When Elon Musk unveiled the first Tesla semitruck back in 2017, it was met with great enthusiasm. Shaped like bullets, the sleek Class 8 vehicles could purportedly go 500 miles between charges, and therefore significantly reduce the costs and emissions of freight transportation. They were hailed as potentially revolutionary for the decarbonization of trucking, which in the U.S. makes up over 20% of the transportation sector’s emissions.
Mike Roeth, executive director at the North American Council for Freight Efficiency, was at that initial reveal in Hawthorne, California. At the time, he recalls, Musk promised the semis were going to go into production in 2019.
“Fast-forward five years, I was at the launch event where they delivered [a few] Tesla semis to PepsiCo and Frito Lay,” Roeth said, referring to the company’s first pilot delivery of roughly 40 hand-built trucks. “At the event, they said they were on the verge of [commercial] production. Well, that’s taken another three years, but here we are.”
Indeed, in February it finally happened. Musk posted on his social media platform X that Tesla is going to “start high volume production” of the Semi this year. And this time, with testing done, a manufacturing plant ready to go in Sparks, Nevada, and open orders, it looks like he may be telling the truth.
“[They] are elegantly delivering way late again,” Roeth said, noting that Musk and Tesla have a history of promising unrealistic timelines, but that most of the time, the promised product does arrive eventually. The question, however, is whether the market — and especially the grid — will be ready to take advantage of the Semi.
Many of the challenges from 2017, most notably the lack of megawatt-scale charging infrastructure, remain. And new ones have emerged, including an overstressed power grid and a policy environment whose enthusiasm towards the electrification of transportation has cooled significantly.
‘Turn an electron into a mile’
Despite its tardiness, the Tesla Semi is still eliciting genuine enthusiasm from people in the industry — particularly those who’ve had the chance to drive the roughly 100 hand-built vehicles that were put into circulation over the past few years.
Adam Browning is the executive vice president for policy and communications for Forum Mobility, a startup working to electrify heavy-duty transport. As he explained on the Energy Empire podcast with Jigar Shah and Jamie Nolan last month, the experience of driving an electric truck is much more “trucker-friendly” than the diesel experience. “Once truckers actually drive these vehicles, they really enjoy the experience,” he said. “It is quiet, there are no fumes, there are no vibrations. One-pedal driving is a lot easier on the entire body than clutching through rush hour traffic on the Harbor Freeway.”
But while that’s true for all electric trucks, the Tesla Semi beats its competitors in two key areas: range and charging speed. This makes it “more efficient in terms of its ability to turn an electron into a mile,” Browning said.
In terms of range, Tesla Semi can go 500 miles in between charges when carrying a light load, which significantly beats existing electric competitors from Volvo and Daimler, which can typically do up to 300 miles between charges.
“That 500-mile truck just radically changes the use cases that you can deploy a truck into,” Browning said.
So far, the vast majority of existing electric trucks in the U.S. have been operating on a regional basis, delivering freight over short distances before returning to a central depot to charge overnight. But with its 500-mile offering, Tesla is providing a vehicle that has the potential to decarbonize long-haul, heavy-duty trucks. (Tesla also offers a 300-mile truck for those looking for a lighter, cheaper option).
Plus, according to Browning, the Semi charges via a megawatt charging system, up to four times faster than most e-trucks currently on the road, which use regular combined charging systems. This means it can charge up to 500 miles in 30 or 40 minutes, “which aligns very well with the mandated breaks for truckers,” Browning said.
Salim Youssefzadeh, founder and CEO of WattEV, a startup that develops charging infrastructure for electric trucks, says those are the features that have been needed all along to decarbonize heavy transportation
“We’ve always known that the biggest bottleneck to adoption is having access to the right truck,” Youssefzadeh said. “The Tesla Semis, they are what they say they are….It’s longer range, the charge is faster, it’s more efficient. It’s not just a slightly better product; it’s significantly better than what’s currently available.”
The company also operates with a trucks-as-a-service model, allowing carriers to pay a subscription fee to use electric trucks that WattEV purchases and maintains. The company, Salim told Latitude Media, has had two Tesla Semis in its fleet and has an agreement with Tesla to take 40 more once they’re available.
‘The classic chicken and egg scenario’
But long-haul, heavy-duty trucks are also hard to decarbonize because of a lack of a high-capacity charging network that would allow a trucker to cover the same distances as a diesel truck. A modern diesel semi equipped with dual tanks can often travel more than 1,200 miles before needing to refuel, something that it can do almost anywhere in minutes.
For reference, there are over 12,000 truck stops across the U.S., not including the thousands of standard fuel stations that can also be used by trucks. By comparison, there are fewer than 100 publicly available stations nationwide capable of megawatt-scale charging, which is the specific type of high-speed infrastructure needed to charge heavy-duty batteries quickly enough to make long-haul electric trucking viable. Most of them are in California.
