Tesla's Electric Semi Trucks Are Priced To Compete At $150,000 (theverge.com)

Last week, Tesla unveiled its new four-motor electric Semi but left out one key detail -- the price. "Now that's changed: the regular versions of the 300-mile and the 500-mile trucks will cost $150,000 and $180,000 each," reports The Verge. "There is also a 'Founders Series' which will cost $200,000 per truck." Tesla does note that the prices are "expected" leaving the company some wiggle room on the final pricing. From the report: If those prices and specs stick then Tesla has a potentially disruptive offering with Semi. Most long-haul diesel trucks are priced around $120,000 and cost tens of thousands of dollars to operate each year. Tesla claims its all-electric Semi will provide more than $200,000 in fuel savings alone over the lifespan of the truck.

Comments

Purchase price is one thing

[FrankHaynes]

but what is the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership)? Maybe the batteries are ridiculously expensive to maintain?

Re:Purchase price is one thing

[arbiter1]

Lets also not forget the setup needed to recharge these things which i doubt a standard EV charge point is gonna cut the mustard without take 20+ hours. Having to wait that long is def expensive issue when companies put miles on these trucks they do. IMO only viable option for electric semi would be hybrid setup like used in trains for many years.

Re:Purchase price is one thing

[Rei]

Typical degradation for Tesla batteries is about 4% in the first year, then 1/2 to 1% in each subsequent year. See the raw data and charts here. And that's for Model S, which uses NCA packs. Semi using NMC cells, which are even more durable.

Re: Purchase price is one thing

[Anonymous Coward]

By "certainly", I assume you mean "possibly".
These semi batteries have got to be enormous, and I hate to break it to you, but electric car batteries are already prohibitively expensive to the average consumer.

Re:Purchase price is one thing

[beelsebob]

They already announced that the TCO is roughly 20% lower than that of a diesel truck when electricity is priced at $0.07 (which is the price they intend to charge at mega charger stations).

Re:Purchase price is one thing

[beelsebob]

Range isn't traded off at all. These things have a 500 mile range. That's 8 hours continuous driving at a trucker's maximum speed. They've already published that they'll be able to charge to 400 miles range in 30 minutes from a mega charger. That means you can get to 180 miles in only 10 minutes.

180 miles is another 3 hours of driving. That's your trucker's 11 hours maximum driving time covered with only 10 minutes spent charging.

That means these are completely open to long haul trucking with basically indefinite range, as long as the mega charger network rolls out fine.

Re:Purchase price is one thing

[stabiesoft]

She must have a light foot. The S is about 5500lbs and if you push that much weight hard it will eat tires.

Re:Purchase price is one thing

[Rei]

Oh shit! You better hurry and tell Tesla that a standard EV charge point isn't going to work!!! You swear that Tesla is run by a bunch of idiots who haven't the foggiest clue about electricity!

The other funny one you see a lot is the concept that Tesla hasn't the foggiest clue about semis. Never mind that the head of Tesla's Semi programme, Jerome Guillen, headed the Cascadia program at Daimler, and that the Semi unit is packed full of truck people, and the truck was engineered in close cooperation with major fleet operators (which is why they had orders already lined up at the launch event).

Re:Purchase price is one thing

[Rei]

There's an interesting thing to consider about the megachargers. I think a lot of people considered Musk's line about the stations being solar powered to be a throwaway remark, along the lines of "they'll have solar awnings, so "a little" of the power provided is solar". Furthermore, I think a lot of people see the announced price ($0,07/kW) to be just a loss leader. But after going over the numbers.... I think they've hit on something huge. Much bigger than just Semi.

Semi uses NMC cells, same as Tesla's grid products. And when you compare the price on the 500 mile vs. the 300 mile Semis, you come up with a price per kWh of something like $80-85/kWh... *after* profit. Tesla usually uses a 25% margin, so you're looking at under $70/kWh. Now, while impressive, and a huge leap forward in battery prices, it's certainly possible. The whole point of the Gigafactory was to make battery prices approach raw material costs, and raw materials for them are something like $50/kWh (and that's with currently elevated raw material costs).

