Welcome to Sparks, Nevada, site of the Tesla Gigafactory and our Tesla Semi factory as well. Yeah, I can't believe it's been five years. We unveiled the Tesla Semi five years ago. It's been a lot that's happened since then, to say the least. We're incredibly excited tonight to actually deliver our first production Tesla Semi Trucks. It's right next door to the Giga Nevada, our Gigafactory here, which produces the most number of battery cells in North America. It produces our drive units, battery packs, yeah. I'd just like to start off by giving a big hand to the Tesla Gigafactory team and the Tesla Semi team.
It's like- so I... I think you've had a chance to tour the production line. So.
Yeah.
Cool. Great. Yeah, we're looking forward to actually delivering our first production trucks to PepsiCo, so this is gonna be fantastic. Yeah.
Yeah. Also a huge thank you to all of our other customers. I mean, a lot's happened in the last five years, and our customers have been super loyal and supportive and, you know, stuck with us and been a huge part of our development, and we're excited to show everything that we've been doing off to everybody tonight.
Yep. Great. Let's get started. Yeah. Yeah, sorry for the delay. It's been like, sheer number, sheer amount of drama between this, the last, that five years ago and now is insane. A lot has happened in the world, here we are. It's real.
Yeah, we threw a great party a few years back, trying to do a similar thing here tonight. You know, Tesla's been growing like crazy. I mean, you know, everybody here has been, you know, contributing towards the growth and unveiling awesome products and really scaling us to the point that now we can actually work on Semi, we're really excited to do that. We've been working a little bit on the background, close to the chest, you know, right level of priority, but, you know, made a lot of progress, incorporated a lot of things that we're gonna talk about. At the end of the day, we have not wavered from our mission to build the most compelling, greatest Class 8 truck in history.
We're going to keep putting our foot forward to do that, and yeah, it's pretty awesome.
You know, people might wonder why build a semi-truck, 'cause if you look at the actual unit volume, it's small compared to passenger vehicles. For passenger vehicles, you know, there's on the order of almost 100 million that are sold every year and whereas semi-trucks it's like 400,000 or 500,000.
Not even, yeah. It's a couple hundred thousand Class 8 trucks a year.
Globally.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
No, no. Sorry. That's U.S., U.S.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
There's in the U.S. probably like 15 million passenger vehicles and a couple hundred thousand semi-trucks. It seems like a small percentage, but it's actually 20% of U.S. vehicle emissions because you've got a huge vehicle, and it's being driven all the time. When you factor in the number of hours driven and the weight that it's carrying, it's actually, although it's only 1% of vehicle production, it's 20% of vehicle emissions. It's over a third of all the particulate emissions. From a sort of health standpoint, particularly in like cities, this is a huge impact. Like, it's gigantic. That's why we're doing it, you know. Yeah.
Yeah. This is really core to our mission. You know, to Elon's point, there's a lot of heavy trucks that are deployed in dense urban areas. The communities that are around freeways, a lot of where these trucks are domiciled, are gonna really benefit, particularly from the particulate emissions reductions and then, you know, just trying to reduce emissions globally. Every truck that we put on the road that replaces a diesel truck is a huge amount of leverage. That is why we're doing this. It makes a huge difference towards driving us towards our total mission of sustainable energy and transportation.
Yeah. I think maybe a lot of people don't realize it's actually quite, like, you know, quite unhealthy to be living next to a highway with diesel trucks, FYI. Being able to make them electric is just gonna be, just in addition to sort of climate change and global warming matters, it's also quiet, and it's gonna improve the quality of your air, and it will actually just fundamentally improve the health of people living near freeways, which is obviously a super big deal.
Yeah, if anybody's been woken up by a noisy truck delivering in the morning, you know, the quiet will definitely be very welcome. I know I will appreciate that.
Yeah. We're aiming to cover all major forms of transport. It's just consistent with the Tesla mission 'cause sometimes we get asked like, "Well, you know, shouldn't Tesla just produce like, you know, fast cars or premium cars or whatever?" It's like, but what's our actual mission? Our actual mission is to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy. That's why we're making this wide range of cars that don't really make sense from a brand standpoint, I guess, traditionally, but they make total sense when you consider what's the mission of the company. The mission of the company is to accelerate sustainable energy. It's super consistent with that goal, and really a crucial piece of the puzzle, and that's why we're doing it.
Yeah, I mean, Elon, you first laid this out in Master Plan, Part Deux, you know, now we're here to actually make it happen and, you know, everything from the mission side, along with reducing the cost of cargo transport and also make it fun. I mean, we wanna make the truck an awesome driving experience, you know, make it kick ass for the drivers.
