Tesla Semi, Tesla’s class 8 electric truck, is still only deployed internally in Tesla’s own operations and with a handful of customers for testing.
After years of delays, the electric truck is finally about to ramp up next year with the start of production at a new factory being built in Nevada.
This is approaching fast while a big piece of the electric truck puzzle remains missing: long-distance charging.
Electric trucks are becoming more popular, but they are mostly limited to closed-loop applications, such as between distribution centers within the same company. Electric trucks shine in those applications since the route of predictable and charging can be done when loading and off-loading at the locations or overnight when not in use.
Long-distance trucking is where electric trucks have yet to make an impact and that’s because of the lack of fast-charging solutions for them.
Technically, commercial electric trucks could use the existing EV charging networks, like Tesla Superchargers, but those are not designed to receive trucks and their charge rate are not high enough to quickly get them on their way.
Tesla’s solution is the Megacharger, a Tesla Supercharger-like charging station capable of a higher charge rate and designed to charge the Tesla Semi.
So far, Tesla has only deployed a couple of these charging stations, like at a Supercharger in Baker, California, and at PepsiCo, one of Tesla’s early partners in testing the Tesla Semi.
Tesla has been known to deploy similar mobile Superchargers that fit on a skid and can be deployed in specific locations when demand is too high for Superchargers in the region, but in this case, we can see that the connectors are not NACS like regular Superchargers but the Megacharger connector for the Tesla Semi.
It’s not clear why this is being deployed in Utah. Most known Tesla Semi trucks in operations now are being used between Nevada and California in Tesla’s own fleet to move parts between factories and in California, used between PepsiCo’s factories and distribution centers.
Maybe Tesla has a new Tesla Semit customer in Utah? Let us know what you think in the comment section below.