Traditional superchargers draw straight from the grid, but they're increasingly starting to use Powerpack battery buffers, and Megacharger will certainly require them in bulk. The battery buffers reduce demand charges from the grid by evening out load and simplify the charging process (cheaper chargers), but you have to pay for them, and they're expensive.

Now let's diverge for a moment and look at solar power. Solar power is getting *cheap*. Around $1,10/W installed in the US nowadays, and falling. The problem with solar (which increases its costs) is, you need either peaking or a battery buffer to handle nighttime and cloudy days. There's also wind power, which is also now very cheap, but also suffers from the same intermittency problem (only more random). And battery buffers are very expensive.

Or, at least, they were. Because the prices on these NMCs are crazy cheap, and they're the same batteries that are used in Tesla's grid products. But wait, it gets even better. Megachargers need a battery buffer to be able to surge charge vehicles. Solar and wind power need a battery buffer to handle intermittency. The key is, you don't need two separate buffers - only the one. The very battery buffer that lets you run a megacharger will also buffer solar and wind. And the price on said buffer should now be far cheaper than it used to be.

I've run some numbers over on the Tesla Motors Club forum, but the short of it is... if Tesla's batteries really are this cheap, then they really should be able to run the stations for solar and wind at $0,07/kWh and turn a profit. Not mere "solar awnings", of course; it means grid-scale solar plants (and/or wind farms), connected to the megacharger. But it's a paradigm shift. And the drop in storage prices is a paradigm shift everywhere, not just for chargers.

Caveat: some assumptions had to be made:
  * The size of the battery packs on the Semi models (but that should be pretty accurate)
  * That Tesla isn't deliberately undervaluing the cost of the larger battery vs. the smaller one (lower margin, etc). Although it's not clear why they would want to do that; it seems just as likely that they would do the opposite, and either way, the cost of the vehicles as a whole argues for cheap batteries.
  * That the trucks in general aren't some sort of big loss leaders (but there's no way Tesla could afford that - at least not for any significant length of time)
  * That the prices Tesla thinks the batteries will cost are correct

Honestly though... I think that it's simply what it appears to be: that through manufacturing scale and advancing research, li-ion batteries are (finally!) starting to approach their raw materials costs. And that's a game changer.

Re: Purchase price is one thing

[Rei]

4:30 now. Welcome to the weekend. :)

Re:Purchase price is one thing

[Cyberax]

My Tesla is at 70000 miles right now and I'm still using the factory brake pads. They will probably survive until the end of car's life. Regenerative braking FTW!

Re:Purchase price is one thing

[vtcodger]

Nothing against EVs, but there's a lot of hyperbole out there. For a realistic appraisal of EV capability, let me recommend this article by UCSD physics professor Tom Murphy. https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/201... This is based on his persanal EV.

Murphy's conclusion

"I am not yet personally convinced that we will see an EV revolution. Gasoline price fluctuations are a short-term killer of long-term planning. Batteries still do, and likely always will, disappoint. I am learning similar lessons on the nickel-iron battery front. We may have to face the fact that gasoline has been the ultimate transportation fuel, and the economists’ picture of universal substitutability may not apply."

That said. Batteries suck, but they are improving -- albeit rather slowly.. If you believe Murphy (and i do), EVs are sort of OK today in a warm climate (Murphy lives in San Diego). My guess is there are applications -- and trucking might be one of them -- where EVs are competetive with/superior to fossil fuel vehicles and others where they aren't. My guess is that there are a few applications, fire engine's, jet aircraft, ... where the high energy density of hydrocarbon fuel will always be superior to electricity.

Re:Purchase price is one thing

[Rei]

This is not correct. Tesla was very clear during the unveiling that semi uses NMC. It's not clear whether Model 3 is NMC or NCA. Model S and X are NCA. Who knows about Roadster.

Re:Purchase price is one thing

[Rei]

More to the point, if you do three 1/3 cycles, that's less degradation than doing 1 full cycle. Significantly.

