With less than a week to go until the Tesla Semi Truck event, Elon Musk dropped a bombshell tweet stating that the truck will “blow your mind clear out of your skull and into an alternate dimension.”
That’s clearly exaggeration, but with the Model 3 production ramp over the first few months so drastically low, the Tesla Semi Truck event is an opportunity for Tesla to show off what it has been working on in parallel to its move into the passenger vehicle space. Tesla Semi has the potential to not only disrupt the entire trucking industry with a lower total cost of ownership electric vehicle that paves the way for electric transportation — it also represents an entirely new market for the automaker, a move beyond passenger vehicles.
Since Tesla’s announcement of its fully electric semi truck, Nikola Motors has unveiled its hydrogen fuel cell electric semi truck prototype, which it plans to deploy along with a network of free-to-fill hydrogen fueling stations across the United States.
In parallel, longtime semi truck engine manufacturer Cummins revealed a fully electric Class 7 semi truck that officially kicked off the electrification of semi trucks. As Tesla has said all along, its vision is not to be the leader in every segment it sells in, but rather, to catalyze and accelerate the transition to electrified transportation. These early moves seem to show that its tactics are working.
Tesla Semi Truck unveil to be webcast live on Thursday at 8pm! This will blow your mind clear out of your skull and into an alternate dimension. Just need to find my portal gun …
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 12, 2017
Tweets from Elon chock full of breaking company news, new product announcements and official feature timelines are the norm for Tesla with the Tesla Semi Truck event date first being shared on Twitter by Elon back in September.
The date was subsequently pushed back to November due to Tesla’s need to eliminate Model 3 production bottlenecks and its philanthropic efforts to restore power to Puerto Rico. Elon has hyped up the Tesla Semi Truck for months now, teasing on a quarterly earnings call that he had driven the prototype around the parking lot.
Tesla Semi truck unveil & test ride tentatively scheduled for Oct 26th in Hawthorne. Worth seeing this beast in person. It's unreal.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 13, 2017
Regardless of whether or not the parking lot at the Tesla Fremont Factory will now be under 24/7 surveillance by unmanned drone cameras, it is clear that Elon is excited about the Tesla Semi Truck and eager to share it with the general public. To date, only a teaser of the front profile has been shared, and even that could be subject to change.
I will be at the event for CleanTechnica in order to get the inside scoop on what exactly Tesla is showing off and to see if there might be “one more thing,” as Steve Jobs so tactfully teased at so many Apple events in the past.
Elon has really made what feels like an emotional push for the Tesla Semi Truck in his tweets, and I for one am excited to see and hear what the team has been working on under Jerome Guillen’s leadership for so long now, especially with so many questions:
Will it be capable of autonomous driving?
Will it integrate with hyperloop and the work that Elon’s doing with The Boring Company?
What will the range be?
What will the cost be?
When will it be available?
So many questions, so little time. In less than 1 week, we will have the skinny on the Tesla Semi Truck and I can’t wait.
Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!
Have a tip for CleanTechnica, want to advertise, or want to suggest a guest for our CleanTech Talk podcast? Contact us here.
Autonomous Drones for Better Farming
I don't like paywalls. You don't like paywalls. Who likes paywalls? Here at CleanTechnica, we implemented a limited paywall for a while, but it always felt wrong — and it was always tough to decide what we should put behind there. In theory, your most exclusive and best content goes behind a paywall. But then fewer people read it! We just don't like paywalls, and so we've decided to ditch ours. Unfortunately, the media business is still a tough, cut-throat business with tiny margins. It's a never-ending Olympic challenge to stay above water or even perhaps — gasp — grow. So ...
