The top 20 CleanTechnica stories of the past week, surprisingly, didn’t include a single Tesla story! Just kidding — it was the subject of 5 of the 20 articles and was heavily embedded in some of the others as well. But we did also have some fascinating pieces about other EVs, clean power trends, scientific advancements, and more.
Alternative title: “It’s a bad idea to doubt Tesla Performance before the product is revealed.”
Following just a day after we reported that Anheuser-Busch had placed the largest pre-order yet for Tesla’s new Semi Trucks — with reservations being placed for 40 units — Sysco Corporation has announced that it has reserved 50 units of the upcoming Tesla Semi Truck.
Anheuser-Busch, a company perhaps best known for its popular beer brand Budweiser, has ordered and reserved 40 units of the recently unveiled Tesla Semi Truck, representatives have announced.
John Feddersen is the director of Aurora Energy Research, an international market intelligence and research agency. He told the Financial Times recently that the power needed to recharge one Tesla Semi in 30 minutes, as touted by Elon Musk at the introduction of the electric Class 8 truck on November 16, would power up to 3,200 typical UK homes for one hour. His calculations are based on hauling a fully loaded cargo trailer for 500 miles — the maximum range of the Tesla Semi according to Musk, a task he says would consume 1600 kilowatt-hours of electricity.
This week is Cleantech Talk’s Tesla Truck take. Anyone can offer a “hot take” on current events, and darn near every media outlet did! But it takes a brave team (or just a very busy-with-other-work one!) to offer a “cold take” weeks later. In our defense, we were trying to add something to CleanTechnica’s already-substantive coverage and reflections (e.g., this and this).
A lot of people don’t typically like it when others get extremely excited and bombastic about something. Others, however, can be stimulated by that excitement and bombast. And the preferences are often more a matter of style than anything else.
The Tesla Semi Truck announcement represents a head-on challenge to the way people move goods around the country, but Tesla is not the first to move into plug-in trucks — far from it. I recently had the opportunity to talk with Tesla cofounder Ian Wright, who has since moved on to start his own company Wrightspeed, which has been helping shipping companies slash their heavy-duty truck emissions for years with its hybrid powertrains. [Note: We also had a Cleantech Talks interview with Ian Wright in 2015 that’s worth a listen.]
Just before the Tesla Semi unveiling, I ran a poll on what the unveiling would include. There were some wacky questions and potential answers as well as some serious ones. The wacky questions and answer choices made it perhaps my favorite piece of work in November. Yet, after a nearly sleepless night and all of the excitement and fun after the event, I forgot about the poll!
What were the hottest, coolest, most interesting, and thus most popular stories of November on CleanTechnica? Read on…
