Watch: Tesla Semi’s 500-Mile Drive On One Charge

December 11, 20221 year ago Iqtidar Ali 0 Comments

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Tesla delivered the first-production Semi trucks to PepsiCo on Thursday, December 1, 2022. Just days before this delivery day — that came 5 years after the semi truck was first shown — the automaker tested the Tesla Semi for a 500-mile run on a single charge, the range that Tesla originally claimed at the unveiling back in 2017.

During the Tesla Semi delivery day presentation, Elon Musk said that they would post the whole video of the 500-mile single-charge run on Youtube — unedited. Tesla showed a few shots of this journey during the presentation but later on posted the entire video on the world’s most popular video hosting platform.

*The interior of a Tesla Semi. Photo courtesy of Tesla.*

“And, this wasn’t you know some ultra-clean, precise test-track simulation or somewhere we, you know, shut down a road — nope, this is the real world, this is over Grapevine, this is with traffic, this is true 500 miles. We were loaded just under 82,000 (lb),” said Dan Priestly, Sr. Manager of the Tesla Semi program who hosted the Semi day event along with Elon Musk.

Elon Musk and Dan Priestly cleared any doubts around this 500-mile Tesla Semi run on a single charge. They said that no special aerodynamics were used for this test and it was not done in a controlled environment. This test was performed on normal roads in usual traffic conditions.

The Tesla Semi started the 500-mile journey from Tesla’s car factory in Fremont, California, to the PepsiCo bottling factory in Lakeside, San Diego, California. According to Google Maps, it takes around 7 hours and 45 mins to cover this distance at average highway speeds and moderate traffic via the I-5S and I-15S freeways.

Elon Musk and the Tesla team shared the following graph during the Tesla Semi keynote delivery. This is a map that not only shows the path of the 500-mile trip, it also shows the truck’s state-of-charge (SoC) at each major stop. When the Tesla Semi started its journey at Fremont, its SoC stood at 97%, and after reaching its destination in San Diego, 4% of its battery still remained.

Elon Musk once again remembered the naysayers who predicted that the Tesla Semi would not be able to deliver a 500-mile range with full load. Once again, Tesla and Elon Musk have proven the critics wrong and are on the verge of disrupting the heavy-duty trucking industry.

The 500-mile Tesla Semi run is actually 8-hour long footage shortened using timelapse to about 2 minutes of video duration. Let’s watch.