Watch Elon Musk’s SEMI Event in 9 Minutes

Dec 2, 2022

Tech

Speaker 1: Welcome to Sparks, Nevada, set of the Tesla Gigafactory and our Tesla semi truck factory as well. So, uh, yeah, I can’t believe it’s been five years. Um, so we, we unveiled the Tesla semi, uh, five years ago.

Um, it’s been a lot that’s happened since then, say the least. Um, so we’re incredibly excited tonight to actually deliver our first production Tesla semi trucks <laugh>. So, uh, [00:00:30] people might wonder why build a semi-truck?

Um, cuz if you look at the actual unit volume, it’s, it’s small compared to passenger vehicles. So for passenger vehicles, you know this on the order of, uh, almost a hundred million that are sold every year. And whereas semi trucks, it’s uh, like for four or 500,000, Speaker 2: Not even, yeah, it’s a couple hundred thousand class, eight trucks a year globally.

Yeah. Yeah. Or no, no, no, sorry.

That’s uss. Yeah, yeah, Speaker 1: Yeah. So it’s, it’s, so there’s, [00:01:00] so the US is like 15 million passenger vehicles and a couple hundred thousand semi-truck.

So it seems like a small percentage, but, uh, it’s actually 20% of US vehicle emissions because you, you’ve got a huge vehicle and it’s being driven, uh, all the time. So when you factor in the, the number of hours driven and the, the weight that it’s carrying, it’s actually, although it’s only 1% of vehicle production, it’s 20% of vehicle emissions. Uh, and it’s over a third of, of all the particulate [00:01:30] emissions.

So from a sort of health standpoint, particularly in like cities, this is a huge, uh, impact, like gigantic. Speaker 2: We’ve been through hot, cold, snow, rain, we’ve been putting this thing through alls paces in the lab as well as in the real world. You know, the simulation team has been doing an incredible job of being able to scale all of that, you know, in the, uh, virtual side.

And the other thing is that we’re gonna take these and we’re gonna put our money where our mouth is, and we’re gonna put these on into our own fleet, into our own supply chain. And we’re gonna use this to transport goods between [00:02:00] our factories and our suppliers because we believe in it, not just from a mission perspective and a cost perspective, but because we want to close that feedback loop. We gotta get that learning as fast as we can.

We want it straight from the drivers. We want it straight from the service techs that are working on it. We’re gonna take all that data that’s coming in and continue torin the product to make it better just like we do on the car side.

Speaker 1: We’re using the, uh, cogno wrap wraps leave. So essentially we’re using the plaid model s model X power train, [00:02:30] and, um, but we’re actually enabling the two of the drive units to actually disconnect so that they’re not freeze spinning efficiency is actually much greater in crews. Speaker 2: Yeah, this is really unique.

I mean, we’re going with a try motor system. One of them is constantly engaged, so that’s for maximum efficiency. You’re getting on a highway that’s doing the bulk of the work, and it’s operating at the peak efficiency point of the entire drivetrain.

And then the other two units are for torque and acceleration. So when the, the driver needs it to get [00:03:00] their job done, whether that’s, you know, getting out of a loading dock or it’s on the road, they need to pass somebody, you’re tackling a grade, you have the torque and power to do it. And the cool thing is that these are clutched automatically, so no driver input needed, but it’s also seamless.

So the highway efficiency unit is cruising along, doing its thing, and if the driver puts their foot to the floor, the torque unit spin up clutching gauges and takes over and it does all of that before we’ve maxed out the torque on the efficiency unit. So it’s completely smooth. There’s no turbo lag or jerkiness or anything like [00:03:30] that.

No driver input needed. It’s smooth, both in terms of acceleration and deceleration for regen. It’s, uh, really cool happening all behind the scenes so that that truck’s clocking it at 82, that that’s weighing 82,000 pounds.

And when you see that pass shot again, Speaker 2: You’ll notice, you’ll notice that speedometer is climbing, you know, we’re going 6% and accelerating up that grade. Yeah, this is, yeah, this is where it comes in. Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s, it’s really, it’s, it’s like driving a, a normal car, not like driving a truck. [00:04:00] Um, it’s just that you’re, you’re moving 82,000 pounds.

Yeah. Um, Speaker 2: Yeah. So any highway grade you come across, you can tackle at speed.

Yeah. You know, there’s no compromise, Speaker 1: No slow down. Nope.

Speaker 2: And the other beauty is that you, you’ve got all this power going up, but you also have it going down. And what that means is you’ve got regenerative braking. So rather than using a Jake break or engine braking like a diesel truck does, where you have to worry about hitting your shifts, if you miss a gear, you’re onto your brakes and potentially in a runway situation, you don’t have to worry about any of that.

