Tesla was building a Semi production line that is very close to the Gigafactory plant in Nevada. According to people familiar with the matter, Tesla hopes to build 5 electric semi-trailer trucks every week.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk just stated that the recent battery supply makes it difficult for Tesla to expand the (production) scale of Semi trucks. As we all know, Tesla’s Nevada Gigafactory was built in an industrial park. Last year, Tesla won another building in the park, covering an area of more than 500,000 square feet.
At the time, the media didn’t know what Tesla wanted to do, but everyone speculated that it was likely to want to produce semi-trailer trucks. It has now been determined that Tesla is indeed preparing to produce trucks.
Insiders revealed that Tesla is building a truck production line, but the output will not be too high. In addition, if Tesla’s Austin plant can increase battery production, it will mass-produce trucks there.
Musk once stated that the final annual output of electric semi-trailers can reach 100,000. Analysts believe that Tesla may have to wait 3-4 years to achieve this goal. Currently, the number of orders for Tesla semi-trailer trucks has reached several thousand. If Tesla can prove to the world that the truck is economical when used, it will definitely affect the industry.
Many companies are interested in trucks, like Aurora. Since its establishment in 2017, Aurora has implanted the Driver autopilot system in 8 vehicle models. Experiments have shown that the system performs best on trucks. Recently, Aurora declared a partnership with Volvo, and it also partnered with truck maker Paccar two months ago.
Paccar and Volvo are world-renowned truck producers, and their combined share in the United States exceeds 50%. Since we can cooperate with them, it shows that Aurora has become an important force for driverless trucks.
The size of the US truck market is about 800 billion US dollars, and about two-thirds of the country’s consumer goods are transported to the market by trucks. According to the requirements of the US labor law, truck drivers must rest for 10 hours after the total driving hours reach 11 hours.
In the case of long-distance transportation, it will often take a few days to complete. Moreover, the US truck industry is highly fragmented, with 200,000 companies, 95% of which own less than 100 trucks, and 20% of their mileage is empty.
Every year, American trucks travel about 170 billion miles on highways, which is far from passenger cars and cars, but they are more willing to accept new technologies. Silicon Valley was not interested in truck technology before, but it has changed recently.
A few days ago, TuSimple, an unmanned truck startup company, went public in the United States. It received support from Nvidia and UPS, and cooperated with Volkswagen Traton. Waymo has also started cooperation with Daimler, the world’s largest truck producer.
(Via)
