> That seems reasonable for a box truck or similar. I'm skeptical about a semi though. I'm sure there are some use cases, just not convinced it's a significant percentage.
TL;DR: pickup and delivery trucks don't go very far each day and pull lighter loads. There are more pickup and delivery trucks than long-haul trucks.
Full version:
I worked for the largest LTL carrier in the country for almost a decade, in process improvement. I'm not a trucker by any means but I do feel like I have a pretty good grasp of the business processes in that industry.
There are two types of trailers typically used in the US: 53', which are generally used to move things directly from point A to point B, and 28' - "pups" - which are typically used to move things that have to go through intermediate steps. Correspondingly, the freight market is divided into "truckload"/"TL" and "less-than-truckload"/"LTL" carriers.
Truckload carriers often drop off 53' trailers at customer locations. Customers fill them up, and the carrier picks them up and takes them to their destination. They also use pups for this purpose, but 53' trailers are more efficient due to the larger capacity.
Less-than-truckload carriers pick up and deliver things that are usually on pallets. Drivers run a delivery route in the morning and a pickup route in the afternoon, pulling a single pup. They bring their pup back to the terminal where its unloaded and shipments are loaded according to their destination.
LTL carriers differ substantially from TL carriers because they have to handle customer shipments, moving them from trailer to trailer. The general flow here is Pickup -> Terminal -> Hub -> Terminal -> Delivery. Shipments going long distances may move through multiple hubs over several days, each of which may handle the shipments to more efficiently use trailer capacity.
The process improvement part of LTL that I worked in was trying to reduce loss and damages by reducing the number of times a shipment is touched. If a terminal in California has a pup full of shipments that are destined for a single terminal in North Carolina, then that trailer should never be opened until it gets to North Carolina. If half of it is destined for Utah and half for North Carolina, then the Utah stuff should be in the back, and when the trailer gets to Salt Lake City the Utah stuff should be unloaded, more North Carolina stuff put on to fill it, and it shouldn't be opened again from that point to destination.
Whew. That's a lot of background information. I wrote all of that to say - for LTL carriers, most P&D trucks don't travel long distances in a single day, and are usually pulling half the load of a long-haul truck. From an operations standpoint I see no reason why the Tesla truck wouldn't be suitable for that role.