Re: Purchase price is one thing

[hey!]

This isn't different than any other facility which consumes a lot of electricity, like a data center. You don't use the power lines in the street meant to support a handful of houses with 100 amp service. If you're supporting a fleet of trucks you get your own connections to the grid.

At some point, as fleets become large and the networks they serve become complex, there will be quite a bit of operations research type thought spent on optimizing where to put charging, but it's not a "gee this is too hard to figure out" problem, not at the outset anyway.

Re:Purchase price is one thing

[Aighearach]

Here is a little helper for those people: Regenerative braking can decelerate as hard as you can accelerate.

This is not true. The reason is that to get the battery to accept the energy back, it needs to be higher voltage than the battery. However, the voltage of the motor windings will be the voltage that you applied to the motor, minus a little bit! So that means you have to boost the voltage. EV motors are three phase of various types, and you're switching the current through two of three legs normally. So for braking, you leave the top side disconnected, and then switch the bottom, which creates a DC-DC boost converter using one half of the motor windings (one half of what you're using at a time, not half the total number available) and treating the motor as an inductor.

Now, Tesla has great engineers, and you don't need a huge voltage difference if you have high quality batteries, which they do, so instead of the normal 48% of the power you used to maintain that speed, you can probably get it a bit higher. Maybe even 75% or something. The good news is, because of the weight of the vehicle and how the affects traction, you can never brake nearly as fast as you can accelerate and the regenerative braking should be able to reach the traction limit just fine if it has good enough firmware. But the braking power is always proportional to speed!

This is why if you're designing an EV using simple braking firmware then you're still mechanical braking for over 50% of the stopping power, and for cars with high quality firmware they get it up to 65 or 75%.

More good news though; most of the wear to mechanical brakes is from heating, not from stopping power used, and if you reduce the stopping power needed by the brake by 50% you've reduced the heat by much more than 50%. So the brakes end up lasting the life of the vehicle in many cases. Under regular use, mechanical brakes overheat and are damaged. If you apply 50% less mechanical braking power, you're no longer degrading them very much.

Between fuel and maintenance savings...

[RhettLivingston]

wow. Between fuel and maintenance savings, the 500-mile range version will probably pay back double its cost! If that holds true, it will become a "must purchase to stay in business" type of item.

I have long thought it insane that the EV business did not start with RVs first, then big trucks and buses, then commercial vans, then SUVs, and finally cars. The torque and maintenance benefits of electric over diesel should allow it to dominate the big vehicle applications. Anyone who has passed an RV struggling through the Rockies or pulled over to the side with steam hissing out of the engine compartment should know that the big vehicles beg for this tech.

Re:Between fuel and maintenance savings...

[Mashiki]

This is from a NA perspective, but first problem, the average driving day is 10h-12hrs. That makes the vehicles already less then the average driving range. Some places allow up to 14hr days, you can even get waives for up to 16hrs/day which require 18hrs off after that single trip.. On top of that long hauling is usually a trip in one direction, so they need place to charge up. They don't exist at all right now. Even companies with massive fleets don't have places in their depots for this. Which is why "truck stops" are so common for fueling. Look at Schnider trucking for example or TST-Overland. The average range between two depots is usually 800 miles or more.

What you should expect is to see a 2-phase system coming into existence, where the battery system is used during initial startup and getting to highway speed, and then used in creep/low gear areas.

Re:Between fuel and maintenance savings...

[Rei]

More to the point, US trucking regulations are:

  * A 14 hour window containing...
  * 11 hours of driving, with...
  * A 30 minute break no more than...
  * 8 hours since the last rest period

30 minutes break at a megacharger adds 400 miles to a Semi (900 total). At the rated 60mph, that's 15 hours - far more than the maximum drivers are allowed to drive.

Of course, those mileage figures are for 60mph. Speed doesn't affect freight vehicles as much as passenger vehicles (freight vehicles have a lower ratio of aero drag to rolling drag), but it's still significant. Likewise, at higher driving speeds, you burn through miles faster regardless. 70mph with a 30 minute charging stop should be nearly 11 hours driving exactly. For 80mph, you need two 30 minute charge periods to fill up the full 11 hours (but that still comes well under the 14 hour driving window).