Yeah. I mean, it looks sick. I mean, look at that thing. I mean, you wanna drive that. I mean, that thing looks like it came from the future. I mean, it drives like it's like driving a, you know, a Tesla, literally. It's fun. It looks awesome. You know, there's actually a big shortage of drivers. If you're a truck driver and you want the most badass rig on the road, this is it. Yeah, that's it. It's a beast. You know, at Tesla, we don't make slow cars. This thing has crazy power relative to a diesel truck.
I mean, actually, especially if you're not towing anything, you could zip around like, it does looks crazy, basically. It looks like a elephant moving like a cheetah. It doesn't look right, frankly. This is not sluggish in the least. It's fast. It's fast to accelerate. It's fast to brake. It's really a step change improvement in what it's like to drive a semi-truck. Yeah, we've got three times.
Yeah.
The power.
Three times the power than any diesel truck on the road right now. You got all the work, all the power you need to get the job done. The other reason that it's a beast is because it's also efficient, and, you know, you can go 500 mi on a single charge on one of these things. It's the mix of those two that this is why this is a game changer. What's awesome is both of those are enabled by our new 1,000-volt powertrain, which is the first vehicle that we're doing with that. Don't worry, there'll be some more things, more vehicles coming with that. This is gonna be a game changer because of all the awesome innovations that have happened, you know, behind the scenes and, you know, under the hood, so to speak.
Cool. Yeah. We're obviously leveraging a ton of stuff that we've already done. We've got, well, it's now probably 51 billion mi driven, I don't know, 'cause more every day. We're using our existing drive units, power electronics, infotainment, the, our super efficient, heat pump, HVAC system, and state-of-the-art inverters. We're able to leverage the existing powertrain and elements that are already made at volume in order to achieve extreme efficiency of cost and capability.
Yeah. It also means we get to leverage all the reliability that the active car fleet is doing. We're accumulating all these miles, getting a ton of demonstrated learnings into the field, and we're gonna go and put all these trucks into the world and get a lot of learnings as well, but we're coming off of a great launching pad with everything that's done in the rest of our products already. It's also enabled because, you know, Tesla's got this full vertical integration on the software and the hardware side. The teams that are working together to put all that together into one package, this is a huge win, you know, for all of our products, but particularly Semi.
Lots of hardcore testing. I mean, one of the things about a commercial truck is that the reliability has to be extremely high. It's gotta be running continuously, can't break down. It's gotta handle every kind of weather. Uptime is super important for any kind of semi-truck. We've tested durability in every kind of weather, every kind of environment. I mean, you could yeah.
Yeah, I mean, even just, we've driven Donner. We'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment, but we've been through hot, cold, snow, rain. We've been putting this thing through all its paces in the lab as well as in the real world. You know, the simulation team has been doing an incredible job of being able to scale all of that, you know, in the virtual side. The other thing is that we're gonna take these and we're gonna put our money where our mouth is, and we're gonna put these on into our own fleet, into our own supply chain, and we're gonna use this to transport goods between our factories and our suppliers because we believe in it, not just from a mission perspective and a cost perspective, but because we wanna close that feedback loop.
We gotta get that learning as fast as we can. We want it straight from the drivers. We want it straight from the service techs that are working on it. We're gonna take all that data that's coming in and continue to refine the product and make it better, just like we do on the car side.
Yeah, exactly. To be clear, like these semi-trucks are running 24/7 between Sparks, technically in Sparks, not Reno, but most people think of it as Reno/Sparks, and Tahoe. Yeah, this is technically the called the Tahoe Reno Industrial Complex or TRIC. Now there's an interesting backstory about why it's called that.
Very.
Yeah. Anyway, it's the Tesla are using the trucks continuously day and night between here and Fremont and back again is gonna be is a great test of the vehicle and will give us a great feedback loop for continuing to improve the product. My clicker's sort of not working. Just wait a minute. There we go. All right. Yeah, we've got a tri-motor.
Yeah
Powertrain system. We're using the carbon overwrapped sleeve. essentially we're using the Plaid Model S, Model X powertrain. We're and actually enabling two of the drive units actually disconnect.
Yeah
S o that they're not, free spinning.
Yeah.
The efficiency is actually much greater in cruise.
