi truck that can accelerate that fast? You in no way want a semi truck that accelerates like that, you want something that can have an enormous amount of TORQUE, so you can pull heavy loads. Not get there faster with a light load. I spent the last decade driving semi loads of bulk milk in and around the Memphis area, so I have some level of a clue about the trans deportation industry as a whole. No one needs faster trucks, we need more efficient trucks. And one final thought is that this idea that you're going to get ANY truck to last a million miles without a break down is just a flat ludicrous. Even with out the problems with a combustion engine there are still an enormous amount of accessory systems that will eventually have a break down. Suspension air bags, air compresses, for their braking systems, and just over all wear and tear from having to run on crappy highways and through bad conditions of all types. When your dealing with moving that much mass you run into all new kinds of engineering problems that I don't think anyone at Tesla has a clue about so far.
And that's before we get into the real serious issue that the Trump admin is killing a lot of solar power subsidies, and that the Chinese have began to enforce tougher environmental regulations on solar panel production, increasing their cost by about 35%.