I DON’T RECALL! – TESLA RECALL NOTICE REVEALS JUST HOW FEW SEMI TRUCKS HAVE HIT THE ROAD

June 20, 2023 Jon Thomson Truck and Bus News

Tesla’s much vaunted first tilt at the heavy commercial market, the Tesla Semi truck is apparently off to a slow start in its native USA.

TheTesla Semi was first revealed back in 2017 and was supposed to be in production by 2019.

Tesla’s controversial and enigmatic founde,rElon Musk announced the start of production in October last year, with the first delivery going to soft drink giant customer PepsiCo taking place in December . Since then however Tesla has apparently also been slow to ramp production.

The company issued a recall for the Semi’s door closure warning system last week and while it is a relatively mundane recall, with the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration noting that the door-open warning only illuminates if the parking brake was disengaged and can be dismissed by the operator. Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards require it to be illuminated any time the door is open, so Tesla issued a voluntary recall in the form of a software update to fix the issue.

However a keen eyed US journalist spotted something more interesting in the recall documents. According to the NHTSA noncompliance report, the recall covers all Tesla Semis produced between November 30, 2022, and March 15, 2023, also revealing the total number of Tesla Semis affected was just 36.

That’s the same number of trucks that PepsiCo said that it took delivery of at Tesla’s launch last December and apparently so far the only customer for the battery electric truck.

According to US media outlets at that time Pepsi claimed to have rolled out 15 trucks to Modesto, California and 21 trucks in Sacramento, carrying cargo for it and subsidiary snack-food company Frito-Lay.

It’s unclear if those were actually in service, though, as an earlier noncompliance report for a different recall referenced all Semis built between November 30, 2022 and February 28, 2023. That recall covered 35 units, one less than this recent action.

It’s unclear, then, when the 36th Semi rolled off the line. By Pepsi’s account, it was in service back in December, but based on the filings it looks like one was produced in the early weeks of March. Regardless, this low total, and the nearly two months between Musk’s production announcement and the first completed truck on 30November suggests that Tesla isn’t producing these trucks very quickly. The company had announced a goal of 50,000 sales in 2024, but like the production target date of 2019, that timeline may be optimistic.