Tesla Semi’s Enormous Battery Might Weigh 11,000 Pounds on Its Own

It's official: the first electric Tesla Semi has been delivered to PepsiCo and Frito-Lay. Tesla held a delivery event Thursday in Sparks, Nevada, to commemorate the event, complete with a load of snacks carried by one of the Semis. Even though I wasn’t there in person, the show still gave me something to chew on.

During the event, Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed that the Semi is rated for 500 miles of range with a fully loaded trailer, which meant that the battery pack inside the truck would have to be absolutely ginormous. How big, exactly, is unknown; however, Musk took to Twitter early Friday morning to reveal roughly how efficient the truck is, which helps me make estimations about capacity and weight.

Based on those efficiency numbers, a bit of napkin math shows just how large the battery pack might be. A rating of 1.7 kilowatt-hours per mile equates to a pack size of around 850 kWh, or around 8.5 times the size of a Tesla Model S Plaid's battery.

Multiple sources claim the 100-kWh battery pack you'll find in a Model S weighs around 1,300 pounds. While it's unclear how much the Tesla Semi weighs without a trailer, the truck's battery pack alone could weigh as much as 11,000 pounds—a figure that can quickly eat into a loaded Class 8 truck's maximum gross weight of 80,000 pounds. For comparison, the GMC Hummer EV weighs 9,000 pounds, and an unladen semi-truck can weigh as much as 25,000 pounds, according to JD Power.

Now, it's important to note that the total weight of the battery pack could vary depending on the type of cells used in production as well as the number of components in a battery pack. Still, a rough weight of 11,000 pounds for the pack alone shows just how heavy battery-powered vehicles can be.

Tesla believes it can further increase the efficiency of the Semi, according to Musk. At 1.6 kWh per mile, the Semi would be able to travel around 530 miles with a full load, and at a potential 1.5 kWh-per-mile rating, that would mean 566 miles on a full charge. It's unclear if the efficiency optimizations would be delivered via an over-the-air update or through future hardware improvements.

PepsiCo's deliveries mark the very first production Semis in the wild. The snack company pre-ordered 100 trucks five years ago when the Semi was first announced in 2017, which unofficially represents around 10 percent of the total number of reservations tracked by the public. Tesla says that it will also be using these Semis to haul freight in its own supply chain, meaning that it expects to produce a number of trucks for its own use in the coming months.

What is the cost? What is the cost of a battery replacement?
How long to charge and at what cost? Trucks are parked everywhere and not at a charging station for hours or days.
If in an accident the battery pack cannot be repaired.
One bad battery cell equals a big bad fire and a dead trucker.

I've read a little bit about the business model for using the electric semi trucks. It's strongly biased to large fleet operations. I think will be a hard reach for many independent truckers and small companies to compete for long haul.

Tesla is rolling out two tractors. The one in the OP article is the long haul. The second tractor is a short haul for local duty.

Long haul will probably roll out first on a LA - Las Vegas route. Hence, the 500 mile range specification.

Hub and spoke terminals will be spaced out at 400-500 mile intervals to fit the range and one driver day. Example: A east bound truck heads out from LA then stops at the LV terminal. In LV, the driver goes into crew rest and the truck disconnects from the trailer and goes to the charging station. The trailer is parked at the terminal and if a mixed load, some cargo removed and other cargo loaded. A new driver hooks up a charged tractor to the trailer and continues east. The trailer itself may only be stationary an hour or in LV before hitting the road east again to the next terminal that's 400-500 miles down the road. The first driver comes out of driver rest and hooks to a trailer going west to the LA terminal. In general, drivers have a regular route, an east-west round trip between LA and LV terminals.

It takes a significant investment for this hub and spoke network to spread across the US. The largest trucking companies largely have these already running between at least where their big customers are concentrated.

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