Tesla's semi-truck 'The Beast' rolls out
Tesla's long-awaited electric tractor-trailer
truck released on Thursday night in California.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has released
a big, powerful truck he has nicknamed "The Beast." A teaser
image Telsa has released, showing the truck heavily back-lit, reveals
a tall silhouette with futuristic angular headlights.
Musk has frequently touted the
truck's reveal which was originally set for September, but it's been
delayed. Most recently, it was pushed to November because, Tesla
said, it needed to divert resources to help restore power in Puerto Rico after
Hurricane Maria.Tesla makes power storage equipment as well as cars. It also
needed to attend to problems with the Model 3 sedan, only 260 of which have
been made since July.
But Tesla is rolling into a big
new market very different from the passenger vehicles it sells now. And the
company is already facing major production issues with the cars it already
makes.
It will be a challenging new line
of business for Musk, due primarily to basic physics. Semi trucks, which tow
large, heavy trailers at high speeds for long distances, are by their very
nature not ideal candidates for electric power.
The reason: A semi truck requires
lots of energy to run, and more energy means more batteries. Since the whole
point of a truck is to carry cargo, a truck that uses a lot of space just to
haul its own batteries would be problematic. The truck could use smaller
batteries, but then it would have to stop more often to recharge and, in the
trucking industry, downtime costs money.
Electric delivery trucks are
already on the market, delivering goods on local routes. Those sorts of trips,
involving relatively short routes at slow speeds that start and end at the same
location, are well suited to a battery-powered truck. Power demands are
relatively low and the trucks can easily be recharged before each shift.
That's why many analysts have
suggested that Tesla's semi truck would be best used to move cargo from ports
to other relatively nearby locations such as rail yards, warehouses or
distribution centers. As with smaller delivery trucks, this would involve short
trips that would have the truck back at a base location for charging.
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