Truck speed limits in the US vary greatly. In higher speed limit states, trucks tend to significantly vary in speed, with more time-sensitive goods going faster, while goods where keeping fuel costs down matters more move slower. With electric, since the "fuel" is so much cheaper, you can expect faster driving to be the more economically optimal case (since it doesn't push drivers out of their legal driving windows).

In Europe it's way too easy. It's just simply: 45 minutes break every 4 1/2 hours or less

Re: Between fuel and maintenance savings...

[Elfich47]

Tesla claims their mega charger will give 400. Lies range in 30 minutes.

Re: Between fuel and maintenance savings...

[Anonymous Coward]

It happens in Australia all the time.
Perth to Sydney route is 4500 km+

Re: Between fuel and maintenance savings...

[swillden]

You're going to pay someone for sleeping in a truck?

Obviously not. The driver who is sleeping isn't getting paid, the driver who is driving is getting paid. A lot of couples drive this way. They make almost as much as what they'd make if both of them were driving separate trucks, but without having to spend all of their time apart. It works very well for the truck owner (which is often the couple) because the truck is rolling nearly 24 hours per day, maximizing the return on capital investment.

Of course, what would be an even better use of capital investment is a couple shift-driving the lead truck of a "train", with the following vehicles self-driving. But mega-charging a train could be tricky, and time-consuming. Plus, rolling 24 hours per day will require more capacity than Tesla is putting in the trucks, even with megacharging. The obvious answer is: put batteries in the trailers.

I mentioned this to my brother (who drives trucks, medium-haul -- for a company that has already ordered several Tesla Semis) yesterday, and he pointed out that they don't even have to give up cargo space to do that. Some haulers have experimented with using the undercarriage area for additional cargo capacity. It has some significant advantages, in that it lowers the trailer's center of gravity (good on windy routes) and eliminates the need for an undercarriage fairing, but it's not much used because loading and unloading the undercarriage compartments is difficult. So... put batteries there. It adds weight, but doesn't consume cargo space.

He also points out that his company's tractors stay in motion nearly 24x7, but the trailers spend a good chunk of each day in a depot getting loaded or unloaded. So, if the trailer batteries can be charged while that's going on, there's less need for the tractor to stop moving.

Big batteries in tractors is probably necessary at the beginning, but I don't think it will be too long before the majority of the capacity moves out of the tractors and into the trailers, at least for long-haul routes.

Anyone priced a semi lately?

[ai4px]

Semi trucks commonly cost more than $150,000. A boon for fleet owners will have batteries on site to swap, so the long charge time is a non issue. Not particularly good for long haul and owner operators.

Re:Anyone priced a semi lately?

[Mashiki]

O/O's want to be on the road as much as possible, on routes that are profitable so you're spot on with that. The fleet owners want the most distance possible, and most already operate so you're going 800mi or more before a fillup. Semi's can be picked up 1-2yrs old for $30k-40k that were previously fleet owned. A lot of fleets are switching to automatics which give better fuel mileage then standard for one thing, which is further driving down the costs of stick shift trucks in the 2nd hand market right now. As for charging/battery swaps? The range doesn't exist to get them from depot to depot, and those companies aren't going to build a second depot for it. And truck stops are already limited space, with next to no storage available for things like batteries.

charging stations

[Elfich47]

I expect the first owners of the Tesla trucks will be fleet owners (Walmart for example). I will bet Tesla will have a mega-charger for the trucks. Then you mount the mega-charger on a boom arm so the truck is charged while the trailer is filled. If it takes an hour to charge the truck, it is no time lost against the loading time.

Re:charging stations

[Gavagai80]

We have numerous truck stops and regular mandatory breaks for the drivers. Until these are self-driving, there's no real need for a quick charge. Once it's self-driving, then sure they'll want to charge fast while loading to shave more hours off the trip.

