The Tesla Semi from an Insider's View After One Year: "Hot Mess"

(Which is not to say you couldn't make some improvements, but you're never going to get 50 mpg while hauling 40 tons.)

I believe this is what they call, in the legal industry, "Hearsay". Pepsi person tells friend person who tells the author. A lot can get lost in that chain of telephone.

But yea, you're right. A lot of it is kinda nonsense statements. Or it's otherwise meaningless. For example

> There is a team of Tesla engineers on call 24 hours a day, ready to fly out and fix anything wrong with the Tesla Semis. No one at PepsiCo is allowed to fix the Semi.

Well, duh? These are preproduction units that Pepsi is probably getting for a song, with the understanding that there are going to be teething issues. Of course no one is allowed to "fix" the semi other than Tesla, no one is qualified to fix them. Hell, Tesla Service Centers aren't qualified because the only people who know enough about these machines are the engineers who built them.

The author likes to repeat things that are clearly non-sense as well.

> The batteries completely burned out

What does "burned out" even mean? Driven until failure? That doesn't make sense. Tesla, if nothing else, understands EV's and battery packs (if maybe not Semi's). They know how to build batteries with protection circuits so they can't go too low and permanently damage themselves. So what this probably means is driven until the battery went flat/dead/0% SOC. And that's, once again, not a shock. Drive a vehicle that isn't ready to do 500 miles, more than 500 miles and its going to go dead. There are a total of ZERO megachargers out in the world that the Semi could use, so... of course they are going to die. If you drive a gas vehicle somewhere there are no gas stations it'll also die.

> The constant use of the battery pack is unprecedented and is causing reliability problems for Tesla and other EV truck makers

There are, what, a half dozen preproduction units out in the world? How can you even come to a statement like this that makes sense? The announcement of the first public delivery of a semi was December 1st, 2022 - so they've not been in fleet hands for even a year yet. I would be shocked if the first unit that rolled off the preprod line WAS reliable overall, if anyone remembers... the roadsters had more than a few issues too.

> All Tesla Semis and other electric trucks are subsidized by California state

Where are the sources on this? If Tesla was actually getting subsidy to build these, it would be in the news. Easy to prove. I cannot find any articles other than one mentioning the hope to get a federal grant to build a megacharger corridor from CA to TX.

Do I think the tesla semi's are the most amazing thing since sliced bread? No. I'm sure they have tons of issues. But shitty writing (I won't even call this article "reporting" since it is basically some dudebro's blog) based on hearsay without any sort of proof or corroboration is just shitty fantasy. Might as well read some of that rule34 fanfiction about Elon that the fanboys write, if you want equal levels of accuracy.

All you can really do is smile and nod, which, it's much more useful to spend your time not listening to this sport of speculation, and, if you must speculate, speculate on if the idea of an electric semi is viable in the first place.

Personally, I think it is. It's a much harder engineering problem than a car though, so, it's likely to take awhile to become really viable, and longer still to get to a place a reasonable person would call "good". I'd also go sofar as to say, tech wise, we're probably not there yet. We need better batteries, and a means to charge them. That's been slow going so far, and likely needs some significant investment.

Something like a billion dollar X-prize, or, make it 2 billion, for inflation reasons, for the first group that can demonstrate a battery tech suitable for mass manufacturing that's 2x current lithium ion cells at 1/2 the cost. That'd probably get us there in the next 5 years or so, give it another 5 to scale out, and the parallel tech developed trying to attain that prize probably sees things developing relatively quickly after that.