Elon Musk: Tesla Semi Truck Event Will “Blow Your Mind”
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.