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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.
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.
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.
Om, nomnomnom...
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.
We gotta go to a crappy town where I'm a hero.
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.
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).
We gotta go to a crappy town where I'm a hero.
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.
We gotta go to a crappy town where I'm a hero.
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.
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.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
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.
We gotta go to a crappy town where I'm a hero.
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.