Yeah, this is really unique. I mean, we're going with a tri-motor system. One of them is constantly engaged, so that's for maximum efficiency. You're getting on a highway, that's doing the bulk of the work, and it's operating at the peak efficiency point of the entire drivetrain. The other two units are for torque and acceleration. When the driver needs it to get their job done, whether that's, you know, getting out of a loading dock or it's on the road, they need to pass somebody, you're tackling a grade, you have the torque and power to do it. The cool thing is that these are clutched automatically, so no driver input needed, but it's also seamless.
The highway efficiency unit is cruising along, doing its thing, and if the driver puts their foot to the floor, the torque units spin up, clutch engages and takes over, and it does all of that before we've maxed out the torque on the efficiency unit, so it's completely smooth. There's no turbo lag or jerkiness or anything like that. No driver input needed. It's smooth both in terms of acceleration and deceleration for regen. It's really cool happening all behind the scenes.
Yeah. I mean, what I find actually really wild about this is that, you can have a truck, which is 82,000 lbs. By the way, reason we can actually do 82,000 lbs is that there's a 2,000-lb extra, that's allowed by law for electric trucks. You get a little bit of a advantage on the, on the, on the weight side. You can, you can basically pull 82,000 lbs at cruise using and the only thing that's doing that is a tiny little motor-
It's like.
On one axle.
It's not that big. About football size maybe. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, you can carry it.
Yeah.
Like, it's like a, you know, vanilla case.
You could check it in your luggage. Good luck at doing that with a diesel engine. One of those is more powerful than a diesel.
Yeah. Yeah. Just that one little guy is more powerful than a regular diesel engine on a semi-truck. I find it, like, amazing that this enormous thing can be pulled by something that you could carry in your hands. It's like, wow, that's power density.
Yep. Yeah. In terms of, you know, we're putting this to use in the real world. That truck's clocking in at 82. That's weighing 82,000 lbs. When you see that pass shot again, you'll notice that speedometer is climbing. You know, we're going 6% and accelerating up that grade.
Yeah.
Yeah, this is where it comes in.
Yeah, it's really like driving a normal car, not like driving a truck. It's just that you're moving 82,000 lbs.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Any highway grade you come across, you can tackle at speed.
Yeah.
You know, there's no compromise.
No slowdown.
Nope. The other beauty is that, you know, you've got all this power going up, but you also have it going down.
Yeah.
What that means is you've got regenerative braking. Rather than using a Jake Brake or engine braking like a diesel truck does, where you have to worry about hitting your shifts. If you miss a gear, you're onto your brakes and potentially in a runaway situation. You don't have to worry about any of that. There's no shifting, no nothing. The regen recaptures all that energy as you're going down these grades, but on top of it also is a safer system for not just the driver, but everybody on the road because there's no gear to miss.
Yeah. I mean, just it's worth re-emphasizing that point. It's an electric drivetrain, when it goes downhill, you actually or when you slow down, it recaptures the energy of motion or the energy of height. The potential and kinetic energy are largely recaptured, whereas for a diesel truck, that's not possible. You can't just you know, create diesel. It, you just end up heating brakes. Then your brakes overheat, and then you can't use them, and then it's actually it's pretty dangerous 'cause your, the brakes stop working.
Yeah, that's why you have runaway truck ramps.
Yeah. Yeah.
It's funny because, if for any of you that have ever driven I-80 and driven Donner, there's a mandatory brake check stop for trucks down by Emigrant Gap. We've done this, and it's really funny because we'll go over the grade, we'll come down, and we just kind of pull to the side and we're like, "Well, there's nothing to check. We've never used the things," and we just keep driving.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We get to the bottom of the hill, we have cold brakes.
Yeah.
That's like mind-blowing in the trucking world. It's, like, insane, basically. Yeah, so. It's really worth emphasizing that. That's a significant safety improvement for the truck driver and for other people on the road. We also have excellent traction control because the precision of an electric motor is vastly better than a diesel engine. You know, it's sort of got like I'm trying to think of the right analogy here, but, like, it's got the precision of, like, a laser printer. It's not great. It's, like, really precise. That's what I'm saying. The reaction is it's like you don't have to worry about like traction control is awesome.
It's got, it's automatically stopping the truck from jackknifing. It's doing all this safety stuff in the background that just isn't possible with regular diesel trucks. It's just, it's a step change in technology in so many ways.
Yeah, and the tight integration with the software team that we have here really makes that happen because it means that we can take all that, the precision and actually put it to use. You know, it's not some tie-in of some third-party powertrain. No, this is all in-house, is we do this really neat, you know, chassis control work at the brake level, the traction control level. We integrate with our total stability control system and make sure that the driver, you know, has a lot of confidence, but also has everything they need to stay on the road. It's a really nice neat, integrated package overall in terms of, you know, software and control, and it's totally seamless to the driver, and it'll be a game changer in terms of safety.
