The Tesla Semi truck was burned in the back until the president’s climate bill was passed.
This is already clear: Tesla will start offering Semi trucks on December 1, 5 years later Elon Musk start taking orders for them. The first people will go to PepsiCo, which will put them to work at a Frito-Lay facility in Modesto, Californiaand a beverage factory in Sacramento.
From there, details are fuzzy for a product the world has known about since 2017.
Specifications? “500 miles range and super fun to drive,” Musk tweeted last week.
There’s not much more information on Tesla’s website, other than zero to 60 acceleration times, which don’t rank particularly high on truckers’ priority lists. For example, braking distance is much more important than beating another big rig, because one The former trucker pointed out after Musk’s prototype presentation years ago. (By the way, it takes 20 seconds to reach 60 mph.)
How many Semis does PepsiCo get? Musk and the food and beverage giant have not yet spoken.
And why did the Semi finally go into production? Musk didn’t address this, but the chairman of climate law Joe Biden signed into law in August is certainly the reason.
Before the Inflation Reduction Act, Musk said Semi was more or less on hold because Tesla didn’t have enough the battery. Semi uses 5 times as many cells as a car but won’t sell for 5 times as much as a car, so it doesn’t make sense to build trucks until the company passes restrictions on battery production, the CEO said last January.
Those cellular constraints don’t seem to have been lifted – Musk said the battery yield as the “base rate cap” for the transition to sustainable energy during Tesla’s most recent earnings call. It also didn’t sound on that July call because the company was close to meaningfully increasing output of the larger battery cells Musk had suggested the Semi would use. He thinks these cells are important to Tesla’s plans for 2023, but not this year.
A week after that earnings call, Senator Joe Manchin and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced they had agreed on legislation that would enact key parts of Biden’s climate agenda. While the amount up to $ 7,500 clean car Tax credits that consumers will qualify for are plenty of titles, more expensive commercial vehicles qualify for a much larger incentive: up to $40,000 per truck.
And low and amazing, days after the Senate passed the bill, Musk announced the Semi would start shipping this year.
Musk doesn’t beg for big incentives. In contrast, he voiced opposition to Biden’s previous Build Back Better proposal, saying he believes “the role of government should be more like a referee, not a player on the field” and called for Washington to “get out of the way and not hinder progress.”
But instead of hindering, the Inflation Reduction Act seems to have promoted Tesla to develop its stalled product. According to RMI, a non-profit organization focused on clean energy, the tax credit “will promote the adoption of electric-powered medium and heavy-duty trucks. “The IRA tax credit makes owning an electric truck cheaper than owning a diesel truck in most use cases.
Musk’s frustrations with the Biden administration are well-documented. If the IRA tax credit is as effective as expected in stimulating demand for electric heavy-duty trucks, it could well be another policy triggering a consensual response.
