Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Thursday night surprise the world, by launching launching a new electric semi-truck
Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Thursday night the world, by launching launching a new electric semi-truck
to announce what he said will be the world’s fastest production car, a new Tesla Roadster.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Thursday night surprise the world, by launching launching a new electric semi-truck
to announce what he said will be the world’s fastest production car, a new Tesla Roadster.
elon musk had hyped the truck on Twitter throughout the week. On Sunday, he promised that it “will
blow your mind clear out of your skull and into an alternate dimension”, while on Wednesday he teased that the truck “can
transform into a robot, fight aliens and make one hell of a latte”.
Tesla is set to unveil its electric big-rig truck on Thursday evening, but that’s not the only concept vehicle it has in the works.
Musk told a crowd assembled at the company’s design studio just southwest of Los Angeles in Hawthorne. “The point of this is
to give a hard-core smack down to gasoline cars.”
In a recent interview CEO Elon Musk, writer Neil Strauss said he got a first look at the big rig, as well as
other prototype vehicles.
In Strauss’ article, he describes the area around the SpaceX campus and then begins to describe the Tesla Design Studio, which
is where Musk will unveil the semi.
“But there is a particular building in Musk city that few have visited, and this is where Musk takes me. It is the Tesla Design
Studio, where he’s slated to do a walkthrough of the Tesla Truck and other future vehicle prototypes with his team of designers
and engineers.”
The fact that Musk was willing to show Strauss vehicles besides the semi suggests that the company could reveal other prototypes soon, possibly at the event Thursday evening.
The battery pack will allow the three-motor, four-seat car to travel 620 miles on one charge, enough to drive from San Francisco
to Los Angeles and back, Musk said. That will make the vehicle the first production electric car to cover 1,000 kilometers on a
single charge, he said.
“From day one, having a Tesla semi will beat a diesel truck on economics,” Musk claimed. “It’s got a better drag coefficient
than a supercar.”
If a driver has a medical emergency, the truck will automatically come to a gradual stop, and can call for help if the driver
doesn’t respond to a prompt, Musk said.The truck’s low center of gravity makes for good handling and roll-over prevention, and
its technology makes jack-knifing impossible, Musk said. The semi has automated-driving features including lane-keeping and autom
atic braking, and has four independent motors, On one charge, Tesla’s truck can travel 500 miles at 60 mph, carrying the maximum allowed weight in the U.S., Musk said, adding that 80 percent of trucking routes are shorter than 250 miles.
Production begins in 2019,“Order now, you get the truck in two years,” he said.
The prices of the truck and Roadster were not ye revealed.
$34.3 billion by 2020.
On Thursday, as Tesla was about to announce its electric semi, an advocacy group for diesel vehicle and engine manufacturers,
diesel refiners and device makers issued a statement supporting the use of diesel-powered vehicles for trucking.
The company is currently spending about $1 billion per quarter, largely to set up the Model 3 factory, and is contemplating a
factory in China to build cars.
