The Tesla Semi Truck is LARPing on Wheels

In 2017 Elon “Nuke Mars” Musk publicly announced the Tesla Semi. In said announcement video he really hammered home the 0-60 performance of the vehicle. As a former truck driver I was enthralled. My main complaint when driving was that I couldn’t drag race a Lambourghini. Thanks Elon!

Thin skinned yarmaluke licking LOLcow Elon Musk even came up with an acronym for the performance of this dragster, called BAMF. This is commonly used as an acronym for Bad Ass Mother Fucker. However, Elon cheekily repurposed this to mean… not much at all. 

Yeah, a normal person would have at least come up with plausible repurposing of the acronym, like Big Amplitude Mover Force. But this is a guy who walked around carrying a sink for no reason after buying twatter, just so that he could make a “let that sink in,” pun.

Anyway the truck was promised for 2019. As you can probably tell, we are not in 2019, but luckily the dumbfuck whose daddy owned a diamond mine finally made good on his promise of delivering a semi-truck in December of 2022. I hadn’t heard about this at the time, but it’s nice to see that Mr. Musk took the Mr. Vaporware criticism to heart, and decided to actually build and release this truck just to say that he did.

The Verge:

Five years after they were first revealed, the first Tesla Semi trucks were delivered to customers at an event at the company’s Gigafactory in Sparks, Nevada, Thursday.

The trucks, which were first unveiled in concept form back in 2017, were supposed to go into production in 2019 but were delayed for a variety of reasons, including the COVID-19 pandemic and a global parts shortage. Representatives from PepsiCo, which reserved 100 Semis shortly after its reveal, were on hand to receive the first batch of trucks.

“It looks sick,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on stage at the event. “You want to drive that. I mean, that thing looks like it came from the future.” Musk later referred to the Semi as “a beast.”

Imagine reserving 100 of these and then having to wait three extra years for Musk to deliver. 

And for the record, the look is the least objectionable part of the entire thing. However, it looks exactly like what it is, which is something desperately trying to look from the future, while in reality being the product of a rich faggot’s narcissism mixed with delusions of grandeur. Truckers don’t want sleek Apple-type designs. We want doors with easily gripped handles.

I know this might not have occurred to those with no firsthand experience, but every trucker has a pair of gloves in their cab. Everything gets dirty when you drive around. Then you have to get out and touch said dirty things, like the handles of the trailer. Then this dirts gets everywhere else you touch.

This hyper-expensive piece of junk is going to look retarded once it gets dirtied up in the slightest. Just give me an easily grasped door handle FFS.

Over the weekend, Musk revealed that one of Tesla’s battery powered class 8 semi-trucks had completed a 500-mile trip fully loaded with 81,000 pounds of cargo. The trip took place from Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California, to San Diego at the southern tip of the state. At the event, Musk clarified that the trip was accomplished without needing to recharge the battery.

81,000 lbs of cargo eh?

Considering that the legal weight limit for trucks is around 80,000 pounds, I highly doubt this was cargo, as opposed to the entire weight of the vehicle, which is totally unimpressive. Of course the Tesla Semi was riding around at the legal weight limit for trucks. How much cargo it was carrying is an extremely prescient question, since one of the main criticism people levied at the vehicle was the reduced payload due to the enormous weight of the battery for comparable range. 

Turns out that we’ll still need to do these back of the envelope calculations, since Tesla isn’t saying anything about the max payload. I’m sure the reason is that it’s super high and Musk just doesn’t want to embarrass the diesel truck world with his futuremobile.

Still, battery-powered electric vehicles will face steep challenges, from weight restrictions to the availability of convenient charging stations, before they can be widely adopted. Truck stops, for example, are largely unprepared to handle the power needs of electric tractor-trailers and their gigantic batteries.

Batteries are mature technology. They were invented over two centuries ago, and there has been plenty of R&D poured into them over the years. The problem is that the energy density of them is truly awful compared to fossil fuels. 

Source. Hydrogen requires very heavy storage tanks which ruin the point. It is also very dangerous.

The most flattering estimations of the energy density of batteries versus diesel fuel, or any comparable fossil fuel, is about one fiftieth. This can be measured in a few different ways, such as by volume or mass, but it’s not pretty either way. However, about ICE’s are only about 50% efficient, which brings the battery power density effectively to around 1/25th that of diesel.

