On Thursday evening, Elon Musk unveiled Tesla’s first electric semi-truck at an event in Los Angeles alongwith the surprise reveal of a new Tesla sports car.
The new Roadster has the same name as the first electric vehicle produced by Tesla from 2008 to 2012. The vehicle emerged from the back of one of the trucks at the end of a presentation focused on the economic and performance requirements of truck drivers.
While the surprising sports car gave a jolt of excitement for viewers.
The CEO had hyped the truck on Twitter all the week and on Sunday, he stated that the truck will blow minds clear out of skulls and into an alternate dimension. On Wednesday he went teasing that the truck can transform into a robot and could fight aliens and make a hell of a latte.
No espresso machine was there to be seen, but Musk promised a laundry list of features claiming that it would ensure the overall cost of ownership will be 20 percent less per mile as compared to diesel trucks.
Among them: faster acceleration, extraordinary uphill performance, a 500 mile ( 805km ) range at max weight at highway speed, and a thermonuclear explosion-proof glass in the windshield.
Safety features do include augmented autopilot, lane-keeping technology, and a design that makes according to Musk jackknifing “impossible”.
The company has planed to build a network of “Megachargers” (as opposed to the “Superchargers” that are used by other Tesla vehicles) that can produce a 400-mile charge in only 30 minutes.
Musk claims that it would be “economic suicide” to continue the use of diesel trucks, saying that the Tesla version would be cheaper than shipping goods by rail if driven in convoy.
Musk said that for production cars, the car’s acceleration from 0 to 60 mph and 0 to 100 mph, and its quarter-mile speed, were all “world records”.
He added that production on the trucks would start in 2019 and the sports cars will be available in 2020.
Despite the confident of Musk, questions will arise about the capacity of company to manufacture the new vehicles.
Tesla did debut its 1st mass-market sedan, the Model 3, to much fanfare back in July, when the waitlist for the vehicle numbered more than 500,000. Production has not gone smoothly since then.
In the 3rd quarter of 2017, the company did produce just 260 Model 3s – below the 1500 it promised in August.
Tesla blames “production bottlenecks” for the these delays.
Some workers at the Fremont of company, California factory are trying to unionise with the United Auto Workers in a campaign that does chiefly cite the above-average injury rates of factory.
The company also got a number of complaints and lawsuits by contractors and employees alleging gender and racial discrimination.
On Tuesday the company argued while hitting back at media coverage of the complaints that the attorney representing some plaintiffs has a record of extorting money just for meritless claims.
Competition in the electric truck market has been heated up. In September, Daimler AG announced that the delivery of its 1st electric trucks to United Parcel Service (UPS). Other companies including Volkswagen, Cummins and Nikola are working on electric trucks .
