Tesla is a very particular company. Not only do they want to dominate the electric vehicle business, but their semi-truck production is on hold. This is until the company can learn how to successfully produce its own batteries.
During a presentation, Tesla showed off their 4680 truck concept, without any battery cells.
This was first unveiled during a presentation in September 2020. Yet, the company is working towards bigger and better things, Namely, a large-scale lithium ion cell that can enable power for the electric semi truck.
Founder and CEO Elon Musk, had this to say: “Prototypes are easy, scaling production is very hard.” Beginning back in 2017, Tesla always had a vague idea of how they wanted their electric semi trucks to look like. The release date had to delay several times. This ranges from 2019 to 2020, and perhaps now back to sometime in the later half of 2021.
They claime that they haven’t boosted the rate of new products to be developed in trucks like the Tesla Semi. Simply because they didn’t have enough cells for it. Were they to make the Semi nowadays, they would still lack the number of cells. This is for the production quality and they would have to be perfect for it.
Musk went on to say, “we will have enough cells for Semi when we are producing the Tesla 4680 in volume.”
As of lately, Tesla has received enough electric semi truck orders from Walmart, PepsiCo and Aneuscher-Busch. At a certain point, they were even able to use their semi truck prototypes as a means of delivering cars to customers as part of pubicity stunts. Yet, it’ll likely be longer until the semis can make their official appearances as working rigs. Musk believes the electric semi truck can be feasible and ready to operate, soon, in spite of Tesla’s large-scale battery production challenge.
Musk leaves us something that really resonates with me, regarding battery production: “It’s really hard to appreciate just how hard it is to scale production. It’s the hardest thing in the world!”