Tesla claims that they have a battery energy density that is around 1/20th of diesel, measured by mass. Fine, whatever. It’s so far off being practical for this kind of thing that it doesn’t matter anyway. 

Above is a video where a professional truck driver who is a fan of electric vehicles chimes in, and basically explains that Musk’s Semi isn’t going to pan out. One thing the driver mentioned is that the cab design is really weird. This caught my attention as well.

Normally when backing up you stick your head out the left window. This is because the trailer blocks your view out the right side when you are at an angle. I guess Musk decided that adding some cameras at the end of the trailer were good enough? Good thing cameras don’t have narrow FOV’s, malfunction, or ever get covered with dirt when traveling or that could be really dangerous!

I know this is a small thing, but “just add cameras to the back of the trailer,” is such a Musk thing to do. For the record, that will also force the trucks to use one very specific type of trailer. Often when trucking you’re picking up a trailer that was left for you, but the Musk Semis not being able to do that is just a minor little practicality problem that supergeniuses can’t be bothered about.

Anyway, the tractor doesn’t have a sleeper cab, which makes it worthless for overnight trips. This was actually a good design choice, since it was already worthless for long trips. The claimed range is 500 miles. As for how long it takes to recharge the truck.

CNN:

Musk and Dan Priestley, Tesla’s senior manager tor truck engineering, also boasted of new “megawatt” ultra-fast chargers that will be used to quickly refill the truck’s batteries, but they did not say how long it would take to recharge the truck. These chargers will be made available for the use of Cybertruck drivers when Tesla’s pickup truck goes on sale, Musk said.

No one has seen these megawatt charges. However, Tesla claims this on their site.

Tesla:

Combination trucks account for about 18 percent of U.S. vehicle emissions—Semi will help change that. With less than 2 kWh per mile of energy consumption, Semi can travel up to 500 miles on a single charge. Recover up to 70 percent of range in 30 minutes using Tesla’s Semi Chargers.

30+ minutes per truck, for just 70% recharging. That’s not really practical, considering that it’s about 10 minutes to refuel on diesel, and you do it about a third as often. That’s why the realistic proposal for these things is to have them used in a city, driven home, and recharging slowly overnight.

But the problem is that many tractor-trailers don’t just do intra-city stuff. Having a vehicle that can do long range trips as well as short range trips provides utility, something the Tesla Semi utterly fails at. 

If you wanted a truck that takes loads only in the city, there are much smaller trucks that Musk could have built. Above is a 10 ton truck, and it is pretty damning that Musk isn’t building any of these sized trucks. After all, why not? There’s no reason not to build smaller trucks to fulfill that niche as well, unless you know your product is hot garbage and you don’t want to spend any more money on this LARPfest than you absolutely need to for PR reasons.

Having a semi that can only make short, intra-city trips is theoretically fine. Except that it also won’t have nearly enough payload capacity to actually haul a full trailer around. How much payload does it have? Well we don’t know, because Musk won’t tell us.

What’s the payload you faggot?

If we assume that the payload is half of what a real semi can tow, then the truck is unworkable for short city hauls as well. Why you ask? Because the way that works is a long haul truck drops off a trailer at a yard. Then a second truck picks it up and distributes it everywhere. If the Tesla can’t pick up a full trailer, or even a half full one, it’s worthless.

No one is bringing in half full trailers on a regular basis to a yard, that’s an incredible waste of resources. And even an estimation of half the cargo capacity, about 20,000 lbs, is probably far too favourable, considering that Tesla themselves absolutely refuse to tell us, despite the first deliveries being two months old. One quarter (lol) is probably more realistic.

There is a reason why they have precisely one customer. That sole customer is Frito-Lays, a gigantic corporation with 80,000 vehicles, who decided to purchase a few of these LARPers to bloviate about green energy. The relatively poorer logistics companies, such as the one I used to work for, are going to hard pass on this garbage. And every single engineer in the world with a basic understanding of the problem could have foreseen this outcome. Until battery energy/mass ratios came down to at least around one fifth of the density of diesel, you can say goodbye to electric semis. 

Shockingly, the world’s fakest genius did not manage to casually shatter the known laws of physics and chemistry. Nor is he disclosing the pricetag for his failure.