Tesla's first Semi handovers arrive ahead of a final price and a charger network

A fleet finance lead building a cost-of-ownership model for the Semi on Monday needs more than a purchase price. The rows under it ask where the truck charges and what it costs to keep on the road.

In Reno, Tesla pitched a lower total cost of ownership ^[5]. Its engineers spent the event on hardware: a truck roughly 1,000 pounds lighter than the original version, with a drive axle that now takes one oil instead of three ^[11]. A maintenance shop now stocks two fewer fluids ^[11]. Lars Moravy, who leads most of Tesla's engineering ^[18], said the three-oil design had "always frustrated" him and that Tesla tends to prioritize "super bespoke" designs ^[12]. "Occasionally we get a little too far out there," said Dan Priestly, head of the Semi program ^[13][18].

The windows are the plainest case of drivers overruling the design. The original Semi had pop-out side windows that did not fully open, and truck drivers and automotive bloggers flagged the problem for years ^[14]. The delivered truck has standard roll-down glass ^[14]. "We fully admit we were wrong about the windows," Priestly said ^[15]. "Turns out there's a lot of infrastructure in the world, whether it's a badge reader, or your toll booth, or you're talking to somebody on a call box." ^[16]

Charging is the row a fleet can least fill in from what Tesla showed. Tesla timed the 30-minute event so the audience could watch a Semi climb from 3% to 60% on one of its megawatt chargers ^[8]. That is 57 percentage points in about half an hour ^[9]. If the plugged-in truck was the 500-mile version, 57 points is roughly 285 miles, and fewer under a heavy load ^[10]. Tesla is building a network of these chargers ^[8].

On paper, supply is the smaller worry. Tesla plans to build up to 50,000 trucks a year at a new plant beside its first Gigafactory in Reno, roughly 1,000 a week, and to add 3,000 jobs ^[6]. Tesla will run some of the trucks itself. "We're super excited to be deploying these into our own operations because it's fulfilling the mission that we originally started out [with]," Priestly said ^[17].

I'd sort the decision on two axes. The first is price: whether the model beats diesel with the Semi at just under $300,000 and incentives set to zero ^[7]. The second is charging: whether the truck parks overnight at a depot where the fleet can install a charger, or its lane needs a megawatt charger on the road. A lane that clears on price and charges at the depot is a defensible pilot now. Clearing on price but needing road charging means waiting for Tesla's network to reach the lane. Where the case needs incentives but the depot can charge, the final sticker decides it. A lane that needs both incentives and road charging can sit out this round.

The tradeoff with depot lanes is range. A truck that returns home every night may not need 500 miles, and TechCrunch's report does not give prices for the shorter-range variants that might suit it better ^[7].