Yeah. Yeah.
We talked power. You wanna talk efficiency?
Yeah, absolutely. You know, some people out there say it can't be done. I don't know who might say that, but I've heard rumors. We just did it. Yeah. We're gonna post the whole video unedited on YouTube.
Yeah.
No jump cuts.
Yeah. This wasn't, you know, some ultra-clean, precise test track simulation or something where we, you know, shut down a road. Nope. This is real world. You know, this is over Grapevine. This is with traffic. This is true 500 mi. You know, we were loaded just under 82,000 lbs . You know, we didn't. No special aero treatments.
Yeah.
Truck came off the line, shook it down, made it run. That's it.
Yeah. There was, like, no fast moves here.
Nope.
To be clear, it's not like, oh, what tricks did they pull? Were there actually a whole bunch of tricks we could've pulled.
Yeah.
Didn't. You know, like, as Dan said, like, no special aero treatment.
Oh, by the way, we should mention there was-.
Yeah
No charging. Like, we charged it.
Yeah, yeah. We free charged.
We didn't stop to charge. Single.
Yes
S ingle driver.
Exactly.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Good point.
Minor detail.
Yeah, yeah, it's not, like, 500 mi, like, with no load, with special aero and special everything. It's, like, fully loaded going from the Bay Area. We actually had to, like, go a bit north to get to, you know, to actually add to get to 500 mi 'cause you can... You know, L.A. to the Bay Area is less than that.
Well, we went all the way to San Diego here.
Oh, okay. Great. Yeah.
W e, that's, we stressed out on the southern end. I mean, do you wanna show 'em the video? I mean.
Yeah, yeah.
W e have the proof.
Absolutely. It's only eight hours long.
Yeah, buckle in. Don't worry, we brought lots of snacks.
Yeah.
Yeah. Standard trip. Down the Five, up Grapevine, through L.A., traffic, construction. You know, we got the bypass and the weigh station, you know, running full 80, or just under 82, full deliveries. Nothing to hide.
Yeah. Yeah, real world It's, yeah.
It, we did take one restroom break. There is a required mandatory 30-minute break within the first 8 hours of operation.
Okay.
Took a small restroom break, but that was it.
Yep. All right. Aerodynamic efficiency obviously matters a lot, and you can see it's shaped like a bullet. It's really aerodynamic. That helps a lot as we get to less than 2 kWh.
2 kWh a mile.
Yep.
That's the name of the game.
Yeah
... is efficiency there. Yep.
Yep. Yeah, I mean, it's really efficient in every way.
I mean, the team's done a lot of awesome work. I mean.
Yes
... we went into the wind tunnel, with this really cool model, rolling road, the whole nine yards, pulled in a lot of learnings and all of our features from the car side that, you know, give us such great real-world efficiency there. Really wanna make sure that the, you know, the truck and the trailer have to work together. You know, this is a combination. This is not just the truck. If you optimize one, you actually might disrupt the whole combination. So we spent a lot of time both, you know, virtually, but also in the wind tunnel to make this happen, really some next-level engineering to of everything they had to do there. You know, it means that we've got a really efficient truck.
Yeah. As I said, it's as easy to drive as a Model 3. Just, like, with basically no training, you can drive this. You know, you have to think bigger when you're driving it. It's not like, it's not hard to drive. It's really easy. We put the seat in the center for max visibility. Low floor, you can stand up in the cabin.
Yeah, that's actually, like, a really big deal. I mean, I mean, you're a tall guy, Elon.
Yeah.
Like, you're able to stand up just fine. you know, the nice thing is that if you're a truck driver and you're out during the day, and it's, you know, it's cold, it's snowy, whatever, you can get in, and this isn't a sleeper cab. This is a day cab, and you can still stand up, and you can, you know, shed your jacket, put it on the wall, all in the comfort. You can put your coveralls on while in the cab. If you have to go do a dirty job, you can do that comfortably as opposed to being out in the elements. That's, you know, that level of space is, you know, unheard of, and we were able to do that with some pretty innovative packaging.
On top of it, there's plenty of cargo storage, you know, for drivers who need to bring any tools, other equipment along. Not to mention, you know, we've got the plug-ins, the wireless charging, everything they need on the electronics side as well.