Sam Abuelsamid, vice president of market research for transportation and mobility at Telemetry, said this is a problem that presents itself every time there’s a new technology requiring two parts to advance.
“It’s the classic chicken and egg scenario: If you don’t have chargers, people aren’t going to buy electric vehicles, but if people don’t buy electric vehicles, nobody is going to build the chargers,” Abuelsamid said.
The issue is the same that presented itself when passenger EVs started becoming popular, he added. And much like it did when it launched its passenger vehicles, Tesla is also investing heavily in developing the supporting infrastructure for truck electrification. The company is estimated to have over 60 sites in development.
“They know that if they’re ever going to sell these trucks, they have to build the charging infrastructure to support them,” Abuelsamid said.
It’s the classic chicken and egg scenario: If you don’t have chargers, people aren’t going to buy electric vehicles, but if people don’t buy electric vehicles, nobody is going to build the chargers.
But scaling heavy-duty charging infrastructure nationwide is complicated by the fact that the megawatt-scale charging stations needed by semis are much more expensive and time-consuming to develop than the light-duty ones.
Youssefzadeh said that for Watt EV, for example, the process can take years. The company has five heavy-duty charging stations in operation and is developing 15 more, all ranging from five MW to 15 MW.
“When we build a site, the first thing we do is reach out to the utilities and start those conversations very, very early on, because you never know how much power is available at any site,” he said, noting that discussions with PG&E for a site in Oakland started before even WattEV took control of the property. “It is time-consuming now, and every utility and every site has its own unique challenges that come with it.”
To advance the development of charging infrastructure even when grid interconnection is lacking, some companies pursuing heavy-duty infrastructure have been installing utility-scale batteries. WattEV’s site in Bakersfield, for example, is supported by a 5 MW solar-powered microgrid, which provides power during the day while relying on a grid connection at night.
This can add up to already steep costs, given that installation for a single megawatt charging system can cost up to $950,000, according to data by EV charging software Monta. That’s a lot of money for something that still has low utilization rates. Only about 1,700 e-trucks were sold in the U.S. in 2024, according to the International Energy Agency; of that total, very few were long-haul ones.
‘A pure economics decision’
That said, light-duty EV infrastructure is now sufficiently widespread to permit cross-country travel, which bodes well for the heavy-duty segment as well. Especially if trucks like the Tesla Semi prove they make economic sense, it may be only a matter of time before the infrastructure catches up.
“At the end of the day, it becomes a pure economics decision for carriers and shippers,” Youssefzadeh said. “Yes, shippers have sustainability goals, but unless you’re cost-competitive with diesel, there’s very little incentive for a large shipper to want to have their goods move with zero-emission trucks.”
While Youssefzadeh is confident that Tesla Semi will be able to deliver on that and eventually fulfill Musk’s promise, Abuelsamid notes that the marketplace is tougher now than it was just a few years ago.
“In the United States, we’ve got a government that has turned 180 degrees from wanting everybody to decarbonize to fundamentally waging war against electrification,” Abuelsamid said, noting that most tax credits for the purchase of EVs and the construction of charging infrastructure have been repealed over the past year. “That poses a problem for any companies that do still want to decarbonize, because… electric trucks are still substantially more expensive than diesel.”
But, according to Roeth, Tesla is going to put the 500-mile Semi out at a price of $290,000. Other electric trucks, like the Freightliner eCascadia and the Volvo VNR Electric, which both have a range of about 250 miles, can cost up to $450,000.
While the Tesla Semi’s price remains significantly higher than that of a standard diesel truck, which currently average $185,000, it becomes far more competitive when paired with incentives. California’s Hybrid and Zero-Emission Truck and Bus Voucher Incentive Project, for example, offers vouchers of $120,000 for a standard battery-electric Class 8 truck. And in fact, of the 900 vouchers California gave out in 2023, about 850 were for people requesting to buy Tesla Semis — even though production was virtually non-existent at the time.
“That’s a shocking number, but it just shows that they have a product that people want to try,” Roeth said.
While California has the most comprehensive voucher program, other states including Colorado, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York have their own initiatives to lower the price premium of electric trucks over diesel models. But they still might not be enough to offset the recent repeal of federal emissions mandates and tax credits.
This is particularly true in an economy with escalating operational expenses.
“In the last 18 to 24 months, costs have gone up substantially. And when you combine that with the incentives having gone away, it makes it a lot more challenging for businesses to purchase trucks like this,” Abuelsamid said, noting that, in general, truck sales have been down in 2024 and 2025.
That said, the surge in oil prices caused by the war in Iran, while damaging to the broader economy, could ultimately give a leg up to the electrification of the trucking industry, he added.
“A lot of oil analysts think that we will get to $200 a barrel, and if that happens in a sustained way for a while, it does start to change the equation,” he said. “That could push fleets to start considering electric trucks.”
