While Tesla’s elusive Semi electric prime mover my be still a rear sight on US roads, the California Highway Patrol has shared a video of a Tesla Semi electric truck handling a closed icy road heading over Donner Pass in the State’s East.
Electric semi trucks and particularly the Tesla Semi are still quite new and rare and there are a lot of naysayers about them hgowerve4r it seems the battery electric heavy hauler seemed to be handling its task quite well on the treacherously slippery road
Bill Gates was one of them. He didn’t believe that a battery-electric truck could travel 500 miles, but he was proven wrong by the Tesla Semi.
However battery-electric trucks still have a lot to prove and the Tesla Semi is working on it by putting in the work on roads across California.
Tesla is reportedly operating a fleet of Tesla Semi trucks between its Gigafactory in Nevada east of Reno and its California operations.
One of the criticisms of the Tesla Semi is that it primarily operates in the easy climates of California and Nevada, but to go between the two states, the electric trucks have to go through mountains and the Donner Summit. Conditions can get pretty bad there and the local California Highway Patrol announced that they had to close the road because it was so icy:
But interestingly, the CHP shared an image of a Tesla Semi going through these icy roads: The Tesla Semi seems to be handling the conditions fairly well compared to the other big rigs that were reportedly “spinning out”.
Tesla is currently only producing the electric truck in low volume for its own fleet and for a select few customers, but it plans to bring the vehicle to higher volume production at an expansion of its Gigafactory in Nevada.
