Tesla Semi Looks Like a Bidenmobile Spurred by the Climate Bill

tech.hindustantimes.com:

This much is clear: Tesla is going to start delivering Semi trucks on Dec. 1, a full five years after Elon Musk started taking orders for them. The first ones are going to PepsiCo, which will put them to work at a Frito-Lay facility in Modesto, California, and a beverages plant in Sacramento.

From there, details are fuzzy for a product the world has known about since 2017.

Specifications? “500 mile range & super fun to drive,” Musk tweeted last week.

There isn't a whole lot more information on Tesla's website, aside from a zero-to-60 acceleration time, which doesn't rank particularly high on truckers' priority list. Braking distance, for example, is far more important than beating another big rig off the line, as one ex-trucker pointed out after Musk's prototype presentation years ago. (It takes 20 seconds to get up to 60 miles per hour, by the way).

How many Semis is PepsiCo getting? Musk and the food and beverage giant haven't said.

And why is the Semi finally going into production? Musk hasn't addressed this, but the climate legislation President Joe Biden signed into law in August sure looks like the reason.

Before the Inflation Reduction Act, Musk had said the Semi was more or less on hold because Tesla didn't have enough batteries. The Semi uses roughly five times the number of cells a car would, but won't sell for five times what a car does, so it didn't make sense to produce trucks until the company had worked through battery production constraints, the CEO said in January of last year.

Those cell constraints don't seem to have lifted — Musk referred to battery output as “the fundamental rate limiter” for transitioning to sustainable energy during Tesla's most recent earnings call. It also didn't sound