There’s no shifting of nothing. And so the [00:04:30] regen, recaptures all that energy as you’re going down these grades. But on top of it, it also is a safer system for not just the driver, but everybody on the road because there’s no gear to miss.

But yeah, standard trip down to five Oh, great. Fine. Through LA traffic construction, you know, we got the bypass on the way station, but you know, running full 80 or just under 82, full deliveries.

Nothing to hide. Yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah.

Real world. It’s, Speaker 2: [00:05:00] Yeah, it, you did take one restroom break for there, there is a required mandatory 30 minute break within the first eight hours of operation. Okay.

Took a small restroom break, but that was it. Speaker 1: Yep. Speaker 2: All right.

I mean, the team’s done a lot of awesome work. I mean, we, Speaker 1: We Speaker 2: Went into the wind tunnel, um, with this really cool model rolling road, the whole nine yards and pulled in a lot of the learnings and all our features from the car side that, you know, give us such great real world efficiency there and really wanna make sure that the, you know, the truck and the trailer have to work together. You know, this is a combination.

This is not just the truck. If you optimize one, you [00:05:30] actually might disrupt the whole combination. And so we spent a lot of time both, you know, virtually, but also in the wind tunnel to make this happen.

And really some next level engineering to, uh, of everything they had to do there. And, you know, it means that we’ve got a really efficient truck, Speaker 1: Like with basically no training, you can drive this, um, you know, you have to think bigger when you’re driving it <laugh>. Uh, but it’s not like, uh, it’s not hard to drive.

It’s really easy. And we put the center, it put the seen the center for max visibility, [00:06:00] low flow, you can stand up in the cabin. Speaker 2: Yeah.

And that’s actually like a really big deal. I mean, and I mean, you’re a tall guy, you on, like, you’re able to stand up just fine. And you know, nice thing is, is that if you’re a truck driver and you’re out during the day and it’s, you know, it’s cold, it’s snowy, whatever you can get in, and this isn’t a sleeper cab, this is a day cabin, and you can still stand up and you can, you know, shed your jacket, put it on the wall, all in the comfort.

You can put your coveralls on wall in the cab. So if you either go do a dirty job, you can do that comfortably as opposed to being out in the elements. So that’s, you know, that level of space is, you know, unheard of.

And we were able to do that with some pretty innovative [00:06:30] packaging. And on top of it, there’s plenty of cargo storage, you know, for drivers that need to bring any tools, other equipment along. And not to mention, you know, we’ve got the plugins, the wireless charging, everything they need on the, uh, electronic side as well.

Speaker 1: O obviously to charge at a truck like this quickly, you need, uh, high powered chargers. So we developed a megawatt class charger as it’s capable of charging at a megawatt to DC Yeah. Um, and it’s our next generation immersive cooling.

So it’s, it’s liquid cooled. Uh, so you don’t need like a [00:07:00] gigantic elephant trunk of a cable. You can actually have a small, small cable and that cable delivers a megawatt.

So the future of transport officer requires a sustainable energy infrastructure. So you gotta have all aspects of the, the energy question answered, uh, sustainable power generation. Uh, then you’ve gotta store the power and then you transfer the power to the vehicle.

So like the three pillars of a sustainable energy future are sustainable power generation, uh, with solar [00:07:30] and wind. Uh, I’m actually a fan of nuclear, um, which we should support <laugh>, um, and, and, uh, geothermal and many others, but things that are sustainable, uh, long term, we, we, uh, you, you, but, but things like wind and solar are intermittent, so you have to have the battery pack to store the energy so when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine, you still have energy and you can also buffer the power so you’re not overloading the grid with spike loads. Speaker 2: Yeah.

And our semi customers are actively deploying this today. And, you know, we’re working with [00:08:00] them so that they have a pathway to get towards, you know, a hundred percent sustainable future, you know, but we have all of this at our disposal, you know, commercial, solar and mega pack. And, you know, the mega pack is great because not only can it do things like peak shaving or some of the other, uh, energy modulation, but it also provides a form of redundancy and backup.

I mean, if we’re gonna ask, you know, a fleet to take on these trucks and run them, they need to ensure that they’re gonna be able to charge them and keep their fleet running the, the amount of powder outage. And that’s one of the things that we can do with the megapack on site as well. Speaker 1: All [00:08:30] right.

So, um, yeah. Thank you all. Thank you all for coming.

Uh, it’s, it’s been a long fi long journey along five years, uh, but uh, this is gonna really revolutionize the roads and I think make the world a better place in a, in a meaningful way.

Um, so thank you for your support, uh, through all the years.