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Tesla CEO Elon Musk has insisted investors think of his electric automaker as a robotics and autonomous vehicle company now. He’s targeted a $20 trillion valuation—nearly four times the value of market leader Nvidia—on that premise. But his Tesla team was in Sparks, Nevada, on Thursday to focus on, well, an electric vehicle: the long-awaited Tesla Semi. The Semi concept first rolled onto a Tesla event stage in late 2017. Nearly a decade later, Tesla officially launched high-volume production at a livestreamed but invite-only event at the company’s factory. It targeted a niche audience: the cost-conscious people who manage large trucking fleets. A handful of them, all men, trooped across the stage to be thanked for their orders to a pulsing techno beat. “It’s going to be, really, a driver’s truck. It’s like a sports car in truck form.” Musk said in a pre-taped video played during the evening event. (Musk, for years the ringmaster at Tesla’s circus-like events, skipped his second vehicle debut in a row; he was attending a White House China State Dinner featuring President Xi Jinping.) The long-range version of the Semi will travel an estimated 500 miles per charge, Lars Moravy, Tesla’s vice president of Vehicle Engineering, confirmed at the event—around the average number of miles traveled by US long-haul truckers each day. The standard version will get an estimated 325 miles per charge. Competitor EVs advertise ranges of 155 to 430 miles. Electric dreams The Tesla Semi has its work cut out for it. While electrics account for nearly 30 percent of heavy-duty truck sales in China, according to state media, they’ve had a slow start in the US, as manufacturers struggle to make the vehicles competitive with their traditional diesel-burning counterparts. Electric semis can cost two to three times more upfront. Right now, they’re not easy to charge because they require a countrywide network of specialized megawatt chargers that can fill large batteries in hours. Tesla’s website shows two such public chargers operating in the LA area. However, Dan Priestley, who leads Tesla’s Semi program, says the company plans to open 30 by the end of the year.
document fetched 2026-09-27 02:53 · canonical https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/09/teslas-big-electric-truck-faces-an-even-bigger-infrastructure-challenge