The Tesla Semi could be a big deal for electric trucking

The Semi is a relatively affordable electric semitruck with pretty impressive performance. It also comes at a moment when Tesla has lost its grip on the global electric vehicle market. Let’s talk about what’s new with the Tesla Semi and why this could be a breakout moment for electric trucking.

Medium- and heavy-duty vehicles, like buses and semitrucks, make up a small fraction of vehicles on the road but contribute an outsize fraction of pollution, including both carbon dioxide emissions and other pollutants like nitrogen oxides (NOx) and small particles. Globally, trucks and buses represent about 8% of total vehicles on the road, but they create 35% of carbon dioxide emissions from road transport.

Tesla’s latest addition to its vehicle lineup, the Class 8 Semi, could be part of the solution to cleaning up this polluting sector. (I’ll note here that I briefly interned at Tesla in 2016. I don’t have any ties to or financial interest in the company today.) 

In November 2017, Elon Musk took to the stage at a lavish event in LA to announce the Semi. At that event, Musk promised a truck that could go from zero to 60 miles per hour in five seconds, could achieve a range of 500 miles, and would come with thermonuclear-explosion-proof glass. (Remember the era before the Twitter takeover and DOGE, when this was what Musk was known for? A simpler time.)

Soon after the unveiling, major corporations including Walmart put in early orders for Tesla Semis. Deliveries were expected in 2019.

That deadline obviously didn’t work out. The date was pushed back several times, and Tesla did start delivering a small number of pilot trucks, beginning in 2022. But this year, things got more serious, with the company releasing its final production specifications in February and rolling its first Semi off its high-volume production line in late April. 

And last week, WattEV announced an order of 370 Tesla Semis. WattEV offers electric freight operations, essentially providing trucks as a service to companies so they don’t have to purchase their own or supply their own charging infrastructure. The company will pay over $100 million for the new trucks, and the first 50 should be delivered this year, with the full fleet expected by the end of 2027. Those trucks will be supported by megawatt-charging systems located in Oakland, Fresno, Stockton, and Sacramento.

With the factory up and running and a huge order on the books, it feels like the Tesla Semi has truly arrived. And some of Musk’s claims from 2017 ring true: The base model has a range of about 320 miles, and the long-range version about 480 miles (quite close to his 500-mile claim).

Delivering this much range for this big truck means a whopping battery. The base model Tesla Semi battery pack has a usable capacity of 548 kilowatt-hours, according to a document filed with the California Air Resources Board (CARB). But the battery is even more massive in the long-range version, which boasts a whopping 822 kilowatt-hour battery. Compare these to the Tesla Model 3, which typically comes with a 64 kilowatt-hour pack.

I reached out to Tesla to confirm the battery size and ask other questions for this article—the company didn’t respond.

These trucks cost quite a bit more than they were expected to in 2017, though. At that time, the expected price was $150,000 for the base model and $180,000 for the long-range. Today, Tesla is pricing the trucks at $260,000 and $300,000, respectively, according to documentation filed with CARB.

That’s considerably more expensive than the median diesel truck being sold today, which rang in at $172,500 for the 2025 model year, according to research from the International Council on Clean Transportation. But it’s much cheaper than similar battery-electric trucks available today, where the median is about $411,000.

And in California, where companies can get vouchers that cover $120,000 towards the purchase price of an electric truck, the Tesla Semi is competitive right away, especially since electric trucks tend to be much cheaper to run and maintain than diesel ones.

Over the years, it wasn’t always clear that the Tesla Semi would ever actually hit the roads. (At that same 2017 event, Musk announced a new Roadster sports car, and that’s nowhere to be seen.) So it’s encouraging to see the factory starting up, and a large order that looks like it could lend this project some commercial momentum.

Tesla had a massive impact on the electric vehicle market, and if it can scale production and support charging infrastructure, it could help do the same for trucking.

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.