Re:charging stations

[Charcharodon]

That usually isn't the case in large fleets. My time in UPS the truck was rarely hooked up to a trailer until it was almost ready to leave (full or scheduled time to depart). They'll probably have a charging yard with these things lined up like shopping carts. I can see that as a thing say at a Walmart where an inbound truck might hang around for its trailer to be unloaded. Though there are probably a couple sitting empty that they just swap out and hit the road. Big equipment can't make you money if they are sitting around waiting.

The one thing everyone seems to be forgetting though is while autopilot may not be legal for use on the highway it is certainly legal for use on private property. Having the trucks move themselves around the yard and self parking will become a thing pretty quick. Truck enters the yard. The driver bounces. Truck parks itself in the loading bay. Ground crew disconnects the trailer. Takes itself over to the charge/maintenance yard. A charged truck hooks up to an outbound trailer. Ground crew makes the connection and hits the go button. Then it goes to the front waiting area to pick up its driver. Driver hops in and off it goes.

Re: charging stations

[Guspaz]

The charging port on the semi has four times as many sockets as the existing supercharger port. Based on the assumption that the vehicle has an 800 kWh battery (this seems to be the general consensus), charging it to 400 miles (80%) in 30 minutes with 90% charging efficiency with would require roughly 1.4 megawatts.

Considering the quadrupled connector, this would be roughly the equivalent of pulling 350 kW through a current supercharger. Coincidentally, the next generation superchargers are planned to put out 350 kW.

So, it all seems reasonable to me. We're not talking about a large number of charging stations here, we're talking about a very limited number that are located either at fleet motor pools and waystations on trucking routes. Grid connections aren't really a problem, lots of commercial buildings draw far more power than that.

Re:charging stations

[Charcharodon]

vtcodger go look up "Hobart ground power unit". We ran 50-75KW ground generators up to aircraft all the time. This tech is more than 50 years old. The cord wasn't all that bad to deal with. 4 big cables in a bundle. Beside all they have to do is break it up into four separate power cords if all the elderly truck drivers don't want to lug that much copper around. All of a minute to hook all four up. The power was scary, but it was common place. After a while you didn't even think about it. We had the carts (diesel generators) and had ground connection (grid). Never saw or head of an catastrophic failure in my 20 years in as an aircraft maintainer.

Easy peasy. This is a nothing sandwich part of the deal.

Re:What we are really waiting for.

[Kernel Kurtz]

I am waiting to see who the first person is to buy one and turn it into a massively overpowered SUV/truck thing for drag racing.

If it is like any other Tesla is will be fast for one short spurt. Then it will go into limp mode.

http://www.thedrive.com/news/5...

Re:What we are really waiting for.

[pezpunk]

ikf you're talking about drag racing, nope, totally wrong. it can do quarter mile runs all day without going into limp mode.

it cannot go around the nurburgring. but nobody suggested that.

Re:Weight is a factor

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody's saying a peep about how much this thing weighs compared to a common diesel.

The diesel one will vary by 800 pounds depending on if the tank is full or empty. (Guess where those pounds end up, matter doesn't disappear.)

Either way I would like to see a system set up where emissions are moved out from the cities.
With semis you can move the cargo over to an EV without having to reload everything.
Diesel semis could do the long transportation with few start/stops that it is good at and then hand it over to an EV semi at the city limit that does the last part to keep emissions away from where people live and avoid most of start/stop situations that diesels are so bad at.

Re: There are other options

[LDAPMAN]

Itâ(TM)s true that passenger trains are relatively limited in the US, the freight network is huge. It carries far more tonage than all the rail lines in Europe.

Will this affect rail electrification?

[b0s0z0ku]

Electrified rail is still the most efficient way to move freight. US should be moving in that direction. Steel-on-steel = less friction. Power from overhead wires = no environmentally costly batteries. No charging/discharge losses either.

Far better than electric long-distance trucks would be getting the freight OFF the roads and onto rail. Ideally highly-automated. Use smaller electric engines to pull shorter trains that can be directly routes from points A to B using highly automated switching control software. Then load it onto electric trucks for the last 25-50 miles or so.