Yep. Yeah, we've got efficiency in every aspect of the vehicle. We've got one-touch suspension dump, it's very easy to attach to the trailer. It saves time and money. It's the fleet's more efficient, the driver's home sooner.
I mean, really, we're trying to extend the idea of this efficiency from not just while you're on the road, but into the yard as well. This before and after, you know, the truck has done its job on the road because that means that, you know, drivers at the end of the day are spending less time at the yard, and they're getting home earlier, and it makes their lives easier. You know, we got a light test that's easy to execute, helps with compliance. There's all these little things that the design team really spent their time, you know, researching. They did ride-alongs, they studied, they did all this work. It was really cool to watch them put them in.
I think they even took, like, a bunch of, like, the various cups and put them in CAD, and you'll see them, like, put them in various cup holder sizes and places. They'll, like, mock up a bag. They'll do all kinds of neat stuff to understand how a driver works throughout the day, and it means that they'll have a more efficient experience overall.
Yeah. Great. Obviously, to charge a truck like this quickly, you need high-powered chargers. We developed a megawatt-class charger, as it's capable of charging at a megawatt to DC.
Yeah.
It's our next generation immersive cooling, so it's liquid-cooled. You don't need like a gigantic elephant trunk of a cable. You can actually have a small cable, and that cable delivers a megawatt. We've 3x'd the current density.
I mean, this is really cool stuff. You're actually immersing the conductor in the coolant, this water-based coolant that we have, and we're then doing some really neat isolation monitoring on the backend to ensure that it's safe and delivering what it needs to. It means that we can really shove a lot of current in a very, very small place. You know, for those that have worked and charged their cars on a V3 Supercharger and the cable's nice and, you know, maneuverable, it's the same thing here. Now we're just shoving 1 MW through it instead. You know, this is key for high-power applications like Semi. You wanna tell them or do you want me to tell them?
Yeah. I mean, it's, gonna be used for Cybertruck too.
Yeah. This is coming to our Superchargers, next year.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The future of transport obviously requires a sustainable energy infrastructure, you're gotta have all aspects of the energy question answered. Sustainable power generation, then you've got to store the power, and then you transfer the power to the vehicle. Like, the three pillars of a sustainable energy future are sustainable power generation with solar and wind. I'm actually a fan of nuclear, which we should support, and geothermal and many others. Things that are sustainable, long-term, we, you want. Things like wind and solar are intermittent, so you have to have the battery pack to store the energy, so when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine, you still have energy.
You can also buffer the power so you're not overloading the grid with spike loads.
Yeah, our Semi customers are actively deploying this today. You know, we're working with them so that they have the pathway to get towards, you know, a 100% sustainable future. You know, we have all of this at our disposal, you know, commercial solar and Megapack, and, you know, the Megapack is great because not only can it do things like peak shaving or some of the other energy modulation, but it also provides a form of redundancy and backup. I mean, if we're gonna ask, you know, a fleet to take on these trucks and run them, they need to ensure that they're gonna be able to charge them and keep their fleet running in the event of a power outage, and that's one of the things that we can do with the Megapack on-site as well.
All right. First deliveries are now.
Yeah.
We'd just like to thank PepsiCo. They've been a great partner. Hey, guys. Hey. How's it going?
Thank you.
Hey. How's it going?
Good. Good.
Yeah, we completed our first cargo run with a very enormous amount of Frito-Lay, which I'm sure we have a lot of them here.
Yeah.
Let's go!
All right.
Yesterday, we were actually able to complete our first delivery, compliments of Frito-Lay. We took a truck down to their Modesto factory from here, and one of their drivers, we delivered the truck, they took it over, and they brought back a load of snacks for everybody here to enjoy tonight. Yep. Big thanks to Kirk and Steven. Yeah.
Do you guys wanna say anything?
Yes.
Okay.
All right.
Look, nothing like this happens without amazing people, and so I just wanna thank the people that spent countless hours to make this a reality. That's it. The people.
Yeah.
That's it. I just wanna echo, I know a lot of work went into it. This is fantastic. We're thrilled.
Great
A bout the delivery today. Thank you.
Thanks for letting us be a part of this. Thank you so much.
Yeah.
Appreciate you.
Thank you.
Yeah. Thank you, Dan.
Thank you so much.
Yeah.
Thanks, Dan.
All right. Yeah. All right. Yeah, thank you all for coming. It's been a long journey, a long five years, but this is gonna really revolutionize the roads, and I think make the world a better place in a meaningful way. Thank you for your support through all the years.